• What’s New Pussycat - Tom Jones
• What’s New Pussycat - Tom Jones
• What’s New Pussycat - Tom Jones

For those that don’t know; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IehQRVylI0U

Though the version most people are familiar with is actually a cover; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G_L9tXEwmc

(I am, begrudgingly, forced to admit that the Captain Tractor version is better)

You say you support socialism, but then you define it as something we “can’t have.” That’s still perpetuating a falsehood no matter how you frame it. And throwing in a true statement about foreign influence doesn’t negate the lies you’re repeating.

If I say “Israel is evil because Jews are all money-grubbing subhumans, and also they’re committing genocide in Palestine”, the truth of the second statement doesn’t negate the blatant anti-Semitic falsehood of the first. It’s just wrapping up a lie in a truth.

I’m not accusing you of actually being some kind of secret alt-right troll here, but I am calling out the fact that you’re unwittingly doing their work for them with this kind of rhetoric.

This isn’t tearing you down. It’s challenging you to be better. If all you can see in that is an attack, that’s your own insecurities talking, not me.

Sorry, I’m gonna be that guy; this is one of those thought terminating cliches that people love to repeat, but it doesn’t actually hold up to scrutiny.

Everything you just described is a problem with literally any political system, as you yourself acknowledged. You literally shot down your own argument, in the same breath as you made it, and then left the falsehood hanging out there anyway. Why? If you’ve already determined that your case against communism, specifically, is actually just a case against all forms of corruption in any political system, so why would you even post this?

And to dig further into the underlying premise, the idea that Communism “can’t work because people can’t be trusted” is genuinely ludicrous. Let’s set aside the arguments about political corruption, because you already disposed of those yourself, and consider the other framing this is usually given; that any form of commons will be abused. That people are lazy, or selfish, and so sharing is impossible. This sounds intuitively correct, but it simply isn’t true.

First off, communism actually requires less trust in people, not more. Communism says “Let’s share resources equitably. Let’s make sure people actually have what they need so that no one person can take too much.” It’s capitalism that says “Let’s give everyone the freedom to take as much as they can and then blindly trust that somehow a few individuals won’t climb their way to the top and horde everything for themselves.” The whole “People are greedy” argument is an argument against capitalism, and it’s the exact problem that communism solves.

Then there’s the “People are lazy and no one will work” argument. We’ve actually tested this. Multiple countries have run trials of UBI, and in every single case, employment actually went up. When you pay people to do anything they want, including not working, it turns out people actually want to work. People like feeling useful. People like having things to do, and contributing to stuff, and feeling like they’re making a mark. The claim that everyone is inherently lazy is thoroughly debunked bullshit peddled by right wing news networks, with no basis in reality.

There’s this adage, “The tragedy of the commons”; “commons” referred to land and other resources that were held in common good. Most typically, a “commons” would be a piece of land in a village where everyone could graze their animals. These eventually went away, and the saying supposes that it did so because of a fundamental human failing; a thing shared by everyone became everyone’s responsibility, and so it became no one’s responsibility. Everyone left the care of the commons to someone else, and so the commons died uncared for.

This adage is complete bullshit. Commons existed for hundreds of years without issue. They went away when we started allowing wealthy capitalists to buy and enclose those common lands and start charging rent for them, or building on them. The people who shared the commons did so without issue for generations. It was allowing a greedy few to do whatever they wanted that killed them.

You’re right, we should try to do better. So maybe be the change, and stop repeating right-wing propaganda. They’ve got enough people on their payroll spreading these lies for them, you don’t need to do it for free.

The Arrogant Worms, and Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie. Canada stays winning.

Feels like the only issue here is the “unsupervised” part. A simple mechanical dispenser would solve the problem.

When this is all over the world owes Ed Zitron a massive fucking apology.

They’re not even better optimized. Hallucination rates are up. Inference costs are up. There’s only an AI industry at all because they’re selling a highly subsidized product, but when they try to raise prices even a little the market collapses. Companies that were encouraging employees to up their AI use are now rationing tokens like chocolate in wartime. This isn’t like Uber where they can push out the old providers and then obtain market capture on something everyone needs. AI is not, and cannot be, essential, because you can always just get a human to do it.

I’ve been using it for years and this has never been an issue for me.

Actually… pushes up glasses… the word shot is Middle English and describes the flinging of a projectile, including from a bow. It predates the use of gunpowder weaponry and derives from the Old English gesceot.

That’s because it was written at a time when nobles were considered the only natural choice of leadership class, so you’ve got military forces being lead by people with zero practical military knowledge. It’s literally meant to be babies first strategy and logistics guide. Sun Tzu is intentionally dumbing shit down for his audience.

A Desolation Called Peace. It’s the sequel to A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine. Very strongly recommended. Really excellent political SciFi thrillers with amazing world building, really good character work and a lot to say about the nature of culture as a form of power.

More circular financing. Definitely a sign that everything is going great.

Absolutely there’s a difference. LLMs, when it comes to this specific task, are better. That’s why they’re being used here. It’s a job they are uniquely well suited to. They do indeed come with high hardware requirements, which is why you’re not forced to use them, and why they provide the option to offload the work to a cloud service.

Personally I would absolutely not want to ever feed my documents into an off-device model, but the point of self-hosted software is that it does what you tell it to and they absolutely should include letting you make bad decisions.

I think you’re under the impression that the difference between those things is far greater than it actually is. Large Language Models work by developing statistical maps of associations. That’s discrimination. They’re a direct evolution of categorization models. The ability to associate a hash of a JPEG with “cat” is the same as the ability to associate “How are you?” with “Great, how about you?” It’s all associative mapping. LLMs are just the current leading edge of that technology. If you want to, for example, generate a list of tags that describe a document, an LLM is the best tool we currently have for doing that.

To put it another way, what you term “discriminative AI” is “generative AI.” It’s generating a category or list of categories in response to an input. That’s not functionally different than generating a sentence in response to a sentence, it’s just an order of magnitude less complex. You can argue terminology but the technology exists on an evolutionary curve, with no real hard boundaries.

Paperless and Papermerge have always done a lot more than just OCR. If that’s all they were, most people can do that already on the software that comes with their scanner. The core selling point of these applications is automatic categorization, sorting and tagging, and those have always relied on machine learning tools. Literally the first thing you do after setting Paperless up is start training the AI.

what’s the best alternative?

You’re asking for suggestions for an automatic document categorization tool that doesn’t use any automatic document categorization?

It reads as especially hysterical in this context, because Paperless is an automatic document categorization system, and I’m really sure what they think the automatic part of that is if it’s not “AI” of some broad description. Paperless, Papermerge et al are basically wrappers for machine learning tools and have been for as long as they’ve existed. LLMs are a natural and obvious fit for the kind of work these applications exist to do.

This just feels like someone reading “Improved AI pathfinding” in the patch notes for a video game and screaming “OH MY GOD IS NOWHERE SAFE?!”

This article is seriously underselling the problem.

Yes, all of this is accurate, and its good data for people fighting back against data centres. They produce shockingly few jobs, and the most highly paid of those will likely be experts moved in from elsewhere.

But there’s a far bigger problem; AI data centres have no path to profitability. The cost of GPUs is so astronomically high and the depreciation so insanely fast that even if 3,000 - 4,000 data centres worth of AI compute demand materializes (it won’t; companies like Meta are already selling their own unused compute because demand is so weak), they still won’t be profitable, ever.

The article talks about how the permanent employment offered - on paper - is in the tens to low hundreds and that’s true, but the real employment is mostly going to be zero. In five years time 99% of these projects will be abandoned before completion, or turned into skate parks.

Banks was ahead of his time in so many ways. What an absolutely brilliant writer.