urlyman.bsky.social
Cycling, designing, coding, over-thinking, sweary.
Trying not to be po-faced in the face of so much po💩
‘BS’ denotes BlueSky me.
My full BS is at https://mastodon.social/@urlyman
195 posts
56 followers
49 following
Regular Contributor
Active Commenter
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And that adds to Sagan's point. We like to point out when a region or country reduces its emissions, but it's a global issue. Adding energy to any part of the "civilizational heat engine" causes the entire thing to grow, including boosting the fossil portion and making it more difficult to replace.
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Indeed
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…massively ramping up energy and materials consumption during an out-of-control overshoot predicament,
destabilising economies,
and tooling up fascism
what are AI’s deterministic traits?
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I do. A tragedy
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…Bush W 1: +3.23%
Bush W 2: +1.04%
Obama 1: -9.00%
Obama 2: -1.86%
Trump 1: -4.99%
The years when they went down had nothing to do with intentional decarbonisation
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While that’s true, here’s the change in US carbon emissions by presidency since Johnson’s second(ish) term
Johnson 2: +18.34%
Nixon 1: +19.28%
Nixon/Ford: +7.62%
Carter: +5.42%
Reagan 1: -7.23%
Reagan 2: +5.27%
Bush: +6.72%
Clinton 1: +5.81%
Clinton 2: +7.20%…
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…Just in case your irony meter is struggling:
‘Nick Clegg, Meta’s former head of global affairs, said asking for permission from rights owners to train models would “basically kill the AI industry in this country overnight.”’
Great. Let’s get to it www.theverge.com/news/674366/...
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…and all along the way, the plan is to produce more than we were before.
And most of the things we produce cannot be metabolised by the community of life *at all*.
What’s right with this plan?
#WTFcene
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…If there’s one thing we know about people it’s that they really *hate* storytelling. They want nothing to do with it.
After all, the entire self-publishing industry exists only because people are forced at gunpoint to write. It’s incredibly cruel to make people create. Thank goodness we have AI
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…Obviously, they’re full of shit: thin-skinned, venal, petulant men-children drunk on their own narcissism.
And if that’s not enough to reject AI bullshit as resolutely as we can muster, then I don’t know what is
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…Some people in the milieu of Silicon Valley are fearful of an actual extinction event that comes from AGI or ASI: Artifical Super-Intelligence. Paradoxically, their solution is to drive its development, because they declare themselves *the ones* who know how to build in the necessary ‘safety’…
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…Previous ‘end times’, and ones that are with us to this day such as The Rapture, have always been about transformation. In which humans don’t go away, they squeeze through some bottleneck to a future utopia…
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…It doesn’t matter that AI has potentially benign uses (if you ignore its entire basis of existence).
It matters that the people building it are eugenicists and power-crazed singularity fetishists.
@racheldonald.bsky.social and @xriskology.bsky.social offer a useful guide overcast.fm/+nh1BmamZQ
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…but LLMs don’t know what the words mean. It’s a con.
As with electoral politics, it’s just bullshit all the way, all the time.
- - -
It’s becoming more obvious that the tools proffered by AI are the tools of fascism. Imagine what a Leni Riefenstahl would have done with Veo3…
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…more people vote for insidious but not smaller lies from liberals.
We can’t stop the reality slap from becoming a punch by voting for liars. And LLMs that ‘apologise’ cannot and won’t help.
Of course, the LLMs are not apologising. They’re probabilistically predicting words to keep you hooked…
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…And as the lies we’ve been sold – perpetual growth, separate from nature, practically limitless resources – start slapping us in the face, people’s response is to vote for a Trump, Putin, Netanyahu, Orbàn, Modi, Le Pen, Farage, Weidel, Erdogan, etc.
In the meantime…
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…On the electoral spectrum, a Trump does not care that you know he’s lying and he does not apologise.
In the liberal camp, they rarely apologise either. They haven’t had to cos the lag between lying and being found out has often been much longer than a parliament. Though that lag is diminishing…
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…Also tragic: our societies’ power structures seem incapable of withdrawing support for discriminatory mass killing when it is meted out on people who are oppressed by discrimination that our own governments institutionalised.
Power learns nothing. It just recycles demented cruelty. If we let it
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…Related:
Last night, we watched an episode of the US version of Who Do You Think You Are.
In it, Rashida Jones went to Latvia to discover how her branch of her mother’s ancestry was the only one not to have been wholly exterminated by Nazis in WW2. Horrific…
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…It’s not enough to follow Netanyahu with an interview with a progressive Israeli.
If you’re going to play Netanyahu’s distortions and falsehoods unedited, you have to counter them directly.
If you can’t because of editorial standards, then report it, but don’t play it…
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…this playing both sides thing as if they carry equal credence is prolonging cruelty.
I thought the BBC World Service were better than their mainstream BBC counterparts :/
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neither post growth nor the unintended consequence of incompetence is #degrowth
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Thanks for sharing the sentiment, Gill.
I don’t think there are good answers. The sheer momentum of proto-fascistic digital capital seems likely to lead to ever worse outcomes :(
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…naturally, the people with vested interests in the capacity for manipulation, want to keep us focused on the latest iterations of computing’s ability to *make*
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…anyway, as John Schellnhuber says:
“When the risks are existential, calculating probabilities doesn’t matter. What matters is the high-end possibilities.”
#climateDiary
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…So, given that we’re *accelerating* greenhouse gas concentrations, it would be extremely foolish of us to suppose that sea level rise will remain smoothly predictable in our era, and…
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…Now, Denmarks’s average elevation is about 30m and the risk of it getting totally inundated like Pacific islands is very distant, but it doesn’t have to be total for it to be catastrophic.
And as @johnenglander.bsky.social points out, sea level rise has been *very bumpy* in the past…
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…glaciologists point out persepctives such as
“with carbon concentrations in the atmosphere considerably less than at present, in the last interglacial period, the ocean was 9 metres higher than it is now”.
Have a look at where Denmark’s centres of population are with respect to 9m elevation…
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…writes that “It is true that Denmark’s drowning … is not terribly likely”: www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...
And yet, for large areas of Denmark, the most populous ones, it is *very likely*. We just don’t know *when*, and…
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…WW2 traumatised my dad for life and killed his brother in North Africa in 1943, aged 21.
Starmer and all of his acolytes are fools who never miss an opportunity to strike the wrong note
www.politics.co.uk/news/2025/05...
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…I do get the notion of building up defence as a bulwark against war. But…
a) if that has ever worked it’s only through the narrowest of blinkers and over time frames we now don’t have
b) actively selling it as a “dividend” is… stoking the sentiment that drove my dad’s generation into WW2…
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#veday
Starmer, commemorating the end of the world’s largest war
by selling militarisation as a “dividend”
to create “jobs of the future”
for a future we’re destroying in ‘peace time’ and accelerating with rampant inequality, enabling of genocide, and now, even bigger military carbon emissions…
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…just more threaded stitches needed, I guess.
Yes but that’s not the same.
You can say quite nuanced things in 500 characters that are not possible in 300. No wonder nuance is falling into the black hole of context collapse
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fishing around?