I don't have much sympathy for the "let's wait and see" moderates, but I do think there's a coherent difference between people who have tried AI tools and found some use for them in some limited context and people who go full Howard Hughes with it like John McGasTown or whatever that idiot's name is. To me it feels like an extension of the argument that these so-called AI systems are a normal trchnology. They aren't a harbinger of the end times, whether you interpret that as the singularity or the biblical Armageddon. It's a normal technology that is breaking in normal ways and is breaking society and the economy in the ways we would expect late capitalism to break. If it wasn't this it would probably be something else. Hell, there's still a chance that the wheel turns to "Quantum" or something else after this and we stretch another few years out of that before the music stops.

AI is a bad tool for any given job, and is fundamentally not worth the price that we as a society are paying to let it exist at this scale. If it wasn't being subsidized by capitalists chasing ridiculous returns and bouyed by an economic system structured entirely around giving it to them then there's no way in hell it would have hit this point. But that's not incompatible with people being able to find utility in it in some cases, and I think we lose credibility by treating any admission that someone has found any value in AI products as a confession of unseriousness. That doesn't mean their use isn't still part of the problem, but I'd we frame the critique in terms of "how much would you actually be willing to pay for you 'occasional' use?" It would redirect the discussion away from the subjective "well I found it useful for X" to the more objective question of just how expensive and destructive these things are to operate and how much of those costs are going to have to be subsidized forever if these things are going to stick around.

This week in unsettling AI ads.

The algorithms feed me variants on this one pretty frequently, always with some fantasy woman offering to be your best friend and definitely not maybe give you dirty pictures. "Normal human woman tied up in a basement" is new, though, and even skeezier than usual. I don't know what the workflow is for these or whether there's an actual person writing the prompts for this, and I don't think there's any answer that would make me less uncomfortable about it.

Given the Star Wars discussion alluded to in the next paragraph, I think we're looking at "try rereading your first book while being less of a self-important dumbass." Like, I get it, Revan is one of the best characters in that canon, and where Vader fell for very human if selfish reasons Revan pushes even farther and was using the dark side to conquer the galaxy in order to try and save it from... being conquered by a sith empire that drew great and terrible power from the dark side of the force. What happened to Vader again? Oh yeah, he sought the dark side for the power to save his wife and became a great and terrible warlord by calling on his rage and despair over... killing his wife. Like, the fact that trying to gain power through the dark side is at best a self-destructive shortcut that will undermine your actual goals is pretty goddamn consistent, and this is Star Wars Legends, a canon not exactly known for being internally consistent. I'm not saying you need to "agree" with that premise, and I think the franchise as a whole is usually too conservative, with the passivity of the light sife being a big part of that. It's just deeply absurd to me for that to be the takeaway from that story. Like all the people who's main takeaway from Jurassic Park was "man, wouldn't it be cool if we had real dinosaurs?" who then went on to be the victims and villains of Jurassic World.

I can understand what they're saying, though. Like, his defining moment is the finale of SC1 where he does sacrifice himself and become this major culture hero. There is definitely room to question that warrior ethos and what it says about the Protoss and what that in turn says about how we think about the real-world cultures and ideas that inspired them, and I'm pretty open to those constructs not being particularly respectful. But within those background structures and the culture they describe the immediate storyline is about how the conclave and even the Khala itself is ultimately destructive and makes the Protoss more vulnerable even as it is their source of strength and identity, which feels actually pretty timely if you read it that way.

Okay, today's Rat fixation that I want to rant about is "constructing hypothetical examples to justify my idiosyncratic position." Like, I'm not even interested in arguing about whether their conclusion makes sense in their hypothetical world, I'm more curious about what kind of chain of thought leads you to speculate about that in 2026. Like, maybe I'm reading way too much into this but in practical terms it feels like "how do I justify voting for the Republicans no matter how far-right they might go, if my local Democrats try to move the tiniest bit left?" which feels like the rat/tech ethos in a nutshell.

Or maybe it's the more traditional past time of trying to construct arguments in favor of controversial-sounding positions so that you can feel smarter and more open-minded than everyone else.

Only the magic eight ball has been rigged with sides reading:

• Signs point to yes

• It is decidedly so

• Absolutely. You're so smart

• Maybe. Good question!

• There are strong reasons to think so

• Lots of people are saying it

• I can see why you'd ask that

• There isn't a strong consensus either way

Is that what "g" has stood for all this time?

But despite well-documented claims to genius IQs, somehow the billionaire set ends up not on the chopping block.

To be fair, while I'm not familiar with the discourse in China I know a lot people consider (rightly) "alignment" as a framing to be a red flag for cranks and rats. It's not that surprising that this attitude hasn't been getting much recognition when the marketing departments of ai companies has been more engaged on that subject than serious academics.

I'm picturing Muppet Joker having the gimmick that the cast varies shot to shot. If it's from Joker's perspective he's the one human in a world of increasingly cruel muppets. If it's from anyone else's perspective then he's the one single muppet, probably played by Beaker.

Now I'm imagining a Muppets adaptation of Redshirts and want to change my answer. I'm imagining that we go through the whole first act of a normal episode with Captain Kermit and the all-muppet bridge crew only to get introduced to our one human, Ensign Ricky, right before the transporter sends them down to the danger zone.

I'm sorry, I think I need to believe that this is taking the piss in order to be able to function. It can't be real (It''s definitely real).

Oh God I read their FAQ and it looks like the whole concept is to gamify smoking weed because if there's one problem with weed it's that it's not addictive enough on its own. I mean the actual concept is to try and smash enough hip tech buzzwords together to extract some amount of the dwindling venture capital continuing to slosh around the valley, but if it actually happens the thing it's going to do is take all the addictionware tactics that app developers have developed and bring them to bear on promoting drug use.