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mostlysignssomeportents · 9 months

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Autoenshittification

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare — but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power

Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem. Back in 2020 when Massachusetts was having a Right-to-Repair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these unfuckingbelievable scare ads that basically said, “Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there’s still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who’ve been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they’re surfing capitalism’s latest — and last — hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital — the capitalists — organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A “rent” is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier’s paradise. People don’t aspire to create value — they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don’t drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don’t found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

This is your brain on the four-hour-work-week, passive income mind-virus. In Techno Feudalism, Varoufakis deftly describes how the new “Cloud Capital” has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.

Shopping at Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores — but each of those stores’ owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It’s a feudal one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they’d reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then “securitizing” the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.

Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.

Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car’s accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car’s value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that fakakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.

But it’s just for starters. Computers are malleable. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

That means that your car can track your every movement, and sell your location data to anyone and everyone, from marketers to bounty-hunters looking to collect fees for tracking down people who travel out of state for abortions to cops to foreign spies:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-selling-data-privacy4cars-vehicle-privacy-report

Digitization supercharges financialization. It lets car-makers offer subprime auto-loans to desperate, poor people and then killswitch their cars if they miss a payment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

Subprime lending for cars would be a terrible business without computers, but digitization makes it a great source of feudal rents. Car dealers can originate loans to people with teaser rates that quickly blow up into payments the dealer knows their customer can’t afford. Then they repo the car and sell it to another desperate person, and another, and another:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

Digitization also opens up more exotic options. Some subprime cars have secondary control systems wired into their entertainment system: miss a payment and your car radio flips to full volume and bellows an unstoppable, unmutable stream of threats. Tesla does one better: your car will lock and immobilize itself, then blare its horn and back out of its parking spot when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Digital feudalism hasn’t stopped innovating — it’s just stopped innovating good things. The digital device is an endless source of sadistic novelties, like the cellphones that disable your most-used app the first day you’re late on a payment, then work their way down the other apps you rely on for every day you’re late:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Usurers have always relied on this kind of imaginative intimidation. The loan-shark’s arm-breaker knows you’re never going to get off the hook; his goal is in intimidating you into paying his boss first, liquidating your house and your kid’s college fund and your wedding ring before you default and he throws you off a building.

Thanks to the malleability of computerized systems, digital arm-breakers have an endless array of options they can deploy to motivate you into paying them first, no matter what it costs you:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Car-makers are trailblazers in imaginative rent-extraction. Take VIN-locking: this is the practice of adding cheap microchips to engine components that communicate with the car’s overall network. After a new part is installed in your car, your car’s computer does a complex cryptographic handshake with the part that requires an unlock code provided by an authorized technician. If the code isn’t entered, the car refuses to use that part.

VIN-locking has exploded in popularity. It’s in your iPhone, preventing you from using refurb or third-party replacement parts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

It’s in fuckin’ ventilators, which was a nightmare during lockdown as hospital techs nursed their precious ventilators along by swapping parts from dead systems into serviceable ones:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland

And of course, it’s in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about John Deere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they’d been relocated to Russia?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

That wasn’t a happy story — it was a cautionary tale. After all, John Deere now controls the majority of the world’s agricultural future, and they’ve boobytrapped those ubiquitous tractors with killswitches that can be activated by anyone who hacks, takes over, or suborns Deere or its dealerships.

Control over repair isn’t limited to gouging customers on parts and service. When a company gets to decide whether your device can be fixed, it can fuck you over in all kinds of ways. Back in 2019, Tim Apple told his shareholders to expect lower revenues because people were opting to fix their phones rather than replace them:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By usurping your right to decide who fixes your phone, Apple gets to decide whether you can fix it, or whether you must replace it. Problem solved — and not just for Apple, but for car makers, tractor makers, ventilator makers and more. Apple leads on this, even ahead of Big Car, pioneering a “recycling” program that sees trade-in phones shredded so they can’t possibly be diverted from an e-waste dump and mined for parts:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

John Deere isn’t sleeping on this. They’ve come up with a valuable treasure they extract when they win the Right-to-Repair: Deere singles out farmers who complain about its policies and refuses to repair their tractors, stranding them with six-figure, two-ton paperweight:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

The repair wars are just a skirmish in a vast, invisible fight that’s been waged for decades: the War On General-Purpose Computing, where tech companies use the law to make it illegal for you to reconfigure your devices so they serve you, rather than their shareholders:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

The force behind this army is vast and grows larger every day. General purpose computers are antithetical to technofeudalism — all the rents extracted by technofeudalists would go away if others (tinkereres, co-ops, even capitalists!) were allowed to reconfigure our devices so they serve us.

You’ve probably noticed the skirmishes with inkjet printer makers, who can only force you to buy their ink at 20,000% markups if they can stop you from deciding how your printer is configured:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty But we’re also fighting against insulin pump makers, who want to turn people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/08/chair-ish/#r2r

These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It’s called the “shitty technology adoption curve”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Technofeudalism is the public-private-partnership from hell, emerging from a combination of state and private action. On the one hand, bailing out bankers and big business (rather than workers) after the 2008 crash and the covid lockdown decoupled income from profits. Companies spent billions more than they earned were still wildly profitable, thanks to those public funds.

But there’s also a policy dimension here. Some of those rentiers’ billions were mobilized to both deconstruct antitrust law (allowing bigger and bigger companies and cartels) and to expand “IP” law, turning “IP” into a toolsuite for controlling the conduct of a firm’s competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is key to understanding the rise of technofeudalism. The same malleability that allows companies to “twiddle” the knobs on their services and keep us on the hook as they reel us in would hypothetically allow us to countertwiddle, seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

The thing that stands between you and an alternative app store, an interoperable social media network that you can escape to while continuing to message the friends you left behind, or a car that anyone can fix or unlock features for is IP, not technology. Under capitalism, that technology would already exist, because capitalists have no loyalty to one another and view each other’s margins as their own opportunities.

But under technofeudalism, control comes from rents (owning things), not profits (selling things). The capitalist who wants to participate in your iPhone’s “ecosystem” has to make apps and submit them to Apple, along with 30% of their lifetime revenues — they don’t get to sell you jailbreaking kit that lets you choose their app store.

Rent-seeking technology has a holy grail: control over “ring zero” — the ability to compel you to configure your computer to a feudalist’s specifications, and to verify that you haven’t altered your computer after it came into your possession:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

For more than two decades, various would-be feudal lords and their court sorcerers have been pitching ways of doing this, of varying degrees of outlandishness.

At core, here’s what they envision: inside your computer, they will nest another computer, one that is designed to run a very simple set of programs, none of which can be altered once it leaves the factory. This computer — either a whole separate chip called a “Trusted Platform Module” or a region of your main processor called a secure enclave — can tally observations about your computer: which operating system, modules and programs it’s running.

Then it can cryptographically “sign” these observations, proving that they were made by a secure chip and not by something you could have modified. Then you can send this signed “attestation” to someone else, who can use it to determine how your computer is configured and thus whether to trust it. This is called “remote attestation.”

There are some cool things you can do with remote attestation: for example, two strangers playing a networked video game together can use attestations to make sure neither is running any cheat modules. Or you could require your cloud computing provider to use attestations that they aren’t stealing your data from the server you’re renting. Or if you suspect that your computer has been infected with malware, you can connect to someone else and send them an attestation that they can use to figure out whether you should trust it.

Today, there’s a cool remote attestation technology called “PrivacyPass” that replaces CAPTCHAs by having you prove to your own device that you are a human. When a server wants to make sure you’re a person, it sends a random number to your device, which signs that number along with its promise that it is acting on behalf of a human being, and sends it back. CAPTCHAs are all kinds of bad — bad for accessibility and privacy — and this is really great.

But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you’re not running an ad-blocker. It’s being able to remotely verify that you haven’t disabled the bossware your employer requires. It’s the power to block someone from opening an Office365 doc with LibreOffice. It’s your boss’s ability to ensure that you haven’t modified your messaging client to disable disappearing messages before he sends you an auto-destructing memo ordering you to break the law.

And there’s a new remote attestation technology making the rounds: Google’s Web Environment Integrity, which will leverage Google’s dominance over browsers to allow websites to block users who run ad-blockers:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

There’s plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It’s a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination.

Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/amp/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

[Image ID: The interior of a luxury car. There is a dagger protruding from the steering wheel. The entertainment console has been replaced by the text 'You wouldn't download a car,' in MPAA scare-ad font. Outside of the windscreen looms the Matrix waterfall effect. Visible in the rear- and side-view mirror is the driver: the figure from Munch's 'Scream.' The screen behind the steering-wheel has been replaced by the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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aurosoulart · 1 year

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some before-and-after pictures of how I’ve been using AI generated images in my art lately 🤖

I share other artists’ concerns about the unethical nature of the theft going on in the training data of AI art algorithms, so I refuse to spend any money on them or to consider the images generated by them to be true art, but I’m curious to hear people’s thoughts on using it for reference and paint-over like this?

my hope is that with proper regulation and more ethical use, AI could be a beneficial tool to help artists - instead of a way that allows people to steal from us more easily.

#ai art #art #digital art #artists on tumblr #right now i use ai as an extension of how i already create art #i make regular use of reference photos and free-use stock images for a variety of different purposes #and i think that with enough of a transformation of the source material #true art CAN be created from ai 'art'#but it's a complicated subject for sure #how do we decide how much transformation is enough to consider it an original work?#how do we regulate the use of image generation algorithms as more and more people get access to them #and start to run them for themselves?#we're in extremely uncharted territory here as technological progress continues to accelerate at an unprecedented pace #it's important to think about these questions and stay informed on how we're reacting #because no matter how hard we try technology doesn't go backwards #but we do still have a say in how we choose to use it and how we feel about it

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critical-thinking-is-mandatory · 2 years

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once more thinking about the tragedy of YA dystopia :/

like. they all just hopped on the capitalism train because of the hunger games’ success and like. just copy-catted instead of like, using dystopia for its intended purpose: to tell the reader what (the author thinks) society should never be like, based on an existing issue in the real world. like, most YA dystopia is straight up just made to capitalise on the dystopia craze without actually putting any political thought into a very political genre :/

#not ml #we could've had it all #ya dystopia #like that's what dystopia is historically #a story based on what an exaggerated version of something fucked up in society would look like #like hunger games is capitalism and reality tv game shows and violence #plus the whole added 'rebellion isn't black and white'#1984 is about like technology and privacy and being monitored 24/7 #what's divergent about? idk some chick is special because reasons #what's the maze runner about? idk. The Bad Guys put kids in mazes To Experiment On Them #like it's the main reason why ya dystopia and dystopia in general gets so much flack #because like a lot of ya dystopia doesn't really like. have a purpose #it's just 'hey maybe this can get my book a movie deal and i can get some cha-ching ching $$'#this is not to say it isn't *entertaining* i am a big fan of ya dystopia and dystopia in general #but it is generally not *good dystopia*#it's just. an entertaining story set in some shit place #with no depth or meaning beyond 'teenager good. bad guy bad.'#and it has its merits ofc #as like wishfulfilment #but it does a real shit job at introducing young adults to politics #and to a lot of other things too #like damn some of the 'love stories' in ya suck ass #anyway

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misskamelie · 2 years

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I believe that children should be taught/learnt how technology works, but doing so by giving them a phone or ipad is literally the worst thing one could do, methinks

#a phone contains far too much information and stimuli I believe #also it's generally packed with far too many functionalities than a kid spending its free time could be interested in #ideally I think they should start by using some single-purpose technology (ex gameboy or a game on a computer) and then expanding from there #this way they probably aren't overwhelmed with information and possibilities #my post #My God I just realized I used gameboy as an example.... a switch is fine too I guess #mostly cause Nintendo knows what the target audience is so their console design is pretty good

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vaibhavpropertiesdelhincr · 7 days

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vinodkaushikadvocate · 9 days

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#PropertyManagementSystem: General tag highlighting the system's purpose.#RealEstateTech: Indicates its role in the realm of real estate technology.#EfficientOperations: Emphasizes the system's ability to streamline processes.#TenantManagement: Indicates its role in managing tenant interactions and needs.#FinancialTracking: Highlights its function in tracking financial transactions and generating reports.#AutomatedTasks: Underlines its capability to automate repetitive tasks #saving time and resources.

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joeygoldy · 5 months

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Useful Tips for Becoming a Successful Agriculture Investor

Agriculture investment refers to the allocation of financial resources, capital, or assets into various aspects of the agricultural sector with the expectation of generating a return on investment (ROI). This could mean investing monies in agriculture land for sale such as coconut land for sale in Sri Lanka, or other types of investments. It involves deploying funds in activities and projects related to agriculture for the purpose of profit, income generation, or long-term wealth creation. Agriculture investment can take many forms, including:

Farmland Acquisition: Purchasing agricultural land for the cultivation of crops or the raising of livestock. This can involve both large-scale and small-scale farming operations.

Infrastructure Development: Investing in the construction and improvement of infrastructure such as irrigation systems, roads, storage facilities, and processing plants to enhance agricultural productivity and efficiency.

Technological Advancements: Funding the development and adoption of agricultural technologies, such as precision agriculture, automation, and biotechnology, to improve crop yields and reduce operational costs.

Agribusiness Ventures: Investing in agribusinesses, such as food processing, distribution, and marketing, that are part of the agricultural value chain.

Research and Development: Supporting research initiatives related to agriculture to develop new crop varieties, pest-resistant strains, and sustainable farming practices.

Input Supply: Investing in the production and distribution of agricultural inputs like seeds, fertilisers, pesticides, and machinery.

Commodity Trading: Speculating on the future prices of agricultural commodities, such as grains, oilseeds, and livestock, through commodity markets or futures contracts.

Sustainable Agriculture: Funding practices and projects aimed at sustainable and environmentally responsible farming methods, which can include organic farming, agroforestry, and conservation efforts.

Rural Development: Supporting initiatives that improve the overall economic and social well-being of rural communities, often through investments in education, healthcare, and infrastructure.

Venture Capital and Start-ups: Investing in start-ups and companies focused on innovations in agriculture, such as vertical farming, aquaculture, or agricultural technology (AgTech).

Agriculture investment is important for food security, economic development, and job creation in many regions. However, it also comes with risks related to weather conditions, commodity price fluctuations, and market dynamics. Investors often conduct thorough research and risk assessments before committing their resources to agricultural ventures. Additionally, they may need to consider factors like government policies, environmental regulations, and social impacts on their investment decisions in the agricultural sector.

How to become a successful agriculture investor

Becoming a successful agriculture investor requires a combination of financial acumen, agricultural knowledge, and a strategic approach to investment. Here are some steps to help you become a successful agriculture investor:

Educate Yourself: Gain a strong understanding of the agricultural sector, including the different sub-sectors (crops, livestock, agribusiness, etc.). Stay updated on industry trends, market conditions, and emerging technologies.

Set Clear Investment Goals: Define your investment objectives, whether it is long-term wealth creation, income generation, or diversification of your investment portfolio.

Risk Assessment: Understand and assess the risks associated with agriculture investments, such as weather-related risks, market volatility, and regulatory changes, whether you are looking at land for sale or any other type of investment.

Develop a Diversified Portfolio: Diversify your investments across different agricultural sectors and geographic regions to spread risk.

Market Research: Conduct thorough market research to identify promising investment opportunities and potential demand for agricultural products.

Build a Network: Establish connections with farmers, agricultural experts, government agencies, and industry stakeholders who can provide insights and opportunities.

Financial Planning: Create a budget and financial plan that outlines your investment capital, expected returns, and cash flow requirements.

Select the Right Investment Type: Choose the type of agriculture investment that aligns with your goals, whether it is farmland, agribusiness ventures, or agricultural technology.

Due Diligence: Conduct comprehensive due diligence on potential investments, including assessing the quality of farmland, the financial health of agribusinesses, and the technology's potential for scalability and profitability.

Sustainable Practices: Consider investments in sustainable and environmentally responsible agriculture practices, as they are gaining importance in the industry.

Risk Management: Implement risk management strategies, such as insurance, to protect your investments from unforeseen events like natural disasters or crop failures.

Continuous Learning: Stay informed about changes in the agricultural industry and adapt your investment strategy accordingly.

Legal and Regulatory Compliance: Understand and comply with local, national, and international regulations and tax laws that may impact your agriculture investments.

Monitor and Adjust: Regularly review the performance of your investments and be prepared to make adjustments or exit underperforming ones.

Long-Term Perspective: Agriculture investments often require a long-term perspective, so be patient and avoid making impulsive decisions based on short-term market fluctuations.

Seek Professional Advice: Consult with financial advisors, agricultural experts, and legal professionals to ensure that your investments are structured and managed effectively.

Successful agriculture investment often involves a mix of financial expertise, industry knowledge, and a willingness to adapt to changing conditions. It is important to approach agriculture investment with a well-thought-out strategy, and to be prepared for both opportunities and challenges in this sector.

#Agriculture investment refers to the allocation of financial resources #capital #or assets into various aspects of the agricultural sector with the expectation of generating a return on investment (ROI). This could mean #or other types of investments. It involves deploying funds in activities and projects related to agriculture for the purpose of profit #income generation #or long-term wealth creation. Agriculture investment can take many forms #including:#●#Farmland Acquisition: Purchasing agricultural land for the cultivation of crops or the raising of livestock. This can involve both large-sc #Infrastructure Development: Investing in the construction and improvement of infrastructure such as irrigation systems #roads #storage facilities #and processing plants to enhance agricultural productivity and efficiency.#Technological Advancements: Funding the development and adoption of agricultural technologies #such as precision agriculture #automation #and biotechnology #to improve crop yields and reduce operational costs.#Agribusiness Ventures: Investing in agribusinesses #such as food processing #distribution #and marketing #that are part of the agricultural value chain.#Research and Development: Supporting research initiatives related to agriculture to develop new crop varieties #pest-resistant strains #and sustainable farming practices.#Input Supply: Investing in the production and distribution of agricultural inputs like seeds #fertilisers #pesticides #and machinery.

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noahlivingston · 10 months

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truly fucking begging people on this website to do some research on AI before you start posting. so many ai ethics posts i see are well intentioned but are so wildly misinformed it’s ridiculous.

#like. i seriously need you to understand that stealing someones likeness and voice for commercial purposes #is VERY FUCKING DIFFERENT #from a 12 year old using a chatbot to talk to naruto #or generating an image from a DATABASE WHICH ALREADY EXISTS #like. like. i realize this is new technology and many people probably dont know about it yet #and the media coverage ive seen of it is. lacking for sure.#so im not blaming people for this exactly #but i seriously seriously need you to understand that there are levels. okay. these situations are not comparable

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horreurscopes · 5 days

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regardless of a myriad of other AI discourse talking points i'm not touching with a 10 ft pole, i think it should always be disclosed when i'm looking at something AI generated. like that's a basic level of societal courtesy, right. AI images more than any new technology that has changed the course of humanity seem to be inseparable from a purposeful obfuscation of their origin. the gimmick is to deceive human perception, their entire purpose is to make you believe you are looking at something created by sentience. AI is at its core a tool for deception and i mean that as a neutral statement. it's a mimic, a pantomime. impersonation. and that is, ethics aside, annoying as all fuck

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leatherbookmark · 10 months

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"they're not VIRTUAL they're REAL LIFE PEOPLE using motion tracking technology from their room that is then shown on the screen in the radio room" but... why

#i just can't take this shit seriously like you present me with an ugly 3d generated guy and tell me it's an idol?#like that's so stupid to me sorry. if there are dudes who can sing and dance then why don't they show the dudes #'technology is just this amazing!!!' what for. like what are we aiming for here what's the purpose of this whole circus #shrimp thoughts #anyway. apparently some chick threw herself at the guys' car as they were leaving the studio. in case someone forgot that some fans are #insane and do actually consider real life idols less than human ALREADY

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helluvapoison · 2 months

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Possessive

how the overlords would put a claim on you

ʕ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʕ•̫͡•ʔ•̫͡•ʔ

˚✧₊⁎ Carmilla Carmine ⁎⁺˳✧༚

As much as she loves spending her mornings in bed with you, wishfully thinking she could stay there all day, she can only give you 3 more minutes at best. Being an Overlord and a CEO keeps her rather busy. You’re grown, you can handle yourself (you have to in this world) she’s not keeping tabs on your whereabouts. Carmilla isn’t itching for a fight like these new “up and comers”. Giving you something to protect you when she’s not around simultaneously puts a target on your back. A simple ring with her name inscribed would suffice, satisfying any possessive vices she may or may not have

˚✧₊⁎ Zestial ⁎⁺˳✧༚

Abhorrent is jealousy, driving the younger generations to filth like, ugh, hickeys. Although, on a certain level he does understand. Being in Hell for as long as he has and alone the same amount, he knows all too well the primal need to claim what other’s might steal. One must leave their mark as a warning sign for others. Zestial’s exceptionally charming when he wants something, notably not asking when he presents you with the crisply wrapped gifts. There’s no less than twenty. Boxes upon boxes of accessories and clothes that suit you but hold his color palette, spider and web details to boot. He’s utterly thrilled when you wear them, showering you in compliments and declaring himself the luckiest soul in Hell

˚✧₊⁎ Rosie ⁎⁺˳✧༚

Goodness, have you seen how sinners nowadays go about the whole ordeal? What happened to romance!? Call her old fashioned, but Rosie likes a smidge of glamour in her techniques! She’ll walk shoulder to shoulder with you, holding her parasail over the both of you. She’ll accidentally press her painted lips on your cheek and forget, quickly getting swept up into conversation with someone or the other. It’s fine, no one would question her! Not if they wanted to live anyways. Butterflies swarm her stomach when she notices you haven’t wiped her imprint away, a proud smile spreading across her face. It becomes purposeful as the days go on

˚✧₊⁎ Alastor ⁎⁺˳✧༚

While happy to broadcast newsworthy exploits, sharing his private affairs with the world is out of the question. Of course the appeal of it all isn’t lost on him, he merely doesn’t see the point. Why broaden your horizons of potential dangers by claiming you publicly? To calm that unruly, covetous alien in the pit of his chest? He’s not that selfish! Besides, nothing less than something permanent could truly satisfy him anyhow

˚✧₊⁎ Valentino ⁎⁺˳✧༚

If he doesn’t have eyes on you, he’s working. Those measley hours apart won’t stop him from reminding all of Hell you still belong to him. He doesn’t trust anyone down here. He’ll convince you it’s for your safety that he tightens the collar around your neck. With a hum of approval, Val’s long and slender fingers twist the tag with his name on it. Heart shaped, of course, he loves you after all!

˚✧₊⁎ Vox ⁎⁺˳✧༚

Only the insecure need to put a claim on their person. That’s not Vox, no way! You’re never really out of his sights anyways, what with today’s power of technology and all! The need to brand you goes a different route. He wants everyone to know you’re spoken for, pulling you on camera every chance he gets. He wants them to stare in awe and envy but cast their eyes down when you walk by in public. A slight on you would be a slight on him personally and no one messes with The Vees

˚✧₊⁎ Velvette ⁎⁺˳✧༚

Truthfully, there isn’t much she wouldn’t do. You’re all over her Sinstagram and that says it all. Every runway show, every red carpet walk, every paparazzi shot you’re always beside her. Vel dresses you left and right to match her OOTD somehow. She snaps a pic every single day (sometimes more) to show her followers their favorite couple is thriving and stylish as always! The description never fails to scream how your all hers

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months

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What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

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/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

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

#pluralistic #ai #economics #business #hype #bubbles #bubblenomics #residue

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xylophonetangerine · 1 year

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Cookie pop-ups are designed to be confusing and make you 'agree' to be tracked. This add-on automatically answers consent pop-ups for you, so you can't be manipulated. Set your preferences once, and let the technology do the rest!

This add-on is built and maintained by workers at Aarhus University in Denmark. We are privacy researchers that got tired of seeing how companies violate the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Because the organisations that enforce the GDPR do not have enough resources, we built this add-on to help them out.

We looked at 680 pop-ups and combined their data processing purposes into 5 categories that you can toggle on or off. Sometimes our categories don't perfectly match those on the website, so then we will choose the more privacy preserving option.

I've been using this since it came out in December 2019 (how time flies!) and definitely recommend it.

#firefox

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wordstome · 3 months

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how c.ai works and why it's unethical

Okay, since the AI discourse is happening again, I want to make this very clear, because a few weeks ago I had to explain to a (well meaning) person in the community how AI works. I'm going to be addressing people who are maybe younger or aren't familiar with the latest type of "AI", not people who purposely devalue the work of creatives and/or are shills.

The name "Artificial Intelligence" is a bit misleading when it comes to things like AI chatbots. When you think of AI, you think of a robot, and you might think that by making a chatbot you're simply programming a robot to talk about something you want them to talk about, and it's similar to an rp partner. But with current technology, that's not how AI works. For a breakdown on how AI is programmed, CGP grey made a great video about this several years ago (he updated the title and thumbnail recently)

youtube

I HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend you watch this because CGP Grey is good at explaining, but the tl;dr for this post is this: bots are made with a metric shit-ton of data. In C.AI's case, the data is writing. Stolen writing, usually scraped fanfiction.

How do we know chatbots are stealing from fanfiction writers? It knows what omegaverse is [SOURCE] (it's a Wired article, put it in incognito mode if it won't let you read it), and when a Reddit user asked a chatbot to write a story about "Steve", it automatically wrote about characters named "Bucky" and "Tony" [SOURCE].

I also said this in the tags of a previous reblog, but when you're talking to C.AI bots, it's also taking your writing and using it in its algorithm: which seems fine until you realize 1. They're using your work uncredited 2. It's not staying private, they're using your work to make their service better, a service they're trying to make money off of.

"But Bucca," you might say. "Human writers work like that too. We read books and other fanfictions and that's how we come up with material for roleplay or fanfiction."

Well, what's the difference between plagiarism and original writing? The answer is that plagiarism is taking what someone else has made and simply editing it or mixing it up to look original. You didn't do any thinking yourself. C.AI doesn't "think" because it's not a brain, it takes all the fanfiction it was taught on, mixes it up with whatever topic you've given it, and generates a response like in old-timey mysteries where somebody cuts a bunch of letters out of magazines and pastes them together to write a letter.

(And might I remind you, people can't monetize their fanfiction the way C.AI is trying to monetize itself. Authors are very lax about fanfiction nowadays: we've come a long way since the Anne Rice days of terror. But this issue is cropping back up again with BookTok complaining that they can't pay someone else for bound copies of fanfiction. Don't do that either.)

Bottom line, here are the problems with using things like C.AI:

It is using material it doesn't have permission to use and doesn't credit anybody. Not only is it ethically wrong, but AI is already beginning to contend with copyright issues.

C.AI sucks at its job anyway. It's not good at basic story structure like building tension, and can't even remember things you've told it. I've also seen many instances of bots saying triggering or disgusting things that deeply upset the user. You don't get that with properly trigger tagged fanworks.

Your work and your time put into the app can be taken away from you at any moment and used to make money for someone else. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people who use AI panic about accidentally deleting a bot that they spent hours conversing with. Your time and effort is so much more stable and well-preserved if you wrote a fanfiction or roleplayed with someone and saved the chatlogs. The company that owns and runs C.AI can not only use whatever you've written as they see fit, they can take your shit away on a whim, either on purpose or by accident due to the nature of the Internet.

DON'T USE C.AI, OR AT THE VERY BARE MINIMUM DO NOT DO THE AI'S WORK FOR IT BY STEALING OTHER PEOPLES' WORK TO PUT INTO IT. Writing fanfiction is a communal labor of love. We share it with each other for free for the love of the original work and ideas we share. Not only can AI not replicate this, but it shouldn't.

(also, this goes without saying, but this entire post also applies to ai art)

#anti ai #cod fanfiction #c.ai #character ai #c.ai bot #c.ai chats #fanfiction #fanfiction writing #writing #writing fanfiction #on writing #fuck ai #ai is theft #call of duty #cod #long post #I'm not putting any of this under a readmore #Youtube

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