The difference between repair work and a wrecking crew has everything to do with the order of operations.

Identifying candidates is *not* the first step for someone serious about repairing the USA's political system. It's the design of elections and representation at issue that needs repair. Fielding candidates in a broken system is like dumping diesel into a regular car engine - get that right, first. For example, the overwhelming number of Green Parties around the world asked Jill Stein to stop running for reason. To promote the GPUSA is *not* to be in agreement with Green Parties worldwide; instead, it's a deliberate strategic error, hardly distinguishable from sabotage.

I'm all for more plurality. Even if I totally like a candidate in the two party system, I want a robust system with plans B and C and D for all of us next election, and my fellow citizens to have a shot at full representation. I want a system like Australia's in the USA where there are no primary elections, just ranked choice voting for the candidates - giving the voters more say, avoiding "split the vote" issues. Other reforms in a more proportional / parliamentary direction can follow.

Setting the rules of fair elections with decent choices needs serious work starting today, not election day.

It's not intelligence. It is not acquiring new behaviors and ideas, but regurgitating old ones in ways it often cannot verify or test. That detachment from reality flies with management, but the rack-and-file can't afford such liabilities.

We don't need large-scale language models to generate sophisticated fabrications. We need small, efficiently fluent interfaces between humans and proven tools and data. The market is going to have to correct to the actual right-sized value of the technology.

You can tell that the next giant solar flare is going to flatten this whole house of cards.

AI trained on AI hallucination will irreversibly and irreparably collapse. That was well-documented here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Farticle...

It gets worse when nation-states like russia and China are actively trying to make that happen. We cannot devalue human intelligence and human contact with reality, and we have to whitelist verifiable information. I believe we're going to need to slow down training of the largest models and work on human-legible knowledge bases for highly vetted reasoning agents.

The industry needs a reality check, and ethics need to assert themselves, to find solid ground and lasting usefulness. Throwing vast amount of funding and energy at building foundations on sand is not the way forward.

Meanwhile in China: a patent on a cheap way to cut undersea cables. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fchina...

Cable cuttings in the Baltic Sea and Taiwan Strait are becoming a regular thing. This is what failed deterrence looks like.

Does the substantiated content of this very article match the headline?

Who is going on the record, versus those speaking anonymously? Are the intelligence officials who say it's just accidents ever named in the article, versus the extensive part of the article where identified experts speak out to say there's extensive evidence for sabotage, and vanishingly small probabilities for it all being accidental? Named versus unnamed sources don't just tip the scales of credibility, they bring the nature of the source and the media relaying it into question.

Don't forget that when the sources are all "anonymous officials" who cover for Moscow's propaganda, you get a Seymour Hersch "poor waif in his underwear" where an extremely russian idiom makes it into English, and part of the damage control is "a translation error" when he's supposedly speaking to US officials. That is exactly how Kremlin propaganda gets laundered into the English media space.

Meanwhile, cable cuttings in the Baltic Sea and Taiwan strait are now a weekly occurrence.

Meanwhile: in China, there's a patent filed for a cheap device explicitly designed to cut seafloor cables. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newsweek.com%2Fchina...

This is especially a shame because crushed glass can easily be rough and jagged enough to meet the same requirements as high-quality sand.

Even neurotypical people complain how difficult it is to maintain their attention span in focused mental labor. For those who live with ADHD, ad blockers are non-negotiable.

Ads are hostile to rational thought generally, but they are anathema to neurodivergent people with sensitivities or a focus-related disability.

Anyone whose business model is to afflict disabled people more than others deserves to fail.

The more greenhouses gasses are in our atmosphere, the more the lower atmosphere warms, and the upper atmosphere cools. Stratospheric phenomena that used to be confined to the polar regions are now global. This was consistently predicted as a component of industrially-induced climate change.

What are the odds that alien life has crossed space just to pester and confuse the locals, versus the odds that this is camera artifacts, misidentifications, and psy-ops? All of the latter are far more likely; in fact, they're confirmed to be happening.

Everyone knows that if you fuse four protons, you get two positrons, two neutrinos, an alpha particle, and SATAN. :D

My god, this is a horrible idea. Ever been in the kind of company where a top-notch HR director quits over openly voiced "ethical concerns"?

I was. My work was key to the company's success, and yet I got trashed by novice mid-managers and people who slept their way to the top. These were corrupt liars. A few decent people got out of there while they could, and they've been some of my most reliable references.

But can you imagine what crooks would do with this kind of database? I hasten to add, the ability to retaliate against workers who go on strike would only grow.

A great many CEOs do not understand or care about the people they employ, period. This would allow them yet more dirty tricks to all they have already.

It's amazing that people still write games and demos for an old machine that lacks basic features, like sending users notifications, and stealing their data. How quaint! Where's the Amiga demo with a like+subscribe model and backing everything up to the cloud?

I guess none of us kids in the 80s and 90s realized the importance of hardware-accelerated ad-optimization. No executive would have ever killed that!

As is, I haven't heard a single report of Amiga users' credit cards leaked from an insecure S3 bucket. Sounds pretty dead.

"What's that, Big Tech? You've allowed your platforms to spread medical disinformation and racial hate and conspiracy theories enough that people are already living in an alternate reality and making it impossible for us to work together to solve the big issues and now there's a metaverse? Great, let's put the goggles on. You're clearly the ones to trust with our perception of reality."

This whole thing makes me want to unplug more.