…of the…I dunno…five different posts this could wind up trying to be all at once because I haven’t got time to pull them apart…one is a bunch of nerdy shit to do with the whole mastodon/fediverse thing & what makes that different from the atmosphere/ATproto/bluesky stuff & how both are able to function in a way that has some stuff in common with kinja & in the event that we were to make some efforts in that regard there’s a thing that could in theory be achieved whereby you’d potentially end up still having a website to visit not just in the sense that people can visit bluesky by typing an address into a browser but more like you could go hit up splinter or deadspin or jezebel or the root or whatever…but sort of like your one kinja login would log you into the comments for all of those…your myname.deadsplinter.com login could potentially work for a few other things…notably if we went the atmosphere route that would log in to bluesky the way all the people whose account names don’t end .bsky.social do that…& some ways that could prove useful as more use cases for that stuff come to pass…but…it’s a whole bunch of massive geekery…& one of the other competing sets of stuff I’m not sure how to not bang on about beyond the bounds of polite conversation wants to draw parallels between the way that in some senses people broadly don’t want to understand more than a particular depth of conceptually how stuff with computers works…& that’s fair enough…plenty of people drive who can’t explain a transmission or how a clutch works or what’s different about drive-by-wire

…but on the other hand…some of those people know stuff about how *their* car works that might be a surprise to some of the people who designed that…& plenty have the broad strokes down & have given a good deal of thought to the operation of tonnage at enough velocity to be a problem…maybe they couldn’t give you an annotated analysis of a car crash labelled with figures for stuff like velocities & vectors & mass & force & whatnot…but maybe they could see a few sets of skidmarks on the road & make some pretty accurate guesses about what went on even after the wreckage was gone…&…in that way…more people than think they have have spent time thinking about what the more formal end of the discussion starts calling things like philosophy…or ontology…or epistemology…or…theory of mind…& how weirdly similar it can feel talking to people I know about computers or other tech & how it works & what they want it to do & how much those two things are both the same & not really all that much to do with one another…or the internet…or “AI”…or if you want to get into it…machine learning, software that evolves, neural networks

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network_(machine_learning)

…that used to get the “Artificial” prefix, too…& how far back lots of the stuff that trying the LLM thing on a strict “throw unimaginable money at it & do it at unimaginable scale” basis is derived from one way or another has its roots & or /root…s…& superusers…in…& how much good it does you to be able to kind of fillet out the parts of the new stuff that is new in a maybe exciting sense to do with emergent properties of complex systems & how remarkable some of this stuff *is*…when pretty much none of that…give or take some squabbling about the extent to which the subsidised give-it-away-to-drive-adoption thing being arguably less of an insane exercise in burning money if you view it as a massive self-selecting unpaid pool of beta testers whose fuckups you aren’t liable for helping train this stuff…or…the degree to which not all languages are equal but the models don’t know that any more than they know any of them…programming languages, for example, are sort of like maths…they are to some extent self-defining of a…space within which they are coherent & deterministic…if you say something correctly in one of those then what it means is knowable & what happens when it is said is predictable…but we reserve “natural language” for the stuff spoken by people…& nobody goes about trying to make out you don’t know how to speak if you can’t copy out some rote learned set of rules for grammar & syntax because they’re already talking to you in it…& I don’t want to wear out that calvin & hobbes thing about the verbing & how it weirds language…or might turn that into an impediment to understanding…or how common that might be…but how uncommonly extreme the impact that has might be on what how many people think they say when they string a bunch of words together…by themselves or in conjunction with what would be some sort imp if we lived in the world as written by terry pratchett…a semantic fruit machine the size of a pocket galaxy or whatever…while allowing unquestionable levels of familiarity to breed an odd species of contempt that undervalues enormously how much of what is meaningful about any of it resides in them & how little in the thing they’re doing all the extra imagining about in order to treat like something it isn’t…because that’s less work…allegedly…than interacting with a thing on the basis of treating it as what it is

…because people have gone & chummed those waters over again…one of the ones who doesn’t really have any excuse for pretending not to know this isn’t what it looks like if the thing they said about the singularity maybe having already happened was actually true…said maybe the singularity happened…& would appear to have been hoping that indeed this would get run up by the yard in column inches of awe…which…in places it continues to be…though in the manner of asterix’s village of hold-outs that refuse to render unto caesar their little corner of a foreign field…it is still remembered that a defining characteristic of the singularity getting invoked is the literal impossibility of making any meaningful predictions about what things look like the other side of that event horizon from ours…it’s…not like that part hid, either…it’s the point of the analogy that got it referred to as the fucking singularity in the first place…& jensen needs to sell a shitload of silicon…just like he knows we didn’t all undergo spaghettification & pop back out the other side like it never happened & nobody noticed

…but…lots of contradictory things can be true…at the same time, too…particularly if you involve a big enough number of people…so it’s simultaneously true that almost everyone has made a bunch of what are effectively choices but often don’t seem that way subjectively & if they knew how the taxonomy worked could file themselves away according to which spread of “schools of thought” they would default into by association based on what they think about this or that…but…they don’t…which doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t still default into this or that school in ways you can infer from what they say they think…but…often enough to arguably be load-bearing in some stuff that’s a fucking wind up…they haven’t ever thought much about their thinking…or thought at all about thought, really…so…it’s not exactly untrue to say that what they currently get away with including under the obfuscation they’ve made of the AI label might be “radically altering our understanding of consciousness”…but…if it isn’t it’s owing a substantial debt to an ability to pull a trick a bit like light being a particle but also a wave like other stuff can’t…”our” understanding of consciousness…if “our” is “all people”…nets out to a lot of the stuff…but if “our” is common-or-garden everyday people of the sort there’s the most of & that are currently alive…well, then AI could be dumber than clippy & the statement could still hold just by dint of causing more people to grasp that just like there’s more to a respiratory system than knowing you don’t stop breathing in & out if at all possible…there’s more to a mind than just having a consciousness that happens to have one of those to call an abode

…sure it might sound like that’s all semi-predictable nonsense that doesn’t belong together & could devolve into arbitrary word-noise to probably plenty of people who could go on to claim to be out time they’d never get back in a way they might get mad at me about…but…that’s the fucking point proving itself while those people are literally refusing to look…plausibly more even that it me not couching it in the way they’d need it to show up to not provoke them that way

…but…it’s not hard to see why even though you literally can’t avoid it & to some extent going about being a person without ever either learning or admitting that there’s anything to learn in the first place…your own philosophy…is like thinking all you need is stop/go because you have a train of thought & know the stops you want…when actually you’re driving a car but you learned how to operate it based solely on the assumption the rearview mirror contains the entirety of the observable universe & from some perspectives it isn’t clear you know which way is up much less which direction you’re facing or if backwards might be forwards for you

…so…if ed milliband says the UK might actually sound off a little about things it doesn’t want to be involved in…a little late for most of gaza but perhaps with respect to the west bank…he…who last I think I recall thinking I knew one way or another I was under the impression would be of the faith in question…can get accused of “jew-hate”

…which…he did…&…the version of how this could have made its way down a page that probably we’d all have had the greatest cause to regret could go off about who said that & what exactly hate does & doesn’t seem to mean to their peculiarly contorted & frankly painful way of pretending to consider that stuff…but…I only have a half an hour before this is due & I can’t really get anywhere that feels meaningfully like making it to a B from an A much less an alpha to an omega about any or all of the stuff I would very much appreciate getting to spend the rest of the day trying to wrap my poor tortured head around

…&…that only leaves thursday’s effort before I risk this happening all over again…on the basis that one of the lovely irish folks that fed me & what the spread implied was potentially a small army delicious food & a fairly unstinting supply of equally tasty booze for a day or two might be hoping I can provide them somewhere to sleep it off this weekend…so…turns out I should have been asking for 2 sunday substitutes the first time

…&…here’s the thing…all I did was spend an enjoyable interlude in a place that happened to have poor cell reception without troubling anyone for a wifi password during any of the indoor bits…for a couple of days…that formed part of a holiday weekend in the states…that a president made a holiday…to get the weight of the working population to stop being quite the electoral monkey on his back it was at the time…& then I fired that cursed flood of inputs back up just in time to find out that the posting-prez…&/or the harping-est harp…was

Everything is just impossibly dumb

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) 2026-09-06T18:17:57.623Z

…like…where to even start…new york was new amsterdam but now it has to be what…real america?

…oh…wait…it can’t be, can it?

…real america can’t be a city…even if calling new york a city is sort of misleading…as is calling it a state…despite it being both…& many things about both broadly signifying “real” america to really a lot of the rather more of the world that isn’t america than the full list of all the americans who would get upset about the idea of a real america that didn’t think it wasn’t an affectation to be wearing tooled leather cowboy boots

Like what are we fucking doing here

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) 2026-09-06T18:18:38.726Z

…&…we could get into it about whose thinking this shit betrays…&/or resembles

This is basically just your weird racist grandpa's timeline tbh.

— Schnorkles O'Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) 2026-09-06T18:49:33.304Z

…but…just the fucking space force uniforms one I could still be ranting about this time next week

It was missing something.

— Ray (@sireviscerate.myatproto.social) 2026-09-07T15:06:34.104Z

…&…ok…the surrounded by assholes thing does mean the spaceballs angle plays…that’s…sigh…semantically parse-able…as are the allusions to starship troopers…but…c’mon…they followed where star wars had already pretty nearly transposed the bad-guys-look-like-nazis into a canonical paradigm*

— Henry Mance (@henrymance.ft.com) 2026-09-08T06:46:57.091Z

…there’s actual blackshirts…again…this time with balaclavas…sort of the way those have been cropping up on “artists” banking the “imitates life” appeal to “keeping it real” in music scenes with family-unfriendly designations like drill music…not to be confused with dril music…because fuck knows what @wint would do with bona fide instruments…are…a choice…that notably isn’t the one the ones that wore the v-for-vendetta masks that were guy fawkes masks before they were movie anarchist masks made

…haven’t watched that one…might be full of all manner of bollocks…but it had the right thumbnail…& it’s probably not any worse than others & maybe got more in it than…say…this

…but if I don’t do something…probably undiginified…this is never going to go up…so maybe we all have a lucky escape & I fall out of the ridiculous without anything having to sublime to change states without transitioning the usual way…maybe I come back & festoon this with shit that makes it feel like I’m not the one losing their fucking mind…who the hell knows…but…fuck it…as well to be hung for a sheep as a lamb?

[* – …ok…if only because on the one hand it’s not fair that myo & meg should be the only ones to bear this kind of burden…but…as a handy bonus…probably proving beyond all reasonable doubt that nobody wants to get pulled over the event horizon of being in that discord thread that got mentioned the other day…& in particular will presumably so thoroughly vindicate butcher’s belief that meg is doing the lord’s work as to risk accidentally birthing an actual church of deadsplinter as a necessary dependency of the ensuing canonisation that makes the lady a saint…to just…ignore all the rest of it & just freewheel a bit down the line of *just the pairing of those generative output uniform designs & the attachment to them of starship troopers*…& with the proviso that this is still the short version of something I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said is likely sufficient to form the basis of some sort of academic paper that depending on which bits you foreground could probably pick between a few disciplines for where it felt like trying to get itself filed…approximately…give or take the audible parts that didn’t make it transcription even as shorthand & were largely profanity by volume…this is how I bounced off finding out about the space force thing first followed swiftly by the context of the post-a-thon labor-day-deluge from the shitpost firehose while still coasting along after a lovely weekend that as it happened turned out to involve meeting (not for the first time but the next part I only just found out the other day) an actual walking, talking still-has-all-their-marbles…& a sense of humor with possibly even a twinkle in his eye…held public office with an (R) after their name in the before times when nobody had heard of there even being a tea party & for a bit after on the basis of if-I-don’t-the-guy-that-will-is-going-be-against-what-they-ought-to-be-for-&-however-right-or-wrong-I-am-I-know-I’m-the-lesser-evil-in-this-picture

…y’all…the deep state is charming…that’s what makes it work…but…it doesn’t really have to be a lie that there’s nobility to be found in public service…but…if you think nobility is a matter of birth…forgive me…but…you’ve got yourself turned around…you’re trying to retrofit something that…doesn’t entail from what you want it to…because it would be comforting if it indeed dictated the stuff which would ensue from that since the thing you’re actually trying to describe is a state of affairs that objectively is comprehensibly iniquitous to the detriment of the vast majority of people in ways that history makes clear are seemingly intractable…namely that the contextually-dependent stuff you can shorthand to “an accident of birth” dictate a number of variables the permutations & combinations of which…despite being in almost every sense utterly unconnected to how “worthy” of any of them a given individual might be…thereafter form a set of dynamically adjusting advantages & disadvantages to them which render their chances in various different senses & indeed milieus substantively different

…the whole reason kier went on about his dad the toolmaker like maggie was a grocer’s girl & burnham is manchestering so hard you’d think it was a neologism for saying something with your whole chest & supposed to be the knew non-toxic masculinity…is that it’s like anyone-but-obviously-not-really-anyone-just-anyone-that-could-include-your-kid-unless-it’s-this-lot-who-can’t-have-your-sort-being-their-sort-without-breaking-their-whole-theory-of-mind-&-fracturing-their-sense-of-self could be president…it’s the hat-tip to “please don’t let’s pretend it’d improve anything to try to do a magna carta from first principles the OG way”

…I…dunno how to get this to make sense when it kind of…doesn’t…but…it’s still true?

…police is police…pretty much everyplace has police…or…is policed, anyroad…arguably a different nested set of conversations, that…but…5-0…the ones some people call & some people don’t in maybe identical circumstances…have some common properties…which can be misleading…& much the way that “cops” as a “reality tv franchise” was…give or take…a more palatable version of the clockwork orange thing with the pinned open eyelids…saying over & over…it’s dumb to break the law…bad things will happen to you & the cops are not as dumb as criminals…look at these fools…with maybe less…je ne sais quoi…than james bond kept up a steady beat of “speak not to the allies of old of the deep magics, witch”…or whatever…it doesn’t mean it isn’t a fun time to watch a bond movie…or tom cruise continue to try to convince himself he’s immortal & insurance companies to underwrite his attempt in a mission impossible flick…or…a statham movie…or…atomic blonde…or slow horses…or…hell…person of interest…retrospectively unfortunate choice of casting aside…or the conversation…or the watergate one…or…rear window or the hunt for red october or the rock or con air or the list is effectively endless

…but the term “policing by consent” might be the OG of EULA’s you can’t avoid having clicked on…it doesn’t feel like you got to choose if something you did was or wasn’t against the law…though maybe someone took the time to explain to you that at least in theory an indirect mechanism existed capable of making something move from one side of that line to another on the basis of “civic will” if it could muster determined support down the appropriate channels for long enough in a sustained fashion…but…there’s sort of an important way in which it is in fact a form of actual social contract with terms in which both parties have an end they’re responsible for holding up…the basic idea is “can we all agree to some starting points along the lines of there being such a thing as rules & there being people whose job it is & isn’t, respectively, to take the appropriate steps when those get broken in ways we’ve learned we should avoid letting people” & for lots of stuff…the deal holds arguably pretty well…pick most points in history in most places & there’s a decent chance that if you took the population & dumped them as-is into their locale after running the mileage back to before there was police…it’d be a death sentence for more of them than…rather more than the police account for in a genuinely uncomfortable number of places given what those numbers still are in a bigger share of those than anyone ought to feel any kind of pride in…so that makes it hard to usefully talk about the difference in various models of possible approaches to a judicial system that perhaps have a different view of what it is one of those would be most useful if it in fact did & whether indeed it is possible to have one that does that given what we know about how all the ones all the everywhere has had one way or another for longer than anyone can remember…actually have

…it’s…well maybe at this point it’s verging on falling victim to that thing the sandman did a riff on under the heading the dream of 1,000 cats

…the trick is in enough of us agreeing that the shape of the world obeys the rule of law for it to develop enough gravity to settle matters…while doing that remains as natural as breathing & you don’t really have to think about it…that’s the part where we’ve all tacitly agreed…oddly enough even the ones that think the cheat code is to rely on how true it is to get ahead by breaking them…that if the police come for your neighbor…they’re just playing their part…& nobody needs to start trying to make any loud & pointed gestures to invoke any second amendments to the thing the original meaning of which is to be considered sacrosanct gospel by vote-wielding theoretical-mind-possessors who appear to have either never read it or to have only read it the way some of the same people seem to read the bible…which is to say on a basis someone else cherry picked for them…while mistaking an insistence that it is the only true reading of the text as the form of devotion that will…they pray with often no shortage of heartfelt fervor…save them from the eternal damnation they are wholeheartedly convinced pretty much the whole of humanity deserves in the eye of their deity…who…a mite confusingly…they tend to quite often call “merciful” along with “lord” on account of how all the dominion-having having always been a deal they’ve been on the nicer sort of receiving end of

…& that’s why you don’t have to get nervous about lying to yourself that maybe you don’t live in that world because too many cats dream of whichever dystopia they most fancy their chances of thriving in while the deluded folks stuck in the matrix…which…no offense to the folks that made a whole lot of money & fans & eventually memes out of that & the ensuing franchise…hasn’t been new since before plato tried to steal that same thunder with a thing about shadows on a cave wall…keep grazing like the handy herd of livestock you can make an honest…ish…living off if you know your husbandry…& the more people who think that’s the real deal the more the world shrinks on you like you’re the warriors & coney island is the promised land…& the more people who think every day is like sunday & all grandmas ought to be as safe as omar’s in a church crown…without even having to think about it…the more there is a law of the land to speak of…even as the lay of that same land is clearly operating with some steep fucking gradients if you start looking to navigate it…in either direction…anyway…the point is…being able to agree that someone ought to exist to fill a requirement because that beats the alternative doesn’t mean that people who would perhaps bid to be the ones to do it with some retributive motives aforethought…wouldn’t be a pretty good method to list out people who ought not to get to have authority of a sort that could support any appeal to it

…but…someone’s got to do it…& sometimes…if you knew the strain it put them under…you’d have a different view of those people…not like the thing where jack bauer coming back from the dead for the fifth time to employ methods known to be largely not conducive to the accuracy of the vital information thusly derived but retrospectively will be *this* time because chosen-by-fate to be deterministically incapable of not ultimately having chosen a path through the probability set that clears the bar for the success criteria…or…I guess these days one of the seemingly endless shows about “special operators”…like that lioness effort, say…which manages to take itself & taylor sheriden even more seriously than presumably taylor sheriden does despite basically being…what was the haysbert one…after he was president palmer for long enough people forget he was in jarhead…oh, yeah…the unit, I think that would have been

…because…forget about the minefield of an audience that could get thrown by finding out homelander isn’t the protagonist…much less the good guy…despite all the iconography…it is…comforting…to believe in the whole jack nicholson truth you couldn’t handle to be not-your-problem thanks to men standing watches in places that stare down people who are trying to kill them…it is…just like probably it never won’t be chinatown, jack

…you only think you know what the dam holds back while you joke about the little dutch kid with a finger in the dyke

…something said it was supposed to be…I dunno…inspired or whatever…by starship troopers…which…is even dumber than what it actually looks like…which is very clearly the empire in star wars…but…starship troopers is heinlein…& I guess they think hienlein is “one of theirs”** because of the whole he-was-kind-of-an-asshole + “stranger in a strange land” & all …but even the fucking book is nearly as clear about the fucked up effect of the hypothetical he was trying to base his whole “bit” on…in the society in the book you don’t have to serve in the miltary but if you don’t you don’t get a vote & you basically can’t hold office…I forget if you can own stuff or have your own business or other forms of civil “power” or if he fully went “go kill shit & maybe die or admit you just want to sponge off a state that gives you everything …the movie hams it up where the book was maybe more in earnest but it’s earned because the premise infers a society more like that depiction than whatever heinlein fondly imagined it might do to one of those…but…both that & star wars pretty overtly went with “bad guys dress like nazis” & I don’t care if hugo boss is still trendy…you want the US space force to be empire…really…you’re…the goddamned president of the actual united states of america & it’s a holiday weekend that became one of those specifically to try to get the working population to stop fucking with the one president who threw them that bone…&…this is your labor day weekend posting medley?

…how the fuck is this still a thing we can’t call something other than reality?

…sigh

…meanwhile…one of the people at the party was a guy I could chat to perfectly happily without anyone offending anyone who’d been an (R) guy in a statehouse in…wanna say massachusetts?

…you know those mythical republicans who were happy to call themselves that back before there was a tea party & you could disagree about stuff but they didn’t make you want to hate them or seem like they hated anybody much?

…at least one of those still walking the earth & capable of speech

…shouldn’t have let it go to my head…should have known there be some unbelievable bullshit waiting for me when I was back where my phone doesn’t lose sight of the online world…but…fucking nora…it’s a bit fucking much?

…hope you guys have had a good weekend & tomorrow gets to be relaxing…or at least more relaxing than not?

** – the most charitable thing I can say & which I’ll only say because you shouldn’t have to endure the way I don’t shut up if I pick up a less charitable line on it when it comes to who gets to wear what emblem or claim to fly under whose flag is that the ones who think the punisher wouldn’t see that like the sons of anarchy would that merch if they were a real set of those…would get by about as well in one of heinlein’s futures…or in the man’s company…as anyone wearing a full-patched cut or the matching ink for an outlaw biker crew with a sargent at arms & a charter & all that shit in the sort of bar that people who know those sorts of people go to…or…if karmic justice were an on-demand service in this reality…spaceXface would next time he makes a reference he thinks plays to *his* ego about a work by iain m banks

…or…how did terry put it that one time

If complete and utter chaos was lightning, then he’d be the sort to stand on a hilltop in a thunderstorm wearing wet copper armour and shouting ‘All gods are bastards!

…in a reality where you really could count on an angry god with a thunderbolt & an arm of legend to get a bit more deus *in* machina in the clutch?

…apologies to them as deserve them…time allowing I may yet offer some value of tokens by way of penance for my sins of the day

…but…old as it is even to my own ears

…this surfeit of half-baked bullshit showing a trace of less thought even than that

…I can say some people make more sense to me than others & some even seem to say some things it seems like it wouldn’t do so much harm if more people listened to

…some people can say some things to some audiences that maybe other audiences don’t hear that way

…anyway

…not even a little bit kidding when I say this could have so very much worse that the way you’re feeling about it right now would qualify handily for in fact being a case of *missing* a bullet…not taking one…hopefully either in the vest or some other part of you that they can shrug off in a scene (or sometimes just shot) transition on the big screen that even when it’s small enough to go in your pocket you can still fall into headfirst far enough to get lost in your own disaster pit before you stop calling what you’re doing having a good time free diving…but…not to keep going with any of the ones this one is sort of meaning when it says this part

…I don’t need to be why anyone that might do me the outrageous courtesy of reading this in a sense beyond pasting it into something that will purport to tell them what it could have said to them if they had more stamina than the insufficient portion I was assured my generation was issued with a deficit of…ought to wind up needing a lawyer on account of some shit I said because it happened to flit through my mind along with you’re-lucky-to-not-know-what-else…because…whatever value of internet that-asshole I might be…it is not the one with the necessary army of litigators in every relevant jurisdiction on retainer so it pays you to use ’em that gets you…the outcome I wouldn’t if I commenced to burning both boats & bridges & claiming it to be a bed of others’ making that justified…well…some frankly unspeakable shit happening to those that seem to be playing by vampire rules in karma’s mirror?

…seriously, reality…I ain’t no sam jackson…but…you way in the red on this shit

al pacino is in this lol

…ok…first off

Isn’t Catholic Batman just Daredevil

— Premium Steve (@premiumsteve.bsky.social) 2026-09-07T17:11:55.481Z

…yes

…& maybe this is just bullshit piled upon bullshit & an insult to the dignity of all involved…but

…it’s not even catholic batman…it’s like that’s the star wars empire outfit not really starship troopers’…kiefer isn’t doing a christian bale in that hat without the mask

…that’s a billy connolly, that is

…no cap…fr fr…et cetera &c. ad infinitum

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/assassination-chain

…see…person of interest…& around we go again because this shit never ends but I swear one of these days it’s bound to be the end of me?

…it’s just a meme…init?

…& to close the open bracket…that block quote that carries that ** bit before you get a shot of the good stuff from a dead horse I’ll be quoting to my grave if I’m any judge…that landed on meg & myo…about 5mins after I quit being in polite company…a little later into yesterday that we’ve come through today…while the rest of you were having a day of rest when I actually did give it a rest…so…I guess what I’m getting at might be that context & perspective are two different things but…even if generally more rather than less is helpful for one of them…perspective…is trickier?

…sometimes you don’t gotta swim with sharks or climb the mountain & hunker down on the steppe hoping you notice the snow leopard before the snow leopard notices you so you can finally return to civilization with the other kind of prize shot without getting all “bring ’em back alive” about it…because you got a big tv & that attenborough does a mean voice-over

…all the same…you also don’t got to be zarathustra to get that sometimes the view from up the mountain is worth the price of the hike & maybe worth sitting with a while even if you have a little trouble on re-entry to the valley below where life is easier…ask anyone who thought they knew what the grand canyon looked like & then actually went there

…that…whatever you call it or however you try to define it…the distinction in kind or quality or attribute to the knowledge you possess of what “the grand canyon” means before & after actually taking in the unmediated sight of the thing…be it from up on an edge looking down or from the raging waters looking up when you can without regretting it…or anyplace in between

…the same way we can’t spin up a thing with a substantive allegorical substitute for being able to “know in its bones” or whatever…as an embodied consciousness possessed of some level of self-awareness & capacity for genuine introspection if exercised that exists in relationship with the reality of the thing in several binding senses mediated through a sensory & nervous apparatus that we only really know a lot about compared to not compared to how much we understand about the stuff we use to understand stuff…however much we apparently manage to convince a recurrently troublesome proportion of successive generations that adopting a position that it not only isn’t but can’t be true that some things make us all human…or seem to want to persuade ourselves that something that we know lacks many of the capacities we take for granted in almost every interaction with other people we ever had unmediated by technology & probably more than we should of the other sort if we were less adept at possessing judgement about our judgement in our own subjective assessment within the enforced privacy of our own minds

…in…actually lots of ways that inconveniently it turns out logic dictates to be both pertinent & load-bearing in addition to not being satisfied by anything currently extant under the sobriquet of AI…it is “easier” in the sense of requiring significantly less exercise of thought…much less rigor…to…sigh…like the one guy with the zen of the art of motorcycle maintenance was seeming like he was reaching for when he put an upper case Q on it somewhat less anonymously…the stuff in the unexamined part of a process of…subconscious…or…background…unmonitored…balancing of assumptions to bake into the matrix you don’t have to…or…arguably…really in many ways have access to…even if you do try to think about them…which…makes some people’s heads hurt even if they aren’t already drinking when it comes up…before they/we/whoever-the-I-with-the-ID-that’s-got-an-id-is…show up for the show that’s the “conscious thought”…even the involuntary ones…but extra for the on purpose stuff

…the simulacra thereof…however pleasing or satisfying or even satisfactory for the given value of getting considered fit for purpose…it’s not a thing that is to itself what you are to yourself…the way you think has more in common with the way your pets think than the way the chatbot thinks…to an extent that makes thinking the term think is saying the same thing in both contexts is pretty much literally a category error

…this doesn’t mean that if you can find a way to do that at as low a real cost as they are desperately trying to keep selling it can both be to the not-nearly-enough-users-to-get-you-there already costing an appreciable fraction of all the available money &/or debt&credit in the socially-accepted-to-be-public-facing global economy…that what the stuff can do couldn’t be economically viable in the sense of providing value greater than its cost for some subset of purposes…or even that some overlap might exist between stuff that would be true of & stuff that does even use the transformer stuff with the “hallucinations” that are both bug & feature rather than turn out if you get into it to be more in the lineage of the machine learning that never made the leap to rockstar meme in a GTA world

…but…the parts of what it is being hawked *as* & who that pitch has been directed *at*…is…I dunno…if crypto getting to do NFTs instead of being made to grow up about being a means of exchange it made sense to think of like the ones we call legal tender was…annexing crimea…then Mag7-style attempts to be yul brynner about AI when they would need to un-pinnochio-themselves into real boys before they could even measure up to the three amigos or the cast of galaxy quest…would…I guess…be invading ukraine…while trying to be russia when you could be ukraine…& quite honestly I think it must be a near certainty that at least some of the people who think that they understand as much about it as they need to while still thinking that’s the smart play…& functionally *are* what popular parlance dubs “the money” & sometimes mistakes for “the markets” the way it forgets about the way institutional investment impacts those retirement funds until retiring to become a fundamentalist about regulating that shit until it actually is a guaranteed income you can live on until you quit doing that…are…for a curiously hollow but equally mundane in its lack of curiosity about itself value of either term…”true believers”

…I know I go on about being a fan of irony…& I smack talk reality enough that maybe I got it coming…but…a project to replace thought with outsourced thought-less-ness at scale for all the marbles around the mid-century curve on whatever pitch my life represents…hard to say whether it makes sense to have that be on the money, really

…fuck alone knows what it’d look like to see it get knocked out of the park

…but…I could do without the overtones of World™ Series vibe when I don’t even think the game on the field of play is rounders much less baseball anymore than I feel like most of the crowd is in the right ballpark or that a ballpark can contain the field in question or that calling it a game or a sport can be anything but an attempt to make it play by rules that don’t break your mind by reducing things to fit the space we can afford them in the mental real estate we have on hand given all the shit that gets crammed in there by all those waking hours

…maybe it’s true that you can’t fix it all so it’s all sunshine & rainbows & unicorns & we all live happily ever after…but…it literally doesn’t have to be the way it is or disaster with nothing in between even if you think those aren’t already suffering from an acute onset case of the identity of indiscernibles…like…in loads of ways that pertain to anything from stuff inside your head to stuff in or through the tech portals to the digital world of tomorrow in your pocket today…people…don’t have to live that way…they…just…ah…shit…oh, well…fuck it

…sometimes there is no dismount if you know you can’t land it & there’s a reason there ain’t no rehearsal?

…uhhh…close bracket]?