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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months

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Dinkclump Linkdump

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in LA (Saturday night, with Adam Conover), Seattle (Monday, with Neal Stephenson), then Portland, Phoenix and more!

Some Saturday mornings, I look at the week's blogging and realize I have a lot more links saved up than I managed to write about this week, and then I do a linkdump. There've been 14 of these, and this is number 15:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Attentive readers will note that this isn't Saturday. You're right. But I'm on a book tour and every day is shatterday, because damn, it's grueling and I'm not the spry manchild who took Little Brother on the road in 2008 – I'm a 52 year old with two artificial hips. Hence: an out-of-cycle linkdump. Come see me on tour and marvel at my verticality!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/16/narrative-capitalism/#bezzle-tour

Best thing I read this week, hands down, was Ryan Broderick's Garbage Day piece, "AI search is a doomsday cult":

https://www.garbageday.email/p/ai-search-doomsday-cult

Broderick makes so many excellent points in this piece. First among them: AI search sucks, but that's OK, because no one is asking for AI search. This only got more true later in the week when everyone's favorite spicy autocomplete accidentally loaded the James Joyce module:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/02/chatgpt-alarms-users-by-spitting-out-shakespearean-nonsense-and-rambling/

(As Matt Webb noted, Chatbots have slid rapidly from Star Trek (computers give you useful information in a timely fashion) to Douglas Adams (computers spout hostile, impenetrable nonsense at you):

https://interconnected.org/home/2024/02/21/adams

But beyond the unsuitability of AI for search results and beyond the public's yawning indifference to AI-infused search, Broderick makes a more important point: AI search is about summarizing web results so you don't have to click links and read the pages yourself.

If that's the future of the web, who the fuck is going to write those pages that the summarizer summarizes? What is the incentive, the business-model, the rational explanation for predicting a world in which millions of us go on writing web-pages, when the gatekeepers to the web have promised to rig the game so that no one will ever visit those pages, or read what we've written there, or even know it was us who wrote the underlying material the summarizer just summarized?

If we stop writing the web, AIs will have to summarize each other, forming an inhuman centipede of botshit-ingestion. This is bad news, because there's pretty solid mathematical evidence that training a bot on botshit makes it absolutely useless. Or, as the authors of the paper – including the eminent cryptographer Ross Anderson – put it, "using model-generated content in training causes irreversible defects":

https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493

This is the mathematical evidence for Jathan Sadowski's "Hapsburg AI," or, as the mathematicians call it, "The Curse of Recursion" (new band-name just dropped).

But if you really have your heart set on living in a ruined dystopia dominated by hostile artificial life-forms, have no fear. As Hamilton Nolan writes in "Radical Capital," a rogues gallery of worker-maiming corporations have asked a court to rule that the NLRB can't punish them for violating labor law:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/radical-capital

Trader Joe’s, Amazon, Starbucks and SpaceX have all made this argument to various courts. If they prevail, then there will be no one in charge of enforcing federal labor law. Yes, this will let these companies go on ruining their workers' lives, but more importantly, it will give carte blanche to every other employer in the land. At one end of this process is a boss who doesn't want to recognize a union – and at the other end are farmers dying of heat-stroke.

The right wing coalition that has put this demand before the court has all sorts of demands, from forced birth to (I kid you not), the end of recreational sex:

https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2024/02/getting-rid-of-birth-control-is-a-key-gop-agenda-item-for-the-second-trump-term

That coalition is backed by ultra-rich monopolists who want wreck the nation that their rank-and-file useful idiots want to wreck your body. These are the monopoly cheerleaders who gave us the abomination that is the Pharmacy Benefit Manager – a useless intermediary that gets to screw patients and pharmacists – and then let PBMs consolidate and merge with pharmacy monopolists.

One such inbred colossus is Change Healthcare, a giant PBM that is, in turn, a mere tendril of United Healthcare, which merged the company with Optum. The resulting system – held together with spit and wishful thinking – has access to the health records of a third of Americans and processes 15 billion prescriptions per day.

Or rather, it did process that amount – until the all-your-eggs-in-one-badly-maintained basket strategy failed on Wednesday, and Change's systems went down due to an unspecified "cybersecurity incident." In the short term, this meant that tens of millions of Americans who tried to refill their prescriptions were told to either pay cash or come back later (if you don't die first). That was the first shoe dropping. The second shoe is the medical records of a third of the country.

Don't worry, I'm sure those records are fine. After all, nothing says security like "merging several disparate legacy IT systems together while simultaneously laying off half your IT staff as surplus to requirements and an impediment to extracting a special dividend for the private equity owners who are, of course, widely recognized as the world's greatest information security practitioners."

Look, not everything is terrible. Some computers are actually getting better. Framework's user-serviceable, super-rugged, easy-to-repair, powerful laptops are the most exciting computers I've ever owned – or broken:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/13/graceful-failure/#frame

Now you can get one for $500!

https://frame.work/blog/first-framework-laptop-16-shipments-and-a-499-framework

And the next generation is turning our surprisingly well, despite all our worst efforts. My kid – now 16! – and I just launched our latest joint project, "The Sushi Chronicles," a small website recording our idiosyncratic scores for nearly every sushi restaurant in Burbank, Glendale, Studio City and North Hollywood:

https://sushichronicles.org/

This is the record of two years' worth of Daughter-Daddy sushi nights that started as a way to get my picky eater to try new things and has turned into the highlight of my week. If you're in the area and looking for a nice piece of fish, give it a spin (also, we belatedly realized that we've never reviewed our favorite place, Kuru Kuru in the CVS Plaza on North Hollywood Way – we'll be rectifying that soon).

And yes, we have a lavishly corrupt Supreme Court, but at least now everyone knows it. Glenn Haumann's even set up a Gofundme to raise money to bribe Clarence Thomas (now deleted, alas):

https://www.gofundme.com/f/pzhj4q-the-clarence-thomas-signing-bonus-fund-give-now

The funds are intended as a "signing bonus" in the event that Thomas takes up John Oliver on his offer of a $2.4m luxury RV and $1m/year for life if he'll resign from the court:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GE-VJrdHMug

This is truly one of Oliver's greatest bits, showcasing his mastery over the increasingly vital art of turning abstruse technical issues into entertainment that negates the performative complexity used by today's greatest villains to hide their misdeeds behind a Shield of Boringness (h/t Dana Clare).

The Bezzle is my contribution to turning abstruse scams into a high-impact technothriller that pierces that Shield of Boringness. The key to this is to master exposition, ignoring the (vastly overrated) rule that one must "show, not tell." Good exposition is hard to do, but when it works, it's amazing (as anyone who's read Neal Stephenson's 1,600-word explanation of how to eat Cap'n Crunch cereal in Cryptonomicon can attest). I wrote about this for Mary Robinette Kowal's "My Favorite Bit" this week:

https://maryrobinettekowal.com/journal/my-favorite-bit/my-favorite-bit-cory-doctorow-talks-about-the-bezzle/

Of course, an undisputed master of this form is Adam Conover, whose Adam Ruins Everything show helped invent it. Adam is joining me on stage in LA tomorrow night at Vroman's at 5:30PM, to host me in a book-tour event for my novel The Bezzle:

https://www.vromansbookstore.com/Cory-Doctorow-discusses-The-Bezzle

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/23/gazeteer/#out-of-cycle

Image: Peter Craven (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aggregate_output_%287637833962%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #the bezzle #ryan broderick #mary robinette kowal #exposition #john oliver #margot robbie #adam conover #ai #ai search #change healthcare #centralization #pharma #pbms #pharmacy benefit managers #corruption #scotus #crowdfunding #clarence thomas

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airbrickwall · 5 months

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#cabecera #CBDC’s #digital currency #banking #centralization #WEF #one world government #age of convenience

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cozylittleartblog · 2 months

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cant tell you how bad it feels to constantly tell other artists to come to tumblr, because its the last good website that isn't fucked up by spoonfeeding algorithms and AI bullshit and isn't based around meaningless likes

just to watch that all fall apart in the last year or so and especially the last two weeks

there's nowhere good to go anymore for artists.

edit - a lot of people are saying the tags are important so actually, you'll look at my tags.

#please dont delete your accounts because of the AI crap. your art deserves more than being lost like that #if you have a good PC please glaze or nightshade it. if you dont or it doesnt work with your style (like mine) please start watermarking #use a plain-ish font. make it your username. if people can't google what your watermark says and find ur account its not a good watermark #it needs to be central in the image - NOT on the canvas edges - and put it in multiple places if you are compelled #please dont stop posting your art because of this shit. we just have to hope regulations will come slamming down on these shitheads#in the next year or two and you want to have accounts to come back to. the world Needs real art #if we all leave that just makes more room for these scam artists to fill in with their soulless recycled garbage #improvise adapt overcome. it sucks but it is what it is for the moment. safeguard yourself as best you can without making #years of art from thousands of artists lost media. the digital world and art is too temporary to hastily click a Delete button out of spite

#not art #but important #please dont delete your accounts because of the AI crap. your art deserves more than being lost like that #if you have a good PC please glaze or nightshade it. if you dont or it doesnt work with your style (like mine) please start watermarking #use a plain-ish font. make it your username. if people can't google what your watermark says and find ur account its not a good watermark #it needs to be central in the image - NOT on the canvas edges - and put it in multiple places if you are compelled #please dont stop posting your art because of this shit. we just have to hope regulations will come slamming down on these shitheads #in the next year or two and you want to have accounts to come back to. the world Needs real art #if we all leave that just makes more room for these scam artists to fill in with their soulless recycled garbage #improvise adapt overcome. it sucks but it is what it is for the moment. safeguard yourself as best you can without making #years of art from thousands of artists lost media. the digital world and art is too temporary to hastily click a Delete button out of spite

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kiwinatorwaffles · 8 months

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#sorry. Sorry #this is how i feel seeing fanart of my blorbos from asian media #especially of phoenix or apollo #kiwi’s calls #kiwi’s shitpost central

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adropofhumanity · 26 days

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#palestine #gaza #free palestine #ceasefire #free gaza #israel #usa is a terrorist state #world central kitchen

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lordkresh · 29 days

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Creative Writer Navigating the Cyclical Paradigms of Governance: An In-depth Analysis The intricate dance between decentralization and centralization forms the cornerstone of human societal evolution, embodying a pattern that is both timeless and inevitable. This dynamic, a pendulum perpetually swinging across the spectrum of governance, is underpinned by the unchanging facets of human nature…

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#Autonomy #Biopsychosocial Framework #Centralization #Collective Action #Decentralization #Governance #Historical Dynamics #Machiavellian Philosophy #Power Dynamics #Societal Evolution #Statecraft #Strategic Adaptation

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kingsoftheblock · 2 months

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Understanding Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs): A Comprehensive Overview

Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) have emerged as a focal point in the evolving landscape of digital finance. As nations explore the potential of digital currencies issued by central banks, it’s crucial to comprehend the concept, implications, and potential impact on the financial ecosystem. Here’s a comprehensive overview to help demystify CBDCs. Defining CBDCs:CBDCs are digital forms of…

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#CBDC #central Bank #centralization #government currency

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sayruq · 24 days

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Joe Biden has called for an “immediate ceasefire” in Gaza, telling Benjamin Netanyahu that future US support for Israel will depend on it taking concrete action to protect civilians and aid workers. As the two leaders held their first phone call since Israeli airstrikes killed seven employees of the international food charity World Central Kitchen (WCK), Biden issued the strongest US rebuke toward Israel since the start of the conflict. In Thursday’s call, which lasted less than 30 minutes, the US president “made clear the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific, concrete and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering and the safety of aid workers”, the White House said in a statement.

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tamarrud · 26 days

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I've always felt uneasy about wanting to get people to pay attention to the atrocities committed by Israel in Gaza by saying "if Israel isn't stopped, it's only a matter of time before it happens to you" because why not care even if this wasn't ever going to affect you personally

But seeing as how Israel had targeted a clearly marked vehicle of World Central Kitchen today, killing 4 of its staff operating in southern Gaza who are Australian, British and Polish - just goes to show these people again that Israel is setting precedent and making sure the world understands that it's not "violating international law", it is in fact changing the standard and setting the stage of what counts as a crime and what is permissible and can be done with complete impunity and no consequences.

#world central kitchen #palestine #gaza #israel

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baradragon · 4 months

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give me the state if you're comfy and what languages were offered

#i got curious cause i went to a big international studies HS #we had 5 languages #spanish french german japanese and latin #this was in central florida btw

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herpsandbirds · 1 month

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Robust Climbing Salamander (Bolitoglossa robusta), family Plethodontidae, Tapanti National Park, Costa Rica

Photograph by Piotr Naskrecki

#climbing salamander #arboreal salamander #salamander #bolitoglossa #bolitoglossine #plethodontidae #amphibian #herpetology #animals #nature #central america

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grouptranslationdevice · 3 months

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Some common points

#Common points #e2 #centralization #decentralized

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lemoocado · 6 months

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computer virus gijinkas 💻

#cursormania #cursor mania #smiley central #computer virus #gijinkas #my art

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barbiediamondcastleofficial · 6 months

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guys Sasha is not the responsible one in the archives. She saw a weird guy with fucked up hands and an uncanny laugh and immediately followed him to several secondary locations. I’m SO sorry to say this but the only og archives crew member with self-preservation instincts is Tim

#Of course he gave up on said self preservation sometime in s3. But he did have it #Sasha’s got that eye alignment knowledge-over-safety instinct #Martin’s like Tim cmon we HAVE to go into the evil tunnels to save our stalker boss 🥺#And then there’s mr remarkably-easy-to-buy-an-axe-in-central-london #the magnus archives #tma #sasha james #tim stoker

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a-contemplative-soul · 5 months

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I believe that one of the biggest problems with current political systems is the strong centralization of power, if there was a way to eliminate such form of government, many problems would be avoided, because when you put a lot of power in the hands of just a few, it creates a greater chance of happening serious mistakes, because if a mind with high power makes a bad decision, many who are at the mercy of that power are harmed. So I think it would be ideal to avoid centralization of power as much as possible, the more fragmented society is in terms of distribution of power, the better it would be, because in case a mistake is committed it would cause less damage, since there would not be so many at the mercy of the same leader.

#Thought #Thoughts #Politics #Power #Society #Centralization #Government #Political System #Political Systems #State

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motherofplatypus · 24 days

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This is a post taken directly from the official account of WCK.

These are the heroes of WCK who were killed by IDF pigs. 1 from Palestine, 1 from Poland, 1 from Australia, 1 from USA, and 3 from UK.

6 of them aren't Palestinian.

None of them are combatant.

If you still think even for one second that those israeli pigs are the victim, that their actions are justified, or even give a single damn about humans' life you're lying to yourself or you're just as much of a pig as they are.

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