1. The business class has been promised they can cut workers and use AI instead, which has been their dream since forever.

2. AI has been shown to deskill workers. Experts lose their skills, new workers don’t gain new skills. Then the owners of AI can rent skills back to people at a profit.

3. If businesses can deskill and fire enough workers, they can take advantage to reinstate things like scrip and slavery.

You rightfully notice that AI isn’t useful enough for businesses to throw an entire civilization worth of money at because you’re thinking about it as a tool, but it’s not a tool, it’s a weapon. A weapon pointed at you and me.

Hey, an actual shower thought

Universities and colleges are letting out now, so now’s a good time to start looking for trans and neurodivergent friendly housing. I’d recommend starting outside of Seattle in Shoreline, Lynnwood, and Everett, as it will probably be less expensive to live. You can always take the Link into Seattle. Look for trans and neurodivergent friendly facebook groups, craigslist postings, discord groups. Be prepared to bounce off people until you find a good place. Reach out to Express Employment or other work placement programs to see if they can find you work. If you think your BPD is severe enough to be considered a disability, you may be able to open a state disability claim and see if you can get a case manager, maybe a therapist, maybe move into an adult family home. There’s also Portland if you think the rainy weather might not be good for your mental health. Just don’t give up and try not to beat yourself up too much.

Currently in the US, my full time job pays me every two weeks (May is a three paycheck month for us). It’s a professional level job, but we’re not overtime exempt, so I only work 40 hours a week or I need to take flex time to balance it out the next week. I sometimes work 9 or 10 hour days, but that just means I get to leave early on Friday.

My part time tutoring job pays once a month, I turn in teaching reports at the end of the week and they use that to calculate hours.

When I was teaching in China I’d get paid on the first of the month, never had any problems with delays, but that might be owed to being a foreign teacher.

When I was in Korea they’d pay twice a month, with the only delay being the first paycheck where they forgot to take down my banking information and the last paycheck that I had to fight HR for.

The current connotation is a marketing term for a series of computer models that generate text, images, and video, none of which is actually artificially intelligent, but which many people have been swept up in with various promises of a future that’s almost certain to never materialize.

If you’re a Palantir employee reading this wondering if you’re the bad guy: You are. You are the bad guy.

Liam (The Plant Slant) does short form video that’s aimed at combating misinformation and giving simple advice for forming nutrition habits

Feel better, speedy

I filmed a lake with dark clouds over it a couple weeks ago for a video outro, set my phone up at the edge of a dock, held onto it the entire time. Could not stop thinking about how screwed I’d be if I had a hand spasm, or if there was a gust of heavy wind, or if the dock suddenly shook and my phone dropped into the lake.

The person who wrote that fancies themselves someone who can manipulate circumstances to their favor through means other than action, such as through social manipulation or persuasion, not realizing that sometimes conditions require changing hearts and minds and sometimes conditions require putting your body on the line.

I know, you should stop using Google

AI doesn’t understand anything, it’s just producing a linguistically coherent answer that may or may not be right. Stop looking to LLMs for answers if you care about whether those answers are correct or not

Reading anything without the help of AI will help you become a better writer because you’ll learn new ways of using words and sentences and syntax in a way that people write naturally. It seems weird to focus on Marxism, but if that’s what gets you reading, go for it.

Libertarian used to be a polite word for anarchist, it was a contrast to authoritarian. Libertarian socialists still see themselves as part of a historical tradition as an alternative to authoritarian socialists, though that’s more European than American. Then there was a political project of European and American conservatives to redefine libertarians to mean conservatives who believed in strong property rights and a weak state.

Anarchism is a broad ideology against authority. Anarchists are against private property rights because if there is private property, there must be an authority to enforce those rights. Instead, anarchists point to pre-civilization methods of carving out individual spaces from the commons so that people can live without having to “make a living.”

There’s been a massive propaganda push by governments and state powers to define anarchist as “bomb-thrower,” or to try and make anarchist ideas seem ridiculous, but anarchists are extremely invested in people recognizing themselves as moral agents invested in communal good while maintaining individuality. if you’re interested in anarchist ideas, try reading non-fiction like David Graeber, or fiction like Ursula K LeGuin, or speeches by Emma Goldman. Don’t let people on social media’s knee-jerk reaction against anarchism turn you off. Even if you end up not being an anarchist, you can at least engage with the ideas and maybe find some stuff that resonates with you.

If they’re still alive and still benefitting from said art and still harming people, no. Any time, money, or attention you give to them enables them to hurt other people.

A couple years ago I saw a band I really liked live. They were really important to me because their music helped me get through the collapse of one of my past relationships. Then it came out that the singer had hurt multiple people in multiple cities on their tour. So now if I stream their music, or buy their merch, or even just listen to their music alone, it’ll be materially supporting a person’s ability to hurt other people.

It’s much easier to separate art from people who are no longer around to hurt other people. I don’t feel bad for appreciating Guernica or reading Infinite Jest because doing so doesn’t support the artists behind them causing harm.

Going back through the game on my all bosses run and finding Ebriatas and Maria for the first time. Ebriatas isn’t the most fun fight, but her design is just so perfect. And learning the Maria fight is just so rewarding, like fighting Gehrman again but even tighter.

Ocarina of Time is my GOAT. Finishing it as a kid and realizing that games could be more than just killing time, that they could be epic journeys with satisfying endings, that they could be a whole art form was really transformative.

I saw someone in advertising a few days ago saying that using AI generated images in their ads kills their sales with gen Z. Gen Z can spot errors in shadows, inconsistencies in textures, small tells that boomers and gen X largely can’t. As a millennial, I can spot a lot of AI, though every so often something slips through. But when I see a youtube channel with an AI generated image, or a business with an AI generated advertisement, or a game on steam with AI generated thumbnails, I click the three dots and ignore.

I think most advertising companies are going to find that the more Gen Z and millennial customers they have, the less they’re going to want to use generated images.

Weird, people keep telling me that all the added energy costs of the blockchain, crypto, NFTs, and training AI/LLMs over the past ten years are overblown and not contributing to climate change. It’s so weird how all those things just happened to coincide with accelerated warming.

It’s good you’re being cautious about it but it would be better to not use it at all. A recent Scientific American article showed that AI autofill suggestions change how people think about a subject just through suggestion, even if they don’t use the autofill. And people who use it are often unaware of their own knowledge gaps, so self-reporting about effectiveness is useless. Using it even a little bit is probably putting metaphorical micro-plastics in your brain.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-autocomplete-doesnt-just-change-how-you-write-it-changes-how-you-think/ https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human-cognition-atrophied-and-unprepared-3/

Protect your brain