MudMan

In that it’s mostly a merch ad hidden behind a clickbait title.

So I guess it’s a good test for that sort of “just read the headline” response.

It’s been a rough few days and I think I may be coming around. What hope is there to parse AI misinformation if people can’t parse a Reddit-like link aggregator?

I may be done with this place at this point. It’s just all bad. If not the whole Internet, certainly the whole of social media.

Yeah, but… this isn’t that.

You’re literally saying “well, anecdotal impressions say this, so I refute this study that says something else”.

We don’t like that. That’s not a thing we like to do.

And for the record, as these things go, the article linked here is pretty good. I’ve seen more than one worse example of a study being reported in the press today.

They provide a neutral headline that conveys the takeaway of the study, they provide context about companies mentioning AIs on layoffs, they provide a link to the full study and they provide a separate study that yields different, seemingly contradicting results.

I mean, this is as close to best case scenario for reporting on a study as you can get in mainstream press. If nothing else, kudos to The Register. The bar was low but they went for personal best anyway.

Man, the problem with giving up all the wonky fashy social media is that when you’re in an echo chamber all the weird misinformation and emotion-driven politics are coming from inside the house. It’s been a particularly rough day for politically-adjacent but epistemologically depressing posts today.

So the report itself argues there is a need for better data, and it seems fairly level headed, but…

…what’s with people being mad about it?

I say this a lot, but there seems to be a lot of weird anti-hype where people want this AI stuff to work better than it does so it can be worse than it is, and I’m often confused by it. The takeaway here is that most jobs don’t seem to be behaving that differently so far if you look at the labor market in aggregate. Which is… fine? It’s not that unexpected? The AI shills were selling that entire industries would be replaced by AI overnight, and most sensible people didn’t think so or argued that the jobs would get replaced with AI wrangler tasks because this thing wouldn’t completely automate most tasks in ways that weren’t already available.

Which seems to be most of what’s going on. AI art is 100% not production-ready out of the gate, AI text seems to be a bit of a wash in terms of saving time for programmers and even in more obvious industries like customer service we already had a bunch of bots and automation in place.

So what’s all the anger? Did people want this to be worse? Do they just want to vibe with the economy being bad in a way they can pin on something they already don’t like and maybe politics is too heavy now? What’s going on there?

Most of that is entirely absurd and not worth getting into. I’m sure a pedantic historian can nitpick it if that’s the way everybody wants to go.

However, let me revisit your accusation of “contradicting my point”. At no stage here have I conflated unarmed protest with peaceful protest. All along I’ve been frustrated by the US mindrot tendency of accepting no nuance between some My Little Pony version of political action and outright armed confrontation. The worldwide protests that show how bonkers the US perception of the issue is were not peaceful, but neither were they an armed confrontation where protestors attempted to use their armed might to deter police forces. They were… you know, political action. Civil unrest. “Civil” being the key word.

The way you and US leftists in general tend to parse stuff like this is nonsense. The fact that mass protests can escalate to the point they went in Nepal, Madagascar or any of the countries in the general “Gen Z spring” movement and prior protest waves disproves the US perspective because a) it has nothing to do with the level of access to weapons, and b) it shows sufficiently commited public action doesn’t have to be either fully nonviolent or an armed insurrection.

Americans look at this as some form ot guarantee their success by either intimidating the other into submission or hoping that the other side will fold immediately. That’s not how this goes. “The cops may charge at us, we should bring guns” is some weird overlap of thinking protestors are entitled to painless victory and that there is no possible pressure beyond violent pressure. It makes no sense to me. And yet, here we are, a bunch of posts down the line.

See, and there it is. Zero to a hundred. It’s either popcorn or civil war, no gradient.

I mean, for one thing Nazi Germany also wasn’t defeated by military cosplayers flashing their gun collection at them, and clearly neither was MAGA America. The first one was defeated by a borderline apocalyptic global war, so… in the grand scheme both the military cosplay and the sternly worded letters are pretty much about just as effective there. We’re still waiting and seeing on the MAGA America part.

But for another, plenty of nonviolent and/or unarmed protest has achieved its goals, historically. From Europe to India to South Africa to the actual United States. The “sternly worded letter” derision is pure action movie fantasy. This month alone the governments of Madagascar and Nepal came down after mass protests. Not a single set of camo pants in sight, just… you know, students organizing on social media and One Piece flags for some reason because this is a weird timeline.

They weren’t even fully nonviolent, either. There were clashes, there was enforcement violence and dozens of people, mostly protestors, were killed in both countries. And still two governments came down and the situations continue to evolve and push for full regime change.

Meanwhile the example I’m being given is some American fascists standing on a street while cops that agree with them wait for them to get sleepy at their military cosplay convention and go home.

I don’t get Americans. I don’t think the way they see the world as a culture makes sense, and I am terrified at how much they export it successfully through places like this. Nepal just held a full-on election over Discord and I still understand how that went down better than middle class America’s political views.

Yeah, no, that’s the point. You look at a barbaric demonstration of a completely broken down society and see something that works. That’s horrifying.

You effectively saw some guy walk into a subway holding his erect, exposed penis in one hand and a machete in the other and went “hey, that guy found an empty seat right away, I think we can all learn a lesson here”.

That’s nuts. It’s weird that you don’t see how nuts that is.

Yeah, no shit, that happens everywhere.

Some people go back the next day, some societies react to this by protesting harder and longer. Other times this devolves into outright conflict or seismic political shifts. Sometimes it settles down over time.

The reaction isn’t typically some combination of “Oh, well, what can you do” and “maybe if we bring actual firearms the natural conflict with authority baked into all civilian political action will dissipate fully and permanently”.

That’s some US-specific delusion and intrinsic tendency to violence right there.

That is fucking terrifying and so is anybody who doesn’t think so.

Why else would you shoot at them?

Is that not what weapons are for? Who the hell goes to a peaceful protest expecting to be shot at with lethal weapons? What the hell? You are not protesting at that stage, you are at war, that’s some Tiananmen shit. Listen to me carefully: if you think law enforcement at a protest is going to open fire with live ammunition on unarmed protesters do NOT go to that protest. Start organizing a guerrilla, see if you can get the legal system to act on the people responsible, get in touch with press and try to get international awareness on the serious breach of human rights happening on your country, but do not just show up in a protest you can reasonably expect will lead to a massacre of unarmed civilians. I can’t believe I have to put this in actual words.

I’m always so baffled by American unwillingness to take any action followed by the immediate assumption that the very next step is going to be full-on murder. Just zero escalation, in their minds it’s either eat popcorn at home or be shooting at people indiscriminately.

I genuinely don’t get it. There’s a mental model at play here but it may as well not be carbon-based.

I mean, it’s a lot safer to shoot at unarmed people. I’d certainly be way more willing to shoot at someone that’s armed.

Like I said, alien thoughts in alien minds. I just can’t follow US trains of thought at this point.

Holy shit, are they? Because from the outside looking in I assume the presumption that a gun may be present is why US police is essentially a military organization willing to shoot anybody at the slightest provocation, so I would assume if you are faced with a crowd of armed people your first instinct to stop that is to shoot first.

I mean, my common sense assumption is that bringing a gun of any kind to a protest is a fantastic way to start a massacre of your own people, but I’ve lost the ability to parse how Americans understand both political action and violence ages ago.

I can give that a whirl if it’s not set up like that already, but the monitor is VERY slow on its own. It basically never wakes up in time for the BIOS bootscreen and any signal interruption sends it on a wild goose chase of signal searching around its inputs that can take ten seconds at a time. It’s not a cheap monitor, either, which I assume is part of the problem, as it wants to be super smart about a bunch of things and has to contend with a bunch of options and alternatives that maybe a simpler setup wouldn’t.

Still, worth a shot to try to tune grub and double check if it’s swapping modes unnecessarily between the bios image and the menu. I hadn’t considered it. Like so many Linux features and app there’s a bunch of stuff you can config on it that I keep not looking into because it’s only surfaced in documentation, if that.

EDIT: Tried, didn’t help. The motherboard rebooting gives the monitor just enough time to search its display port input, decide it’s been unplugged and shut down, so by the time another monitor picks up the slack it’s too late and the timeout has expired unless you’re mashing down to stop it. The changes do make the second monitor come up at its native resolution instead of changing modes, but the mistake happens elsewhere.

I could just set a longer timeout, but I’d rather have a faster boot when I’m sticking to the default than wait for the whole mess to sort itself out every time. Been mashing bios entry buttons and bootloader menus since the 90s, what’s a couple decades more.

Still dumb, though.

I don’t know about Gentoo, but as a serial dual booter I know this pain well.

I swear about two thirds of the time going through grub on every boot adds to the process are waiting for my monitor to figure itself out. Half the time it doesn’t get there on time at all.

Mind you, I said that of smartwatches for a while until I got one and realized that… well, yeah, being able to see your notifications without taking your phone out of your pocket is worth it on a thing you already wear anyway.

But that’s still… you know, an understandable use case that is already well covered and rings don’t do.

I may not be the right person for this, considering the entire “let us monetize your yuppie paranoia about being healthy and hot” nonsense has always missed me entirely. I remember in the early days of fitness bands I made a joke about them in front of a hip, techie audience and I immediately realized that hip, techie audiences don’t think tracking their steps and heart rate 24/7 and shipping the data out to Google is a extremely dumb thing to do that only exposes their sexual insecurity.

Turns out that’s a me opinion.

You could certainly build a ring that unfolds or at least isn’t a full circle around your finger if you weren’t obsessed with encroaching intoj an existing jewelry format for marketing reasons.

Of course that would imply that there’s a need of some kind to have a headless computer around your finger, which… there isn’t?

I still have a Redhat install CD from the early to mid 2000s somewhere in the attic. I think it came with a PC magazine.

Arguably they still can’t.

But yeah, I’m less surprised that they already existed and more suprised that I had already heard about them.

The thing is in my memory it wasn’t that special because at the time computers came in a lot more flavors than now. There were a ton of semi-recent computers that used just some variant of Basic, others some variant of DOS, DOS and Windows were different things and both in use, Apple-IIs were a thing, but also Macs…

I remember the first time I gave it a shot it was a bit of a teenage nerd challenge, because the documentation was so bad and you had to do the raw Arch thing with Debian and set up things step by step to get to a semblance of an X server, let alone a DE. And then after spending a couple nights messing with that I didn’t think about it much until a few years later when Ubuntu sort of figured out making things easy.

By the mid 2000s I remember people my age laughing at older normies for not having heard of Linux already, so it all moved relatively fast. It was maybe less than a decade between it coming into being and then it being something you probably don’t use but you’ve heard of, which is faster than I would have said if you asked me.

I guess that contributes to it. I guess when someone gave me install media (I believe for Debian, if you’re gonna be pedantic about it) their approach may have been “there’s now free Unix you can just get” and that’s why it didn’t feel new.

Man, Linux is one of those things where it’s less old than I think.

I don’t see myself as an early adopter at all, but I remember trying to get some version of Debian running on the same Pentium PC I had gotten to play stuff like Duke 3D, and I don’t remember at the time thinking “oh, this is some new thing”, so I had assumed the concept existed for decades, rather than being just a handful of years old.