Mitch Effendi (ميتش أفندي)

I have been using, exploring, and researching generative AI and big data / machine learning for like 6 or 7 years now, and all I can say is that generative AI is not at all ready to take most jobs, mostly because the error rates are extremely high for businesses that really can’t tolerate even one mistake, like fast food ordering systems. The liability is going to be insane once a chat bot recommends that someone at the drive-thru order a bleach and mcflurry special, and the high-as-balls teenager working the machine just does what the computer tells them to do.

The issue at hand imo is that C-suites and VPs and shareholders have all been marketed to — it’s obvious to anyone who has worked with it in any real amounts of time that this shit ain’t ready, but, the brass all sure believe that it’s ready, and they’re gonna try. Once the funding floor falls out (in, say, an inevitable recession that comes once foreign countries’ central banks pull their investments in US savings bonds) and these mega model companies start charging what their tech actually costs, people are gonna be the cheaper option real fast.

Personally, I think that any established professional will be fine. If you are already good at programming, you will probably keep doing programming from here. If you’re good at art or design and have work from the past 10 years, you will probably be fine.

Who I mourn for are the kids who are just now coming up. There will be absolutely no cheap opportunities for young and hungry but inexperienced young adults — that space of ‘good enough’ can and will be filled with generative AI. :/ I have no idea what the solution there is besides a campaign towards mentoring youths and giving them opportunities explicitly.

My suggestion personally is that trans folk start taking boating lessons. They might not let you leave by plane, but they can’t stop a small boat from leaving shore somewhere, anywhere, along the 28,000 miles of coastline along the East Coast. Purchasing an old fishing trawler will be helpful, as if your boat obviously has fishing equipment onboard, drone strikes are less likely and less justifiable — especially given how many wealthy, white Americans regularly pilot their little boat-houses to Bermuda every year.

Additionally, in less than three days’ voyage, you can reach several sovereign overseas European territories through which to claim asylum, such as St. Pierre and Miquelon (France), Bermuda (Britain), Sint Maarten (Dutch), and Greenland (Denmark). Stay out of public, and stay safe everyone. Now is the time to use all of those social-avoidance skills we have been practicing for decades.

To quote Death Cab for Cutie, “he was a bastard in life, thus a bastard in death.”

Nazis did not have an ideology. They were a grievance movement that utilized a common folk scapegoat (Jewish and Roma migrants) to unify the fractured German political landscape in the Weimar Republic era.

It was a populist demogogue movement that cynically and callously used terminology that was common and popular among poor working class people in order to trick them into believing that their movement was about anything other than hatred, extermination, and pilfering public coffers. The ‘Socialist’ part of their name was a cynical play to attract those who were active in Communist organizing in the early 1900s.

There was no collective ownership in Nazi Germany. The government owned much of everything, and the only parties that benefited from that ownership were the individual cronies that Hitler personally feted. Nazi Germany was socialist in the way that Vladimir Putin’s Russian Federation is a Communist state — IN NAME ONLY.

Frankly I don’t understand why they didn’t expect anything less by creating random traffic choke points. Mark my words, attitudes on ICE are going to start shifting radically once they start causing more and more collateral damage in pursuit of these capricious arrests.

It’s gonna be something big, like, an ICE agent smearing one of Jeff Bezos’ kids with an SUV while they’re chasing a 75 year old abuelita through a palisade in downtown San Francisco. It’s gonna be random, and whichever unlucky ICE agent ends up doing it is going to get crucified — literally. This kind of high recklessness isn’t even seen in states with sophisticated surveillance or fascism. We are absolutely on some Great Leap Forward bullshit right now.

there was. but also, I mean Kirk getting shot was a school shooting in itself. he was shot on a college campus while students were there.

Really cool action movie that just never stops. Highly recommended.

Bad Bunny is outside of my orbit, and I hadn’t heard of him until he was first on SNL, but you can tell that he did SNL once and decided this is what he was all about now. He is very cute that way.

If I can ask, have you spent any time in the Rust Belt? Because I grew up there, and I can tell you that Americans don’t actually want plastics manufacturing in their backyard, nor will they appreciate the lung cancer and COPD rates skyrocketing because some dipshit has misplaced nostalgia for a time you most likely didn’t even live through.

For a time, I was quite close to manufacturing workforce development in the US. The dirty little secret that nobody who kvetches about American manufacturing will ever acknowledge out loud is that we have plenty of manufacturing in the US, but manufacturers have the plants in places where people cannot affordably travel, nor do natural American workers seem to want to actually do factory work.

They all say they do, by I can tell you from looking at actual jobs data that only 1/10 American workers who start at a factory job actually remain there longer than a month. To fix any of this, we all need to first acknowledge that maybe manufacturing doesn’t exist as much because it’s a shitty job with low pay, low security, and carries a high risk of on-the-job injury. None of y’all are gonna be lining up to be the guy who agitates the molten steel while it’s being transported from the forge to the smelter. Do you know how many people were just encased in molten steel? Do you know how often we just sorta moved on without even compensating the family? Enough so that the American labor union practically began in Pittsburgh.

Millions of small retail or craft businesses now out of business: “haha so true bestie!”

Naked corruption. Investing in cryptocurrency is essentially enabling billionaires to abuse workers on a cosmic scale.

Neato. Always cool to see a new approach. Synapse/Matrix is excellent, but, running a federated Matrix server is an exercise in frustration. So many version forks, so many hard crashes. :(

Aw, look at that, you got the stink lines and everything.

I’m not sure why you put AI in scare quotes — image recognition is a form of AI, and one that predates any LLM or generative technology. OCR A was invented in 1966.

I have been wondering for years why drone bombings aren’t more common with terrorism groups now. They even have off-the-shelf drones that can fly entirely through vertical flow sensors and AI image recognition.

All my IT and InfoSec friends have called me alarmist for suggesting even the possibility of a GFW of America, but every day that passes, it looks more and more likely to happen, doesn’t it?

Start practicing circumvention techniques now, y’all, while it’s still legal and cheap to do so. Learn amateur radio. Learn Meshtastic. Learn all the different censorship-resistant VPN technology out there. Host your own websites or services for friends, family, or your community. It doesn’t make it impossible, but it does make it hard, and fascism is nothing if not lazy.

From now on, you can’t trust any statement the government puts out. Governments have always lied to save face, but this is a new level where they don’t even have to pretend to have an argument or a spin on things. It’s “Oops! All Lies!” because it’s easier.

Why bother coming up with a plausible scenario when all anyone wants to know is the shit that already makes them feel good?

It’s not the most relevant to THIS guy, but in general, a government purposefully separating parents from their children with no means of reunion is one of the named conditions of cultural genocide.

Literally, it’s part (e) of the UN Resolution, the ‘Genocide Convention.’

… any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
© Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
*(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.[5]

We spent so long discussing the legitimate genocide in Palestine, and yet, so little on the damn genocide that has been happening within our borders since 2016.

I feel like it’s an eventuality that during a forest fire, misinformed hunters will just be firing rifles at firefighters trying to save their land.

checks notes

Wait… That already happened?

For anyone too lazy to read, ChatGPT does have guardrails for this kind of thing, but if you continue a conversation anyway, eventually it will stop giving that information and start just being agreeable. It basically gave the kid instructions, and actively discouraged him from any cries for help, because it might keep him from his goal.

My friends, I understand the notion to use an LLM as a cheap replacement for therapy, I genuinely do. But, please don’t use them for that, they cannot give you good advice, and they usually can’t even remember anything except the 128,000 token window it has open right then. A human therapist takes notes and remembers them.