Tootfinder

This is a pretty good rundown on why the #GenerativeAI bubble isn't like the #DotComBubble but *far worse.*
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3-vf78ZwTc

For reference (more of "Cars are Racist," with some "Cars are Settler Colonialist," and "Cars are Ecocidal"):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s19okTYl8MA

Someone else pointed out that I left out a whole bunch of racism stuff. I also realized I totally left out the settler colonialism aspect of cars which... there are books about.
Looks like I'm gonna need to revisit this a lot after I do some more reading.
Speaking of which, if you feel like there's something missing here please feel free to point it out. I know it's not exhaustive (just exhausting(.

Also, I'm sorry it's so long. It turns out cars are fucking awful and I hate them a lot.

RE: https://chaos.social/@vogelchr/116953057618621110
OMFG WTF

Alright, I fucking wrote the first draft. Now I'm tired.
Something something #FuckCars
https://hexmhell.writeas.com/transitliberationism-a-bicycle-anarchist-manifesto
Edit: also the usual. Editing is welcome, feedback, fact checks, typo call-outs, are all greatly appreciated.

Listening to the Revolutions podcast and there are so many things that happened based on some mistake or misinterpretation then cascade faster than anyone expects. Honestly, after all the evil shit the oligarchs are doing, I really think it'll end up being some obscure parody or just misinformation that kicks off the insurrection in the US.

Our resources are controlled by a cult that's demanding that we have faith in their impossible god.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12559-012-9124-9

RE: https://nerdculture.de/@tynstar/116781190514549458
I want everyone to realize that we have no evidence that such an intelligence is computationally possible.
Edit: this seems to be a parody quote or misattribution based on some folks checking the actual video for the quote.

I'm going to deviate a bit from my normal audience and focus in on #tech (especially #Security folks). I came across the practice from public health and emergency management and brought it into work. They seemed to have never heard of it. I'm curious how common my experience is. (Please boost for visibility)
Have you ever used table top exercises in your work (such as, to verify a runbook would work as expected)?
Yes, and I work in tech
No, and I work in tech
Yes, and I don't work in tech
No, and I don't work in tech

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@hex_m_hell/116603232724527092
Trying to get my technical writing back up too.

I want Mike Duncan's "Revolutions" but covering the Spanish Civil War, China, Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, and the various anti-colonial struggles, then come back to France for May 1968, and a few others, maybe ending with the Zapatistas, Rojava/DAANES, the Gen Z uprisings, and maybe introducing Myanmar.

Sealioning cultists are swarming like muggen and earn the same treatment.

It's worth nothing that oil, the dominant funder of both political parties, the industry that ultimately maintains veto power over both parties political platforms, is not profitable without massive state investment. Roads, parking, and infrastructure grants, all put money in the pockets of the industry that is destroying the planet. That money then comes right back into the political sphere to control the frame of debate around climate change and how to address it.

Logistics in the technical sense (part of supply chain management) is a subset of logistics in the vernacular sense ("the handling of the details of an operation"). You can explore this second and more general sense, and thereby build an understanding of the first and more technical sense, by iteratively asking the question, "how does one make that happen" and follow questions from there.
A big part of organizing is figuring out the (vernacular) logistics (and helping others figure it out). You want to organize a seed swap? Ok. How does one make that happen? Well, you need seeds, people, a place, and perhaps a time. How does one make that happen? You can forage seeds or you can buy seeds for a garden and swap extras. How do you get people to come? Well, figure out where you want people to come from and choose an accessible place. What's the easiest thing to do? Get people from your neighborhood. How does one make that happen? Well, maybe put up flyers. How does one make that happen? Well, print them on your printer if you have one, or at a library, then go post them up. Etc.
Keep asking questions until you either find a roadblock that you can't find a way around, or you find things you can do yourself (one of those things you can do yourself is asking friends to help).
If you practice the exercise of thinking about how things happen, you can start to find things that you can do yourself. You can start to understand what exists now, and you can imagine what's possible. By thinking about logistics, you can figure out how to replace things when they collapse or are dismantled. You can also identify things that can't easily be replaced, and try to figure out alternatives.
This practice is good for figuring out how to build, but it can also be a valuable practice for figuring out how to resist. Concentration camps and ethnic cleansing also require logistics. Mass displacement means moving people. How does one do that? People are generally going to be moved in planes or buses. How does one do that? Well, people get loaded on to planes or buses in specific places. Planes and buses need fuel. Planes are fueled at their airports, which may well be the same places where people are loaded on to them. There is a fuel depo and a fuel truck that makes flying people out of a specific place possible. How does the fuel get to that fuel depo? Well, that fuel is probably also delivered by truck. Someone drives those trucks. Someone fuels those planes. Someone clears the planes for takeoff. Someone fuels those busses. Someone drives those busses. And so on.
Logistics networks can be highly complex. The more complex the operation, the more possible points of failure and more possible points where pressure can be applied, where operations can be disrupted. Ethnic cleansing is a complicated operation. The logistics of disrupting complicated things tend to be much less complicated than the logistics of the complicated things themselves.
The Right has exploited this fact for a long time. Centralized social services are logistically complex. Public infrastructure is logistically complex. By destroying these things, they can loot public resources by privatizing the infrastructure and functionality.
But the things that support the Right are even more logistically complex. Oil, cars, AI data centers, internal paramilitary, these are extremely complicated and fragile. There are numerous pressure points, all of which can respond to numerous strategies.
If we want to win, we should reduce the influence of politics over the things we care about. We should focus on building distributed mutual aid networks that don't rely on state funding and aren't subject to the whims of politicians. This is also known as "dual power." That is, creating counter-institutions outside of the dominant political system. The Right already does this in the form of churches and corporations.
As we reduce our complexity, we can then press our complexity advantage against the things for which the Right *needs* the state: the apparatus of violence needed to maintain capital and enforce the dominant order.

Also, anyone doing #Anarchist #Writing (in German or English) submissions are open!
https://en.scrappycapydistro.info/submissions

RE: #DearLazyWeb (#Anarchist lazy web): does anyone know if anything like this already exists?

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/116595370298718556
If anyone *does* want to boost a good disaster prep zine, boost it here. I'd love to have some stuff to share with people.

Some old white dude decided to jump all over yelling "Ackchyually, no one forced you to buy a car!!", and I'm just blocking. This shit is so easy to research. Like, yeah, people were forced to buy a car by minimum parking zoning that spread out cities, mass transit being (very intentionally) destroyed, and giant cars that murder people. There are actual laws that very intentionally made things worse, and then there's the intentionally created prisoner's dilemma of ever expanding car sizes.
This shit is extremely easy to research. At this point I'm just assuming it's trolls or the type of people who would be like "but no one has *proved* smoking causes cancer" back in the 90's. Yeah, that was a thing, and they sounded *just fucking like these people today.*

I keep seeing the "cars replaced horses" thing related to "AI."
People keep comparing "AI" to cars (positively) without thinking about the fact that cars were forced on people (AAA bought up and destroyed tram lines, there were massive protests, etc), and are the primary driver of climate change that is currently on track to make complex human society impossible. Meanwhile, cities that weren't destroyed for cars, or that have reversed most of the damage, are some of the most desirable places to live.
Maybe we could take the car analogy as a warning. Maybe it could be a reminder to think about how forcing technology on people against their will can reshape society in a profoundly negative way.
The answer for cities has been to right-size transit. Eliminate cars wherever possible, maintain emergency vehicles and mobility aids, and find more efficient alternatives (bikes, trams, metros, and trains) where possible. I feel as though we can extrapolate from the metaphor.
We do not have to repeat the mistake of reshaping society around a single, oversimplified, solution in order to benefit a tiny minority. Perhaps we can actually choose the right technologies based on use cases, rather than hype or dogma.
Cars didn't replace horses. Cars replaced walkable cities, tram lines and mass transit, and children playing in the streets.
"Cars replaced horses" to the benefit of a small group of elite men, at tremendous cost to literally everyone else. When people say, "AI is the new 'cars replacing horses'" they are saying something very specific about their privilege and intentions.

RE: https://social.seattle.wa.us/@divestspd/116938691728026126
Really hoping for an update.

It's also worth thinking about interpersonal conflict between marginalized people with different experiences. Who mediates? How? How do you account for your existing biases when mediating people with different experiences of oppression than your own?
Practice can help answer those questions before you have to "do it live." I'd personally love resources on this, because I had to "do it live" as an organizer, and that was awful.

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@tiotasram/116595511143252449
These types of things regularly destroy otherwise well organized groups. If we could develop practice exercises around sexual violence, bad-jacketing, and interpersonal conflict, we could significantly decrease state leverage against movements and internal disruption.
Bad things happen. We will have to deal with those bad things. The more experience we have dealing with them (even in simulation), the more easily we'll be able to manage them and the more often we'll be able to do the right thing.
But yes, this would need to be at the very least informed by DV/SV survives to make sure scenarios drive towards the right conclusions.

I mean, these are all really good and most of them focused on the subject:
https://www.tangledwilderness.org/zines

and this
https://www.tangledwilderness.org/zines/go-bags

I'll drop this here...
https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/zines/

#Seattle folks who are interested in #DisasterPrep organizing might also be interested in the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods matching funds (closed for 2026, but thinking forward to 2027). We talked about getting grants, but I don't think we ever applied.
#Amsterdam has one too. We don't have to do everything ourselves. It's OK to use money like this to build capacity if we can find good targets. At least, that's my take.

For anyone in the Salish Sea region and thinking about disaster prep, the "Puget Sound: Regional Catastrophic Disaster Coordination Plan and Annexes" is probably worth reading also:
https://mil.wa.gov/asset/5ba4211ba3e85
That one is from 2012.
The Puyallup tribe also created a climate change adaptation report, which is also useful for thinking about how climate change will impact the region (in this case, Tacoma):
https://www.puyalluptribe-nsn.gov/wp-content/uploads/Puyallup-Climate-Change-Impact-Assessment_2016_July-13-v3-pagesV2.pdf

We never built the disaster prep zine, unfortunately. We did build a wildfire and smoke prep zine though, which was cool.

Oh, here it is (July 2018). It's nice that this report back didn't include any names or initials so I didn't need to sanitize it:
Meeting Notes:
Table-top exercise scenario topic was state and far-right repression.
Responses:
Strong networks require redundancy, so no one person is a social connection, skills, or resource gatekeeper. These people are often targeted by the state, and if they get burned out and leave, it also weakens and jeoprodizes groups.
Ways to strengthen our networks:
Mentoring/sharing responsibility. Creating a culture of mentorship and support so new people learn skills, take on responsibilities, and are introduced to other folks. Reducing burden on a few key people too.
Chaos Monkey exercise: ask central people to step back from communications/organizing to see what happens.
Regular check-ins! & Delegates check-in with new members they sign up
Ask well connected folks to introduce people to build social redundancy.
Gaming (D&D, board games, etc) committee could support a more fun, and socially robust network.
Practical safety tool:
Burner phone. Not everyone needs one, but good to have access to.
TO DO LIST:
Make regular announcements at each meeting for people to check-in with folks they know (especially those they haven’t heard from in awhile!)
Start google doc for disaster preparedness zine
Why you should prepare (ideological argument)
What people should have (the basics)
How to prepare
Frame as questions, so people can find the answer that best suits themselves.
Such as “what are you preparing for?”
Where do you spend most of your time? (home? Office? car?)
Make it as easy as possible for folks to get the basics (list locations for supplies, etc.)

Oh, here's one of our docs for anyone in PNW. It's incomplete (also, from 2018):
Running list of disaster risks in the Pacific Northwest:
EARTHQUAKE (Three main faults - Cascadia, Seattle, )
PANDEMIC FLU (Global risk)
Especially high in Seattle compared to many other large US cities due to the high number of international flights and international organizations based in the Seattle.
STORMS
HEAT WAVES
Seattle lacks a familiarity with extreme heat. Less than half of people have air conditioning. Growing wealth inequity, homelessness, and addiction increases the risks posed by high temperatures.
VOLCANIC ERUPTION
Mount. Rainier.
WILDFIRES & WILDFIRE SMOKE
“Harvard University researchers, in collaboration with colleagues at Yale University, have created a watch list of hundreds of counties in the western United States at the highest risk of exposure to dangerous levels of pollution from wildfires in the coming decades. Among them, heavily populated counties such as San Francisco County, Calif., King County, Wash., Alameda County, Calif., and Contra Costa County, Calif., are projected to face the highest level of risk of wildfire smoke exposure in the coming decades.” [source]

Such exercises don't need to be grand though. They can be small. They can be for any domain. They can be organized by people with experience to help people who are new.
A simple scenario of "you're at a protest" can branch off into "you hear blast balls and smell tear gas," "you see someone with a gun," "you see someone injured by police," or "a kettle is forming." Games can allow people with experience to transfer information in a highly effective way, a way that lets new people leverage their knowledge immediately but without risk.
Other scenarios might be things like...
- Someone tells you that your organization has been infiltrated by a right wing agitator
- There's conflict between two members of your organization
- An organizer goes missing
What scenarios do you think activists and organizers should think about?

Here are the scenarios from our 2018 meeting notes:
- Cyber-attack
- Earthquake (FEMA or KC)
- Wind Storm/Power (KC)
- Critical Power Failure
- Pandemic Flu (KC)
- Hurricane
- Chemical Accident
I think we ultimately eliminated "Chemical Accident" as "not something we could do anything about" and "Pandemic Flu" as "too big." Funny that the last one turned out to be something that we had to take care of anyway.

Again, this is focused on community organizations that work directly with emergency management (police, fire, etc). But the ideas still work well (if not the execution) for all sorts of other types of orgs:
https://cdn.kingcounty.gov/-/media/king-county/depts/dph/documents/safety-injury-prevention/emergency-preparedness/cre/cbo-tabletop-exercise-guide.pdf?rev=e9695770e3e2444ab635e2af14254dfc&hash=55894CC9A38E70249D494DF367FD6310

Here are some notes I've found also (not ours, but I think we distilled some ideas from these):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tz0mNWt01Fbc78m3waYzviM3exjDY2aj/view
This is related to FEMA stuff.
Edit:
Apologies in advance for the google link. It's not our doc. But also, we did use google drive. I wouldn't do that today.

We also talked about a "Chaos Monkey" exercise, where random people would be chosen to step out for a period of time to see how it impacts the organization. This really helps identify organizational over-reliance on people who could burn out/be arrested/otherwise be neutralized. It forces an organization to be more resilient because disruption becomes a normal thing that people must adapt to. When a real disruption happens, it's already something people have practiced for.

Table top exercises (basically TTRPGs for government and business) can be used to test plans and refine plans without needing to actually experience a natural disaster, security event, etc. They're used by militaries to practice war. I've been part of such exercises to test incident response runbooks I've written.
I've been reading a friend's thesis about Operational Art and Critical Philosophy in relation to revolutionary praxis. I wonder if anyone has ever run a table top exercise for an action (or for higher level strategy), and, if so, has anything they could share about it?
While organizing with the Seattle GDC, our disaster prep group ran a table to exercise. We chose scenarios from a set of county exercises for local disaster preparedness. Our GM (who worked in public health at the time) had to modify it a lot to fit our use case, but it still gave us a lot of insight.
Unfortunately, it was a number of years ago so I don't really remember the specific scenario or what came out of it.
I did look back at some notes that I found, and we did suggest creating a D&D committee (partially just for conviviality). Reflecting on this in light of reading this thesis, I feel like we we're really on the mark.

There were people then doing everything they could. Some of them survived, a lot of them didn't. They were heroes, and we should spend more time reflecting on their sacrifice and the bravery of their resistance.
There are people today resisting. They are also heroes. We will never know all their names.
If you are doing all you can, you are doing what you're supposed to do. Some of those people are also calling for new Neurenberg Tribunals. That's also worth keeping in mind.

I'd like to remind anyone calling for a new Neurenberg Tribunal that the original one was only necessary because Germans didn't respond appropriately to the evil shit Nazis were doing, when they were doing it. The tribunals essentially asserted that the German people would have been justified in using any force necessary to stop the Nazis, and that all who didn't try to use such force were complicit.
Sit with that for a bit and ponder the implications.

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@scrappy_capy_distro/116595476430224824
Oh hey! I've been part of a writing group and this recent edition has our work in it. I'm pretty happy with it, and everyone else's work is great. Really excited to be in this.

The thesis I was reading spent the majority of it's time focused on John Boyd's OODA loop as a tool for critical analysis in high pressure or constrained situations. Table top exercises could also benefit from using these steps to slow down the thought process, expose what's actually happening, and sharpen these tools.
So each step could start by observing (which is generally what the GM will tell you, but you may ask additional questions to refine observational thinking). What do you look for in any given situation? How do you gather data? What sources do you use?
Next you would orient. Talk through this out loud. What does that data mean? How this fit what you already know, or does it challenge your assumptions? Are you observing something related to a previous action? What does that tell you about your previous action or actions? How do you turn the data you observed into intelligence you can act on? How do your observations narrow the options for the next possible action?
Then you decide your action. But you're not simply deciding, you're coming up with a hypothesis that your action will test. Anything you do is an opportunity to learn something about the world, about your situation, about the accuracy of the model you're using to make decisions. What belief does your next action imply? How will you know if that action was correct or incorrect? What observations would challenge your hypothesis? What observations would confirm it? Are those mutually exclusive, or are there additional observations or actions you must make to clarify things?
Then act. Finish your turn by choosing your action or actions (individually or collectively). Perhaps take a moment to write down notes, like what your observations, your hypothesis, and if you think your previous hypothesis was confirmed or refuted. You can review these all later to refine your thinking.
By exploring these ideas in a safe environment, you can train your brain to run through the process at high speed when under pressure. This helps you avoid panic. It's a lot like slowly practicing marshal arts moves until they become muscle memory, which then just happen without thought when needed.

RE: https://mstdn.social/@MaryAustinBooks/116936000385533547
Best be ready to back up those words with more than votes or they're gonna get ignored.

Multiple times, apparently...
https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/111/#r1427

They have done similar stuff with warehouse workers in the past:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-under-fire-for-software-that-recommends-firing-workers/

Huh, there's a deleted article claiming that Amazon has been firing people with AI:
https://web.archive.org/web/20251201000000*/https://www.yeetmagazine.com/at-amazon-employees-are-now-fired-by-artificial-intelligence-the-future-of-work-or-just-cold-tech/

The Amazon "replacing HR with AI" stuff is also public knowledge:
https://www.fastcompany.com/91565321/amazon-is-taking-human-out-of-hr-ai-chatbot-app-aza

I know Amazon has been frantically replacing HR with AI, and I know that they have also been firing otherwise top performers who are on medical leave. But it seems like it would be difficult to figure out if they did exactly the same thing without a similar leak.
https://www.reuters.com/world/meta-used-ai-target-workers-with-medical-conditions-layoffs-former-employees-2026-07-14/

I need to take a break for a bit.

Police coordinate with ICE all the time, even in sanctuary cities. They ignore the laws, they ignore orders, because they are a fascist gang. The Fraternal Order of Police endorsed Trump *AFTER J6 RIOTERS KILLED COPS*. They have ignored anti-black pogroms basically every time they haven't been leading them. Portland Police literally had a squad to "fight communism" made of known Klan members. That kind of shit is *everywhere*. Washington police formed a death squad to assassinate Michael Reinoehl on Trump's orders. ICE is *still* carrying out ethnic cleansing, and police, who have always been racist and anti-labor, help them every chance they can. These cops are enforcing abortion bans, all while protecting Epstein billionaire. I'm not even touching on *half* of the shit.
They are murdering mothers, they are murdering children, they are kidnaping parents using children as bait, and they're doing all this while protecting child predators. This is one system.
Abolish ICE and the fucking police. Now.

There has to be a rock bottom, but it feels like we've gone straight through bedrock and glitched into some unrecognizable upside-down where we just keep falling faster and faster.
If this isn't enough to get people into the streets until this stops, I just can't imagine what it would take. They literally murdered a 1 year old and they claim it was because his dad was stealing diapers. What the actual fuck?

RE: https://mefi.social/@MissConstrue/116587674238145868
Motohegemony requires a very specific set of conditions to exist. It relies on an incredibly complex supply chain, and a fragile framework of political and financial support. Leaders have been largely competent (though, perhaps, malevolent), and have prioritized systemic stability over all else.
The conditions that made that system viable have collapsed. Your best bet to avoid being consumed by that collapse is to fight for bike infrastructure and mass transit, and to abandon cars as much as possible.
You will have to adapt to a life without cars. There is no question of "if" that will be necessary, but "under what conditions." Will you choose the time, or will the time be chosen for you?

I had a dream I was watching a documentary called "A History of Genocide" that basically had this premise. There's an Öcalan quote in Democratic Confederalism that I'm gonna have to track down again where he said something along the lines of "States are easier to rule when they only have one culture, so there's an implicit force driving all states towards genocide."

As I listen to the Revolutions podcast mini series on 1848, it's hard not to fixate in the ways in which the Liberal obsession with nationalism and national borders planted the seed for the genocides that followed. Liberals are still confused by why genocide is a persistent problem, as though liberalism itself should have fixed it. "We must establish more liberal institutions," they believe, "like the ICC, so that we can hold people accountable."
But genocide is simply a property of nations and borders. Nations have always be arbitrarily drawn and diverse groups of people have always lived together. I grew up with the balkanization of post-soviet Russia and post colonial Wars in Africa. Conservatives (that is, classical Liberals) would talk about how these people were simply uncivilized or somehow genetically predisposed to conflict. But the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides were similar to the Liberal violence implicit in nationalism from the beginning. The Bosnian Genocide was quite specifically a product of the Liberal nationalism of 1848.
There are still people in the world whose culture is defined by migration. These cultures do not recognize the legitimacy of borders because borders make their culture impossible. The very existence of these lines, and their necessary enforcement, is genocidal to pastoralists and other migratory people.
You literally cannot have borders and not be committing genocide. Concepts of national identity just add to the genocidal push, targeting ethnic minorities. Ethnicities defined by not having a nation of their own, such as Roma and non-zionist Jews, are, like pastoralists, permanently threatened by these imaginary lines.
And now, people look at the genocide ICE is carrying out, at the terror and murder, and they blame Trump. But Trump is simply the avatar of forces far beyond his comprehension.
Every liberal needs to look at their beliefs and realize that these murderous policies are implicit in the very concept of a nation.

The Strange and Obscure Rituals of the Neurotypical Community: a collection of essays I never had the dopamine to write

This also sets up the legal framework for controlling local models, which I was talking about like last week or something.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@doriandiaconuro/116743712041133107
Jailbreaking is something that fundamentally can't be fixed. That's literally a property of LLMs.

"AI is going to replace a lot of jobs."
Ok, what do you think is gonna happen when you stop paying the "don't riot" bill? How long can you go without paying that bill before an angry mob is gonna come to collect? You can tell from their vacant eyes that they never considered that.
They're gonna go in their bunkers... And then what? They all care about getting into the bunkers and never consider that the doors can be welded shut and the vents filled with concrete.

LLMs can do a lot of the work people are tasked with doing on a regular basis, because a lot of the work people do is bullshit. The majority of what we do isn't to achieve any goal, it's a way to distribute just enough wealth to keep things calm while keeping us all too busy to actually make things better.
We aren't paid to make stuff or do things. We're paid not to riot. Elites used to know that. The fact that they've forgotten how the machine works is evident in its current implosion, and will only become more obvious as they forget the one thing that actually keeps them safe.

RE: #Boycott or economic blackout, #GeneralStrike, and #TaxStrike are escalations. Get in the streets and stay there. This is like a bouncer putting someone's arm behind their back and moving them.
Sometimes people try to slip out of that and fight back. Imagine if a bouncer just let themself get pummeled because they weren't ready, even after the belligerent asshole telegraphed it. A lot of bouncers take martial arts, not because they use it as a first response but because they want to be ready for those edge cases.
Armed revolution is like a bouncer getting down to brawl and calling in their buddy with the zip ties and bear mace. It's not something anyone starts with, or anyone wants to escalate to, but some people can't take a hint and are incapable of doing what's best for everyone.
Always know your next step (even if you hope you don't have to take it).
Imagine if a bouncer was just like, "oh, I asked him nicely but he told me to fuck off. I guess the creep who's punching random people and pissing in the corner runs the bar now."

I will never not boost this. He traded so many lives for his own.

RE: https://todon.eu/@CrimethInc/116913952636548872
When this specific phase of history is over, and, perhaps, we've turned NWDC into some artist space like Seattle's Inscape, we'll put a statue of Willem in the center of the garden where those buses once were. It's not something he'd probably have liked much, but memorials aren't for the dead. They're for the living, to help us remember what to aspire to.

I will also point out that, if you are accessing a system illegally then you have no recourse if someone exploits vulnerabilities in your scraping infrastructure via illegally exfiltrated data.
I do vulnerability research against AI systems for fun, and I use things like robots.txt as a warning. Fail to respect it at your own peril. You have been warned.

But I would warn anyone circumventing anti-LLM protections that, as the tide turns against #LLM usage and "#AI" as a whole, that it may become politically useful for some state AGs to score political points. Those political points may come by putting you in prison, or, at the very least, dumping lawyers on you and ruining your life. An AG doesn't need to win to score points for their political party or to virtue signal. All they need to do is build a case against you. Because the CFAA is *so vague* it's easy to make something plausible enough that it won't get thrown out immediately.
So if the gentile "please don't do that" isn't enough, maybe consider this.

Working in computer security, I've learned to be *real fucking careful* about this law and have heard of it being interpreted *very broadly.* If a client of mine described a system to circumvent access restrictions like this I would fire them. But assuming I didn't fire them, I would
1) tell them to shut it down immediately
2) tell them to talk to a lawyer.
LLMs, as a class of user, are clearly not authorized to access the information. By circumventing access controls, they have "knowingly accessed a computer without authorization." Those access restrictions exist to protect against various damages, including bandwidth use and "intellectual property theft" (another concept I'm not a fan of, but anyway). By violating those restrictions they could open themselves up to legal liability.
Now, IANAL. My job is to describe risk. That's a sufficient risk. It actually doesn't even matter if you'd win the case in the end, a lot of people just can't afford to fight.
But, in this case, it tends to be powerful people, for whom the law does not apply, abusing people who neither have the protection of the law nor the money to just ruin someone's life with a flood of lawyers.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116908308620011433
Though the DOJ clearly says that it would not prosecute this type of action, as it doesn't align with their objectives, this is a pretty clear violation of the CFAA (18 U.S.C. §§ 1030). It otherwise qualifies in every way as a federal crime.
I'm not a big fan of laws but I do think it's worth noticing that some people end up in prison for decades doing shit like this while other people face no consequences at all. (Which, I guess, actually illustrates why I'm not a fan of laws.)

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/116891026406639288
Yeah, I'm not done with this. How dystopian is it that so many people are physically trapped in their houses, that a whole society feels like it's just fine to wholesale sacrifice the safe mobility of children, the elderly, and people with disabilities, so everyone who can drive is able to sit and wait in long lines of giant metal boxes that pump out fumes that are literally making huge parts of the planet uninhabitable for humans.
What the fuck is this shit?? But yeah, sure, cameras are the problem here.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/116568367313642477
Oh, did Cause finally accept that bringing events that bring fascists with guns and people who want to murder students might be bad for business, or did she just realize that she might actually get sued this time?

While billionaires try to build #AGI, it's absolutely clear that, were it built, it could not possibly be controlled.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1607.00913
Given their obsession, this seems like bad news (it's old news). Fortunately, probably it can't be built.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12559-012-9124-9
So that's fun. It's interesting that the second is older than the first. It would be interesting to actually read the second rather than just the abstract.
Billionaires are killing us with climate change in order to create an evil god that they can't control, even though they never bothered to check if creating that god was even possible in the first place. So that's all fun.

If you dump enough money into the AI hole, can you so completely destroy the intellectual commons that access to information can be mediated through a small set of companies? I mean, we've been mostly down that road for a long time and we're just now getting mad about it. Corporate AI is the endgame, not the opening strike.

Yeah, it's time for a blue shell.

The "AI Industry" (to the degree that it exists) has burned billions of dollars with no real hope of recuperating that. Models offered by services, charging huge amounts for inference, don't really offer much, if anything, above open source models run locally. Many of the claims made by these companies, and their supporters, have turned out to be lies. It seems as though the whole thing is a huge grift.
Investments will likely never be recovered. We've already seen a bail out in the form of military contracts. We will see much more public money dumped in to these technologies. In fact, threatening workers and suppressing labor strength is so strategically valuable that I expect LLMs to just be publicly funded (by being folded into the military industrial complex).
On these grounds, it can be easy to reject the technology outright. After all, how can anything useful not be profitable?
Even for radicals, capitalism can cloud our lens. The fact is, the dominant technologies of our age tend to not be profitable. Or rather, they are "publicly funded, privately profitable" (/hums in propagandhi/). Just like oil.
Outside of Saudi Arabia, oil is mostly not profitable to get out of the ground. Even there, it had only historically been profitable because of massive global military investments. The oil-centric world we have today is largely built on, and kept in place by, massive government subsidies. Roads, street parking, and direct subsidies to oil companies are all massive investments that tie populations to the resource at the heart of the military industrial complex: oil.
Oil was strategically important, because you can't run a modern military without it. The fossil fuel economy doesn't exist because fossil fuels are so cheap, but because modern militaries are only really possible by militarizing the population.
Unprofitable things *are made profitable* to serve the strategic interests of authoritarian systems. Though we have better alternatives to most oil-based products, it would be hard to argue that oil is not a useful resource. We can acknowledge it's strategic importance while also recognizing that the elimination of oil is essential to the survival of humanity.
Returning to "AI," we're seeing the same type of thing but it's more obvious. After the crypto grift, this seems to just be another way to transfer money into the pockets of the rich.
But crypto wasn't exactly a grift. It had a strategic function to power. It wasn't what we were told it was. It didn't free us from central banks. It wasn't a new way to invest. It wasn't anonymous. But it did create a new way to bribe politicians. It did make it easier to funnel public money into the pockets of the far right.
"AI" can similarly be mostly a grift. It can fail to do most, or all, of the things it claims, and it can still fulfill strategic functions. If we dismiss it as "just another grift," I think we miss a lot. "Just a grift" isn't something sustainable. It is something that will die out. It's something we don't need to resist because it is self limiting. But a strategy is something different. A strategy is more complex. A strategy will be sustained, at any cost. A strategy must be actively resisted.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@skinnylatte/116735308375585073
Borders are violence.

It makes a solid case for the latent fascism of cars, but I would argue that cars actually play an even more active role in creating fascism. Which, I am actually arguing in the essay that I need to get back to writing.

Oh look, someone wrote the "cars are fascist" essay I wanted to write and it's pretty good:
https://brockpress.com/editorial-is-the-automobile-fascist/

I'm not even the first person to say things along this line either:
"Another motivation for reducing the steel intensity of modern society is to limit the consequences of geopolitical conflicts. The more steel we produce for peaceful purposes, the more steel becomes available for war and destruction. Remarkably, the production of military equipment is absent from modern steel statistics, and if mentioned, its share is very low. However, in times of war, steelmaking facilities switch to producing steel for military purposes. The steel industry can thus be converted into a weapons industry at any moment, and there is now a lot more steel production capacity available than there has ever been in history."
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2024/03/how-to-escape-from-the-iron-age/ buried in the last footnote.
Oh, and that article also shows the math that proves that there is no way to move to EVs without absolutely blowing through the carbon budget. You have to switch to bikes and trains. There's literally no other way to keep an even close to habitable planet.

I need to write that "Bicycle Anarchist Manifesto" I've had in my notes for a while.

That's not even getting into my perennial favorite thing to point out: civilian reliance on cars unifies the interests of the population with the military.
US military domination of other countries *relies on cheap oil.* (And also the petrodollar, so oil use globally). If your life is dependent on cheap oil, then you are more likely to support invasions that promise cheaper oil, or oil subsidizes to drive down prices.
But wait, there's more. The auto industry itself is a fungible asset for the military industrial complex. Factories that make cars can pivot to making tanks and aircraft during war time (as they have). The existence of this infrastructure increases the probability of war.

Orwell's dystopia was walkable. He could not have imagined anything as bad as a society built for cars instead of people.
And, FFS, oil literally funds global fascism. It is the lifeblood of the movement. Hitler's obsession with making every German a driver and getting rid of bikes was not a coincidence. He *hated* bikes. Fascists almost universally hate bikes and mass transit while praising cars. This shit is actually extremely bad and makes for a society that's easier to control. And people still seem to think Elon Musk's mobile surveillance boxes will save the world. Cars are fascism all the way down.
Bikes and bike infrastructure makes for a society where you see and interact with other humans *all the time.* Cars and car infrastructure makes for a society where you interact with machines instead of humans. Cars make people more isolated, which makes people easier to control.

Why yes, I *am* writing that bicycle anarchist manifesto and I am on the section about how American motonormitivity reinforces white supremacy. Why do you ask?

Fuck Robert Moses. I'm not saying it for any particular reason, other than that I was reminded that it is a thing that should be said, at least daily, by at least one person, for the foreseeable future.

Just another work of fiction, completely unrelated to the current moment.
https://hexmhell.writeas.com/the-snatchers

Excerpt from an essay I may or may not write:
Ontologies evolve to fulfill functions. They serve a purpose, and will be adapted until they fulfill this purpose. There are, occasionally, things that exist within those ontologies which do not actually exist.
Programming bugs are an example. There is no such thing. Code is code. It can't be right or wrong, it just is or isn't. The mismatch between the intent and the execution creates a side effect. We may confidently assert such a thing exists. We may name such things. But they don't exist. This becomes apparent when you try to figure out how to suppress one specific instance of a bug in one specific place through multiple revisions.
At some level, a lot of things don't actually exist. We only need to follow through the logic of The Ship of Theseus to see how our ontologies break down.
One thing that doesn't exist, that is a side effect rather than an object, is the personal self. You do not exist. Your perception of your existence is an illusion, a necessary side effect.
Every day you wake up a different person. Every second you are not who you were. That person is as dead as you will be the next instant, as all versions of you will be every second until there are no more. These selves are bound together by imperfect memories. The person you remember as yourself, all those people, never existed. You created them based on your current experience, your current iteration.
You could, just as easily, wake up an unrecognizable person, in some Dark City, and never know the difference. Continuity is absurd. And yet, some people believe they'll still experience the same self after being frozen or "uploaded." It's a silly illusion.
Once you can get over that illusion, you can let go of the need to thrash against the void. You can let go of the various furious dreams of immortality.
At a high enough level, all ontologies are illusions. Useful illusions, but illusions none-the-less. There is only the undifferentiated universe, and you are experiencing it. You are the universe. You will always persist, long past the time this specific iteration or any iteration experiences it.
This implies a certain obligation then to all the others experiencing the same self, the future iterations that may remember being someone like you, and any other person you, the universe, could wake up as tomorrow.

Humans should not operate cars. They are too dangerous. But it's been so normalized that everyone thinks they just have the inalienable right to fling their murder box around everyone else.

Like, actually fuck cars. They have always been bad for everyone. They have been Orwellian shit for a long time, but it's always the rest of us that suffer.
I actually think this is a good wake up call. These things will *always* be a problem. Cars being perfect for controlling people is a geometry problem. The technical element just makes the rest easier.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@briankrebs/116890719090826544
Maybe it's time to build society in a way that doesn't require you use giant, people crushing, mobile surveillance units that require legal documentation to operate, every time you want to go get milk.

inb4 the first person gets arrested for using an unlicensed hacking model. See y'all on the other side of Sundevil 2.0

One solution here is to make corporate LLMs unprofitable. Local resistance to data center build-outs is already making that happen, as is other resistance. But, honestly, they're already doing a pretty good job of this themselves. The "AI industry" has never been profitable. Local #LLMs can't be monetized and also can't be prevented.
It's simply not possible to recover training investment costs by charging for inference. I guess they can try to make local models illegal, which is totally possible. I can totally see corporations pushing through a bunch of regulation to "control uncensored models" creating a black market for ablated models.
It's gonna be a wild ride. Get your dark nets ready, we're very close to an even more cyberpunk future.

When they say "we are entering a new industrial revolution" what they want you to hear is "things that were once expensive will now be cheap," but what they mean is "we will be using the massive economic disruption, that we are creating, to change the world against your will and further shape it towards the interests of a small and powerful minority."
#LLM #AI

I also think that's one of the hidden lessons of May Day. It's always been about immigrant labor. It's always been about internationalism. Countries deport international anarchists because they are an easy group to target, but also because they make things especially challenging for authoritarians.
Tangentially related: https://www.liveliketheworldisdying.com/how-the-history-of-may-day-can-prepare-us-for-tomorrow/

A lot of languages increase accessibility. Aside from a lot of working class folks not speaking English as a primary language (or not at all), there are also other accessibility languages like ASL. These aren't just valuable for accessibility though. There's still a lot of cutting edge anarchist theory in all types of languages that isn't available in English. And how many surveillance tools do you think are scanning social media for ASL?
Authoritarian structures collapse in the face of the kind of complexity that we want to exist.
Multilingualism is a prefigurative praxis.

If you are an anarchist and you speak only one language, learn another one. Learn the language of your land, the indigenous language where you live. Learn the language of your ancestors, especially those languages that the state has tried to murder away. Learn an international language other than English, which have also been targets of state repression.
Prioritize languages that you both have some connection with (because it's hard to learn a language you don't care about) and languages that the state has tried to erase (because there are *reasons* those languages were targeted). Language (which can't be fully separated from culture) adds complexity. The state often tries to murder away language because (among other reasons) hierarchy is threatened by complexity. Every language adds some surveillance overhead, some more than others.

I really want a podcast that mixes anarchist academic papers and interviews with their authors with real projects from around the world and interviews with organizers and agitators in a single content stream.
Anyone know if anything like that exists today?

RE: https://mastodon.social/@theleftistlawyer/116545503922049830
Any meeting you organize, do this. Always. That includes your office if you work in one.

Just to pull one more thing from the linked article:
"These sad sociopathic fucks are attempting to write a future where everything and everyone behaves in a way that benefits them. Where no one gives them lip. Where no one tells them no. Where no one defies them. Where consent has been taken off the table."
LLMs have shown them the world they want to see. They have seen a vision of the future where they are the absolute dictators of a world of sycophants. They trained models to act like this, because that's what they want to exist. But they've made the mistake of conflating the reality they want with the world that actually exists.
This will destroy them. That's not a question at this point. The open question is "how many of us will be consumed by the process of their self-destruction?"

Keep fighting, no matter what the cost. Keep fighting in solidarity, if for not morals then because you are next anyway.

It's also important to recognize that tech oligarchs won't let this die. It's too important to them. This is part of the boss fight right here. They will take everything from us to coerce us into making LLMs profitable, to deskilling our labor and selling (skewed) human knowledge back to us at a premium. They will take away every benefit the state has, kill as many people as it takes to funnel every penny of government subsidy into this. They will burn every drop of subsidized oil. Those ICE camps are gonna be used for something. If it takes right wing death squads, they'll do it.
They will kill every last one of us to realize total domination. We have to be ready for that, and prepare accordingly. As many lives as have been taken by people with similar ideologies, those ideologies have always lost. If we know what's coming and prepare for it then they will lose faster, and at a lower cost.

I'm glad someone put that to words, because it's been bouncing around in my head for a while. It's yet one more example of how intersectionality is critical to understanding and resisting the horrors we are all living through.

Now, I have a lot of reasons to hate vibe coding, but one of them is that I just think more easily in code. I reason by writing the code. It's not something I can easily disentangle.
Architectures tend to live in my head as pictures that change as I write. The words are code. There's no intermediate. So the offer of being able to skip the poc phase is just not interesting. "Oh, cool, I can skip the part where I preemptively identify problems? Great. That's gonna work out well." Vibe coding can give you working proof of concepts that self destruct when you try to grow them (much like any poc code you just try to use without actually engineering).
I don't know that this problem will ever get fixed. Even if it does, I don't know that this fix will ever rival human engineering. I don't think it's actually possible to know that yet, there are too many factors at play. It's definitely lowered the bar for writing proof of concepts. Now a business idiot can make a proof of concept, which even further distorts their understanding of what engineering actually looks like.
In order to go back to work, I'm basically expected to be ramped up on LLM stuff. But it all keeps reminding me of the feeling of powerlessness when we organized against Trump, when we organized against the rally at UW, when I tried to stop someone from pepperspraying people and I got shot. It's all the same ideology of rapists and pedophiles forcing their entire world on us against our will, thinking they can dangle "the Epstein files" in front of everyone and then yank them away like nothing ever happened... Like no one knows they implicate the entire power structure.

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116713587055769588
I was actually using LLMs a couple of years ago for text classification. Before that I pushed hard for resources to support automation. I helped build an automation team where none existed. I pushed to use transformer models to solve problems before LLMs existed. I used simple ML to make predictions and classify issues. I've been on the cutting edge for a long time.
I *should* be an early adopter of the modern LLM thing. But tech oligarchs transformed themselves into reverse ouroboros (infinitely shoving their heads up their own asses). The oligarchs never really believed that other people had free will, but I think they had been too scared to let that slip. After the lockdowns, I think they just snapped and here we are.
As much as I trash LLMs, I've had a nuanced critique for a while (wiring about this now). The lack of consent is so huge. The oligarchs have plans for us, and it doesn't involve our consent.
Under different conditions, I do actually think there could be revolutionary elements to this tech (not so much LLMs themselves as LLM MCP, and not for the things they think). But without consent, I think (and hope) the friction will overcome the momentum.
"AI" is already more expensive than humans. It will never be profitable as long as people resist. There are multiplying problems, and I don't see those being fixed without collective effort. I have a lot of thoughts, but "consent" (or the real or implied lack thereof) is central to so many aspects of LLMs.
The oligarchs want to force LLM tech onto all of us without our consent. Ultimately, they want to replace us all with obedient machines. The mistake they made was assuming we would be as obedient as the LLMs with which they have become so obsessed.