ABrockwell @aebrockwell@qoto.org

I live in a world that just told me a convicted white nazi rapist with several failed businesses and marriages is better than an experienced Black woman.

Better yet, people are outside walking around freely like they didn’t vote in a nazi. Talking about football and sports like the world isn’t about to end.

This shit is actual insanity.

An important thing about Elon Musk that’s widely known in tech circles but perhaps not in the wider world: he’s an ignoramus.

His technical knowledge is shallow and careless, full of parroting and fantasizing.

People who’ve worked on the small amount of code he actually wrote long ago describe his work as an unskilled mess.

At every company he runs, there are teams of people devoted to keeping him away from the engineers, who largely succeed to the extent that he forgets they exist.

1/3

"As The New Republic editor Michael Tomasky wrote, 'It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.' The right-wing media now controls the agenda.

For those of us who grew up on a steady diet of truth-telling, it’s gut-wrenching to see this mega misinformation machine grow into a multi-headed monster."

~ Dan Rather

#Trump #economy #eggs #PriceofEggs #media
/4

https://steady.substack.com/p/a-big-win-for-propaganda

No, ChatGPT won't help in the classroom, won't save teachers time, and doesn't represent a set of skills students need to learn.

On OpenAI's latest nonsense:

https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/chatgpt-has-no-place-in-the-classroom/

#resist #resistance #Politics

The use of deep learning #AI in licensed (regulated) professions like #medicine, #law, and #engineering troubles me—deeply. It is not that I fear AI taking jobs away, but that I am concerned about AI robbing licensed professionals of their competency, judgement, and professional responsibility.

Doctors, lawyers, and engineers work with "lives", hence the licensure and regulation of their professions. But #software, even deterministic ones, are littered with latent bugs. Once non-determinism is added to software, the potential for errors increase exponentially. So, it is impossible to regulate software: "responsibility" for errors cannot be allocated to individuals in a practical, reliable, consistent, and fair manner.

AI is non-deterministic software; no person can explain in a legally satisfactory way how the 20-billion parameters are making life-critical decisions. Taking actions based on AI's decisions one does not fully understand is, at best, "professionally irresponsible" and, at worst, "criminally reckless". Therefore, licensed professionals relying on AI to perform their jobs (diagnosing diseases, drafting legal opinions, designing bridges, etc.) is a dangerous trend.

A similar reasoning suggests that programmers should seriously reconsider why they have relinquished control of their code to AI.

A pedophile running the nation’s largest law-enforcement agency, a criminal in the White House, South Dakota’s governor running a border agency — I’m just going to assume that the absolutely least qualified person will be chosen for every position in this administration.

This is America!👇

People keep telling me to ‘avoid the echo chamber’ and make an effort to understand what the other side is up to.
But hold on a minute. Why should we spend a single one of our precious daily seconds descending into rabbit holes of hate and conspiracy, of racism and deceit, of grift and corruption, of the rejection of science and rationality, of pandering to oligarchs, of mean spiritedness?
They can have all that. We’ll take a pass.

An excerpt from "They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45", an interview with a German after WWII on why they didn't rise up against the regime due to incrementalism.

“Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk alone; you don’t want to “go out of your way to make trouble.” Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, “everyone” is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, “It’s not so bad” or “You’re seeing things” or “You’re an alarmist.”

And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it. These are the beginnings, yes; but how do you know for sure when you don’t know the end, and how do you know, or even surmise, the end? On the one hand, your enemies, the law, the regime, the Party, intimidate you. On the other, your colleagues pooh-pooh you as pessimistic or even neurotic. You are left with your close friends, who are, naturally, people who have always thought as you have.

But your friends are fewer now. Some have drifted off somewhere or submerged themselves in their work. You no longer see as many as you did at meetings or gatherings. Now, in small gatherings of your oldest friends, you feel that you are talking to yourselves, that you are isolated from the reality of things. This weakens your confidence still further and serves as a further deterrent to—to what? It is clearer all the time that, if you are going to do anything, you must make an occasion to do it, and then are obviously a troublemaker. So you wait, and you wait.

But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds of thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions, would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the “German Firm” stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all of the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying “Jewish swine,” collapses it all at once, and you see that everything has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we do nothing). You remember those early morning meetings of your department in the university when, if one had stood, others would have stood, perhaps, but no one stood. A small matter, a matter of hiring this man or that, and you hired this one rather than that. You remember everything now, and your heart breaks. Too late. You are compromised beyond repair.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/They_Thought_They_Were_Free

#USpol #USpolitics

It's disturbing seeing some medical and public health professionals trying to normalize RFK Jr by saying "we have to meet him halfway."

NOPE.

RFK is a charlatan who has deliberately spread disinformation that has killed people.

Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

ChatGPT is a human conversation simulator, not an information system or a knowledge base.

It has no understanding of anything: it only outputs plausible responses.

Because ChatGPT has no understanding of anything, it does not know what things like “a source” or “a true statement” are.

Do not trust its directions.

Do not ask an intermediary who has no capacity to understand information to explain it to you.

You will waste time and make mistakes.

Instead, go to your university library and look it up yourself, with the help of your local librarians.
Actual information is contained in brains, documents and databases.

Further:
Formatting citations and bibliographies means presenting metadata according to formal style instructions.

This is not natural language.

ChatGPT will make errors, which will take time to track and correct.

Instead, use a reference manager, such as Zotero.

It will format things reliably, exactly as expected.
Just clean up the references’ metadata as you collect them, and then your bibliographies will not contain mistakes.

https://www.arthurperret.fr/blog/2024-11-14-student-guide-not-writing-with-chatgpt.html

It's been hours, but The Onion purchasing Infowars still warms my heart.

Not that I believe even this Republican Senate will confirm Kennedy as HHS head, but America's adversaries are surely overcome with joy as the Trump regime does everything in its power to destroy public health.

BTW, journalists, this is not a "controversial" nomination. It's a completely bonkers move, and just this once maybe you should consider saying so forthrightly, and explaining why that is the case.

Criminal Trump nominates monstrous Gaetz to oversee criminal justice in America.

The Washington Post calls Gaetz an "outspoken ally" of Trump, and the NY Times calls naming him attorney general a "provocative move".

Now THAT is how you normalize the criminals and fascists in charge of the next U.S. government.

Please spend your news dollars on real journalism, not the pathetic drivel these organizations are feeding you.

@MariaHill

kakistocracy /kăk″ĭ-stŏk′rə-sē, kä″kĭ-/
noun

Government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens. Government by the worst men. Government under the control of a nation's worst or least-qualified citizens.

I like “cheat sheets” like this - it assists in unfriending assholes I thought I knew.

The truth is that the media is more afraid of bias than they are of misleading their readers. And while that seems like a slippery slope, and may very well be one, there must be room to inject the writer’s voice back into their work, and a willingness to call out bad actors as such, no matter how rich they are, no matter how big their products are, and no matter how willing they are to bark and scream that things are unfair as they accumulate more power.

-Ed Zitron
https://www.wheresyoured.at/lost-in-the-future/

The GDP of Russia is 2.2 trillion dollars. That is an economy about half the size of California. That is who the USA is now surrendering to in the Ukraine war. That is how much of a coward Trump is.

Via Marc Elias:

If you are a Democrat who is spending time attacking Kamala Harris or her campaign rather than focusing on the fight ahead, you aren't helping anyone.