Anthony

I'm Anthony and I'm an organic computer scientist and a Luddite. I believe that unsound research lends itself to social harms.

website: https://bucci.onl/about.html

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Last Notes

2026-05-21 12:28:50 GMT

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> There is no training of AI or tracking from their search engine. Their search engine only uses AI when you want it to.
Unless they have blatantly changed their operation, this is a misrepresentation. Their URL literally used to be "kagi.ai", which you can browse on the Internet Archive if you were serious about understanding this company. Their blog at kagi.com still has posts with text like this, which I'm picking from just one of several posts on the subject:<li>"Not a lot of people know that Kagi started as Kagi.ai in 2018 and has a long heritage of utilizing AI"</li><li>"Our early efforts, however, enabled us to use machine learning to deliver answers to questions directly within the search experience, making us the only search engine besides Google and Bing able to do so when we launched the public beta in 2022"</li><li>"Our approach allows us to take advantage of the entirety of available human knowledge...Kagi acts as a gateway to the giant repository of human knowledge, patiently waiting to serve our needs"</li><li>"With the recent advancements in AI, our interest in exploring how it can improve search has reignited. Last year we published technology demonstrations for AI in search and AI in browser and today we are unveiling integrations based on this demos directly in Kagi search."</li>
Their future business model as stated in 2019:<li>"Imagine a world where the market grades AI assistants by their ability and offers them at different price points. Depending on your budget and tolerance, you can buy beginner, intermediate, or expert AIs"</li><li>"Instead of everyone sharing the same Siri, you’ll have your completely individual Mike or Julia or Jarvis - the AI. The more you tell your assistant, the better it can help you, so when you ask it to recommend a good restaurant nearby, it’ll provide options based on what you like to eat and how far you want to drive"</li>
Etc. You'd have us believe they stopped these efforts---which require training on user data to be fully realized---and turn all this off unless users opt in? Not plausible. This is plenty of reason to believe they are collecting every interaction every user has with their search engine to train their AI assistants and realize this vision. You can't have your "individual Mike or Julia or Jarvis" unless Kagi is collecting data from you and training Mike, Julia, or Jarvis with it.
If one were inclined to, one could read Kagi's [AI Philosophy](https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/ai-philosophy.html ) and take note that what they are listing as the main limitations of using AI in search are not in fact the main limitations of using AI in search according to experts on this subject. To me this suggests they are not inclined to provide a good search and information retrieval experience based on the best understanding of how to do that. Instead they wish to provide the AI-based "question answering" experience that their blog has been detailing for many years.
> they return blended search results
Yes. Blended into a slurry by AI.
> But it’s clear you don’t like them
I stated facts as I know them, with the purpose of sharing information that other people might find useful when making a decision about whether to use Kagi. You can verify what I said on the two posts I linked previously as well as Kagi's own blog, if you cared to. What you're saying here reads as a typical dissembling tactic deployed to discredit unpleasant facts by labeling them as "only aesthetic" or "emotional", on the assumption that somehow aesthetics or emotions are less valid, which of course is a false assumption. That you are misrepresenting the practices of a company with a founder who's regularly expressed chauvinistic views (to put it kindly) reads to me as projection, or worse. Regardless of the motivation, this isn't about what I "like". It's about what Kagi has repeatedly stated it actually does.

2026-03-17 16:47:13 GMT

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Maybe I'm rude but I ignore it if I can and if I can't I say "I don't get how you tolerate being sick so often."

2026-02-09 16:50:07 GMT

I think abduction is a deeply underappreciated aspect of human reasoning.
#logic #abduction

2026-02-09 13:52:59 GMT

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I personally know more than one person who's spent years writing about some method, let's say TDD, going to conferences presenting their ideas etc, fully independently of their employer. Said folks are now slinging AI slop and writing about how great LLMs are. Blaming the employer doesn't pass a smell test.

2026-02-08 20:22:30 GMT

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That's what I had in mind. The key bit is that if our understandable human languages aren't moving up the complexity scale along with whatever it is we think we're representing about math, then "whatever it is we think we're representing about math" is as incomprehensible to us as "all of math". We don't have the language to express it, so it looks algorithmically random (i.e. incompressible)--even as we claim to have made an "automated mathematician" to produce math for us!

2026-02-08 18:40:14 GMT

I'm tinkering with an argument based on algorithmic complexity that if it were possible to make something like an "automated mathematician" or "automated scientist", then these would be expected to eventually produce outputs that we humans would be unable to distinguish from random noise.
Getting the whole argument just right is fiddly, but the basic idea is this. You feed some kind of theory into the AM/AS, which is a black box. It churns on this and spits out a result, which is added to the theory (I'm neglecting the case that the result is inconsistent with the theory). It can now churn on theory + result 1. After doing this long enough, it's churning on theory + result 1 + result 2 + ... + result N. Whatever it spits out will be dependent in particular on results 1 - N. Unless you know these results, you will not be able to understand what it outputs. I.e. it will look like noise to you. If the AM/AS is appreciably faster at producing results than people are at understanding them, there will be an N beyond which no one can understand the output. It'll look like random noise.
If you're into software development, this would be analogous to a software system that generates syntactically-correct code and then adds it to a software library it can then call. If you were to run this long enough, virtually all the programs it generated that were short enough for human beings to read and understand would consist almost entirely of library calls to code generated by the system. You'd have no idea what any of this code did unless you studied the library calls, which you wouldn't be able to do if the system were expanding the library faster than you could read and understand it.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader whether this is a desirable thing to do and whether it's happened yet. I would offer, though, a question to ponder: what reason is there to believe that a random number generator hooked up to an inscrutable interpreter produces human flourishing, for any given meaning of "human flourishing" you care to use?
#tech #dev #mathematics #AutomatedMathematician #AutomatedScientist #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #ThoughtExperiment

2026-02-08 15:32:07 GMT

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This really makes me wonder whether the decades of constant blog posts about method, such as software craftsmanship, *-driven design, agile, extreme programming, etc etc etc (event sourcing, the hexagonal architecture, etc etc etc etc etc dear lord there are so many), were all, ultimately, not serious. If a single technological advance coupled with hype and corporate pressure is enough to convince people to throw all of that out, how serious could it have been, really?

2026-02-08 00:19:56 GMT

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https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1769891986.847341

2026-02-06 14:47:27 GMT

Happy [Bandcamp Friday](https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-fridays ) to those who celebrate.
#Bandcamp #BandcampFriday #music

2026-02-06 14:22:25 GMT

What they don't tell you, what you have to figure out for yourself, is that the "things" in the slogan "move fast and break things" is us. It's people.
#tech #dev #SiliconValley #SocialMedia #AI #GenAI #etc

2026-02-05 16:15:10 GMT

Economy looking wobbly eh?
#US #economy

2026-02-04 18:49:56 GMT

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I think you're dead on about the focus on automating tasks.
Here's John Searle in 1983:
> Marvin Minsky of MIT says that the next generation of computers will be so intelligent that we will ‘be lucky if they are willing to keep us around the house as household pets.'
Here's Joseph Weizenbaum in 2007:
> Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT, once pronounced—a belief he still holds—that ‘‘the brain is merely a meat machine.’’
He goes on to note that meat is dead and might be eaten or thrown out. Flesh is what's alive. He also draws attention to the word "merely", as in "nothing more than".
I share with Weizenbaum the belief that Minsky has clearly expressed a *disdain* for human intelligence. We're on the order of household pets. Our brains are no more than food or trash. Obviously Minsky doesn't speak for all AI researchers then or since, but his "meat machine" language is all over the place, and this disdain or even contempt for human intelligence and achievement is also common.
It definitely doesn't speak to a curiosity about intelligence, which I think requires at least a little bit of love and esteem.

2026-02-04 17:52:48 GMT

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He has a history of denying genocides that includes dismissing firsthand accounts of refugees escaping them, going back to the Khmer Rouge at least. Further revelations that he doesn't respect people with less power than he enjoys are unsurprising to me as well.

2026-02-04 16:14:07 GMT

I wonder whether the digital age has led to a decline in the use of atlases, which in turn might be expected to imbue a false sense of increasing objectivity as scientific practitioners of become less acquainted with analog methods.
#science #PhilosophyOfScience #objectivity #digital

2026-02-04 15:42:40 GMT

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Cool! I'm curious how you address the cyborg myth. Given things like artificial hearts and prosthetic limbs there's a believable setup for a sorites paradox: when, exactly, does the person stop being "themselves" as you replace, one by one, their organic parts with mechanical analogs? I think that paradox does a lot of work for people who want to assert organism=mechanism. Do you think there will be a Zoom option or recording of this? I can't see myself making it to Vienna...

2026-02-04 15:34:20 GMT

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If you stuck a human infant into the same "learning environment" as an LLM being trained, they would not learn English. This simple-minded thought experiment demonstrates to me that LLM-based AI, or really anything in machine learning that has this form of training, is not and cannot be a model of human intelligence. Pretending a computer is a human baby doesn't help either but that's another conversation!
I too have been struck by the apparent lack of curiosity of our colleagues. One tentative conclusion I've come to is that there is a subspecies of STEM folks driven largely by impressive demos. I feel like this tendency reflects the perversities of short-termist economic thinking, but in any case the view is a splashy demo that makes it into *Nature* and the NYT but has shoddy science backing it is superior to excellent science that has no splashy demo. The field "progresses" from one impressive demo to the next. Pollack used to say things along these lines, but that's no surprise given that he founded the DEMO lab: it's right there in the name! I think that mindset is not uncommon, though. Even those who agree the science is important run up against the constraint that there's significantly more funding for flashy demos than for basic research.

2026-02-04 11:58:30 GMT

"Cloud" is an appropriate for that kind of computing. From a distance it can appear solid. Up close, it's a fog, with nothing clear and with none of the apparent solidity visible.
#tech #dev #cloud #CloudComputing

2026-02-02 22:08:01 GMT

I am astonished to have bookmarked a message from the Pope in my pile of AI-related links.
[MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE LEO XIV FOR THE 60TH WORLD DAY OF SOCIAL COMMUNICATIONS](https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/communications/documents/20260124-messaggio-comunicazioni-sociali.html )
His emphasis on face and voice is good.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #PopeLeo

2026-02-01 17:09:50 GMT

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I am not a lawyer; nor am I deeply studied in the legalities, so you should double and triple check anything I say, and if it ever comes to it, speak to a lawyer.
That said, my understanding is that if you are not under arrest, ICE has no right to access your phone unless they have a judicial warrant. You can file a criminal complaint of theft in the local jurisdiction where it happened (local politicians sometimes recommend this: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/06/metro/ice-immigration-rights-bystander/ ). The [Alasaad v. McAleenan ruling](https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-court-rules-suspicionless-searches-travelers-phones-and-laptops ) found such searches unconstitutional. I don't know what followup rulings might have occurred or whether the consensus has shifted since then. You definitely do not need to consent to a search either of your person or of your phone.
Even if arrested, you are not required to speak to anyone other than to say "I wish to remain silent", "I do not consent to a search", and "I wish to speak to an attorney". You are entitled to contact an attorney. They will confiscate your belongings, but you do not need to tell them the password to unlock your phone.
Practically speaking, this is an agency that is willing to shoot people dead knowing that even the president will openly spread lies about what happened. They will almost surely threaten someone to unlock their phone and will take a copy of its contents regardless of whether they are legally entitled to do that. How much one resists is a question of how much danger one anticipates and what they are comfortable with risking. I'm definitely in no position to make recommendations about something like that.

2026-02-01 16:04:43 GMT

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> The Trump-Vance lie that the city had been “destroyed,” the notion of “carnage,” the dehumanization of immigrants— all of this creates the impression that their promised ethnic cleansing action would be a > *response*> to something, rather than a simple > *choice*> to exercise state violence against an invented racial enemy. These reversals are very important. It is important to consider this carefully.
> First, Vance reported that the Nazi propaganda campaign that he had himself inspired amounted to factual evidence. Mental chaos has been created where there was none before. And then that mental chaos becomes the justification for physical chaos: Trump’s “large deportations,” ICE raids that will, in fact, wreck an improving local economy. And once that physical chaos has been created, it will be blamed on the immigrants who are no longer there. Most of this has already played out. A key threshold, which it appears that we are about to cross, is the application of the state violence. At that point, so to speak, the lie is supposed to become “true.”
#USPol #ICE #history #authoritarianism #tyranny #resistance #resist #narrative #immigration #Haiti

2026-02-01 15:58:37 GMT

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> In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are making hasty preparations for a “large deportation” promised by the president. To all appearances, and according to local sources, the city is two or three days away from a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis. The destined victims are ten thousand or more Haitians.
From [Timothy Snyder's substack](https://snyder.substack.com/p/ethnic-cleansing-in-ohio ). Note the use of the phrases "ethnic cleansing" and "hate campaign", which are accurate. Snyder later states, regarding his use of the word "Nazi", "I use the word advisedly". It's well worth reading what he says about that. J.D. Vance's words led to a self-professed US Nazi group terrorizing Springfield Ohio. Snyder spells out how the hyperreality--the non-existent parallel and false world Vance set in motion and then Trump amplified--is turning into real-world consequences for real people.
#USPol #ICE #history #authoritarianism #tyranny #resistance #resist #narrative #immigration #Haiti

2026-02-01 15:33:43 GMT

I like the historian Timothy Snyder's observations about what has been happening in the US with respect to ICE recently, and why it is different from previous actions of this agency. I'll paraphrase him, so errors and omissions are mine.
Here's one point: masked thugs in mismatched camo are breaking laws that include abducting, assaulting, and executing people, and the regime is attempting to force us all to refer to this as "law enforcement". For all the many criticisms one might aim at US law enforcement, members typically wear blue, show their faces, and doctrinally aspire to behave transparently and professionally (please don't @ me with your critiques of law enforcement or hashtag ACAB comments; this is not meant as a defense, only a contrast. I've been beaten and teargassed by cops and witnessed far worse so I am acquainted with this aspect of US "law enforcement").
In other words the regime is attempting to change consensus reality so that Americans accept that the phrase "law enforcement" includes random, unprovoked breaking and entering by heavily armed masked men into homes or vehicles, assaults, and summary executions on the street, targeting *all citizens*. They want this to be a normal and accepted occurrence anywhere and at any time. Much as one might criticize previous administration's immigration policies---and one might really really criticize those---this attempt to shift consensus on "law enforcement" to include summary executions of anyone and all the rest is new (It is not new for certain groups; what I think Snyder is saying is that it'd be new for *everyone* to be targeted in this way, and for most people to accept that's just how it is now).
Snyder also points out that the border plays an important role here because it is where the country, and therefore the law, ends. In other words, it's not coincidental that the regime chose to elevate ICE. Historically, authoritarian regimes have a marked tendency to expand the lawlessness and indefiniteness of border zones to include the entire territory of the country, and the current regime is no different. Immigrants and immigration aren't the only targets here. The larger aim is to indefinitely suspend the rule of law nationwide by making the entire nation into a border zone (Recall the Texas governor kidnapping immigrants and shipping them to "blue states", a classic attempt to spread resentment of immigrants throughout the country). Again, this is a narrative move, an attempt to shift consensus reality.
So, one way to resist is to simply not accept either of these attempts to change reality. Continue to refer to what's happening as unacceptable, not who we are, etc. Continue to point out that out of control border "enforcement" has led to street executions. Continue to name these actions as the criminal acts of thugs. Continue to pressure people with power, such as lawmakers, to do the same. Not out of some misguided or naive nationalism or patriotism, but in order to keep a stake firmly planted in the ground against the forces attempting to move it.
Incidentally, all eyes on Haitian and Haitian-American people in Ohio over the coming weeks. The Haiti Temporary Protected Status designation ends this coming Tuesday, February 3, 2026. Haitians in Springfield were specifically abused during the Trump campaign. The US has a long history of abusing and dehumanizing Haitians dating back at least to Thomas Jefferson, so the Trump campaign rhetoric was no outlier or anomaly. Haiti is also one of the countries specifically named in the US State Dept's announcement about indefinitely halting immigrant visa processing. It would not be surprising if the next ICE "surge" targeted Haitian immigrants in Ohio given how the groundwork's been laid.
#USPol #ICE #history #authoritarianism #tyranny #resistance #resist #narrative #immigration #Haiti

2026-01-31 20:39:46 GMT

> The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
*Truth and Politics*, Hannah Arendt

2026-01-31 19:24:20 GMT

i just tried to type cd .. while viewing a PDF 🤦

2026-01-31 14:19:21 GMT

Finally had a pipe freeze. We have an unfinished basement that usually stays above 40℉, plus I monitor it, so I wasn't concerned. However, it looks like there are localized areas of the basement that get colder than the spot I'm monitoring, and last night it got down to -10℉ outside. Apparently that was enough. The problem looks like it was localized to one spot right at the pressure tank, and hitting it with a space heater for 10 minutes was enough to clear it. It looks like nothing's damaged. Got lucky.
It looks like I'll be doing some insulating. This is the longest, coldest cold snap I've experienced here and the bright side of it is that it's alerted me to a trouble spot as well as the limits of our current systems!
#maine #weather #cold #FrozenPipes #plumbing #insulating

2026-01-30 19:25:29 GMT

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Ars is a font of crithype these days. @npub15wh…e9hw

2026-01-30 16:40:38 GMT

Another read of this is that four organizations claim the right of ownership over "nearly all the world's commercial sound recordings". A cultural archive they claim is worth around half of US GDP, an immense sum.
Frankly it reads to me like an admission of their own guilt.
**Spotify and the three main major record labels sue Anna’s Archive for $13trillion for “brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings”**
From https://www.nme.com/news/music/spotify-major-record-labels-sue-annas-archive-13trillion-allege-brazen-theft-millions-files-3925977
#culture #music #AnnasArchive #spotify #UMG #WarnerBros #Sony #lawsuit

2026-01-30 13:34:08 GMT

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A teacher I know, when giving his spiel about his AI, asks "would you bring a forklift to the gym to lift the weights for you?" I like to point out that using AI converts a generation problem (create the work) into a recognition problem (recognize that the work is adequate). The two are cognitively different--you can learn to understand a natural language without ever being able to speak it--and you are giving up an opportunity to learn how to create works better when you lean on AI instead.
Still, it's the framing I object to. This technology has been forced down the throats of everyone, students included, and if surveys are to be believed it's been against a large majority's will. I don't think we should requiring the victims of this, especially not overburdened teachers and their students, to take extra steps to cope with the consequences. That's an injustice we should not accept. But the inclination to try to think of technology solutions to this grander social problem is doing exactly that, in my view. By now technologists have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that they do not have our collective best interests at heart, and we should therefore not be accepting their tools as solutions to the problems they themselves are heavily contributing to causing.

2026-01-29 21:12:25 GMT

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No one should be required to submit to a machine to prove they are a human being who did human work. It is literally dehumanzing to demand this of people, and it leads nowhere good. It's a technosolutionist way of thinking and deepens injustice. Plus, it can't work *on its own terms*. @npub1py4…7td9

2026-01-29 19:51:30 GMT

The phrase describing this behavior is "state terror". It is not "enforcement" or "operations". This is inexcusable.
**ICE agents shatter window, leave 1-month-old baby, mother in car after Portland arrest**
> Video shows federal immigration agents leaving behind an infant and broken glass after detaining a Guinean immigrant with no known criminal history.
#maine #ICE #ICEOut #Trump #USPol #StateTerror

2026-01-29 19:23:05 GMT

Would the perception that an LLM chatbot is speaking to you be dissolved if they were deterministic instead of stochastic?
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #ChatGPT #Claude

2026-01-29 18:03:08 GMT

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It's possible this has come full circle because I'm always chasing my own tail.

2026-01-29 17:53:00 GMT

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I wonder what prompt they used to induce Claude to output this text.

2026-01-29 15:50:52 GMT

Failed another captcha because I couldn't be bothered to read let alone follow the directions.

2026-01-28 15:51:37 GMT

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They propose adding AI slop features to SearXNG. I suspect they're OK with slop-coded features too. You should carefully read these issues if you are going to depend on and recommend this engine.

2026-01-28 15:49:37 GMT

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It's an important development for many reasons, but one is that there are many people now arguing something like this: because of double descent, we don't need to worry about the bias-variance tradeoff anymore. With enough compute we can continuously lower the bias, and with enough data we can continuously lower the variance. It takes a bit more subtlety to tease out why this is a reasoning error. It unfortunately meshes well with prevailing prejudices in thought, especially among technologists (the theory-free ideal, Han's notion of dataism, etc.), so it's a tricky argument to land. I like Brighton's notion of "the bias bias" for this: preferring ever-increasing model complexity really is a bias, unjustified by either evidence or theory.

2026-01-28 15:34:54 GMT

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Beware of SearXNG. They are developing AI psychosis. https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1768916331.977611

2026-01-28 15:30:40 GMT

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The type of docility demanded of us arguably makes us less than human, and in this respect it really is anti-human. This assemblage is certainly anti-imagination, for instance. The "AI subject" is an entity that doesn't think or create, and self maintains this status.

2026-01-27 20:42:16 GMT

I've added 3 domain blocks in the last few weeks, the first time I've had to do this in quite some time. I'm now blocking a nicely symmetrical 111 domains.

2026-01-27 20:29:01 GMT

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I don't have the foggiest idea what you are saying nor why you chose to say it.

2026-01-27 20:10:22 GMT

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> What do these people actually mean when they shout that man is a machine? It is, as I’ve suggested, that human beings are ‘‘computable’’ (> *berechenbar*> ), that they are not distinct from other objects in the world, in any way deserving of special respect or even attention. This then leads, at first gradually and then with exponentially increasing speed, to a view of human beings as mere objects who—no! Not who, > *that*> —can be exploited, inducted in killing machines, imprisoned, tortured, killed (providing they are ‘‘enemy combatants’’). It leads to the American military sponsoring programs to produce robot soldiers. What is then left of Norbert Wiener’s vision of the human use of human beings? And does not our world show us with utmost clarity how far we have already come?
> I want here to emphasize, especially to this audience, that all this is not the fault of the computer. Guilt cannot be attributed to computers. But computers > *enable*> fantasies, many of them wonderful, but also those of people whose compulsion to play God overwhelms their ability to fathom the consequences of their attempt to turn their nightmares into reality.
#AI #ComputerScience #human #life #TormentNexus #machinic

2026-01-27 20:02:52 GMT

> Perhaps the most (in)famous and illustrious American computer scientist and acknowledged principal pioneer of the discipline now known as artificial intelligence (AI), Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT, once pronounced—a belief he still holds—that ‘‘the brain is merely a meat machine.’’ It is significant that the English language distinguishes between ‘‘flesh’’ on the one hand, and ‘‘meat’’ on the other. The latter is dead and may be eaten, thrown in the garbage, fed to pigs, and so on. Flesh, on the other hand, is living matter and, as such, deserves the respect and dignity for life of which, among others, Albert Schweitzer spoke eloquently. The word ‘‘merely’’ in Minsky’s sentence means essentially ‘‘nothing but,’’ that is, also not deserving unusual respect. His statement is a clear reflection of a profound contempt for life that, as I see it, is shared explicitly by important sectors of the AI community, the artificial intelligentsia, as well as many scientists, engineers, and ordinary people. Daniel C. Dennett, an important American philosopher, once said that we must give up our awe of life if we are to make further progress in AI.
From Weizenbaum, Joseph (2007). *Social and Political Impact of the Long-term History of Computing*
#AI #ComputerScience #life #brain #mind

2026-01-27 19:16:42 GMT

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https://buc.ci/abucci/s/post-b4c1b92cf6a5fc5abe1ac917914c12ef.png

2026-01-27 14:54:22 GMT

A few inchoate thoughts on Gas Town, since I think this example has more to it than “it’s just a meth binge/crypto scam/one-shot AI poisoning”. Part of the reason I think this is that some of the rhetoric it deploys dovetails perfectly with broader trends and phenomena, and I think it's worth pulling those out.
1. Economists from the physiocrats (18th century) onward promised society freedom from material deprivation and hard physical labor in exchange for submitting to an economic arrangement of society
2. In a country like the US, material deprivation and hard physical labor have been significantly reduced since then:
1. Though too many clearly still suffer too much, a large proportion of people live free from fear of starvation or lack of shelter
2. The US has deindustralized, meaning hard physical labor is not the reality for a lot of people. For a lot of people labor is emotional or symbolic (“knowledge work”)
3. In other words, for lots of people the economic promise has been fulfilled
3. Having to think hard is one of the service economy’s analogs for hard physical labor. If the promise of economics is to be continually pursued--meaning it maintains the promise that if we collectively submit to it, in exchange we will enjoy a freedom--a natural target of the promise is providing freedom from the need to think hard
1. It is not coincidental that “Gas Town”’s announcement post mentioned Towers of Hanoi, an undergraduate CS student homework problem that for most students requires thinking hard. It’s designed to encourage a kind of “eureka” moment where recursion as a computer programming technique becomes more clear. GT claims to fulfill the promise of not having to think hard like this anymore: the LLMs will do that thinking for you
2. It is not coincidental that Gas Town is described as being very expensive. Economic power in the form of asset accumulation is what earns you freedom in this way of conceiving things. If you want the freedom from having to think hard, you’d better accumulate assets
1. Since the promise is greater collective freedom, endeavoring to accumulate assets is, in this view, a collective good
2. This differs from effective altruism and other “do good by doing well” conceptions. Rather, the very mechanism of economics produces collective wealth, so the story goes, which means the more active one is as an economic agent, the more collective good one produces (“wealth” and “good” being conflated)
3. Accumulation of assets is the scorecard, so to speak, of such enhanced economic activity, and the individual reward can then be freedom from having to think hard
4. Expending significant resources is viewed as a good in itself from a (naive) evolutionary perspective
1. Lotka’s maximum power principle (supposedly) dictates that those entities that transform the most power into useful organization are most fit from an evolutionary standpoint
2. Ernst Juenger’s notion of “total mobilization” brings this principle to politics/political economy/geopolitics: those nations that “totally” mobilize their national resources are the ones that will dominate geopolitically
1. See, for instance, the RAND Corporation’s [Commission on the National Defense Strategy](https://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/NDS-commission.html ): “The Commission finds that the U.S. military **lacks** both the **capabilities** and the **capacity** required to be confident it can deter and **prevail** in combat. It needs to do a better job of **incorporating new technology at scale**; field **more and higher-capability platforms, software, and munitions**; and **deploy innovative operational concepts to employ them together better**.” (emphasis mine). In summary: the US is about to be outcompeted (lacks fitness); in response, it should go big (“at scale”, “more”) in an organized way (“deploy innovative operational concepts”, “employ them together better”)
3. The rhetoric around LLM-based AI includes similar language, exemplified in the GT post: burn through as much infrastructural resources as possible to produced organized outputs “at scale”, dovetailing perfectly with the “total mobilization” concept
4. LLM-based AI plays a prominent role in US federal government strategy, particularly military strategy, with language about dominance serving to justify its use
3. It is not coincidental that Gas Town uses many orders of magnitude more resources to solve the Towers of Hanoi problem (“Burn All The Gas” Town). This dovetails perfectly with the previous remarks
#ComputerScience #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #GasTown #economics #eugenics #MaximumPowerPrinciple #evolution #EvolutionaryTheory #Darwinism #USPol #US

2026-01-27 13:38:52 GMT

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Personally I feel like no left-leaning politics in the US is ever going to fly until leftists grapple directly with their eugenics problem. Granted I am not in a position to say with any certainty, but from where I sit I see almost no evidence that this is happening at all. Nowadays a lot of lefties I know are flirting with "nothing important can happen unless we're sitting in a room together breathing on each other", but will not wear masks, use proper ventilation, or monitor CO2, let alone actively care for one another. Ignoring COVID like this is doing the fascists' work for them.
So yeah, I share your skepticism.

2026-01-27 02:05:59 GMT

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I don't know for sure, but the large number of parameters and large training sets of the popular LLMs strongly suggests they train them past the interpolation threshold, which would mean they cannot be overfit.
If you trained an LLM with only demonstrably true statements, they would still output false statements. They have no representation of truth at the level of the sequences they emit.
"Hallucination" is therefore a human judgment about the human user's reaction to LLM output and is not reflective of any semantic content of that output. All LLM outputs, whether they appear to have semantic content or not and regardless of whether that aligns with the user's expectations, are thus hallucinations in a sense.

2026-01-26 17:15:58 GMT

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It took the three of us a bit under 2 hours to dig out from the roughly 18" of snow (slightly more maybe?). One of us is a four year old who loves being a snowplow. His favorite book right now is The Little Snowplow. There were a bunch of woodpeckers at the feeders, undeterred by the weather. We can get the car out and both the postal truck and the propane truck have clear spaces to do their things. I need new boots.
No grand ideas about the universe came to me, but I did realize something about Bénabou cosmoses I didn't know before so that's something.
#maine #weather #snow #thoughts

2026-01-25 19:01:36 GMT

Looks like the snow has started here. If we do end up with the 12-18 inches the advisories have been warning about, it'll be a mess.
On the bright side, lately I've been doing a lot of informal thinking while shoveling snow. I'm turning over an informal argument grounded on Chaitin incompleteness that if our physical universe has continuous space-time, then we must make non-computable leaps in our theories in order to increase the fidelity of our understanding. "Artificial scientists" running on computers will always have inescapable limits that don't apply to human beings. It's exactly the sort of wacky thing that makes for good shovel thinking.
#maine #winter #weather #advisory #SnowStorm

2026-01-25 18:09:25 GMT

Now I wonder if putting $INSTANCE$host$ in a post will do what this one does:
https://sharkey.nomaakip.xyz/notes/ahvkpg5d2pnx0005
This is a test of $INSTANCE$host$ .

2026-01-25 13:17:09 GMT

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You can solve Towers of Hanoi, a problem we give undergraduate computer science students who are learning about recursion, in six orders of magnitude more time, space, code, and cost. What's not to love?!?!

2026-01-24 17:33:20 GMT

Should I click the "Update payment details" link in the "Payment Declined" email from [email protected]? It's possible I forgot to update my account information with 33ucek.c7qp5x.ra7x5j.us Inc, Who can remember so many accounts anyway?
#spam #phishing #scam

2026-01-24 16:27:53 GMT

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Well, we didn't quite get down to -20℃. More like -18℃, around -1℉. Plenty cold still. Definitely in the dangerous range, especially with the wind chill. I think I'll stick by the wood stove today.
We're meant to be getting 12" of snow or more Sunday going into Monday, but right now it's sunny. Forecasts keep changing wildly so I'm not sure what to expect yet. That much snow will mean 2+ hours of shoveling, which I'm not looking forward to I have to confess.
#maine #winter #cold #Arctic #weather

2026-01-24 14:03:29 GMT

Something to know about Maine is that according to Wikipedia the population is around 1.4 million, placing it 42nd out of 50 in terms of population among US states. Average population density is a bit over 41 per square mile (the NYC area tends to have over 10,000 per square mile, by contrast). According to the 2010 census (again from Wikipedia), 94.4% of people here are (non-Hispanic) white.
Doing the arithmetic, there are roughly 78,400 non-white people in this state. Under the assumption that the targets of certain federal agencies are not white, wouldn't searching Maine be a waste of resources? Unless those resources were not in fact intended to efficiently find people with unfavored immigration statuses, say. You don't go looking for needles in one of the biggest haystacks.
To be clear I am not saying other places should be trageted. I am saying that the facts speak to ulterior motives.
#maine #uspol

2026-01-23 22:46:48 GMT

Bracing for -20℃ temperatures tonight. The temperature is dropping pretty rapidly now.
#maine #winter #cold #weather

2026-01-23 18:13:23 GMT

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Latent diffusion models were conceived as a way to efficiently represent very complicated probability distributions. They have a wide variety of uses, though I'd say many of those uses are the ones that large corporations invested in "big data" are concerned with. I've found in my time working for and with corporations that once you ascend far enough up the chain you're almost certain to encounter people whose primary drives involve "capturing the knowledge" of the people who work below them (seems like a form of Marx's notion of dead labor). Latent diffusion models promise to be able to do this. There may not be a single "killer app", but many individual applications that are together serving this background disposition. Adobe sticks image generators in its various creative tools to let people more quickly do things they were already doing such as remove backgrounds from photographs, smooth out noise, or upsample. These are all tendrils of the same phenomenon, it seems to me.
But I can't say I know for sure; I'm just spitballing. They've probably confessed some of their motives in their earnings calls.

2026-01-23 17:42:58 GMT

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This is not quite an answer, but to the extent that corporations are the main purchasers of image generators, the promise seems to be similar to what LLMs promise. Confine human endeavor to a small, controllable world that seems "creative", but is incapable of generating a true challenge to the powerful. Here I am using Leonard Savage's small vs. large world distinction. The former is like living in a chess game according to the rules of chess; the latter is like living in the real world, where you can knock over the board, refuse to play, draw a smiley face on the Queen, etc etc etc. If chess grandmasters convince people that all of society's concerns should be decided over a chess board according to the rules of the game then they've locked in their power because there is no rule of chess that allows you to suspend the rules of chess. That's how I've been seeing the value of AI (to the powerful) lately.

2026-01-23 13:45:28 GMT

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If it quacks like a Ponzi scheme...

2026-01-22 20:46:09 GMT

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Oh no that's horrible.
The one that was plaguing me today was on a shopping site, but wasn't an ad. It's become fairly common in product views to have a set of images of the product, with a set of thumbnails below or alongside the current main image. The one I was viewing changed the image if you moused over a thumbnail, and popped up a zoomed version of the image if you moused over the main image. The net result was that placing your mouse nearly anywhere resulted in something popping into your view and covering up a sizable proportion of the page. The frenetic popping and unpopping made it easy to lose track of where your mouse pointer is, which led to even more frenetic popping and unpopping. Since I use a screen magnifier most of the time, the popped up stuff took up 90% of the available screen real estate. The net result was deeply frustrating, and I closed the page and moved on with my life.
The individual features are all useful. I like being able to see several different images. Being able to zoom the image is nice at times. However, the way they were all crammed together was poor, at least for me.

2026-01-22 18:15:50 GMT

I wonder if there's a psychological price that a web developer has to overcome to make a non-trivial web page with no pop-ups of any kind. It seems like a compulsion.
At least in the way I use computers as a low vision person, pop-ups are extraordinarily anti-accessibility. Yes, even tooltips and alt-hovertext, depending on how they're done. Some websites are close to unusable because of these things.
#tech #dev #web #DarkPatterns #accessibility

2026-01-22 18:04:23 GMT

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It serves a community purpose, collecting a list of people to block in one convenient place.

2026-01-22 17:48:32 GMT

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I was speaking thermodynamically: regardless of the details of the mechanisms involved, walking functions to move a body with mass from point A to point B. This is not a precise definition of *walking in particular*, but such a definition is not necessary to speak of the energetics (it's also a distraction in my opinion). Moving a massive body from one position to another will require the dissipation of energy except under special circumstances I assume we're excluding (e.g. that the body was already moving that way, that there is no friction). That energy does not come out of thin air; it comes from some organized (low entropy) energy source that at a minimum is concentrated at point A. Given the effects of friction, and/or the needs of changing momentum, etc., the process of moving is dissipative, meaning the entropy of the energy will increase (e.g. it's diffused as heat).
Therefore, a source of organized energy must be available to the moving thing: when it comes to things that walk that's usually in a material form we'd call food. And, the moving thing must dissipate that energy in order to achieve an actual motion: when it comes to potential energy bound up in matter that's a process we'd typically call digestion or metabolism.
This isn't a question of the definition of walking, in other words. It's a question of how thermodynamics works.
At this point this thread feels like talking past one another, so this is my last post. Best regards!

2026-01-22 17:31:15 GMT

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While I was noodling on what I read on Wikipedia about Aristotelian hylomorphism, what occurred to me is that the functional programming notion buries form, in a sense, and that might be the relation. These things function to compose two processes that could be separable. One builds up a structure from parts; the other breaks down the structure, computing something about the parts+structure along the way. What's lovely about hylomorphisms is that they can go directly from the initial part to the value computed without ever building up and breaking down the structure. The structure remains implicit, in other words. You might say the I/O process a hylomorphism encompasses has an implicit form built into it. I don't know if that's the reason for the use of this term in functional programming, but I suspect something along those lines might be.

2026-01-22 16:34:07 GMT

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I'm doing to same, thinking out loud here.
I think one of the many challenges with current discourse around AI is that it's functioning to draw people into a small world that is convenient for certain perspectives. It's as if a group of chess grandmasters succeeded in convincing everyone to settle all disputes over chessboards. I think we have to pay attention to this.
I'd say the creativity lies in the prompts and what the person does with the output, more than in the dataset. The dataset is dead, so to speak. It can't get up and dance for you. What's still live is the interactions that are made with it.

2026-01-22 16:18:20 GMT

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The only hylomorphism I'm familiar with is the computer science concept, so I'm not sure I'd be able to follow you there on first read. I do feel like I'm seeing a tendency in the fields I do follow towards a panpsychism or pancognitivism that I read as an attempt to breathe a form into non-living matter that explains how it becomes animate, alive, evolving, or what have you. The attempts I'm aware of feel circular, but then again I'm not super knowledgeable about such things.
Channeling Hegel, I think Han is saying that associations of words lack comprehension: there's no single concept that encompasses what the words are saying into a unified whole. So, word associations are accretive: you can only add more, never synthesize. In my mind it's a bit like gathering more and more 2-d points of a circle without ever realizing they lie on a circle; you have a growing mess of data with no comprehension, no finality or completion in the form of the circle. I think there's a case to be made that computers by themselves are not capable of bridging this gap in general: humans must be involved because we are able to make leaps of logic that are uncomputable. Which I suppose is a kind of experience.

2026-01-22 16:01:43 GMT

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I'm not talking about everyday sense. I'm talking about being precise. If one is being precise, our best physics and thermodynamics tells us that the dissipation of organized energy is necessary for physical work to occur; and we usually refer to such a breakdown as "metabolism" or with some related word (I'm not a biologist). I stand by my original point: by asserting otherwise you are assuming away the question, not responding to it. Which is of course your prerogative.

2026-01-22 15:57:06 GMT

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I realize what follows is quite a digression and probably not about what you intended, but after reading a few of your posts and typing this out, I figured I'd share anyway in case it resonates.
> generate new responses to text or image inputs by the user
I'd pick some fault with the choice of name "process generative". The cited artifacts seem to be neither of those things. They can be embedded into generative processes for sure, but it'd be the people who interact with them that make them processal and generative, in my view, not the models themselves. Below is the tl;dr:
I'd say the use of "new" in the quote above is load bearing. Technically and historically, the latent diffusion model underlying many image generators was developed to represent complicated probability distributions in a concise set of parameters. To use this model as an image generator, one must collect a set of samples of the image distribution one hopes to represent, and then apply a training procedure to develop the parametric representation. There's already several layers of representation happening here, each with a corresponding fidelity loss but also a kind of "reality loss" if you want to call it that: the subjects of images -> the images themselves -> vector representations of images -> a probability distribution over the vector representations -> parameters representing distributions over vector representations.
Once you finally have the parameters in hand, you can then sample from the represented distribution. This is the "generation" step, and what you are referring to as "new". I'd argue both words are inappropriate here in any but their jargon senses.
Something like ChatGPT has a similar flavor, though it arose from sequence-to-sequence translation research, which is not explicitly about representing complicated probability distributions. However, implicitly that's what it's doing (it's a descendant of conditional random fields, which were more explicit about this aim). At base when you enter a prompt, you're drawing a sample from a conditional probability distribution over sequence space, conditioned on the prompt sequence (I'm ignoring the guardrails and other wrappers around the core LLM for brevity).
So, what exactly is "new" in a sample from a probability distribution? Arguably nothing. Users might be surprised because they were not previously aware that some particular sample was "in there". But it's the kind of surprise a street magician trades in with a two-headed coin, the kind of surprise that happens in a board game. What we generally think of as "new", "novel", "creative", usually happens in the realm before this stack of representations, not several layers deep in it. Or it plays with the representations themselves, rather than keeping them fixed and sealed. Or it knocks the board game over entirely. Or it comes up with some other thing I haven't listed.
What exactly is "generative" about a sample from a probability distribution? Also arguably nothing. Yes, "generative" is a piece of jargon used to mean roughly "draw a sample from". But if we imbue "generative" with a sense of open endedness, a quality we think human language and creativity, biological evolution and ecosystems, and political and social systems have, among others,then a probability distribution cannot be generative. It encapsulates what Leonard Savage called a "small world", and even he acknowledged there's such a thing as a "large world" and that it's inappropriate to apply these small world methods and concepts to the large world.
To me, words like "generate", "new", and "process" refer to the large world. There might be small world analogs, but those will always be missing something important.

2026-01-22 15:34:41 GMT

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You're pointing out a delay between the feeding process and the walking behavior, not an absence of feeding altogether.

2026-01-22 15:09:32 GMT

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> Does data arrive at true understanding, or statistical associations?
Maybe you've read him, but Han digs into this, and his answer is a resounding "no". He refers to a data-only view as "total ignorance". He cites Hegel while making this argument, so we've been around this block for over 2 centuries now.
> The greatest irony, is believing we have moved beyond these challenges. Whereas the reality is we have merely stopped engaging with them.
I couldn't agree more. There's a lot to engage with here, and it's frustrating at times that so many seem to be assuming the problems away rather than grappling with them. Among other things it's a wasted opportunity to learn and discover.

2026-01-22 15:02:03 GMT

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Just an aside, but:
> the obvious reason for that is that our standard concept of 'what it means to walk' doesn't rest on digestion in any way....
looks to me like asserting the consequent. Being embodied implies digestion of some kind is *necessary*. So this is not at all an "obvious reason"; in fact, saying so assumes away the argument entirely. In other words it's a metaphysical statement that excludes what's being discussed.
Why would digestion or metabolism be necessary? Because to walk requires (physical) work, which requires dissipating organized energy. The process of taking the organized energy and converting it to the work required to move is a breakdown of the organization: metabolism, digestion, call it what you like. Saying that walking has no necessary relationship to this is equivalent to saying that walking is not an embodied action, assuming away the entire argument.

2026-01-22 14:26:54 GMT

I put the text below on LinkedIn in response to a post there and figured I'd share it here too because it's a bit of a step from what I've been posting previously on this topic and might be of some use to someone.
In retrospect I might have written non-sense in place of nonsense.
If you're in tech the Han reference might be a bit out of your comfort zone, but Andrews is accessible and measured.
> It's nonsense to say that coding will be replaced with "good judgment". There's a presupposition behind that, a worldview, that can't possibly fly. It's sometimes called the theory-free ideal: given enough data, we don't need theory to understand the world. It surfaces in AI/LLM/programming rhetoric in the form that we don't need to code anymore because LLM's can do most of it. Programming is a form of theory-building (and understanding), while LLMs are vast fuzzy data store and retrieval systems, so the theory-free ideal dictates the latter can/should replace the former. But it only takes a moment's reflection to see that nothing, let alone programming, can be theory-free; it's a kind of "view from nowhere" way of thinking, an attempt to resurrect Laplace's demon that ignores everything we've learned in the >200 years since Laplace forwarded that idea. In that respect it's a (neo)reactionary viewpoint, and it's maybe not a coincidence that people with neoreactionary politics tend to hold it. Anyone who needs a more formal argument can read Mel Andrews's > *The Immortal Science of ML: Machine Learning & the Theory-Free Ideal*> , or Byung-Chul Han's > *Psychopolitics*> (which argues, among other things, that this is a nihilistic).
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #coding #dev #tech #SoftwareDevelopment #programming #nihilism #LinkedIn

2026-01-21 17:39:38 GMT

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I've had good experiences with Kile (https://kile.sourceforge.io). It's a KDE project but should be installable on any flavor of Ubuntu with sudo apt install kile on the command line or with whatever tool you use to install software. I haven't written book-length things with it, but I have used it for articles and I don't see that it'd falter on longer works. I don't have any experience using Markdown in it, only Latex. I don't know if it can even handle Markdown.

2026-01-21 15:07:54 GMT

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I refuse to use the anti-human, anti-imagination, anti-ecological toolset that is being used in the enterprise to disempower workers and more broadly to disempower all of us. The only way one can assert such tools have "value" is by ignoring the political project they represent and the vast harms they cause, and uncritically hyperfocusing on a microcosm. I won't do that.
If you have a look at my CV you'll see I am quite capable of building such things myself from the ground up, so this is not a position taken out of technical ignorance.

2026-01-21 14:05:57 GMT

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> Our investments will be focused on specific areas where generative AI excels
It excels at making bullshit, porn, and spam at scale, when it's not greasing the wheels of oppressive government and corporate policy. Wikipedia is, or at least has been, the opposite of this.
> Supporting Wikipedia’s moderators and patrollers with AI-assisted workflows that automate tedious tasks in support of knowledge integrity
Nope. That's not how moderation, or generative AI, work. Fighting a bullshit generator's bullshit output is a formula for making moderation harder, not easier. Knowledge integrity is compromised if the bullshit generator can randomly place hard-to-find bullshit within the knowledge base.
> Giving Wikipedia’s editors time back by improving the discoverability of information on Wikipedia to leave more time for human deliberation, judgment, and consensus building;
Nope, that's not how AI works either. Generative AI is terrible at information retrieval, and terrible *for* information retrieval. We've known this forever. Besides Google's AI telling you to glue the cheese onto your pizza, there's research on this. See https://dair-community.social/@emilymbender/113422515033543544 , which links two academic papers and an expository op ed. AI does *not* improve the discoverability of information.
It goes on and on and on like this, splattering AI booster rhetoric all over the place. To me it reads like a surrender document. Human beings managing human knowledge meant for humans should be holding the line against this anti-human, anti-imagination, anti-ecological technology, not embracing it and using the accelerationist rhetoric of its promoters.

2026-01-20 19:12:13 GMT

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I'm enjoying Darkspace. Thanks for this; hadn't encountered them before.

2026-01-20 18:42:16 GMT

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It's interesting how different people experience such a thing differently, especially with regards to whether it's a positive or negative experience. I tend to associate noise with disaster! Though I can see how the silence after the noise could be chilling.

2026-01-20 15:36:50 GMT

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I understand. I end up going off because I have a background in this!
Thanks for the well wishes. It's definitely brutal out there (here?), and I'm old enough to have been around this block a half dozen times.

2026-01-20 14:15:52 GMT

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I don't dispute OpenAI's influence on the perception of that term, but I feel compelled to say that what you've expressed here is historically inaccurate. For one thing, Ben Goertzel is credited with popularizing the term AGI in particular, and he's been working on notions like that since the early 2000s. Kurzweil used "strong AI' for a very similar notion around the same time or earlier. Discussion of the notion dates back to the 1950s. The fact that the chatbot became a goal of AI research dates to Turing 1950.

2026-01-20 13:54:36 GMT

Since I'm job and work hunting I tend to see the absurd new job titles that are bouncing around in the tech sector. The latest, which I've seen twice today, is "artificial general intelligence engineer" or some permutation thereof. I do my best to spend the minimum possible time on these and have no guess about whether they're legitimate.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #AGI

2026-01-20 13:38:51 GMT

Am I to understand from this that SearXNG is in the process of becoming AI poisoned?<li><a href="https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/2163" target="_blank">https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/2163</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/2008" target="_blank">https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/2008</a></li><li><a href="https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/2273" target="_blank">https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/2273</a></li>
The last issue hasn't been active since 2023 but the 1st one has been active recently and the middle one last summer.
#SearX #SearXNG #SearchEngines #AlternateSearchEngines #MetaSearchEngines #web #dev #tech #FOSS #OpenSource #AI #AIPoisoning #AISlop

2026-01-19 14:54:33 GMT

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Yes. It's partly why I'm so critical: *Nature* has played a large role in uncritically spreading AI disinformation. Till they reined it in arXiv did too. Corporate marketing in a lab coat is still corporate marketing, and I don't think scientific publishing platforms should be publishing it next to scientific communication as if these two forms of communication are of a piece. I also think crithype is a real phenomenon. There are ways to present a fuller picture of a technology, including the voices from corporate labs while staying within the bounds of the scientific, but it seems *Nature* has chosen not to do that, at least as far as I can see.

2026-01-19 12:35:04 GMT

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I wouldn't call someone from Anthropic an expert. They're a businessperson with significant amounts of money, reputation and their own livelihood on the line. We need to get out of the mode of ignoring deep conflicts of interest like this, especially when they seem to be driving the viewpoints expressed.

2026-01-19 12:32:34 GMT

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...and now the power's back on. I think CMP's alerting system could use a bit of calibration. It's currently saying my road does not have power.
I always give it a bit when the power comes back because more than once it's come back then gone out again shortly after. I think this outage might be over though.
#maine #CMP #PowerOutage

2026-01-19 12:20:47 GMT

I love the quiet of a power outage, especially when there's snow on the ground. These breaks in the otherwise relentless grinding of the world machine are such a relief. I suppose people uaccustomed to it find it unsettling.

2026-01-19 12:14:15 GMT

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Now they're saying 11am. Yeah.
#maine #CMP #PowerOutage

2026-01-19 11:55:04 GMT

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CMP is saying there are roughly 2,000 people without power, about 1,100 of whom are in Alfred, about a third of the town! Looks like it's a local outage, a good sign.

2026-01-19 11:50:42 GMT

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Central Maine Power is claiming power will be restored here by 7:15am, about half an hour from now. But as I recall that's what their alerts said last time, at least until it became clear it would be an extended outage. So I've hunkered down in case this one lasts awhile.
#maine #CMP #PowerOutage

2026-01-19 11:44:16 GMT

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We didn't get that much snow, but the temperature is hovering near freezing so it's wet and heavy. Probably tore down some tree branches.
A couple years ago we went a good five days without power (about a day in between two longer outages when we did) but haven't had one since till now.
#maine #CMP #PowerOutage

2026-01-19 11:26:15 GMT

Power went out at 5am here in Alfred. The fire alarm beeping because of the power loss woke him up, which in turn woke me up. Good thing. Fire's stoked now.
#maine #CMP #PowerOutage

2026-01-18 21:43:22 GMT

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To spell that out a bit: the other major strands of programming involve a bureaucracy intended to suppress the messiness inherent in the stateful behavior of digital machinery. The ubiquity of notions like leaky abstractions, weird states, bugs, exceptions, errors, faults all point at (a) the messiness is intrinsic; (b) the messiness is negatively valenced, meaning to be suppressed.
The future lies in embracing statefulness and effectfulness in self-modifying code. Unlike the bureaucratic procedure of rule-based coding, this style of programming is more like surfing, or performance, or gardening. Your task as a programmer is to plant a seed of code that unfolds into something beautiful. I'll leave as an exercise for the reader what the soil is in this metaphor.
(I'm only half joking!)
#ComputerScience #SoftwareDevelopment #tech #dev #politics

2026-01-18 21:37:02 GMT

Weird thought of the day: the revolution lies in imperative programming.
#ComputerScience #SoftwareDevelopment #tech #dev #politics

2026-01-17 21:04:33 GMT

The backyard scene after last night's and today's snow.
#maine #snow #winter
https://buc.ci/abucci/s/post-afcc3f53bd5dfd5224ef6bbf9f27e383.jpg

2026-01-17 13:38:57 GMT

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Got about half an inch overnight here in Alfred and it's still going, lightly. An inch sounds plausible. Getting some coffee in me before going out to shovel.

2026-01-16 19:29:28 GMT

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I once made an animated visualization for a coevolutionary algorithm project using a self-reloading gnuplot script that parsed the output log of the coev process, made a plot (replacing the contents of the gnuplot output window with the new plot), and then re-loaded itself to do it all over again. Modern tools might be gnarly but they are meaningfully less gnarly, it seems to me!

2026-01-16 16:45:53 GMT

> A mere week into 2026, OpenAI launched “ChatGPT Health” in the United States, asking users to upload their personal medical data and link up their health apps in exchange for the chatbot’s advice about diet, sleep, work-outs, and even personal insurance decisions.
(from https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/chatgpt-wants-your-health-data/).
This is the probably inevitable endgame of FitBit and other "measured life" technologies. This isn't about health; it's about mass managing bodies. It's a short hop from there to mass managing minds, which this "psychologized" technology is already being deployed to do (AI therapists and whatnot). Fully corporatized human resource management for the leisure class (you and I are not the intended beneficiaries, to be clear; we're the mass).
Neural implants would finish the job, I guess. It's interesting how the tech sector pushes its tech closer and closer to the physical head and face. Eventually the push to penetrate the head (e.g. Neuralink) should intensify. Always with some attached promise of convenience, privilege, wealth, freedom of course.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #OpenAI #ChatGPT #health #HealthTech

2026-01-16 15:39:28 GMT

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Let me begin by saying that in my initial read of your post, your tone sounded condescending. "I don't want to spoil this", as if I'm a naive child still believing in Santa Claus and you're about to ruin my beautiful dream with a reality check. It's not that I think you intended this, but I do think it's important to mention because it derails dialog immediately and I'm assuming that was not your goal.
I'm well aware of quantum mechancs, quantum field theory and so on. I'm no physicist, but my view is that quantization is not discretization of space and time, even though it's common to see folks confuse the two. The "basic stuff" of physics is continuous, even as phenomena we care about might not be. Likewise, a continuous guitar string has vibrational modes that are discrete; this fact doesn't mean the guitar string is discrete in nature nor that it vibrates in a discrete time the way a computer does.
Here are some examples illustrating why I say that:
The Schroedinger equation happens over continua: the wave function isn't over the natural numbers or integers, but over topological manifolds. This means in particular that if the wave represents a particle's possible positions, those positions could be anywhere in a continuous space. The wave function evolves according to continuous time, not a chunky time like a computer.
The strings in string theory (at least the variations of string theory I'm aware of) are continuous entities existing in a continuous space. They vibrate in different modes, which give rise to discrete phenomena analogous to guitar strings, but they can be located anywhere in a continuous space, and they vibrate in continuous time.
A free electron moving through a vacuum doesn't cha-chunk cha-chunk from one discrete point to the next; it moves smoothly along, as far as we know. The electron holds discrete increments of *energy*, which affects such things as the orbitals around a nucleus that it can occupy *in probability*, but as far as we know there's no impediment to it occupying any orbital shape at all. The theory tells us where it's most likely to be, not that it is 100% forbidden from being in certain places. That, too, is continuous in nature.
Something like causal set theory is a proper discretization of physics. In that, the physical world really is a discrete set of points, and what looks to us like continuity is only an appearance that emerges from our vast size relative to the Planck scale. But causal set theory and its relatives are not accepted as standard physics. Perhaps they will be some day, but that day is not today.
I hope that helps clarify where I'm coming from.

2026-01-15 17:45:16 GMT

I've been playing around with this set of ideas and questions:
An image of a cat is not a cat, no matter how many pixels it has. A video of a cat is not a cat, no matter the framerate. An interactive 3-d model of a cat is not a cat, no matter the number of voxels or quality of dynamic lighting and so on. In every case, the computer you're using to view the artifact also gives you the ability to dispel the illusion. You can zoom a picture and inspect individual pixels, pause a video and step through individual frames, or distort the 3-d mesh of the model and otherwise modify or view its vertices and surfaces, things you can't do to cats even by analogy. As nice or high-fidelity as the rendering may be, it's still a rendering, and you can handily confirm that if you're inclined to.
These facts are not specific to images, videos, or 3-d models of cats. The are necessary features of digital computers. Even theoretically. The computable real numbers form a countable subset of the uncountably infinite set of real numbers that, for now at least, physics tells us our physical world embeds in. Georg Cantor showed us there's an infinite difference between the two; and Alan Turing showed us that it must be this way. In fact it's a bit worse than this, because (most) physics deals in *continua*, and the set of real numbers, big as it is, fails to have a few properties continua are taken to have. C.S. Peirce said that continua contain such multitudes of points smashed into so little space that the points fuse together, becoming inseparable from one another (by contrast we can speak of individual points within the set of real numbers). Time and space are both continua in this way.
Nothing we can represent in a computer, even in a high-fidelity simulation, is like this. Temporally, computers have a definite cha-chunk to them: that's why clock speeds of CPUs are reported. As rapidly as these oscillations happen relative to our day-to-day experience, they are still cha-chunk cha-chunk cha-chunk discrete turns of a ratchet. There's space in between the clicks that we sometimes experience as hardware bugs, hacks, errors: things with negative valence that we strive to eliminate or ignore, but can never fully. Likewise, even the highest-resolution picture still has pixels. You can zoom in and isolate them if you want, turning the most photorealistic image into a Lite Brite. There's space between the pixels too, which you can see if you take a magnifying glass to your computer monitor, even the retina displays, or if you look at the data within a PNG.
Images have glitches (e.g., the aliasing around hard edges old JPEGs had). Videos have glitches (e.g., those green flashes or blurring when keyframes are lost). Meshes have glitches (e.g., when they haven't been carefully topologized and applied textures crunch and distort in corners). 3-d interactive simulations have [unending glitches](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCto7D1L-MiRoOziCXK9uT5Q ). The glitches manifest differently, but they're always there, or lurking. [They are reminders](https://www.dullien.net/thomas/weird-machines-exploitability.pdf ).
With all that said: why would anyone believe generative AI could ever be intelligent? The only instances of intelligence we know inhabit the infinite continua of the physical world with its smoothly varying continuum of time (so science tells us anyway). Wouldn't it be more to the point to call it an intelligence simulation, and to mentally maintain the space between it and "actual" intelligence, whatever that is, analogous to how we maintain the mental space between a live cat and a cat video?
This is not the say there's something essential about "intelligence", but rather that there are unanswered questions here that seem important. It doesn't seem wise to assume they've been answered before we're even done figuring out how to formulate them well.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs

2026-01-15 13:31:19 GMT

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I believe this is the goal of US policy (such as it is) at the moment. It appears the aim is to restore the "spheres of influence" view of the world, with China, Russia, and the US as the primary poles (possibly Japan too). This means the US retreats from global influence, Europe is reduced to vassal status of Russia and/or China, and organizations like NATO and the UN are diminished. Given who these people are, I don't think rhetoric, no matter how solid or convincing, will change this dynamic.

2026-01-15 13:27:34 GMT

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Lots of fog where I am in Alfred this morning, and showers.

2026-01-13 18:54:09 GMT

This article in The Register about "Poison Fountain" looks to be crithype, and the Poison Fountain project looks to be misdirection, scam, art project, or some other thing, but almost surely not a serious data poisoning proposal.
**AI industry insiders launch site to poison the data that feeds them**: https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/11/industry_insiders_seek_to_poison/
[Poison Fountain](https://rnsaffn.com/poison3/ ) starts with "We agree with Geoffrey Hinton: machine intelligence is a threat to the human species". This is a tarball of wrong. (1)
The rest of the website is absurd, and the "Poison Fountain Usage" list doesn't make any sense. There are far more efficient and safer ways to poison data that don't require you to proxy content for an unknown third party. Some of these are implemented in software, as opposed to <ul> in HTML. That bullet list reads like an amateur riffing on what they read about AI web scrapers, not like industry insiders with detailed information about how training works.
Recommend viewing the top level https://rnsaffn.com , which I suspect The Register may not have done.
The Register:
> Our source said that the goal of the project is to make people aware of AI's Achilles' Heel – the ease with which models can be poisoned – and to encourage people to construct information weapons of their own.
Data poisoning is not easy, Anthropic's "article" notwithstanding. Why would we trust Anthropic to publicly reveal ways to subvert their technology anyway?
None of this passes a smell test. Crithype (and poor fact checking, it seems) from The Register it is.
(1) Hinton stands to gain professionally and financially from people believing this. Hinton personally bears a large amount of responsibility for setting off this so-called species level danger. Hinton, like all of us, cannot possibly know whether "machine intelligence" is even possible, let alone dangerous to people; that's a fanciful notion that serves the agendas of the wealthy and powerful quite well. In other words, crithype. Etc.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #Anthropic #PoisonFountain #UncriticalReporting #crithype #TheRegister

2026-01-13 15:03:01 GMT

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On a more uplifting note, my wife has a paper out in [the latest issue of](https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/56223 ) *Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural*, titled *Aquatic Birds and the Liminality of the Sea in Greco-Roman Mythology*:
> In the Greco-Roman worldview, the sea forms a permeable boundary between the realms of humans, the gods, and the dead. This article demonstrates that seabirds embody the connective role of the sea in Greco-Roman mythology. Seabirds nest on land, feed by diving into water, and fly in the air. Therefore, these birds are imagined connecting the world of mortals with that of the dead and the gods, and they illustrate the transitions humans live through in their interactions with the gods and their experience of death.
Here: https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/2/article/979701
A disclaimer: my wife has been [running a project on birds in ancient mythology](https://sites.tufts.edu/ancientbirds/ ) for many years, and I've been involved in it since 2018 or so (in other words I'm more than a bit biased here, for several reasons). For my part I've been using qualitative data analysis techniques like Formal Concept Analysis and Rough Set Theory to explore datasets she and her students have been creating using D'Arcy Thompso's *Glossary of Greek Birds* as a focal point. There's a page about the FCA analysis on the linked site.
I find it fascinating that some of the arguments about the role birds play in Greek myths become visible in such analyses. For instance, one of the things we've observed in the data is that the words/concepts "female" and "metamorphosis" appearing in a myth fragment are strongly associated with some form of "diving into the sea" also appearing (the metamorphoses in question often being death-related, and diving into the sea, as the above paper argues, represents death to the ancient Greeks).
#writing #AcademicPublishing #AcademicWriting #AncientGreece #GreekMythology #birds #death #FormalConceptAnalysis #FCA #RoughSetTheory #RST