cecilkorik

Why are those things important for solarpunk though? Why is that the most solarpunk thing ever, when equally (arguably more) capable portable battery packs have existed for at least a decade. I have a half dozen of various sizes, they are very rugged and some of them are very lightweight. (The better ones use LiFePo4 batteries and are vastly safer but therefore also somewhat heavier relative to their power and capacity but you can choose whichever you prefer to optimize for)

It’s hard to take a nuanced position on AI due to the justifiable anger about it and how it’s being forced, oversold, and abused. But there is legitimate use and technology there. And it’s not just about medical usage, it’s got genuine uses and is genuinely interesting. It’s not “intelligence”. It’s barely even “knowledge” but it’s really quite powerful and useful if you understand what it actually is and how to use it effectively.

I describe it as a bunch of statistical models, collected in various similar but slightly different ways, representing the vast majority of human knowledge ever posted on the internet that is capable of simulating all that knowledge into a surprisingly convincing reproduction of the original information in a wide variety of ways and leveraging a lot of very interesting connections between all that data. Is it perfect? No. Is it accurate? Not in a way that can be relied on. Can it make decisions? No. Is it your friend? No. Is it thinking? No. It’s just pretending, it’s all a simulation, it’s all fake. But the underlying statistical model itself is really interesting and does contain real, valid, useful information.

Having a static, permanent statistical model of the entire internet as it exists at certain points in time, that fits on my phone is wild and if you can’t imagine ways that could potentially be useful not just right now but also in the future you’re not very imaginative.

It’s useful in the same way that demographic data is useful. Demographic data doesn’t let you look into your neighbor’s house and tell you exactly how much money they make, but it can certainly make an educated guess. It might be close, or it might be wildly wrong. That inaccuracy doesn’t make it useless, it’s just useful in a different way because it does contain important, aggregated data that is useful for other things. Just because some people, many people use it wrong doesn’t make it not useful.

The three kinds of lies are: lies, damned lies and statistics. But statistics are still important. You can use them to make wrong decisions and support misleading concepts very easily, but if you’re careful with them and understand their limitations, they can also be very, very powerful. Sometimes too powerful.

It has lots of false positives and false negatives. It is actually a very simplistic system, if it was “smart enough” we wouldn’t have diseases. In fact, a good number of diseases, especially chronic ones that millions or billions of people suffer from throughout their lives, are actually the immune system’s fault. It is not a “smart” system. It is clever. Sometimes. Until it’s not.

Can you hear these chocolate thieves talking to you, Tesco? Are the chocolate thieves in the room with us right now?

He said a shelf of chocolate could be worth £500 and the group had spent £3m on security and other measures to prevent thefts.

And how’s that working out for you? … Oh, so, you’re just passing the costs of both the theft AND the security along to consumers, and then declaring that as profit and keeping it in your own pockets? I see, I see. Interesting.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they also intend to depopulate the world. With careful engineering they probably have ideas how to pull it off. Crime, wars, plagues, neglect, economics, from the perspective of a billionaire the world would be a lot better place with a lot fewer people on it, solving pollution and global warming, providing much less strain on all the limited resources that all their fun projects could use instead while turning more of the Earth into their personal “nature preserves” with all the carefully cultivated charm and ecological desertification of a freshly mowed lawn or a lake stocked with fish.

Remember that these are people who are very selective about what sort of lived human experiences they choose to value. And most of us aren’t on their list. We are only here because we are useful, for now. But they’re working hard to make it so that we’re no longer useful, and I’m sure they’ve already thought that through. They don’t want a society of leisure for us. They want a society of leisure without us.

And it’s wild how much even that has been absolutely normalized by all these shitty lazy developers and platforms. Vibe coding it just going to make it worse. All these programs that look nice on the surface and are just slop on the inside. It’s going to be a mess.