@timbray@cosocial.caIn which I spend months in apparently unexplored parts of the nondeterministic-finite-automaton territory and get a good result. Once again, of interest only to people who care about ε-closures. (Those people are my people.)
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/20
@elduvelle@neuromatch.socialLittle #MastodonTip : if you ask a question in a post and eventually get a good answer, you can edit your post with the answer added!
That way people who have boosted it will know the answer as well (it should notify them) and people who see it know that there is no need to answer.
@tante@tldr.nettime.orgIt's good that bigger mainstreamer people such as John Oliver are also talking about the "AI slop" era and phenomenon. I do think he was a bit too charitable though.
AI slop is not just bad visuals, it's the esthetic of modern fascism.
https://youtu.be/TWpg1RmzAbc?si=IJOnB4
@hex@kolektiva.socialEverybody is wondering if some ICE agents are actually just bounty hunters, and that's possible but not super likely. What's much more likely is that a good chunk of the agents deployed today are the American equivalent of Wagner, which is currently named "Tripple Canopy" but you probably know as "Blackwater."
It's reasonably likely that the mercenaries who were grabbing people off the streets in Portland in 2020 are back at it for round 2. After all, this is just another opportunity for Trump to dump money in Erik Prince's pocket and wouldn't it be good for Trump to have a man on his side who happens to own a private army?
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/inside-federal-protective-service-homeland-securitys-domestic-police
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialWhy AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Edit: fixed some typos.
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and thus more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of management caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.
@scott@carfree.cityWhen I hear people dehumanize and hate on homeless neighbors, it's not just callous, but short-sighted. We no longer live in a stable democracy and climate. There's a good chance you and I will be displaced and homeless one day. How would you hope to be treated then?
@samir@functional.computer@… @… Yes, I’d definitely go in this direction too. I used to run community events of > 200 people on zero budget and it was fun! I’m sure that the real thing is always mad, in a good way.
@grumpybozo@toad.social
@sean@scoat.esWhen I find it discouraging that young twenty-somethings often don’t seem to care about these things, it’s good for me to remember that I care a lot now, but I really don’t even remember these giant protests from when I was a young twenty-something.
I do remember talking with people and saying things like “going to war without actual evidence—just GWB saying stuff—is stupid” and being shot down by older folks.
But I really don’t remember most of the political action.
@bthalpin@mastodon.socialWe visited my wife's grandmother's village of origin recently, and I got to wondering why there were so few distinct surnames in the local cemetery.
I adapted a Wright-Fisher population genetics model to explain it: https://brendanhalpin.net/blog/posts/names/
@bobmueller@mastodon.worldGood news: The Oklahoma Supreme Court decision barring religious charter schools stands.
Bad news: Because SCOTUS tied on their vote. That's uncomfortably close to overturning it. I don't know which way Justice Barrett would have voted. She's Catholic, but she's surprised people in the past.
@Billybobbell@twit.social@… Great Podcast interview on Intelligent Machines, gave me faith that there are still people with a conscience working in the technology sector. Fight the good fight!
@unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyzFrom Helen Branswell back in 2019:
"Let’s take a look at the tricks measles has up its sleeve: ...
"The so-called infectious dose for measles is small. And people who are infected emit a lot of viruses as they cough or even exhale. ...
"After someone breathes or coughs out the viruses, they can remain in the air for significant periods of time. In fact, it’s estimated that a susceptible child who entered a room — say a doctor’s waiting room — two hours after an infected child was there can become infected. ...
"... people who contract the virus are contagious for about eight days. Most importantly from a transmission point of view, half of that time is before they have developed the rash that typically lets people know: This child has measles. ...
"The introduction of measles vaccine drove down the number of cases to the point that now some doctors don’t recognize measles when confronted with it. ...
"The good news is the measles vaccine is one of the best around. Two doses of vaccine in childhood protect about 97 percent of the children who receive it."
#measles #virus #vaccine
@cdarwin@c.imHundreds of employees at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
have signed an open letter,
directed to Department of Transportation (DOT) Secretary Sean Duffy,
criticizing proposed cuts to the agency
and condemning recent policies that could potentially harm the U.S.
The letter, titled
“The Voyager Declaration”
in honor of two spacecraft that were launched by NASA in the 1970s
(that continue to zoom beyond the boundaries of t…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialJust finished Weirdo by Tony Weaver Jr. Jes and Cin Wibowo. It's a good graphic novel semi-memoir about bullying and depression. I suspect it won't be true to the experiences of people with chronic depression (In Limbo by Deb JJ Lee is another graphic novel memoir I read recently that does involve chronic depression).
#AmReading
@DamonHD@mastodon.socialJust got back from an event... Lobbied my MP on a couple of points, and drank lots of wine, and had polite but tricky convos about all sorts of hot subjects this evening witth people that I had not met before. At the limit of my peopleing spoons, but good.
@mapto@qoto.orgA good explanation why people report different experiences with LLMs. The bottom line is nothing new at all: _verify_the_results_, instead of simply trusting them because you don't know.
https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/06/why-do-people-have-…
@lindawoodrow@mastodon.social
@thomastraynor@social.linux.pizzaGood code release at work and zero issues! People don't see all the work done in the background weeks before.
Multiple walkthroughs with some of the clients, testers, developers, and the support team. The full set of instructions, modules, db changes, job changes, and schedule changes are reviewed. The day of the release, the support team and release coordinator (me) walk through every job that implements the release, special jobs, backups, and checkpoints.
When done, we d…
@pre@boing.worldWent to see a Hoopla improv show at The Bell, a mix of half a dozen different groups doing different thin
gs. "Shuffle improv" were basing their scenes on a shuffled playlist built by the audience on the way in
and an interesting format from a improv-as-a-second-language group chatting about their experiences in a
foreign land and basing their scenes off it. The group called "twelve people" only had six but were good
chaotic fun.
Lots of stuff about cooking and food.
I found myself pondering optimum size for an improve group. In general the larger groups seemed more fun to me, with the exception of three-person "burn the script" who did excellent work. More than eight wouldn't fit in the tiny stage at that venue. In rehearsal I like to have the group split in half and perform for each other. Hard to do that with fewer than six. Still up in the air if our group will get off the ground or not. More people does mean more calendar clashes even if it makes for a cheaper-per-person room hire.
Everyone has instagram pages, which are no use to me. Won't link or visit there. Interesting that nobody has a Twitter profile any more and of course nobody seems to have just a damned website which still strikes me as madness. Imagine not wanting to own your own space on the web?
#improv #london
@gedankenstuecke@scholar.social«Users have reuploaded 5,000 models used to generate nonconsensual sexual content of real people to Hugging Face after they were banned from Civitai. […] Hugging Face did not respond to multiple requests for comment. It also did not respond to specific questions about how and if it plans to moderate these model»
I wish the people that tried to tell me that Hugging Face are the good guys can now see them for what they are…
https://www.404media.co/hugging-face-is-hosting-5-000-nonconsensual-ai-models-of-real-people/
@thomasrenkert@hcommons.socialWhat would be a good role for an #AI assistant within a team consisting of multiple people?
Imagine a group of researchers working on a project, or teachers implementing a new approach, students working on an assignment together, or a small startup company launching a product.
What would be some tasks best delegated to an AI assistant (current tech) in these kinds of teams?
Maybe …
@drgeraint@glasgow.socialLord Carlile of Berriew Q.C. did a terrible job of defining terrorism: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7b9cb240f0b62826a04b08/7052.pdf
In the absence of a good definition, I'd define it as putting people in fear of m…
@samir@functional.computerLots of people are suggesting Apple’s own Reminders app, so perhaps it’s worth explaining why it doesn’t work for me.
I use Reminders all the time as a grocery list, and I find the UI reasonable for that. However, for tasks, I find it confusing and noisy (I prefer Todoist), and I don’t think it’s actually very good at reminding me to do things. It tries once, and gives up until the next day! A strange behaviour, for an app named “Reminders”.
@servelan@newsie.socialDon't have a bachelor's? Work the fields, boys...
'[I]t's an opening for people in the U.S. looking for work. I think that this is good news particularly for less-educated Americans who are likely to see a rise in wages," Camarota told the news outlet. "Maybe it'll even be helpful in dragging some of these noncollege-educated men who are working age back into the labor force.'
Study: 'Trump Effect' Sent 600K Immigrants From Labor Force | Newsmax.com
https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/immigration-trump-labor-force/2025/06/19/id/1215651/
@cdarwin@c.imGOOD TROUBLE LIVES ON:
Rally · Volunteer organized
Thursday, July 17
7:30 – 8:30pm PDT
State Street & West Cabrillo Boulevard
Santa Barbara, CA 93101
About this event
Good Trouble Lives On is a national day of nonviolent action to respond to the attacks posed on our civil and human rights by the Trump administration and to remind them that in America, the power lies with the people.
On July 17, the anniversary of Congressman John Lewis’s pass…
@NFL@darktundra.xyzInside Los Angeles Rams minicamp in Maui: 'This is about being able to get some good quality time with each other' https://www.espn.com/nfl/story/_/id/45539957/inside-los-angeles-rams-2025-minicamp-hawaii
@ruth_mottram@fediscience.orgTo go back to my previous post, for a plant-based diet to be attractive, we need to help people choose plant based alternatives to meat for more or less all occasions. So meat is no longer the default
That's what we need good chefs for: to help turn traditional foods into vegetarian/vegan alternatives that are tasty and easy to prepare.
Most traditional dishes are surprisingly modern. Our tastes can easily be changed...
As an example, in France, the markets are laden with charcuterie and cheese, BUT ALSO, beautiful fresh fruits and vegetables - a nudge towards the latter would improve human health, animal welfare and reduce emissions...
#PlantBased food.
This site however is outstanding making french cuisine vegan
https://menu-vegetarien.com/
@saraislet@infosec.exchangeI need you to think about how bias happens in the real world.
Like the banality of evil, bias isn't often perpetrated by monsters, rather by well meaning people who think they're being fair and thoughtful and doing their best — and they (you! us!), we ARE doing our best, but I need you to understand that doing our best isn't good enough to identify, understand, prevent, nor heal all harm.
@AmazingMeagen@historians.socialThis was a particularly good #wine brought back from #Argentina
Shared with good people during a good English summer evening.
@tante@tldr.nettime.orgIn the end it seems to me that one of the main distinctions between people who see LLMs as good and those who don't is whether they see the digital part of the world as "content" or "people".
If it's all just content, LLMs make sense. If it's where people live LLMs become a somewhat dumb idea.
@dr2chase@ohai.socialI've been trying to explain to somewhat car-brained people that honest to gosh, people on bikes are actually good at not running into things, most of them DO wait for green lights, etc, and every so often I manage to collect some illustrative video. This one is notable because in the space of 5 seconds 4 bikes pass through the same not-wide space, traveling in different directions, and it just happens, no big deal, but I fear they could not get past the "chaos!"
@stefan@gardenstate.socialI see many people argue that it doesn't matter if it is cruelty or good intention if the end result is the same.
I'm still of the opinion good intentions matter.
@emd@cosocial.ca
@theodric@social.linux.pizzaMade the mistake of clicking a Reddit result about some ADHD-related thing. These people are in a fucking cult. They think their disorder is a superpower. Typical American toxic positivity participation trophy bullshit. There's nothing good about ADHD-- it sucks! More so each day
@kazys@mastodon.socialGoodbye John, it was good to know you.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/05/memoriam-john-l-young-cryptome-co-founder
@davidaugust@mastodon.onlineSeems to me Coke should put pages of a certain file and list on their bottles, just print them on there. It would really get the information to the people.
Could be so refreshing.
source: https://trumpstruth.org/statuses/32028
@memeorandum@universeodon.comThe 'Parasites' and the 'Good Immigrants' -- Meet more of the worst people in the world. (Jonathan V. Last/The Bulwark)
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-parasites-and-the-good-immigrants-trump-deportations
http://www.memeorandum.com/250710/p85#a250710p85
@BBC6MusicBot@mastodonapp.uk🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #NickGrimshaw
Jehnny Beth:
🎵 No Good For People
#JehnnyBeth
#newRelease 🆕 single
https://open.spotify.com/track/2uhoiTvEQ7pZEBQMIz8LTn
@MamasPinkyToe@mastodon.worldIf your job is rounding up brown people, you are not a good person.
@ErikJonker@mastodon.socialGood Signal tips for activism.
#signal
@spamless@mastodon.socialTonight our pop-jazz choir, Sing'n'Swing, had its first public concert in two years. We changed choir directors about a year-and-a-half ago. The concert went well. I sang a small solo, which also went well. A number of people told me I killed it. I took that as a good thing. 😃 Here's a post-concert photo.
@blakes7bot@mas.torpidity.net#Blakes7 Series A, Episode 09 - Project Avalon
GUARD: Sir.
TRAVIS: Good. Stay alert.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/109/262 B7B1
@inthehands@hachyderm.ioHey, folks who understand alt text and limited vision accessibility:
I have need to write alt text for the diagram below. The alt text needs to be comprehensible to somebody who is encountering this kind of diagram for the ••very first time••. I could describe the images using the relevant jargon, but that would only serve people who already know the thing this activity is teaching them!
Any suggestions for how I could write good alt text for something like this? Is it possible? (The horizontal black bars are minus signs, i.e. subtraction. This is clear from context in the text, but probably not clear in the image.)
PLEASE NOTE: I am looking for people with ••relevant accessibility expertise••, not just random best shots from people who (like me) don’t really know much about this kind of problem.
@midtsveen@social.linux.pizzaMy day just took a nosedive because some fascist jerk is celebrating a bill landing on his desk!
Honestly, it’s wild how people still put their faith in the same old power games when real change comes from people coming together, running things themselves, and kicking the fascists out of the picture.
Being autistic, I usually struggle to get what people mean, but Rudolf Rocker said some real shit that even my autistic brain understands.
@bobmueller@mastodon.world
@ThatHoarder@mastodon.onlineI spent years in that particular trap: 'I don't understand how to fix this. I definitely can't do a good job. So why bother trying?' https://www.overcomeco…
@gedankenstuecke@scholar.social«AI is a tool (sorry!) that people who are bad at their jobs will use badly and that people who are good at their jobs will maybe, possibly find some uses for. People who are terrible at their jobs (many executives), will tell their employees that they “need” to use AI, that their jobs depend on it»
The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work
https://www.404media.co/the-medias-pivot-to-ai-is-not-real-and-not-going-to-work/
@samir@functional.computer@… So good!
(The number of people I’ve met recently who are asking Cursor to write all their unit tests… *grumbles*)
@berlinbuzzwords@floss.socialAfter a full day of sessions, come relax and connect with fellow attendees at our Get-Together on 16 June, generously sponsored by our partner Search Guard. Enjoy tasty food, drinks, and live music – a fantastic opportunity to meet new people and catch up with familiar faces.
Learn more: https://2025.berlinbuzzwo…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialOverly academic/distanced ethical discussions
Had a weird interaction with @/brainwane@social.coop just now. I misinterpreted one of their posts quoting someone else and I think the combination of that plus an interaction pattern where I'd assume their stance on something and respond critically to that ended up with me getting blocked. I don't have hard feelings exactly, and this post is only partly about this particular person, but I noticed something interesting by the end of the conversation that had been bothering me. They repeatedly criticized me for assuming what their position was, but never actually stated their position. They didn't say: "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, it's actually Y." They just said "I'm bothered you assumed my position was X, please don't assume my position!" I get that it's annoying to have people respond to a straw man version of your argument, but when I in response asked some direct questions about what their position was, they gave some non-answers and then blocked me. It's entirely possible it's a coincidence, and they just happened to run out of patience on that iteration, but it makes me take their critique of my interactions a bit less seriously. I suspect that they just didn't want to hear what I was saying, while at the same time they wanted to feel as if they were someone who values public critique and open discussion of tricky issues (if anyone reading this post also followed our interaction and has a different opinion of my behavior, I'd be glad to hear it; it's possible In effectively being an asshole here and it would be useful to hear that if so).
In any case, the fact that at the end of the entire discussion, I'm realizing I still don't actually know their position on whether they think the AI use case in question is worthwhile feels odd. They praised the system on several occasions, albeit noting some drawbacks while doing so. They said that the system was possibly changing their anti-AI stance, but then got mad at me for assuming this meant that they thought this use-case was justified. Maybe they just haven't made up their mind yet but didn't want to say that?
Interestingly, in one of their own blog posts that got linked in the discussion, they discuss a different AI system, and despite listing a bunch of concrete harms, conclude that it's okay to use it. That's fine; I don't think *every* use of AI is wrong on balance, but what bothered me was that their post dismissed a number of real ethical issues by saying essentially "I haven't seen calls for a boycott over this issue, so it's not a reason to stop use." That's an extremely socially conformist version of ethics that doesn't sit well with me. The discussion also ended up linking this post: https://chelseatroy.com/2024/08/28/does-ai-benefit-the-world/ which bothered me in a related way. In it, Troy describes classroom teaching techniques for introducing and helping students explore the ethics of AI, and they seem mostly great. They avoid prescribing any particular correct stance, which is important when teaching given the power relationship, and they help students understand the limitations of their perspectives regarding global impacts, which is great. But the overall conclusion of the post is that "nobody is qualified to really judge global impacts, so we should focus on ways to improve outcomes instead of trying to judge them." This bothers me because we actually do have a responsibility to make decisive ethical judgments despite limitations of our perspectives. If we never commit to any ethical judgment against a technology because we think our perspective is too limited to know the true impacts (which I'll concede it invariably is) then we'll have to accept every technology without objection, limiting ourselves to trying to improve their impacts without opposing them. Given who currently controls most of the resources that go into exploration for new technologies, this stance is too permissive. Perhaps if our objection to a technology was absolute and instantly effective, I'd buy the argument that objecting without a deep global view of the long-term risks is dangerous. As things stand, I think that objecting to the development/use of certain technologies in certain contexts is necessary, and although there's a lot of uncertainly, I expect strongly enough that the overall outcomes of objection will be positive that I think it's a good thing to do.
The deeper point here I guess is that this kind of "things are too complicated, let's have a nuanced discussion where we don't come to any conclusions because we see a lot of unknowns along with definite harms" really bothers me.
@arXiv_csHC_bot@mastoxiv.pageHow Warm-Glow Alters the Usability of Technology
Antonios Saravanos (New York University)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.14720 https://ar…
@todbot@mastodon.social @todbot@mastodon.social @unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyzTrade Unionists Against the Benefit Cuts (UKPol)
Good letter, including both the principle of the thing and the likely outcomes in practice. Starmer & co should take note.
"We the undersigned are trade unionists opposed to the Universal Credit and Personal Independence bill, designed to restrict access to PIP and to reduce the sickness element (LCWRA) of UC. We believe this is shameful anti-worker and anti-working class legislation. ...
"Not only will these cuts cause increased financial hardship for some of those made vulnerable by a disabling society, but will also add considerable expenses and a much increased workload to workers in several sectors. This is because more people will be plunged into debt. More people will be served with eviction notices... Cutting incomes will push people further from work...
"The Disability Policy thinktank forecast that the cuts will lead to £1.2bn in extra costs for the NHS and local care services provided by councils, raising the alarm for both councillors and MPs whether the cuts will backfire even on their own economic terms."
Still accepting signatures:
#disability #benefits #unions #NHS #debt #UK #UKPol
@tante@tldr.nettime.org"AI is a tool (sorry!) that people who are bad at their jobs will use badly and that people who are good at their jobs will maybe, possibly find some uses for. People who are terrible at their jobs (many executives), will tell their employees that they “need” to use AI, that their jobs depend on it, that they must become more productive, and that becoming an AI-first company is the strategy that will save them from the old failed strategy, which itself was the new strategy after other f…
@mariyadelano@hachyderm.ioFor context - I didn't write that prompt or feed particularly bad input to prove my point. I was trying out Claude, which so many people tell me is "the good" LLM product and above-and-beyond.
This prompt was written by Anthropic's own team, and featured in their gallery of web apps that can be built with this AI.
THEY THINK THIS IS GOOD!
@hex@kolektiva.socialEpstein shit and adjacent, Rural America, Poverty, Abuse
Everyone who's not a pedophile thinks pedophiles are bad, but there's this special obsessed hatred you'll find among poor rural Americans. The whole QAnon/Epstein obsession may not really make sense to folks raised in cities. Like, why do these people think *so much* about pedophiles? Why do they think that everyone in power is a pedophile? Why would the Pizzagate thing make sense to anyone? What is this unhinged shit? A lot of folks (who aren't anarchists) might be inclined to ask "why can't these people just let the cops take care of it?"
I was watching Legal Eagle's run down on the Trump Epstein thing earlier today and I woke up thinking about something I don't know if I've ever talked about. Now that I'm not in the US, I'm not at any risk of talking about it. I don't know how much I would have been before, but that's not something I'm gonna dig into right now. So let me tell you a story that might explain a few things.
I'm like 16, maybe 17. I have my license, so this girl I was dating/not dating/just friends with/whatever would regularly convince me to drive her and her friends around. I think she's like 15 at the time. Her friends are younger than her.
She tells me that there's a party we can go to where they have beer. She was told to invite her friends, so I can come too. We're going to pick her friends up (we regularly fill the VW Golf well beyond the legal limit and drive places) and head to the party.
So I take these girls, at least is 13 years old, down to this party. I'm already a bit sketched out bringing a 13 year old to a party. We drive out for a while. It's in the country. We drive down a long dark road. Three are some barrel fires and a shack. This is all a bit strange, but not too abnormal for this area. We're a little ways outside of a place called Mill City (in Oregon).
We park and walk towards the shack. This dude who looks like a rat comes up and offers us beer. He laughs and talks to the girl who invited me, "What's he doing here? You're supposed to bring your girl friends." She's like, "He's our ride." I don't remember if he offered me a beer or not.
We go over to this shed and everyone starts smoking, except me because I didn't smoke until I turned 18. The other girls start talking about the rat face dude, who's wandered over by the fire with some other guys. They're mainly teasing one of the 13 year old girls about having sex with him a bunch of times. They say he's like, 32 or something. The other girls joke about him only having sex with 13 year olds because he's too ugly to have sex with anyone closer to his own age.
Somewhere along the line it comes out that he's a cop. I never forgot that, it's absolutely seared in to my memory. I can picture his face perfectly still, decades later, and them talking about how he's a deputy, he was in his 30's, and he was having sex with a 13 year old girl. I was the only boy there, but there were a few older men. This was a chunk of the good ol' boys club of the town. I think there were a couple of cops besides the one deputy, and a judge or the mayor or some kind of big local VIP.
I kept trying to get my friend to leave, but she wanted to stay. Turns out under age drinking with cops seems like a great deal if you're a kid because you know you won't get busted. I left alone, creeped the fuck out.
I was told later that I wasn't invited and that I couldn't talk about it, I've always been good at compartmentalization, so I never did.
Decades later it occurred to me what was actually happening. I'm pretty sure that cop was giving meth he'd seized as evidence to these kids. This wasn't some one-off thing. It was regular. Who knows how many decades it went on after I left, or how many decades it had been going on before I found out. I knew this type of thing had happened at least a few times before because that's how that 13 year old girl and that 32 year old cop had hooked up in the first place.
Hearing about Epstein's MO, targeting these teenage girls from fucked up backgrounds, it's right there for me. I wouldn't be surprised if they were involved in sex trafficking of minors or some shit like that... but who would you call if you found out? Half the sheriff's department was there and the other half would cover for them.
You live in the city and shit like that doesn't happen, or at least you don't think it happens. But rural poor folks have this intuition about power and abuse. It's right there and you know it.
Trump is such a familiar character for me, because he's exactly that small town mayor or sheriff. He'll will talk about being tough on crime and hunting down pedophiles, while hanging out at a party that exists so people can fuck 8th graders.
The problem with the whole thing is that rural folks will never break the cognitive dissonance between "kill the peods" and "back the blue." They'll never go kill those cops. No, the pedos must be somewhere else. It must be the elites. It must be outsiders. It can't be the cops and good ol' boys everyone respects. It can't be the mayor who rigs the election to win every time. It can't be the "good upstanding" sheriff. Nah, it's the Clintons.
To be fair, it's probably also the Clitnons, a bunch of other politicians, billionaires, etc. Epstein was exactly who everyone thought he was, and he didn't get away with it for so long without a whole lot of really powerful help.
There are still powerful people who got away with involvement with #Epstein. #Trump is one of them, but I don't really believe that he's the only one.
#USPol #ACAB
@shoppingtonz@mastodon.socialNever gonna have their games again, they have polluted the internet and the minds of people by creating this closed source stuff.
There is genius in there and how can it be legal to withhold genius from the world?
But how good are we so far?
Anyway genius used to enslave the world is not worth it
#VPN
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.ioFor the love of science, why do so many people use AI-generated slop images for their blog posts and in their presentation.
It literally never looks good, doesn't add anything and makes you look like someone who love shitty images.
Stop.
@johnhobbs@mstdn.caBut here’s the good news that way too many people are missing:
𝐖𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦𝐬 𝐜𝐫𝐮𝐦𝐛𝐥𝐞, 𝐚𝐧 𝐮𝐧𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐞𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝 𝐨𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐢𝐬 𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐠.
You are not alone in feeling uncertain about your economic future. Millions of people find themselves in a similar position. Traditional careers leave you exposed.
Here is the key: The world has changed. It has moved online – and unless you are moving with it you will be left behind.
@azonenberg@ioc.exchangeSemi-anonymous Internet friend relationships must be so weird to people who aren't used to the culture.
Example 1: guy I've known on IRC for probably ten years and I consider a fairly good friend, I have his personal phone number, we talk quite often.
But I only know roughly what city he's in and his first name. He's in my phone as [first name] [irc handle].
Example 2: Catgirl I've known for a couple of years, she's been to my house, I've been to…
@shriramk@mastodon.socialFor people mad about MX flags 🇲🇽 in LA: do you know where Six Flags gets its name? (Hint: short for "Six Flags over Texas", referring to the six countries that governed TX. A good trivia question is what those are. Can't go far in TX w/out seeing the 6.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_flag
@karlauerbach@sfba.socialGee, that statement by senator (no capitalization deserved) Joni Ernst and "the white house" about how good it is for Medicare to let people die is applicable to the abortion issue:
As the white house (and Ernst) argue, fewer people receiving medical assistance means (does it really mean?) more for everyone else.
Gee, then if that argument holds they ought to be in favor of abortion - because that means fewer people who will need government services, meaning more for th…
@servelan@newsie.socialSuch b.s.: "He said "good people" oppose trans kids participating in school sports and it "doesn't make you homophobic" to want to ban them." Oh, *yes it does* make you homophobic.
Gavin Newsom rages about trans kids in sports & how Democrats hate his stance - LGBTQ Nation
https://www.lgbtqnation.com/2025/07/gavin-newsom-rages-about-trans-kids-in-sports-how-democrats-hate-his-stance/
@edintone@mastodon.greenI have been trialling Substack as a supplement to my blog. Substack has a large community of people interested in local and social history, so it's a good fit for me. I'm not planning to stop blogging, and some posts may appear in both places, but it allows me scope to write on a wider range of topics. https://
@andres4ny@social.ridetrans.ita pox on the house of the people who decided that soldered ram on laptops was a good idea
@crell@phpc.socialAnd yet people insist LLMs will be a net unmitigated good for humanity.
Seriously, anyone saying that has drunk the kool-aid.
https://retro.pizza/@CactuarJoe/114807099935520042
@samvarma@fosstodon.orgThis succinctly crystallizes my hitherto inchoate thoughts on basically all big LLM efforts https://mastodon.social/@glyph/114840612040237978
@ErikJonker@mastodon.socialWell made documentary about the 7/7/2005 bombings in London. Analysis and overview of events. Great interviews with various people who experienced it.
Good to remember how vulnerable we are for terrorist attacks.
https://www.netflix.com/nl/title/81715711?
@spamless@mastodon.socialTonight our pop-jazz choir, Sing'n'Swing, had its first public concert in two years. We changed choir directors about a year-and-a-half ago. The concert went well. I sang a small solo, which also went well. A number of people told me I killed it. I took that as a good thing. 😃 Here's a post-concert photo.
@scott@carfree.citySolnit: "It's...routine to blame the Democratic Party for what the Republican Party does. The two parties are unconsciously regarded as akin to a husband and wife in a traditional marriage in which it's the job of the wife to placate and soothe the husband and help him realize his goals or be held responsible for his outbursts and outrages."
@cdarwin@c.imTom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, refers to undocumented immigrants as “the gotaways,” the ones we didn’t catch.
In a lecture at Loyola University Chicago in April, Bishop Mark J. Seitz of El Paso observed that the current immigration crisis
“is driven by the deeper crisis of public and social life.”
He continued: “On a fundamental level, these are signs that we are losing the story of who we are as a country.
This is a crisis of narrative.
Are w…
@hex@kolektiva.socialAnd just to be 100% clear, #LosAngeles is nailing it. Massive peaceful protests are great. That's absolutely unequivocally a good thing. So are burning cop cars. Diversity of tactics is critical.
Escalating radically at a protest with kids and grandmas is a shit thing to do. Don't do that unless it's absolutely necessary. Having kids and grandmas out protesting is important. Having them peacefully block vehicles with their bodies or occupy ICE facilitates *is* a strong thing. That is real. That's not virtue signaling, it does something... And sometimes that isn't enough. Sometimes things *need* to escalate to save people.
Diversity is good. Don't break the diversity of tactics *either way*. #LA seems to be doing a pretty good job right now or holding that balance. I hope to see more of that in every city.
@lindawoodrow@mastodon.socialOn this cold midwinter night, fire in the fireplace, cup of red wine, good dinner of locally caught mullet with salad from my garden. Life is good even though the world is going to shit. I feel for people in so many places who don't have this warmth, safety, full belly, tonight.
@ruth_mottram@fediscience.orgThe one good thing about the whole US interference in #Greenland thing is that I no longer have to explain to journalists and others that the island is part of the Kingdom of Denmark (for now). But there's so much more that people should know about Greenland.
Which is the thrust of this piece:
https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/who-expert-greenland/
@pre@boing.worldThis month's newsletter/digest is on it's way to the email box of all the amazing friendly good people who asked for it.
The rest of you bitchy vicious augmentative people in public spats can read it here:
#newsletter #digest
@inthehands@hachyderm.io“I can also find no obvious correlation between where someone lands on that spectrum [of finding LLMs useful for coding] and things like experience levels; people fall here and there regardless of where they work, how much trust I have in their ability, how good they are at communicating, how much of a hard worker they are, or how willing to learn they might be.”
3/
@ErikJonker@mastodon.socialNo worries people, the good news is Hegseth on Defense means it is the weakest departement ever. But shall we stop with the whole "NATO Act", it is clearly gone... Also a small detail, there is no need for a contingency plan because the US already has a large base and military in Greenland. But it fits with Hegseth's absolute stupidity.
"Hegseth says the Pentagon has contingency plans to invade Greenland if necessary"
@davidaugust@mastodon.onlineMy article Vent or Win, Choose Wisely has been accepted for publication by The Geopolitical Economist:
https://medium.com/the-geopolitical-economist/vent-or-win-choose-wisely-c618c86f1472
@BBC6MusicBot@mastodonapp.uk🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #NewMusicFix
Jehnny Beth:
🎵 No Good For People
#JehnnyBeth
#newRelease 🆕 single
https://open.spotify.com/track/2uhoiTvEQ7pZEBQMIz8LTn
@hex@kolektiva.socialI think this analysis misses or hides the more radical way of viewing things, that of the state responding to an already existing people's revolution (the slave revolt angle) but I do think it's also good context and interesting to see liberals trying to take the narrative.
https://youtu.be/BK1cyndeuNs
@scott@carfree.cityMinneapolis and Saint Paul are finally launching this BRT line that was already in the planning phase when I last visited in ... 2019.
Good, but if it's gonna take that long, maybe agencies should just incrementally upgrade the buses that exist instead of these big fancy unicorn "BRT" projects?
https://
@hex@kolektiva.socialFather's day was a good reminder that the most important people in my life are my partner and my kids. My partner and I are doing a sugar fast next week, so I'm gonna throw on a dopamine fast as well.
See y'all next week. (Keep me honest ;)
Happy #FathersDay to all who celebrate.
@unchartedworlds@scicomm.xyzSome very insightful comments in this thread i.m.o.
"It's classic Skinnerian operant conditioning with intermittent (variable rate) rewards. You want whatever it's outputting to be good (code, text, image, etc). Sometimes it isn't but sometimes it is, and you can't usually understand why. When it is good, you experience the reward. The fact that the reward is intermittent and inscrutable makes the desire to repeat the behavior extremely strong."
"Normally an intermittent reward is a sign of a skill that one can master. ... It makes sense that as a species for which tool use is so fundamental that we'd be especially prone to this. ... But we really aren't prepared for when the thing can't be mastered, where it's fundamentally unreliable."
"the slot machine cycle... if I can just figure out exactly how to word this prompt..."
"It feels so overwhelmingly good to some % of people they don't even bother to measure if their AI stuff is actually doing anything useful, because of course it must be, because the feeling is so strong."
#LLMs #addiction #Skinner #behaviourism #OperantConditioning #VariableReinforcement
@cdarwin@c.imThe scary thing about MAGA isn’t that it’s obviously evil—it’s that it’s appealing to people who think they’re good.
It offers them a way to feel righteous about their resentments, patriotic about their prejudices, and principled about their selfishness.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/08/who-go
@pre@boing.worldIt's been a pretty good run, more than two hundred years of freedom for some people (if they aren't slaves) and even sixty years - nearly one lifetime - of actual universal suffrage!
Now that this short experiment in democracy has ended, I wish all of America good luck in the struggle to come, as you each discover your place in the new strict social order.
Try to stay out of the camps!
The title "Land Of The Free" has now moved to.... 📨 👐 ... New Zealand!
So from now on the new Forth of July will be the Sixth of February.
Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.
#freedom #forthJuly
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialLong; central Massachusetts colonial history
Today on a whim I visited a site in Massachusetts marked as "Huguenot Fort Ruins" on OpenStreetMaps. I drove out with my 4-year-old through increasingly rural central Massachusetts forests & fields to end up on a narrow street near the top of a hill beside a small field. The neighboring houses had huge lawns, some with tractors.
Appropriately for this day and this moment in history, the history of the site turns out to be a microcosm of America. Across the field beyond a cross-shaped stone memorial stood an info board with a few diagrams and some text. The text of the main sign (including typos/misspellings) read:
"""
Town Is Formed
Early in the 1680's, interest began to generate to develop a town in the area west of Natick in the south central part of the Commonwealth that would be suitable for a settlement. A Mr. Hugh Campbell, a Scotch merchant of Boston petitioned the court for land for a colony. At about the same time, Joseph Dudley and William Stoughton also were desirous of obtaining land for a settlement. A claim was made for all lands west of the Blackstone River to the southern land of Massachusetts to a point northerly of the Springfield Road then running southwesterly until it joined the southern line of Massachusetts.
Associated with Dudley and Stoughton was Robert Thompson of London, England, Dr. Daniel Cox and John Blackwell, both of London and Thomas Freak of Hannington, Wiltshire, as proprietors. A stipulation in the acquisition of this land being that within four years thirty families and an orthodox minister settle in the area. An extension of this stipulation was granted at the end of the four years when no group large enough seemed to be willing to take up the opportunity.
In 1686, Robert Thompson met Gabriel Bernor and learned that he was seeking an area where his countrymen, who had fled their native France because of the Edict of Nantes, were desirous of a place to live. Their main concern was to settle in a place that would allow them freedom of worship. New Oxford, as it was the so-named, at that time included the larger part of Charlton, one-fourth of Auburn, one-fifth of Dudley and several square miles of the northeast portion of Southbridge as well as the easterly ares now known as Webster.
Joseph Dudley's assessment that the area was capable of a good settlement probably was based on the idea of the meadows already established along with the plains, ponds, brooks and rivers. Meadows were a necessity as they provided hay for animal feed and other uses by the settlers. The French River tributary books and streams provided a good source for fishing and hunting. There were open areas on the plains as customarily in November of each year, the Indians burnt over areas to keep them free of underwood and brush. It appeared then that this area was ready for settling.
The first seventy-five years of the settling of the Town of Oxford originally known as Manchaug, embraced three different cultures. The Indians were known to be here about 1656 when the Missionary, John Eliott and his partner Daniel Gookin visited in the praying towns. Thirty years later, in 1686, the Huguenots walked here from Boston under the guidance of their leader Isaac Bertrand DuTuffeau. The Huguenot's that arrived were not peasants, but were acknowledged to be the best Agriculturist, Wine Growers, Merchant's, and Manufacter's in France. There were 30 families consisting of 52 people. At the time of their first departure (10 years), due to Indian insurrection, there were 80 people in the group, and near their Meetinghouse/Church was a Cemetery that held 20 bodies. In 1699, 8 to 10 familie's made a second attempt to re-settle, failing after only four years, with the village being completely abandoned in 1704.
The English colonist made their way here in 1713 and established what has become a permanent settlement.
"""
All that was left of the fort was a crumbling stone wall that would have been the base of a higher wooden wall according to a picture of a model (I didn't think to get a shot of that myself). Only trees and brush remain where the multi-story main wooden building was.
This story has so many echoes in the present:
- The rich colonialists from Boston & London agree to settle the land, buying/taking land "rights" from the colonial British court that claimed jurisdiction without actually having control of the land. Whether the sponsors ever actually visited the land themselves I don't know. They surely profited somehow, whether from selling on the land rights later or collecting taxes/rent or whatever, by they needed poor laborers to actually do the work of developing the land (& driving out the original inhabitants, who had no say in the machinations of the Boston court).
- The land deal was on condition that there capital-holders who stood to profit would find settlers to actually do the work of colonizing. The British crown wanted more territory to be controlled in practice not just in theory, but they weren't going to be the ones to do the hard work.
- The capital-holders actually failed to find enough poor suckers to do their dirty work for 4 years, until the Huguenots, fleeing religious persecution in France, were desperate enough to accept their terms.
- Of course, the land was only so ripe for settlement because of careful tending over centuries by the natives who were eventually driven off, and whose land management practices are abandoned today. Given the mention of praying towns (& dates), this was after King Phillip's war, which resulted in at least some forced resettlement of native tribes around the area, but the descendants of those "Indians" mentioned in this sign are still around. For example, this is the site of one local band of Nipmuck, whose namesake lake is about 5 miles south of the fort site: #LandBack.
@davidaugust@mastodon.online"I hate [politician on my side not doing what I want], they need to go!"
You can blame people you basically agree with, or you can work with the people available to try to work toward better.
1st feels good for maybe 5 minutes, then ruins improvement right now, the 2nd has a chance to make things better.
Try to take your anger, your resentment, which I share, to those chiefly responsible for problems, and not to those nearest and ablest to help, even if not as fla…
@ErikJonker@mastodon.socialAOC wrote on BlueSky, a good summary of the Trump budget bill adopted in Congress.
"I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE.
This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined.
It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing."
#usa
@hex@kolektiva.socialI'm not saying any new shit:
"I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail, MLK
@samir@functional.computerIf LLMs were so good at writing code, they wouldn’t need a new thought leader yelling about them every day.
They might be. At this point, I do not care. Lots of people (including, most recently, Ptacek, Yegge, etc.) are trying to sell me something and I have no interest in listening.
If your thing is good, show, don’t tell.
But it’s not, is it?
These articles… you’re not trying to convince me, you’re trying to convince yourselves.
So please: keep them to yoursel…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.social"As we approach the coming jobs cliff, we're entering a period where a college isn't going to be worth it for the majority of people, since AI will take over most white-collar jobs. Combined with the demographic cliff, the entire higher education system will crumble."
This is the kind of statement you don't hear that much from sub-CEO-level #AI boosters, because it's awkward for them to admit that the tech they think is improving their life is going to be disastrous for society. Or if they do admit this, they spin it like it's a good thing (don't get me wrong, tuition is ludicrously high and higher education absolutely could be improved by a wholesale reinvention, but the potential AI-fueled collapse won't be an improvement).
I'm in the "anti-AI" crowd myself, and I think the current tech is in a hype bubble that will collapse before we see wholesale replacement of white-collar jobs, with a re-hiring to come that will somewhat make up for the current decimation. There will still be a lot of fallout for higher ed (and hopefully some productive transformation), but it might not be apocalyptic.
Fun question to ask the next person who extols the virtues of using generative AI for their job: "So how long until your boss can fire you and use the AI themselves?"
The following ideas are contradictory:
1. "AI is good enough to automate a lot of mundane tasks."
2. "AI is improving a lot so those pesky issues will be fixed soon."
3. "AI still needs supervision so I'm still needed to do the full job."
@cdarwin@c.imThe Trump people have just announced that they have sent a letter to Columbia’s accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, accusing Columbia of being in violation of civil rights law.
My initial reaction is that this is good news since it implies both that Columbia hasn’t further caved-in yet and makes clear that the Trump people have run out of ammunition
@samir@functional.computer@… Oh good, then I hope people take her up on it ASAP.
@ErikJonker@mastodon.socialThis is a good article, being critical about the anthropomorphizing around GenAI / LLMs. But also not blind for their added value.
https://addxorrol.blogspot.com/2025/07/a-non-anthropomorphized-view-of-llms.html
@cdarwin@c.imTimothy Snyder:
The people described as "undocumented" or "denaturalized"
(and other categories sure to be invented soon)
are portrayed as criminals.
If the Trump regime tries to enslave such people on a large scale, there will be a court case.
But waiting for the Supreme Court to do the right thing is, to put it gently, no substitute for action.
It would be good if there were explicit legislation banning slave labor in all circumstan…
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialFor various reasons I'm probably not going to be at any Saturday protests for long, but I'm thinking about buying & dropping off some supplies to support them:
- Bottled water and/or electrolyte drinks.
- Slats, posterboard, markers, and stapler to let people who show up without a sign make their own.
Anyone else got good ideas or planning on doing supply runs?
#Protests #NoKings
@tiotasram@kolektiva.socialSo I've found my answer after maybe ~30 minutes of effort. First stop was the first search result on Startpage (https://millennialhawk.com/does-poop-have-calories/), which has some evidence of maybe-AI authorship but which is better than a lot of slop. It actually has real links & cites research, so I'll start by looking at the sources.
It claims near the top that poop contains 4.91 kcal per gram (note: 1 kcal = 1 Calorie = 1000 calories, which fact I could find/do trust despite the slop in that search). Now obviously, without a range or mention of an average, this isn't the whole picture, but maybe it's an average to start from? However, the citation link is to a study (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32235930/) which only included 27 people with impaired glucose tolerance and obesity. Might have the cited stat, but it's definitely not a broadly representative one if this is the source. The public abstract does not include the stat cited, and I don't want to pay for the article. I happen to be affiliated with a university library, so I could see if I have access that way, but it's a pain to do and not worth it for this study that I know is too specific. Also most people wouldn't have access that way.
Side note: this doing-the-research protect has the nice benefit of letting you see lots of cool stuff you wouldn't have otherwise. The abstract of this study is pretty cool and I learned a bit about gut microbiome changes from just reading the abstract.
My next move was to look among citations in this article to see if I could find something about calorie content of poop specifically. Luckily the article page had indicators for which citations were free to access. I ended up reading/skimming 2 more articles (a few more interesting facts about gut microbiomes were learned) before finding this article whose introduction has what I'm looking for: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3127503/
Here's the relevant paragraph:
"""
The alteration of the energy-balance equation, which is defined by the equilibrium of energy intake and energy expenditure (1–5), leads to weight gain. One less-extensively-studied component of the energy-balance equation is energy loss in stools and urine. Previous studies of healthy adults showed that ≈5% of ingested calories were lost in stools and urine (6). Individuals who consume high-fiber diets exhibit a higher fecal energy loss than individuals who consume low-fiber diets with an equivalent energy content (7, 8). Webb and Annis (9) studied stool energy loss in 4 lean and 4 obese individuals and showed a tendency to lower the fecal energy excretion in obese compared with lean study participants.
"""
And there's a good-enough answer if we do some math, along with links to more in-depth reading if we want them. A Mayo clinic calorie calculator suggests about 2250 Calories per day for me to maintain my weight, I think there's probably a lot of variation in that number, but 5% of that would be very roughly 100 Calories lost in poop per day, so maybe an extremely rough estimate for a range of humans might be 50-200 Calories per day. Interestingly, one of the AI slop pages I found asserted (without citation) 100-200 Calories per day, which kinda checks out. I had no way to trust that number though, and as we saw with the provenance of the 4.91 kcal/gram, it might not be good provenance.
To double-check, I visited this link from the paragraph above: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022316622169853?via=ihub
It's only a 6-person study, but just the abstract has numbers: ~250 kcal/day pooped on a low-fiber diet vs. ~400 kcal/day pooped on a high-fiber diet. That's with intakes of ~2100 and ~2350 kcal respectively, which is close to the number from which I estimated 100 kcal above, so maybe the first estimate from just the 5% number was a bit low.
Glad those numbers were in the abstract, since the full text is paywalled... It's possible this study was also done on some atypical patient group...
Just to come full circle, let's look at that 4.91 kcal/gram number again. A search suggests 14-16 ounces of poop per day is typical, with at least two sources around 14 ounces, or ~400 grams. (AI slop was strong here too, with one including a completely made up table of "studies" that was summarized as 100-200 grams/day). If we believe 400 grams/day of poop, then 4.91 kcal/gram would be almost 2000 kcal/day, which is very clearly ludicrous! So that number was likely some unrelated statistic regurgitated by the AI. I found that number in at least 3 of the slop pages I waded through in my initial search.
