Mitch's Blog

Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:

The MAGA movement needs violence and intimidation to function, both online and off. Without its central bundle of grievances and universe of enemies — LGBT people, people of color, leftists, Democrats — Trump’s supporters might notice that he’s ransacking the country’s institutions and making their lives worse. So they can’t acknowledge that a decade inside the pressure cooker of political violence has turned Trump supporters in spree shooters in waiting.

And the U.S. will have to weather that storm under the most inept and corrupt national government we’ve known.

How should I prepare for that? I have no answers, and have been continuing along as we always have been.

I hope that living in California will provide protection.

This is something that keeps me awake staring wide-eyed at the ceiling at 4 am in the dark.

Previously

Here’s something I saw walking the dog, giving a Lincoln Lawyer vibe. I have not seen this car or license plate before. It was parked about a half-dozen houses away from us on our street.

Lately when I think of going to the movies I think of driving across town, parking and paying money to sit in a dark room and watch things on a screen. I have screens at home.

Hamilton Nolan: “The ‘imperial boomerang’ is the concept that all of the methods of oppression that a mighty nation visits upon its far-flung imperial subjects will one day be turned back upon its own population. And here we are.”

“Workslop: Bad study but an excellent word”, by David Gerard at Pivot To AI:

The word of the day is: “workslop.” There’s a new article in Harvard Business Review: “AI-Generated ‘Workslop’ Is Destroying Productivity.” [HBR]

Workslop is when a coworker sends you some obvious AI-generated trash and you have to spend your time redoing the whole thing. They save time by wasting your time:

Workslop is a result of top-down AI mandates, Gerard says. However, the report identifying the trend is an “unlabeled advertising feature” for enterprise AI, not a real study. The report blames workers, but bad management is the real culprit.

Cory Doctorow: " … a third of the stock market is tied up in seven AI companies that have no way to become profitable and … this is a bubble that’s going to burst and take the whole economy with it…. "

I firmly believe the (economic) AI apocalypse is coming. These companies are not profitable. They can’t be profitable. They keep the lights on by soaking up hundreds of billions of dollars in other people’s money and then lighting it on fire. Eventually those other people are going to want to see a return on their investment, and when they don’t get it, they will halt the flow of billions of dollars. Anything that can’t go on forever eventually stops.

Cory’s advice to Cornell University, during a visit to lecture there:

I told them that they should be planning to absorb the productive residue that will be left behind after the bubble bursts:

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Plan for a future where you can buy GPUs for ten cents on the dollar, where there’s a buyer’s market for hiring skilled applied statisticians, and where there’s a ton of extremely promising open source models that have barely been optimized and have vast potential for improvement.

There’s plenty of useful things you can do with AI. But AI is (as Princeton’s Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, authors of AI Snake Oil put it), a normal technology:

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology

That doesn’t mean “nothing to see here, move on.” It means that AI isn’t the bow-wave of “impending superintelligence.” Nor is it going to deliver “humanlike intelligence.”

It’s a grab-bag of useful (sometimes very useful) tools that can sometimes make workers' lives better, when workers get to decide how and when they’re used.

That’s what a big business should do. But what about individuals? That’s something I’ve been thinking about, and getting nowhere.

People today aren’t more productive than they were in 1975, despite advances in computers and the Internet.

I spent a couple of hours this weekend processing and closing browser tabs.

I’m sure these two things are completely unrelated.

‘We’re insanely hubristic’: how The Rest Is History became the world’s biggest history podcast. “If you found history boring at school, this podcast will have you intently listening to 20 hours on the French Revolution – and that’s before even getting to the Terror.” Can confirm. I love this podcast.

Small Acts of Good, US as Third World Country, and How Culture Changes. By Chris Arnade. American decline is much on my mind lately. I take it very personally – I am not built to do well in a failed nation. Arnade, like me, is cautiously optimistic, seeing our current rapid decline as reversible.

What Happens When a Bad-Tempered, Distractible Doofus Runs an Empire?. “One of the few things that Kaiser Wilhelm II, who ruled Germany from 1888 to 1918, had a talent for was causing outrage.” (Via @sjvn@mastodon.social. Thanks!)

White Lotus season one: I don’t know if it would be right to say we liked it. This is a show about essentially likable characters who chronically self-sabotage due to their acute cranial-rectal inversion. The show featured brilliant, subtle performances by Steve Zahn, Jennifer Coolidge and Murray Bartlett as Armond, the put-upon resort manager. Just kidding: They weren’t subtle — they were outrageous and ridiculous and delicious. We will watch season two.

We liked Superman. But it was too long and it made me miss Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder, Gene Hackman, Ned Beatty and Valerie Perrine.

Krypto stole the movie.

The supporting characters were better than the main action: Nathan Fillion as the Green Lantern, Hawk Girl, Mr. Terrific, Drunk Party Supergirl.

Wendell Pierce was terribly underutilized. I’m going to start walking around with a big cigar in my mouth.

If this is the start of a DC Cinematic Universe, I’m there for it.

I was planning to see this in the theater — our first theater movie in at least five years. But I changed my mind. And I’m glad I did. It’s more comfortable to see it at home, where we can take breaks and enjoy our own snacks.

I have only a half-dozen phone numbers in my iPhone tagged as favorites. I actually looked at all of them for the first time in a long time this week. How long? One of the numbers was for voicemail for a job I left more than five years ago.

The next items on my to-do list are filling out expense reports and dropping stool samples at the vet. Gosh — hard to choose what to do next!

What Nvidia and OpenAI’s $100B agreement means for telcos. OpenAI just inked a $100B “memorandum of understanding” with NVIDIA, which could lead to a tectonic industry shift for telcos. Or it could all be vaporware — a “memorandum of understanding” is not a signed contract. By me on Fierce Network, earlier this week.

My latest on Fierce Network: Telcos tackle AI’s impact at Fierce Network Research event. At the Dallas Cowboys headquarters, a bunch of telco execs got together to figure out what the heck to do about AI.

Here’s Minnie one evening this week, letting me know it’s time to quit fooling around and put out her food. Priorities, man!

The Advocate: “The man Meta has appointed to help address ‘ideological and political bias’ in artificial intelligence is a conservative influencer who believes that pesticide turns children LGBTQ+ and that the COVID-19 vaccine caused Matthew Perry’s death.” Crazy as a hatful of snakes.

The Week America Woke Up to Oligarchy. By Matt Stoller. “Americans, broadly speaking, hate both parties, because [Americans] subscribe to an entirely different vision of what it means to be free. That version means freedom from coercion and a basic equality before the law.”