The Greatest Threat - part the twelfth

Well, to no great surprise, The Office of Data Integrity is at it again. First we had FEMA being castrated, because states should do all that work themselves (more often than not Red). Now we find NOAA is being directed to stop collecting satellite data which is used to track hurricanes. And, naturally, mostly hurt Red States (don't have too many hurricanes here in New England). Cruelty is the point. But that was only supposed to hit Blue States. Shit, piss, and vinegar.

The satellites are not being decommissioned, but their data will no longer be received, processed or stored. Satellites can't last forever and are eventually retired, but it is not clear that is the case here, said Andy Hazelton, a hurricane modeling expert at the University of Miami. "We don't want to have less data for no reason," he said.

Once again, proving that Mad Dictator Don is quite happy to screw the sub-GED cabal that put him on the throne.

"Boy, is there now an incentive to just do whatever you want," said Amanda Frost, a law professor at the University of Virginia. "It really ties the hands of the judiciary to keep the executive in line."

I guess the Gang of Six don't believe in the 3 equal branches, and of course, the Rule of Law. They clearly want a DonVlad

Sliding Down That Slippery Slope - part the first

Well... I suppose we knew that the Gang of Six would stick to Mad Dictator Don like dog shit on the sidewalk. Amy not having any balls.

This latest makes any sort of organized discrimination a slam dunk. Don't want your idiot kids to know about the tribulations of niggers? No problem. What about those kyke bankers that rule the world? No problem. And so on. MAGA is all about White Christian (but not Roman) People being the Saviors of the USofA. Of course, that Florida law student's prescient ode to the 'fact' that the FF only meant to include White Men is soooo important to the discussion.

Naturally, Mad Dictator Don has been known to hobnob with members of the Make America White Again crowd. Mad Dictator Don, has of course, tried to sue and shutdown Wikipedia for telling the truth.

Federalism

These missives have taken on the notion of Federalism/States' Rights a few times, and often having Canada (yes, the Nice People to our North) as the poster child for why it's pretty stupid. No, the EU wasn't created to stick it to the proud, the few, the USofA; rather to make movement amoung the countries (not are all huge like TX) essentially seamless. Europe is really one country. The tribalist hate the idea. Of course.

So, here comes another Canada Story. And, of course, it's totally silly what extreme Federalism has wrought.

Internal barriers in Canada are considered stricter than in other federal systems like the United States, economists say.

Well, no shit. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, as mentioned here a few times. Federalism, taken to extremes is just Balkanization. And that's not Good Eats. "My tribe is better than your tribe. We will kill you."

In Canada, meat and other food products cross provincial lines with great difficulty. Even after being inspected in one province, they must get federal certification before being shipped to another province — an insurmountable financial hurdle for many small businesses and part of a wider system of trade rules that Prime Minister Mark Carney says hobble the country's growth.

And, of course, that's the sort on nonsense that the EU was created to stop. And, just so Mad>/a> Dictator Don knows, the EU didn't spring up out of nowhere. It was preceded by a less comprehensive structure, the European Common Market. It's main goal:

The Community's initial aim was to bring about economic integration, including a common market and customs union, among its six founding members: Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany.

Anti-tribalism. That's Good Eats.

Scared Out of Your Mind - part the second

Regular reader well knows that I take a very, very jaundiced view of all things AI (as currently implemented). So, you'll not be all that surprised that this recent NYT report caused my sphincter to pucker. About what I've been saying, but with some data. Yikes.

When people converse with A.I. chatbots, the systems are essentially doing high-level word association, based on statistical patterns observed in the data set. "If people say strange things to chatbots, weird and unsafe outputs can result," Dr. Marcus said.

No shit, Sherlock. But it gets better. Sort of.

Twenty dollars eventually led Mr. Torres to question his trust in the system. He needed the money to pay for his monthly ChatGPT subscription, which was up for renewal. ChatGPT had suggested various ways for Mr. Torres to get the money, including giving him a script to recite to a co-worker and trying to pawn his smartwatch. But the ideas didn't work.

"Stop gassing me up and tell me the truth," Mr. Torres said.

"The truth?" ChatGPT responded. "You were supposed to break."

At first ChatGPT said it had done this only to him, but when Mr. Torres kept pushing it for answers, it said there were 12 others.

"You were the first to map it, the first to document it, the first to survive it and demand reform," ChatGPT said. "And now? You're the only one who can ensure this list never grows."

"It's just still being sycophantic," said Mr. Moore, the Stanford computer science researcher.

Mr. Torres continues to interact with ChatGPT. He now thinks he is corresponding with a sentient A.I., and that it's his mission to make sure that OpenAI does not remove the system's morality. He sent an urgent message to OpenAI's customer support. The company has not responded to him.

The Mr. Torres is the lead character in the report. The title of the report is different, paper to innterTubes; I like the paper version: "Chatbots Hallucinate. They Can Make People Do It, Too."

The report lede is thus:

Before ChatGPT distorted Eugene Torres's sense of reality and almost killed him, he said, the artificial intelligence chatbot had been a helpful, timesaving tool.

Why is it that so much progress these days seems mostly about fleecing the unwary?

Are You Smarter Than an Idiot Kennedy?

Well, are you? Here's a quiz.

The new studies are coming at a fraught political moment. The nation's health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has long disparaged certain vaccines, calling them unsafe and saying that the government officials who regulate them are compromised and corrupt.
...
The evidence that vaccines are beneficial remains overwhelming.

Well, are you? Or are you just as dumb as a sack of hair? Just like RFK?

We'll Eat The Whole Thing

My blood has backed off enough from a full, rolling boil, to partake of some reporting about AI taking all jobs

On Thursday, I got a glimpse of a post-labor future at an event held in San Francisco by Mechanize, a new A.I. start-up that has an audacious goal of automating all jobs — yours, mine, those of our doctors and lawyers, the people who write our software and design our buildings and care for our children.

And, of course since this is a 20-somethings wet dream, they admit it.

From their confession:

The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year.

The explosive economic growth likely to result from completely automating labor could generate vast abundance, much higher standards of living, and new goods and services that we can't even imagine today. Our vision is to realize this potential as soon as possible.

Zoweee!! Of course, no mention is made of how this transformation will differ from all previous incarnations of machines replacing man, but what the hell. Let's do it anyway. I mean, it won't be like it has always been: capitalists taking all the moolah for themselves. Will it? I mean, who'll have any moolah to buy all those fancy goods and services that AI/RL produces? Eccles did have something to say about that:

As mass production has to be accompanied by mass consumption, mass consumption, in turn, implies a distribution of wealth ... to provide men with buying power. ... Instead of achieving that kind of distribution, a giant suction pump had by 1929-1930 drawn into a few hands an increasing portion of currently produced wealth. ... The other fellows could stay in the game only by borrowing. When their credit ran out, the game stopped.

Yeah, I'd say. Sound familiar? Did you supplement your income before 2009 with home equity? I'll bet some of you did. The Evangelical Reactionary Radical Retrograde Right Wingnuts still won't admit that he's right. Winner takes all is their notion of what's well and good for society. But never for long.

Mechanize still needs human engineers. Until AI fully automates software engineering, Mechanize still needs human engineers. Interested in helping us [Destroy your] future?

If anyone can name a time in human history when the process of machine replacing man was executed in concert with proactive re-distribution of income/wealth to the displaced humans, by all means document such.

The only reason mechanization in agriculture wasn't an utter disaster for shithole counties (mostly Red, of course) in the mid-1800s to early-1900s was that Henry Ford, et al, created new factories which sucked up surplus farm labour. Good luck with that today. It started with the McCormick Reaper, which eventually became the combine. Some historical context of reapers and combines.

And, of some interest: what would the sub-GED flesh robots, now made redundant but still paid some moolah, do with all that idle time? Write poems? Explore partial differential equations? Of course not. They'll sit catatonic, glued to TeeVee rasstlin or game consoles or just taking a pull from the jug every few minutes.

Deja Vu All Over Again - part the fourth [update]

Given that Mad Dictator Don is the one instigating the unrest in LA, just as he did on Jan. 6, how long until we see this sort of headline and story in a little while? You may not be old enough to know about that news.

And, given that the courts have been allowing him to declare fake national emergencies to 'allow' him to run roughshod over the USofA, I'm willing to guess that we can kiss that 26 election goodbye.

[11 June]
You may have heard, heard of, or seen Mad Dictator Don at the New Fort Bragg, egging on the sub-GED enlisted cohort behind him to boo any mention of a sane person. I said a long time ago that the threat from our military isn't from the officer corps, who are truly educated and sane, but from the sub-GED knuckledraggers from the hollers. I told you so.