In reverse chronological order gopher://tilde.pink/0/~bencollver/log/atom.xml 2026-06-10 gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/log/2026-06-10-using-openrsync-instead-of-rsync/ Ben Collver static struct opts opts; typedef int (rsync_option_filter)(struct sess *, int, ... I was lucky because i happened to only use rsync command-line arguments that were also supported by openrsync. However, i ran into one surprise: In contrast to rsync, openrsync requires the destination to be a directory. I used the following kludge. OLD: rsync /dir/file.db host:/dir/file.new NEW: cp /dir/file.db /dir/file.new NEW: openrsync /dir/file.new host:/dir/ NEW: rm /dir/file.new Why would i do this? To sync a database to a different file on the remote side, waiting to clobber the remote database until after the synchronization has completed. Comparing stripped executable sizes on NetBSD, rsync 3.4.3 is 511464 bytes and openrsync is 135376 bytes. I thought it was interesting that openrsync uses a single process with an event loop. In contrast, rsync forks multiple processes. Thank you OpenBSD for providing this alternative! tags: bencollver,technical,unix Footnotes ========= [1] Assertion failure since 48070e68d73f Tags ==== bencollver technical unix ]]> 2026-06-10 17:37:47 gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/log/2026-06-08-the-queer-thing-about-sin-by-harry-tanner/ Ben Collver A tyrant is less well equipped to fall in love with boyfriends than > he is to have children. Making love is by far the more pleasant if > it is done with desire [rather than by necessity]. Desire always > comes less naturally to a tyrant--Desire does not reach for > attainable things, but the ones the Desirer hopes for. Aeschylus--the gruff and shaggy-bearded veteran-turned-playwright--staged a play entitled The /Myrmidons/ centring on the death of Patroclus. After his death, the ghost of Patroclus returns to speak to Achilles, furious at the great warrior for abandoning him and the army. The language he uses leaves very little to the imagination: > It seems, Achilles, that you never appreciated the sacredness of my > thighs, You never were grateful for those countless kisses. The extraordinary thing, from our perspective, is that this tale is played out on the Athenian stage in front of thousands of audience members. Aeschylus even stages a scene where Achilles has sex with the dead body of his lover, but the fact that the play was performed means that the subject matter was not considered obscene. There were severe consequences for producing a play that fell foul of public mores: one playwright, Phrynichus, was fined for a play depicting the capture of the city Miletus in the 490s BCE. Aeschylus apparently received no such fine or disgrace. Tolerance (even celebration) of same-sex love was secure for now. However, it's hard to provide a date for this play's performance. It's thought to have been staged sometime between the years 470 and 456 BCE (after the time of the Persian invasion). The ancient world did not have magazines or the Internet. But it did have pots. Pottery might seem an unlikely medium for pornography, but Athens had a thriving export industry sending images across the sea to modern-day Italy, where the Etruscan people--in particular--collected their pots enthusiastically. Etruria and its people had an unorthodox relationship to sexuality: unlike in the rest of the ancient world, marital sex was celebrated and the Etruscans both produced and bought art which showed off passionate sex between married people. The industry had begun in earnest in the 6th century BCE. The porn pot industry tells us that this period in human history was remarkably tolerant of and very interested in same-sex desire. Combined with plays like the /Myrmidons/, a picture emerges of a culture in which queer imagery and storytelling was popular. But by the year 450 BCE, the gay porn pot industry had almost entirely stopped. [The rich got richer and the poor got poorer.] In the debate on Mytilene, Cleon got to his feet. Addressing his powerful faction of self-made men, he made a statement that is familiar to us today. "Men of Athens, a lack of learning, so long as it is accompanied with self-control is more useful than learned governance with /excess/. Those [of us] who are less well-born can manage the house of state far better than they can!" The elites--so Cleon says--may have their degrees, their intellectual ideas, but those of us who have made their own way in the world, without all that fancy learning, are the only ones who truly know how to run the state. Intelligence and academic advancement are unnecessary, useless and, even worse, a sign of excess. Cleon argued for the total destruction of Mytilene and its people. He argued, in other words, for genocide. But one ancient Greek scholiast did write a /scholion/ to this line. He said, "Of the many men who were calumnied for gay sex, one was Gryttus. A man who on account of his campness and being prone to pleasure used up all his time among male companions... Cleon the demagogue sentenced him to death as a punishment." So, sometime in the 420s BCE, Athens made an example of this man, Gryttus. He died for the crime of having sex with other men. In the space of 100 years, Athens had gone from being a city known for its beautiful porn pots, a city where thousands enjoyed plays and stories about the power of gay love, to this--the forced execution of a man whose only crime seems to have been having sex with other men. By this stage, a conspiracy of events precipitated by a rapid rise in wealth inequality had led to politics of self-control. Cleon argued the people were better than the elites with their fancy theories, their fancy wines, and their fancy parties. The trouble is that most of Cleon's audience probably also enjoyed spending their hard-earned cash on good wine imported from abroad. They would all have wanted a piece of the landed estates and the luxurious, extravagant houses of the super-rich. So Cleon found a different kind of extravagance to rail against. Who better to attack than gay men? Gay sex was a symbol of stepping outside the boundaries of self-control, a symbol of extravagance and excess. Gay sex had the additional advantage of being an irreplaceable desire for only a very small fraction of the population. It became the perfect target. For the first time in the recorded history of Athens, men were put to death for the crime of gay sex. As the century drew to a close, these three queer men at the centre of Athenian cultural life--Agathon, Pausanias, and Euripedes--packed their bags and left Athens. They went north, crossing the Attica border, into an emerging kingdom--the kingdom of Macedon. They did so at the invitation of King Archaelaus, who offered to pay them a considerable sum to live at his court and compose there. Archaelaus, a king of a thriving, prosperous nation, was considerably more relaxed about same-sex desire than the politicians of Athens. He welcomed queer artists and poets from numerous more repressive Greek states, and, as time went on, Macedon became the place of queer legend. Even the great philosopher Socrates was invited to Macedon, but unfortunately he chose to remain in Athens--where he was subsequently put on trial and executed for "corrupting the youth". Chapter 3: Queer As Macedon =========================== At the height of its power, much of Athens' wealth came from Laurion, a rocky outcrop outside the city that contained a rich supply of silver ore. Slaves ordered into the mines faced brutal conditions. Cramped in tiny, dark, damp spaces, they hammered at rock for hours on end. The Athenian economy was built on an expansive population of enslaved human beings. They were expendable; if they died, you bought another. Or, you captured a nearby town and enslaved the entire population. Surprisingly, though, the bones dug up of slaves from the 5th century BCE suggests they were relatively well fed. Isotopic analyses show traces of a high-protein diet, rich in fibrous cereals--a sign of excellent nutrition. They were not being fed luxurious foods, but nor were they starved. But as time goes on, this begins to change. From the beginning of the 4th century BCE, the quality of nutrition drops dramatically. This pattern is echoed across nearly all the grave sites in ancient Athens. Food inequality emerges. The graves of the richest are untouched by these dietary shifts; they eat as they always have. But the diet of the poor begins to suffer. In the 5th century BCE, just as in archaic Megara, most graves in Athens were identical in size and shape. A hundred years later, that picture had changed. In 409 BCE... The appearance of these extravagant burials and tombs points to a noticeable widening of inequalities. At the same time, as the grave analyses show, diets of the poor became more meagre and less nutritional. A new ideology was being born in Athens. Same-sex desire was acknowledged as something that some people felt, but it was inadvisable to act upon it. Chapter 4: Plato And The Philosophy Of The Closet ================================================= It is a friend of Socrates called Xenophon who inadvertently reveals the true meaning of the charge which brought Socrates to his death: > It is truly strange to me that some were persuaded that Socrates > corrupted the young. Firstly, Socrates was the most > self-continent, in matters of sex and the stomach, of all men... The jury, however, was unconvinced. Part of the difficulty of getting to the root of any problem in Greek philosophy is that serious work in parsing out the meanings of ancient Greek words is still underway. Much of our understanding is based on highly biased Victorian translations. Xenophon even tells us separately that people used to visit Socrates for advice on how to cure their same-sex attractions. But it is clear that the climate in Athens at the time was opposed to [gay sex]. As well as the role of growing inequalities and monetization in forming the household and promoting self-restraint as a desirable behavior, there was another problem stalking Athens in the 4th century BCE. That problem was debt. For Plato, debt is about living beyond one's means and therefore exhibits a lack of self-control. It seems strange to us to lend money to a beggar, but in Athens it was perfectly routine. The reason for this has a very dark side. The /ptochos/ (singular of /ptochoi/) could be lent money, but in the absence of any property or possessions to secure his loan, he would be required to offer up his own body. He could be sold into slavery at any moment to repay his debt. The complete text of Xenophon's /oeconomicus/, however, we do have, and it provides one of the most revealing pictures of Athens during this time. ... This couple describe how self-restraint will lead to the accumulation of household wealth. Much as in archaic Sparta, where self-restrained was used to justify why some men had more money than others, there are signs it was becoming an object of fixation in ancient Athens. The connection between self-restraint of bodily desires and shrewd accumulation of wealth is explicit. It should come as no surprise then to find the /Oeconomicus/ raging against another issue: > I do think that those who fall head-over-heels in love cannot give > much attention to anything except the object of their desire. It > is no easy thing to find a hope or preoccupation sweeter than queer > love. Indeed, when things need to get done, there can be no harder > price than prevention of being with those you love. Isomanchus thinks that queer people cannot be trusted with money. The ancient logic here is that queer people experience excessive desire. Since excess desire reveals a lack of self-control, they could never be trusted with the running of the household. This quiet picture of suburban family life is easy to overlook and has often been assumed to be rather dull by classicists, but it provides important clues about how the zeal for economic management coincided with a rising homophobia. The idea that there /was/ a design, a secret order to all the chaos, may have been especially seductive during a time in which war, slavery, debt, and economic insecurity all conspired to make the lives of Plato's contemporaries frightening. But the cost of this was to reduce sex to a single function. It was to deny that sex can perform many functions and that pleasure and love are reasons enough in themselves. Chapter 5: Alexander The Straight? ================================== Nearly 500 years later, in the early 3rd century CE, a writer named Athenaeus wrote a book about a dinner party held for a group of highly eccentric scholars. At the party, the guests compete with one another to cite the most tangential and abstruse fragments of philosophical or poetic texts that they have stored in their memory. The work is called /Deipnosophistae/ [1], which most scholars translate as the /Dinner Sophists/, but could be translated as something like the /Clever Diners/. The /Clever Diners/ preserves thousands of fragments of ancient philosophy, aphorisms, and ideas that would otherwise be completely lost to us. It is from /Clever Diners/ Book 13 that a segment comes about Zeno the Stoic. We are told that a contemporary of his, Antigonus of carystus wrote a biography of Zeno in which he claims Zeno [the founder of Stoicism] was attracted /exclusively/ to men. [The library of Alexandria] was not organized according to the sophisticated referencing systems we have become used to today. Instead, as you walked down the marbled aisles, past shelf after wooden shelf, you encountered miniature statues of various literary giants. If you turned right at the bust of a scowling Plato, you would find arranged alphabetically all his scrolls. Scholars today have speculated that this arrangement is the basis for the ancient and medieval "memory palace" techniques (whereby people remember details, by placing them in an imaginary building--a palace or a library). The ideas forged in the world Alexander conquered, of Stoicism and self-control, are direct products of a high-tax, trade-focused economy where the individual and his family were the only insurance against poverty and slavery. These ideas would form the bedrock of Christianity and Western thinking, but it is only half of the story of how the West came to think about queer sex. Chapter 7: Toxic Masculinity In Ancient Rome ============================================ Roman ideas of queer sex were fraught with complexity. .... some sources paint a picture of a divided, homophobic Rome, while others suggest a lurid interest in documenting the most over-the-top stories about gay sex possible. [And at the same exact time period.] ... it is exceptionally rare to hear of a happy, cohabiting queer couple. Once noticed, this silence is deafening. In many ways, queerness in ancient Rome was fraught with the same moral and ethical questions that cocaine is today. Actors and performers were closely associated with queer sex, which was regarded as morally inferior and dangerous by the political and legal elite. Having sex with a male slave in order to humiliate him into submission in a private household would not draw too much attention from polite society. But throughout much of the Roman Empire's history, if a politician went anywhere near it, or a lawyer, or a member of a public office was in any way associated with queerness, their career would be over. Like cocaine, queerness in Rome was indistinguishable from wealth and luxury, and it was talked by a guilt, an anxiety about decay, about status, about health, and--above all--about a loss of self-control. As its empire expanded, Roman Italy was becoming a place of unprecedented disparities in wealth. At the time [2nd century CE], a poorer Roman citizen possessed 1/714 of the wealth of a median Roman citizen. These were still individuals with money who could vote in assemblies. Much of rural Italy and the empire was made up of tenant farmers who paid in cash to lease their farms from richer landlords. The richest Roman aristocrats had 10,476 times the wealth of the poorest. This was a gap that is estimated to have far exceeded even that of Victorian London. With debt crises spiraling and wealth inequality sky-high, the Romans responded--as had the Spartans before them--with a rigorous narrative of discipline. In the law, in history, and in poetry during the Roman Republic, queerness was used as a trope to attack and ridicule another man. As Augustus tightened his grip on power, he brought in a series of further morality laws. Perhaps not by coincidence, this was happening while wealth inequality was rising in Rome. In modern-day Florida, queer books are [banned] from library shelves while gay men party at night in Miami. We should not expect the Romans to be free of the same contradictions. Stoicism continued to curry favour in Roman intellectual circles as wealth inequality climbed in Rome. Chapter 9: The Birth Of Modern Homophobia ========================================= The period also shows some evidence of lesbians. The dictionary writer Hesychius preserves the little-used word /dietaristriai/ (literally: "rubbing women"), which he defines as "women who turn to their female companions in sex, in the manner that men do". The precision of this vocabulary, as in classical Greece, contradicts the claim that the first time queer lives were explicitly labeled was when the term "homosexuality" was invented in the 1800s. When Henry VIII kicked off the English Reformation, self-control and prudence became embedded more firmly than ever in the fabric of both secular and religious life. The picture for the poor in late Tudor England was bleak. Starvation was routine in some parts of the country. People began to moralize the consumption of food; excesses of diet were seen as deep ethical failings, not just examples of greed. The connection between economic and sexual crimes is as alarming as it is predictable. This was not just the case in England. In France in 1605, a novel was published called /The Isle of the Hermaphrodites/ [2] which painted queer bodies and queer desires as motivated by gluttony and excessive consumption of food. Eighteenth-century Boston was hardly a utopia, but it has often been held up by historians as a rare example of economic equality. What is remarkable about Boston is the openness with which queer men and women wrote and cohabited, and the lack of criminal consequences. There is also evidence in the 19th century of lesbian couples living together in "Boston Marriages". Karl Popper theorized--in his book /Open Society and Its Enemies/--that the belief that we are all in inevitable decline from perfection helped lay the groundwork for Nazi ideology, and for this he put the blame squarely on Plato's door. Like Plato, the Nazis argued against democracy and had a strict doctrine of purity and "natural" law--and Plato proposes many different forms of eugenics in both his /Republic/ and his /Laws/. As Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the US advanced neoliberal economics, a new age of self-reliance dawned. In an interview with /Woman's Own/ magazine, Thatcher pugnaciously declared, "there's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families." This commitment to social atomization included a rollback of welfare and a renewed attack on gay people. At the Conservative Party Conference, October 1987, she lambasted schools for teaching children--in a fantasically naive turn of words--that "they have an inalienable right to be gay". What followed was Section 28 of the Local Government Act, which banned teachers and other government workers from discussing homosexuality in schools. In recent academic literature, a correlation has been identified between GDP per capita (a measure of the wealth of the average person) and LGBTQ+ rights. One study even showed that for every $2,000 increase in the GDP per capita of a nation, a corresponding 8-point rise was seen on a scale of LGBTQ+ rights. The global decline in LGBTQ+ persecution is also thanks to greater social connection and community brought about by the Internet. Today there are sustained efforts by forces hostile to queer love and identities to eradicate us. They claim free speech gives them a right to spread lies: that we are medically abnormal, that we are deviant and excessive, that we don't understand healthy, ordered boundaries. The next stage--if history is any teacher--will be a return to values of self-restraint, personal independence, and hyper-masculinity. As in ancient Athens, we should expect to see queer people characterized as excessive aliens unable to contain themselves. A recent computational model has shown increasing narratives against LGBTQ+ people designed to dehumanize them and present them as disordered. The final stage, which in some sense is already widespread, would be to celebrate the ideal man and woman as heterosexual, sexually self-contained (only releasing the restraint as long as it takes to conceive children) and devoted to the duty of the family. Shame would be weaponized against those who fell short of this ideal. If this does happen, then much of it will take place to mask the development of inequalities and unsustainable debt in society. We resist by reaching out across communities. author: Tanner, Harry tags: book,history,philosophy,queer title: The Queer Thing About Sin Footnotes ========= [1] Deipnosophistae Banquet of the Learned, Volume 1 Banquet of the Learned, Volume 2 Banquet of the Learned, Volume 3 [2] The Island of the Hermaphrodites Tags ==== book history philosophy queer ]]> 2026-06-08 20:41:01 gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/log/2026-06-06-the-ai-con-by-emily-m-bender-and-alex-hanna/ Ben Collver There are only three sources of growth: population growth, natural > resource utilization, and technology. Developed societies are > depopulating all over the world, across cultures--the total human > population may already be shrinking. ... Our enemy is deceleration, > de-growth, depopulation--the nihilistic wish, so trendy among our > elites, for fewer people, less energy, and more suffering and > death. Sounding the alarm that "developed societies" are "depopulating" is coded language for "white, Western countries are not having enough babies." Andreessen's "techno-optimism" is explicitly embedded in a positive eugenics project. Chapter 3 ========= So-called AI's dirty little open secret is, though, none of these tools would work if it weren't for a massive, underpaid workforce in the Majority World--that is, outside of countries such as the U.S. and Western Europe... Automation has always been part of a larger strategy of shifting costs onto workers and accruing wealth for those in control of the machines. AI is part of a longer tradition within global industry of finding ways to replace labor and/or enforce grueling schedules and working conditions in the name of productivity. They shunt some kinds of labor, especially those that require specialized human intervention and skill, into the margins, where workers are more easily exploited. Most AI tools require a huge amount of hidden labor to make them work at all. ... OpenAI had subcontracted Kenyan workers making less than $2 per day to filter out gore, hate speech, child sexual abuse materials, and pornographic images from ChatGPT and OpenAI's image generation tool DALL-E. This industry has been called by many names: "crowdwork", "data labor", or "ghost work" (as the labor often goes unattended and unseen by consumers in the West). Another role arising due to the generative AI rush is the "red teamer". Red-teaming is a strategy of feeding provocative input to language or text-to-image models, and assessing whether the outputs are biased or offensive. As journalists Karen Itao and Andrea Paola Hernández have written, AI companies "profit from catastrophe" by chasing economic crises--for instance, in inflation-ridden Venezuela--and employing people who are among the most vulnerable in the world. AI hype at work is designed to hide the moves employers make towards the degradation of jobs and the workplace behind the shiny claims of techno-optimism. It spins a vision of the future where automation means that people are freed up to do interesting work while machines take over tedious tasks. But when we look behind the curtain, we see instead that automation is being wielded as a cudgel against workers and trotted out as a cost-saving device for employers, leaving workers the tasks of cleaning up after it, tasks that are devalued and more poorly paid while also being less creative, engaging, and fulfilling--or at worse, outright traumatic to carry out. Chapter 4 ========= The impact of the decisions from automated systems have been dire. In a well-documented example, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County's Child and Youth Services employees a predictive algorithm known as the Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST) to ostensibly reduce caseworker load by assigning a score, 2 through 20, indicating the amount of risk at which a child may be in their home. The tool relies on existing records, including prior calls to Child and Youth Services, police, jail records, and public health and educational records. The score /could/ be used to channel more resources to the child's family, especially in cases of child poverty. But much of the time, the score is instead used as a means to justify family separation: removing children from the home and placing them in the foster care system. In this way, the function of the automation isn't to support people, but rather to provide a false sheen of objectivity over a brutally discriminatory system. Family separation has been a fact of the child welfare system for Black and Indigenous children from the system's origins; the act of removing these children and placing them in the care of white parents as a means of "saving them" is part and parcel of the system's racism. The use of predictive analytics in this context provides a means of automating this violence and offers new ways to supercharge and scale it. What's needed is more resources and more time for social workers to connect families to those resources. Automation in the name of efficiency here only makes the government more efficient at harming families. Another dire example involves an algorithm called "nH Predict", used by UnitedHealth Group (the largest health care insurer in the U.S.) to determine the length of stays it would approve for patients in nursing homes and care facilities. In a class-action lawsuit filed in November 2023, the estates of the two named plaintiffs--deceased at the time of filing--alleged that UnitedHealth kicked them out of care too early, based on nH Predict's output, even as the company knew the system had an error rate of 90 percent. The court filing says that UnitedHealth used this system anyway, counting on the fact that only a tiny group of policyholders appeal such denials, and that the insurer "[banked] on the [elderly] patients' impaired conditions, lack of knowledge, and lack of resources to appeal the erroneous AI-powered decisions." The families of the two plaintiffs2 spent tens of thousands of dollars paying for care that went uncovered by the insurer. Reporting from the /Stat News/ largely confirms the allegations in the lawsuit, namely that after acute health incidents, UnitedHealth aimed at getting elderly patients out of nursing homes and hospitals as fast as possible, even against the advice of their doctors. Moreover, when patients challenged their denials, physician medical reviewers were advised by case managers not to add more than 1 percent of the prior advised nursing home stay. And case managers themselves were fired if they strayed from those targets. The executive in charge of the division controlling the algorithm stated on a company podcast, in a comically evil admission, "If [people] go to a nursing home, how do we get them out as soon as possible?" Crosscutting all of the problems above is the issue of bias. When the systems are wrong, the effect of those errors is not distributed evenly across the population. Just because you've identified a social problem doesn't mean LLMs or any other kind of so-called AI are a solution. When someone says so, the problem is usually better understood by widening the lens, looking at it in its broader context. As Shankar Narayan, the Tech and Liberty Project director at the ACLU of Washington, asked regarding biased recidivism prediction systems: Why are we asking who is most likely to reoffend rather than what do these people need to give them the best chance of not reoffending? Likewise, when someone suggests a robo-doctor, robo-therapist, or robo-teacher, we should ask: Why isn't there enough money for public clinics, mental health counseling, and schools? Text synthesis machines can't fill holes in the social fabric. We need people, political will, and resources. Chapter 5 ========= We can't delegate science to machines, because science isn't a collection of answers. It's a set of processes and ways of knowing. ... the allure and prestige of AI raise the risk of narrowing fields of inquiry to those questions which can be approached with these tools. At the same time, the imagined tools represent the epitome of a view from nowhere, or the idea that one can have objective knowledge of a set of truths, uncolored by their personal experiences. Still other problems can be summed up as the perception that science is too slow. But here we're not convinced this is actually a problem. Rather, we contend that slower science is better science and that, in fact, we can't meaningfully do science at all unless scientists can work in community with each other and have the time and mental space to engage with each other's ideas. Chapter 6 ========= These groups [AI Boomers and AI Doomers] are, counterintuitively, two sides of the same coin: the substance of the coin is the belief that the development of AI is inevitable and that that resulting technology will be both autonomous and powerful, and ultimately beneficial, if we play our cards right. Neither depicts the real harms of actual existing automation, at best dismissing them as less important than the imaginary existential threats. Doomerism/Boosterism seem to obscure, rather than illuminate, what's at stake when it comes to the current AI boom. From the Doomer/Booster point of view, then, it is of critical importance to work out how to make sure that the supposed coming AI overlords are "aligned" with humanity's goals. This Doomer/Booster research field is called "AI safety". When AI Doomers warn against existential risk, what they really mean is "existential risk for well-off, white, Western, and able-bodied people who are insulated from becoming climate refugees." Gebru and Torres compellingly argue that these ideologies have their origins in the Anglo-American eugenics movement. Not only do they have a direct lineage to eugenics--for instance, the person who coined the term "transhumanism" was Julian Huxley (brother of novelist and author of /A Brave New World/, Aldous Huxley), a major figure in British eugenics. But they are also eugenic in contemporary argumentation. For instance, one of the main arguments for longtermism is that, according to its utilitarian logic, we should discount current-day suffering because we need to optimize technological development to seed the environment for the trillions of future humans who will colonize space. If you think that's absurd, we're with you. What this means is that the actually existing humans suffering--borne primarily in the Majority World--is ignored for hypothetical threats of rogue algorithms. This is a eugenicist frame of seeing the world: the need of advancement for future white people at the cost of Black and brown people in the here and now. Humanity /is/, however, facing an actual existential risk in the form of the climate crisis. The latest assessment report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change warns: > Every increment of warming results in rapidly escalating hazards. > More intense heatwaves, heavier rainfall, and other weather > extremes further increase risks for human health and ecosystems. > In every region, people are dying from extreme heat. > Climate-driven food and water insecurity is expected to increase > with increased warming. When the risks combine with other adverse > events, such as pandemics or conflicts, they become even more > difficult to manage. Chapter 7: What Can You Do? (Ask Probing Questions) =================================================== But there are things that we can do, both individually and collectively, to resist AI hype--in this hype cycle and the next, no matter what the technology happens to be, nor how it's marketed. We can burst the bubble, through pointed questions and pointier ridicule. We can built up information literacy, both through our individual practices, and through supporting and learning from other informational institutions--namely libraries. * * * What is being automated? ------------------------ What goes in, and what comes out? Can you connect the inputs to outputs? -------------------------------------- What is the evidence that there is sufficient information in the input to determine the output? For example, researchers at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology claimed in 2020 that they had created a system that could tell, with 80 percent accuracy and "no racial bias," whether someone was a criminal, based only on a picture of their face. They weren't the first. In 2016, researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University made similar claims. Applying out questions to this case, the input to these systems is relatively straightforward: a photo of someone's face. The output, however, is much more vexed. On the face of it, it seems like a simply binary (yes/no) classification problem: Is this person a criminal? But criminality is not an inherent property of a person. The category is "criminal" is instead produced by an interaction of at least three things: the person's behavior (very much constrained by their circumstances), social norms around what is considered criminal behavior, and the legal regime the person finds themselves in. So there cannot possibly be sufficient information in the input (an image of a face) to determine the output. Are these systems being described as human? ------------------------------------------- For any system sold as an "AI [human role]", we can always ask: What motivates calling this thing by that name? What else do we expect of people in that role, and who is falling for the suggestion that this system can also do those things? Relatedly, we should be on the lookout for ranked-order comparisons between automated systems and people. Researchers and corporations frequently brag that their system has achieved "superhuman" performance on various tasks. But the comparison to people implicit in the word "superhuman" belies a misapprehension of what software is. Software systems are tools, which people use to do things. We wouldn't say that hammers have a "superhuman" ability to drive in nails, nor that airplanes have a "superhuman" ability to fly. ... "hallucination" refers to the experience of perceiving things that aren't there. But LLMs actually don't have perceptions, and suggesting that they do is yet more unhelpful anthropomorphization. How is the system evaluated? ---------------------------- What is actually measured, and how does this relate to the intended use of the system? Often, this information simply isn't available, which is a good indication that you're looking at pure hype. For example, the company SoundThinking sells a product called ShotSpotter to municipalities around the U.S., claiming that "ShotSpotter" is a proven acoustic gunshot detection system that alerts law enforcement to virtually all gunfire within a city's ShotSpotter coverage area within 60 seconds" and that "[f]rom 2019-2021 the system had a 97% aggregate accuracy rate across all of our customers, including a very small false positive rate of less than 0.5% of all reported gunfire incidents." Neither of these claims is backed up with links to the studies that provided those numbers. However, audits in Chicago and New York City found that the vast majority of ShotSpotter alerts (87 to 91 percent) were false alarms. We would all have been better off if people in the right government positions had asked SoundThinking probing questions about their evaluation methodology up front, and then chosen not to buy into this unnecessary surveillance system that sends cops into situations believing that there is an active shooter... Who benefits from this technology? ---------------------------------- Who is harmed, and what recourse do they have? How was the system developed? ----------------------------- What are their labor and data practices? * * * Garance Burke of the Associated Press (AP) developed a chapter for the /AP Stylebook/--a canonical reference for many journalists inside and outside the AP--on how to talk about AI. Burke instructs journalists to "get back to basics" and ask many of the same questions we pose here... As a consumer, you have the option to simply not use AI tools. ... We can also refrain from sharing information that isn't grounded in real sources... Above and beyond that, we can work to support and maintain public information access systems. There exists a set of practices around information access that both predates the web and search engines and remains a vital force in our communities. We're talking about the practice of librarians, libraries, and library science. This means supporting libraries is an important means of individual and collective resistance. ... As Maggie Tokuda-Hall, of Authors Against Book Bans, explains, the purpose of these book bans isn't just the surface culture-war effects of whipping up moral panics around race, gender, and sexuality. They also serve as a massive drain on the time and resources of local libraries, impeding their function as engines of democracy. Shifting away from "innovation" towards regulation that protects people makes it clear that it's not the details of the technology that should be the focus, but its potential to impact people and society. In other words, the expertise needed to effectively regulate technology is expertise in sociotechnical systems, human and civil rights, and the crafting of laws such that they achieve the desired goals. While tech companies would like policymakers to feel snowed under by progress and to think they are perpetually playing catch-up, policymakers should be concerned with protecting rights and maintaining civil structures, things that don't change so fast. We call on policymakers to look into the ways in which both the production and use of the new technology are trampling on human and civil rights and ask: how can those rights be better protected and what regulatory and enforcement mechanisms would be effective in protecting them? Documenting a dataset requires collecting and publishing information about how the data was generated or collected, why certain choices were made, who is reflected in the data, how the dataset will be maintained over time, whether people reflected in the data consented to being in the dataset, if the data are copyrighted, and much more. This all takes work and advance planning, and reflects an attitude of care towards datasets, especially towards the people reflected in them. This approach stands in stark contrast to the prevailing approach as Big Tech companies and startups grab everything on the Internet that's not nailed down and claim it as their own. While it may seem that documenting the data is a fairly technical ask, it is crucial information for any organization or regulatory body working in the public interest to understand what, precisely, is in the training datasets upon which AI systems are built. It's also a way to counter claims that a machine may have "emergent" properties, like Google CEO Sundar Pichai's claim that their chatbot "learned" Bengali without being specifically trained on it. On the face of it, this claim is ridiculous. But researchers and regulators can confirm this only by having access to the data, or at least thorough documentation of it. We can't have accountability without transparency. If an automatic decision system is going to be used to determine which benefits are allocated to which people, regulators and public interest technologists must be able to audit the training data driving that system. If a language model is being used as a component of a resume-screening system, then the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (and analogous regulators in other countries) should have access to the training data behind the model... Another kind of transparency is transparency about the fact of automation, otherwise known as disclosure. Is that a chatbot or a person? Companies and organizations using automated systems, seeking a way to avoid taking responsibility for their decisions, may attempt to displace accountability to the systems themselves. The banking and investment giant Goldman Sachs, estimating in early 2023 that two-thirds of jobs would be exposed to automation, with 18 percent of global work outright replaced by it, by June 2024 was saying the technology is nowhere near where it needs to be to replace jobs at that rate. Daron Acemoglu, labor economist at MIT, published an estimate that productivity gains from AI will be less than 0.53 percent over the next ten years. On an investment call after its 2024 Q2 earnings, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai was grilled with questions about when its big bet on AI--to the tun of $12 billion per quarter--would pay off. David Cahn at VC giant Sequoia Capital wrote in June 2024 that AI firms need to turn something like $600 billion in revenue for the AI bet to pay off. author: Bender, Emily M. & Hanna, Alex detail: tags: book,non-fiction,political title: The AI Con Tags ==== book non-fiction political ]]> 2026-06-07 07:02:27 gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/log/2026-06-03-immersive-reading-by-chloee-weiner/ Ben Collver Tags ==== article science ]]> 2026-06-03 07:21:26 gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/log/2026-06-01-on-avoiding-open-slopware/ Ben Collver [2] AI is Dehumanizing Technology [3] AI is Water Hungry [4] VIM Classic [5] Open Slopware List [6] Qemu Is Pro-Slopware [7] The AI Con [8] "AI" Is A Dick Move [9] Backlink to freet's phlog [10] Backlink to f6k's phlog Tags ==== collapse political technical ]]> 2026-06-10 08:01:28 gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/log/2026-05-31-the-call-of-the-wild-with-harrison-ford/ Ben Collver [2] The Call of the Wild (Gutenberg Ebook) [3] The Angry Mammoth by Jack London tags: outdoor,retrocomputing,video Tags ==== outdoor retrocomputing video ]]> 2026-06-03 06:31:03 gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/log/2026-05-27-the-shallows-by-nicholas-carr/ Ben Collver tags: book,history,non-fiction,political title: The Shallows Footnotes ========= [1] Commonplace book [2] The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth [3] Anti-Intellectualism In American Life Tags ==== book history non-fiction political ]]> 2026-06-03 06:31:03 gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/log/2026-05-26-lady-into-fox-by-david-garnett/ Ben Collver Lady Into Fox (1922) is a story about a newlywed English couple who go on a walk in the woods and the wife abruptly turns into a fox. I expected a whimsical child's tale, but no, this story is serious. Lady Into Fox is a relatively short read and i recommend it. It reminded me a lot of another book i read, The Fox Woman (1999) by Kij Johnson, which is set in Japan and steeped in classical Chinese culture. Both books were online recommendations. Both books seriously and philosophically explore the ramifications of human and magical fox relationships. Neither book is for children. [1] The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson (1999) This world-- call it an image caught in a mirror-- Real it is not, nor unreal, either --Minamoto Sanetomo (1192-1219) To summarize without spoilers: magical foxes aren't evil, but they aren't exactly good either. Entering relationships with magical foxes tends to have a deleterious effect on humans. I take it as an allegory: humans find wild nature alive, attractive, and free! But it never ends well. These humans would have been better off to stick with civilization. This view is confirmed by the following review of Lady Into Fox: > For the British, the fox--as the last wild mammal of any size, one > of the few predators of our livestock--represents the threat played > by the wild in our national psyche like no other animal on this > rather tame, industrialised island. In this context, the fox's > growing presence in our cities makes it ripe for a new phase of > vilification, as the ultimate urban pest, a despoiler of suburban > order and a biter of innocent children. > --Alex Klaushofer [2] Alex Klauhofer's review of Lady Into Fox author: Garnett, David, 1892-1981 detail: source: tags: ebook,fantasy title: Lady Into Fox Footnotes ========= [1] The Fox Woman by Kij Johnson (1999) [2] Alex Klauhofer's review of Lady Into Fox Tags ==== ebook fantasy ]]> 2026-06-03 06:31:03 gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/log/2026-05-24-topo-maps/ Ben Collver [2] LibreMap Data [3] USGS Map Downloader [4] USFS Map Web Site [5] Archived USGS Maps [6] Historic USGS Maps [7] OpenStreetMap Tags ==== outdoor ]]> 2026-06-03 06:31:03 gopher://tilde.pink/1/~bencollver/log/2026-05-22-walking-and-the-wild-by-henry-david-thoreau/ Ben Collver In Wildness is the preservation of the World. ... From the forest > and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. ... > The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a > meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has risen to > eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigour from a similar > wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not > suckled by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the > children of the Northern forests who were. > Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. > In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is > but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild > thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the Scriptures and > Mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. In these passages he equates wildness as being near to goodness. What is wild is what is most alive, attractive, and free. Civilization, on the other hand is dull, tame, and out of touch. > English literature... is an essentially tame and civilized > literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wildness is a green > wood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of > Nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform > us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became > extinct. This was an interesting point to ponder. A species is clearly defined. It is easy to test whether something is a member of a species, so it is relatively easy to declare a species extinct. A wild person is not a species. How do you test whether a person is wild? It's a subjective evaluation. If you find a person remarkably alive and free, then they are wild. Thoreau wrote that exposure to wild foods and wild places engender wild thoughts, which creates wild people. I agree with this idea. You are what you eat, and you are what you pay attention to. The trends of deforestation, extinction, topsoil depletion, and such produce a scarcity of wild food, wild places, wild thoughts, and wild people. The extinction of wild people lagged not far behind the extinction of wild animals. Life, even "tame" life, has the potential to develop new species. People have the potential to form new thoughts and ways of being. Hope exists in our natures and in the geological scale of time. There is a substance called shilajit that extrudes from rocks in the Himalayan mountains. It tastes bad to me, but it's nutritious and good for health. It has its origin in primeval forests that were buried, pressurized, and raised by plate tectonics to high altitudes. Now, 30+ million years later, our bodies can benefit from those extinct forests. Mystics wandered into the mountains and ate geological goop seeping out of a rock and it helped them not starve for a few more days. This planet is full of surprises. > That is active duty, which is not for our bondage; that is > knowledge which is for our liberation: all other duty is good only > unto weariness; all other knowledge is only the cleverness of an > artist. --Vishnu Purana Quoted like a true Transcendentalist. :) Knowledge itself can be classified "by its fruits" so to say. I read that in ancient Egypt, they used pairs of opposites for a more broadly encompassing meaning. For instance "of life & death" would mean "of all everything". A Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil, then, would mean a hierarchy of knowledge of everything. But i think the Good & Evil, as opposed to Life & Death, would imply an evaluating kind of knowledge, judging everything but being disconnected from it. The truth which can be spoken is not the true truth. Articulation is like a pin that pierces through a butterfly, fixing its body to a definite spot, but killing the actual butterfly. A person who values wildness would do well to pay attention to wildness. For an introvert, it would be that which is wild within. Thoreau provides the beacon to follow. What makes you feel more alive, attractive, and free? I'll name one thing that does it for me: acceptance. I give my subconscious permission to think whatever it thinks. I give my body permission to assume whatever posture it wishes. I give my mind permission to feel whatever emotions it has, or to not feel whatever emotions it hasn't. This body and mind are beautiful and have served me well. I give myself leave to revel in glorious thoughts, or glorious reverie, as i see fit. I would like to expand this to include more of the world and the beings around me. author: Thoreau, Henry David, 1817-1862 detail: source: tags: philosophy,outdoor,transcendental title: Walking, and the Wild Footnotes ========= [1] The Footpath Way Tags ==== philosophy outdoor transcendental ]]> 2026-06-03 06:31:03