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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: April 25th, 2026

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  • the best way to make sure everything is some flavor of fine is to keep learning new practical skills. I got pretty doomery there. But the other technological trend that can’t really be stopped is decentralization. Communities can, and will continue to be able, to grow their own food and produce their own power. Knowing how to make thst stuff happen is going to be incredibly important in the rest of the 21st century


  • We’re basically already at a point where most enterprise documentation is written partly or entirely by AI, and then read mostly by AI. Eventually true understanding of e.g. how to build a docker-compose file will be genuinely rare. And they want to apply that model to everything.

    The risk isn’t that GAI will decide, in an Asmovian sense, that the best way to make peace on earth is to kill us all, or that to achieve it’s manufacturing quota it must transmute all matter in the universe I to paperclips. The real risk is that the MBA-wielding professional-managerial class will not be able to resist the siren song of demolishing labor with something that works “well enough.” Eventually they’re going to put it in charge of something critical like ATC or dam control or the electrical grid.

    Humans, by our nature, are diverse, and one fuck up rarely cascades through the entire global system. We make small fuck ups and train each other. AI “learns” by observing and probabilistically imitating, and one model could be deployed in a thousand places and screw up the exact same way.

    tldr ai won’t kill us, our bosses will once Anthropic wines and dines them












  • Really donald. Mr president. You want generals who are more like the ones who lost. you want losers? If the shoe fits, I guess.

    i wonder how many Germans felt similar to howni feel, which is that the crimes against humanity are injurious but the incompetence is just insulting.

    Like its bad enough that our civil rights are being taken out from under us, the death camps are horrifying, and the political malpractice is infuriating. But the fact that we’re all letting people who are this stupid do all these things inflicts a level of psychic damage I can’t properly articulate.



  • Company’s that own a patent can release spores causing cross contamination, then sue a farmer at harvest for their crop containing copyrighted genes.

    No they cannot. This little bit of common knowledge is bullshit on several levels.

    1. nitpicky, but plants reproduce by pollen and seeds, not by spores. okay, since i’m being nitpicky potatoes and sugarcane don’t reproduce with seeds. potatoes are tubers and sugarcane uses cuttings. some plants reproduce with rhizomes but we usually don’t eat those. point is spores are for mushrooms and ferns and whatnot.
    2. the big seed producers pledge not to sue for trace contamination
    3. monsanto was preemptively sued by farmers in 2013 because the farmers were afraid of the windblown lawsuits and wanted to get monsanto’s patents on genetics struck down. court said no, because Monsanto could not be sued over a threat that did not exist. That is, Monsanto had never actually sued anyone for windblown genetics. But given the above point the court also said monsanto is legally not allowed to sue for windblown genetics. because they promised not to.
    4. copyright and patent law are two different things. seeds and their genetics are covered under patents. that’s either better, worse, or sideways depending on your perspective but it is different.

    big ag is evil and they fuck farmers over constantly but you don’t have to bullshit to make them look bad