it's weird how schools now monetize your kids back to you. buy the photo we took of him and the class picture too, buy a mug with this artwork we had him make in class.
when it’s over we’ll call it the sungularity.
you don’t, actually, gotta respect the hustle.
i love it when Apple flags the sent mail i cc to myself junk.
large language models are ghosts of us, all of us, the living and the dead.
@SteveRoth I'm surprised Germany is lower on the graph than US! I don't know whether there's an easy way in FRED, but I think it'll be important to disaggregate non-working-age because child from non-working-age because retired. At a household level, households with kids are unusually high demanders, where households of retirees unusually low. Part of that is just a matter of household size differences, but I think only part. Even on a per-cap basis, I suspect households with kids demand more.
@SteveRoth Interesting! But is that inflationary or deflationary? The most straightforward intuition is that a rising dependency ratio is inflationary: everyone consumes, but fewer produce, prices must rise until only the fewer goods and services can be purchased. But empirically, population aging in eg Japan and Germany has been more disinflationary than inflationary, the reduced activity of older people diminishing demand more than the loss of supply from their retirements.
Ben Sperry on AI-generated content and Section 230: https://truthonthemarket.com/2023/03/03/how-will-the-law-deal-with-ai-getting-facts-wrong/
@fossesq That really is true. They seem to be phoning it in. I’m not sure that’s just a Florida problem. I moved from CA, where obviously the Democratic Party is relevant. It governs. But even there, it doesn’t actually connect with the public, it just relies upon our votes since the other guys are crazy, otherwise acts autonomously except when some scandal proves an embarrassment.
@fossesq way over my head, for the moment! i’d actually probably prefer the more urban vibe of Tampa, but the whole area is lovely.
except the overlay of a threat of fascism. which, well, that is a caveat. we’ll all have to see how things evolve, we just moved here, but can we stay here? (i lived in SRQ seven years in my youth, ‘cuz i went to New College. unfortunately that’s not helping me feel more at home either.)
algorithmic feeds are influence ops camouflaged among abdications of responsibility.
@fossesq thanks! does pinellas count as a tampeño?
The energy devoted to establishing the truth or falsity of conjecture X should grow with the distance between (optimal action conditional on X) and (optimal action conditional on not X).
If you are going to do the same thing whether X or not X, who gives a F about X?
"In fact, artificial intelligence is something of a red herring. It is not intelligence that is dangerous; it is power. AI is risky only inasmuch as it creates new pools of power. We should aim for ways to ameliorate that risk instead." @Meaningness https://betterwithout.ai/scary-AI ht @rezendi
"As digital platforms, more or less invisibly, use homophily to guide us to people, purchases, destinations, and ideas, they help to produce a social world in which previously held identities and positions are reinforced and concentrated rather than challenged or hybridized." https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/are-friends-electric/289193/homophily-the-urban-history-of-an-algorithm/
We talk about structural racism, but maybe prior to and upstream from that is "structural homophily" — the tendency of like to associate with like. That tendency, the degree to which it obtains, is obviously socially contingent. But our networks and algorithms are often designed according to a self-fulfilling that like prefers like. cf https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/are-friends-electric/289193/homophily-the-urban-history-of-an-algorithm/
The fascist impulse among the leading political faction in my new home state is cartoonishly evident. https://www.wfla.com/news/politics/florida-bill-would-require-bloggers-who-write-about-governor-to-register-with-the-state/ ht @mrbadger42 @morgfair
"platform companies have become knowledge intermediaries, like newspapers or school curriculum boards, while insulating themselves from traditional accountability."
From "The Moral Economy of High-Tech Modernism", an excellent, provocative essay by @henryfarrell https://crookedtimber.org/2023/03/01/the-moral-economy-of-high-tech-modernism/
@stephenjudkins depends how he does it, though! plutocrats normalized stealing all of our laptops in ways that would have seemed inconceivable in the 1990s. Musk stole all of our private DMs!
@stephenjudkins one might argue that domestic malefactors are less accountable, because they slip through certain kinds of defenses that foreign actors are more likely to encounter. it's not clear TikTok behaves any worse than Twitter, but boy is it more scrutinized, and more likely to be held to account!
My basic contention is that anything Russia or China should be constrained from doing with respect to our domestic affairs so too should Elon Musk be constrained from doing.
@stephenjudkins @failedLyndonLaRouchite