7 Comments

1. …just…trying not to mess up the DOT?

   Wacky story in @ftm.eu this morning – apparently Musk's xAI has listed a random office block in Estonia as its Europe-wide contact address, and even the building owners hadn't heard a thing about it. http://www.ftm.eu/articles/elo...

   — Max von Thun (@maxvonthun.bsky.social) 2026-05-11T06:46:18.075Z

   Musk brings court case about OpenAI moving away from non profit status but correspondence shows he was in favour of doing this if ‘he was the controlling shareholder or allowed to merge it with his car company, Tesla.’ 👍www.ft.com/content/c68b…

   — Hetan Shah (@hetanshah.bsky.social) 2026-05-11T06:45:45.272Z

   @eryk.bsky.social has the right take on this: "On its own industrialization didn’t benefit the working class, workers demanding benefits is what benefited the working class!"Still, i can't help wondering how many in that room secretly use it.

   — René Walter (@rawx.bsky.social) 2026-05-11T06:19:26.864Z

   Is it possible to have 'sustainable AI'? If it was, it would be fundamentally unrecognisable compared to the system design being deployed by big tech today, which has inefficiency, waste, bloat and excess built in from the ground up. Was very nice to speak to Green Left Weekly for this interview

   — Ketan Joshi (@ketanjoshi.co) 2026-05-11T07:02:12.959Z

   …&…fuck it…while I’m bitching about stuff with an overlapping L in the topline

   Excellent piece by @sophiasgaler.bsky.social for @theguardian.com ahead of the release of her book, “How to Kill a Language”. When #languages die, we don’t just lose words, or sounds, or meaning – we lose culture, and knowledge, and, sadly, people.

   https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/may/10/what-happens-when-we-lose-a-language

   …but, hey…cloud…silver lining…that’s how you get navaho code-talkers so it’s more of a feature than a bug…you just gotta get your head in the game

   Kashmir has become a dense site of surveillance, where biometric systems, CCTV, and other technologies and policies shape everyday life. Tech Policy Press Fellow Petra Molnar speaks with a Kashmiri journalist who describes reporting under continuous monitoring, intimidation, and fear.

   — Tech Policy Press (@techpolicypress.bsky.social) 2026-05-11T03:54:00.425Z

   …but…bro…have you seen the RoI on palantir, bro?

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2. P.S.

   …just in case someone would have clicked on the clip more than the twice it would take me to play it from here?

   https://www.greenleft.org.au/2026/1453/analysis/green-left-show-84-ai-destroying-climate

   …should be the whole thing the clip comes out of…&…to sort of…not put words in the guy’s mouth so much as take his second thoughts out for a spin

   It occurred to me after listening back to my comments here how much 'sustainable AI' is like the electric hummer bsky.app/profile/keta…

   — Ketan Joshi (@ketanjoshi.co) 2026-05-11T10:26:30.107Z

   *cough*

   You can't make AI sustainable by improving its efficiency (EE). High efficiency is *required* to scale AI. If we were stuck at Intel 286 levels of energy efficiency, one ChatGPT inquiry would cost $10K~$100K and no one would use AI!It's Jevons Paradox on steroids!youtube.com/live/Lwn8kZv…

   — Dan Miller (@danmiller999.bsky.social) 2026-05-11T07:14:57.584Z

   …there…I think that got it out…maybe I’ll quit hacking for a bit & we can all pretend I don’t sound like I contracted something that’s probably either consumptive or contagious?

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3. Not to defend America or America’s tech overlords, because lol, hard fucking pass and all that, but the problem isn’t really geographical, it’s how do you build a system in which nobody has the power to turn it into a weapon? And who do you trust with that? So far we’ve found the answer is … uh … I’ll get back to you on that?

   Like I think the EU is doing far better on “Internet is a valuable but dangerous tool and we should treat it as such” but all it takes is a Hungary or a Brexit to set tens of millions of people back to square one and if it happens 30 feet to the left of this arbitrary line, alas, even if we wanted to make it our problem, it simply can’t be.

   I like the theory of a world court that could prosecute across national lines but also we tried that with war criminals and rich and connected countries simply don’t get punished (quelle surprise). If we can’t even send the Abu Graib torturers to the Hague, how can we expect Mark Zuckerberg to face international justice?

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   • …some begged questions beg others in return until they make a recursive cascade

     …ok…let me start over because that doesn’t sound like I’m agreeing with you?

     Not to defend America or America’s tech overlords, because lol, hard fucking pass and all that

     …notably you have two A values in your expression…but…despite what they told me in algebra…A₁≠A₂…not in the ways that…say…you would yourself be an example of Aₙ?

     …at that level of variable differentiation…I’d say we sail uncomfortably close to 1=2 the way the OG ruleset the rest of it is accreted over like a coral colony…but…n>millions by a couple of orders of magnitude…so…sort of butterfly’s wing territory on the big sweeping ripple effect on the chaos, no?

     the problem isn’t really geographical

     …right…but…it…went poorly for the templars when they ran the same play…in the end, I mean…went real great up to then…ditto the east india trading company…&…the stuff that made the west indies a confusing designation in the end…or that golden triangle thing…geometrically your triangle is a pretty load-tolerant polygon & all…in a bunch of ways you can put the corners almost wherever you like & the ways it holds up are the same in some usefully proportionate way, too

     it’s how do you build a system in which nobody has the power to turn it into a weapon?

     …also…this should be a system that puts all things within convenient reach of all people anywhere & let anyone speak to anyone or swap any kind of anything for anything…wherever either of those happen to be…at the order of “who can I call on this phone” but without anything not being a local call…& never get the lines crossed…but also it should be impossible for anyone from a government to a telco to the people that have to install & repair all the parts of it that you never touch to know anything you did or didn’t do on it or where you were when that happened at the same time as a bunch of other things happened that when all is said & done mean the place the thing was is the places where you personally are with more specificity than the targeting routines on a broadly autonomous drone for some reason there’s a government somewhere that hates you several hundred thousand bucks’ worth of a lot…or…knows you eat fish on fridays…whichever is scarier

     …& the only players at the table are ones that have to use chips or the numbers are too big to feel real

     who do you trust with that?

     …can we have box on the multiple choice for “I dunno – aliens maybe…with…like…Culture Mind tech…like…actually not this bullshit”?

     …otherwise I dunno man…shit seems proper built to never make sense to me

     Like I think the EU is doing far better on “Internet is a valuable but dangerous tool and we should treat it as such” but all it takes is a Hungary or a Brexit to set tens of millions of people back to square one and if it happens 30 feet to the left of this arbitrary line, alas, even if we wanted to make it our problem, it simply can’t be.

     …probably hard agree…but…can’t help feel like it’s a bit like the multiple-meanings-not-enough-terms problem all over the thing…not you…just the actual whole messy reality of it

     …what’s infrastructure…what’s a service…what does provision *mean*…or access…or rights or permissions…why is it so hard to not have to check to see if the wrapper to put a spirit level on your phone screen using the same thing that makes the GPS say it needs calibrating by waving the thing about like a mad person having some kind of a fit or trying to cast an incantation of some sort…despite access to the same component that is in no way confused…&…why would the spirit level need your geographic coordinates if it isn’t offering to be an altimeter that needs to cross-reference some stuff…& if the GPS bit is right there why do either need to ping somewhere that isn’t your phone the answer to all those values multiple times while you leave it there saying how level the playing field is?

     …well…the answer isn’t always google play services but on a pretty sizeable number of devices including a lot that it wasn’t that way on when they were purchased…it would be…because they did the SpaceX:xAI thing but for play services and location requests a while back now & if you want that app you posted to the store to kick anything your way…or…well…to have come from the store, basically…which…quite soon now they aim to do like the apple one & make the wall around the garden not really have gates to anyone else’s…so…even if you aren’t trying to get your microdose transactional high serving ads in your free app…meanwhile

     …I told you I’d have to wake them up…but…that’s just mean…eyes glazed over I can deal with…but audible snoring…I got feelings, too?

     I like the theory of a world court that could prosecute across national lines but also we tried that with war criminals and rich and connected countries simply don’t get punished (quelle surprise). If we can’t even send the Abu Graib torturers to the Hague, how can we expect Mark Zuckerberg to face international justice?

     …did we, tho?

     …I mean…the brits talk a lot of smack about how my unwritten constitution could beat your parchment like a dusty carpet with a magna carta

     …but…who gots a king getting paid out of taxes to be richer than thou?

     …post WWII as a historical paradigm has a ton of stuff going for it that maybe it doesn’t if not for some values of both “Great Britain” & “America”…give or take how touchy you want to get about the meaning of special in the relationship once the BFF wants in on their gilt-edged-gauche idea of the G like they gatsby…europe, too…hell…historically…even when the wall was still up in berlin it was a haven of peace & brotherly love on a comparative basis

     …&…like…I know the deepmind lot got a lot of investment because they made a thing that could outmove players as often as not when they were the best in world & the game was go

     …but if go represents anything it’s that a hard-to-get-simpler set of things in a there-are-hardly-any-rules-to-even-remember relationship…can still produce an emergent dynamic across the sum of the simple bits that is too complex to plausibly map all the potential permutations of…even if you happen to be someone or something that can do that if the game is chess…which…has more rules & lots of sorts of pieces so it seems like it ought to be harder

     …on the other hand…go is probably a bad example…outside of the one sort of move you get to make one of at a time in an orderly rotation…most of the ones AI is going to save us from by being better at are moves we don’t believe in anyway so it’s probably fine that the people making the ones that result in money behaving like it possesses specific gravity…aren’t really the part that’s killing us

     …I just need to watch less star trek & walk it off, I expect

     …but the annoying bastard that won’t shut up that lives in my head & makes the stuff it seems like I make you lot suffer look like a nice trip to the seaside for a picnic on a sunny day with no flying insects…sounds an awful lot like the ketan joshi bloke when he says the bit about how if you thought about what it would be if you did it the way that would be not all-the-parts-that-seem-bad while trying to have some good parts left to play with in case those were maybe going somewhere…you…would wind up with something bearing so little resemblance to the thing in play that it wouldn’t reasonably make sense to say there was a sort of thing that they could both be…&…it…makes me cranky…or…crank-ish, I guess

     …so…I try to make a habit of not talking *at* people about it as a matter of basic courtesy…but…systems under pressure need valves sometimes…so…it’s like a spin on “whistle while you work” really?

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4. Yeah my “it’s not geographical” is much less “don’t blame America” (do, please, feel free, I’ve got a list of places to start, etc.) and more “what then keeps your country’s tech elite from being exactly the same in 5-10 years?” Because we’ve already seen the answer is basically … nothing. And that’s true of all high-level corporate crime. I’d love for the Dems to sack up and say things like “We should break up Meta” less even specifically because of Meta/Facebook’s various crimes and Zuck’s general attitude and more as a [Thom Yorke voice] “this is what you’ll get.” But then they incorporate in the Cayman Islands and looks like financial crimes are back on the menu, boys! Or they speed-run what they did here i.e. get so big they can’t fail or be reined in by the government. It’s always easy to distrust the foreign company; it suddenly gets harder when it’s your homegrown success story.

   And no, you’re not wrong on The Hague. It was always for bad Asian/African dictators and never, ever for America or Israel. W should be doing his “cute” little paintings in a 8×8 cell right now. But that isn’t how “justice” works.

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   • …yeah…pretty much all of that

     …it’s…not that there isn’t sense to be made of it…& like you say it’s not even really a game you can say is ring-fenced to the states any more than the profits are when it’s time to make out the tax return…kind of where I was going with the crack about the templars…the other sort you could argue were proxies but the templars in a few ways sort of seemed like a proto-multinational that put the corps in corp even when it was maybe the only one

     …church perq’s without answering to rome…without needing to be the king of england to tell his holiness to take a hike…the wealth of a nation but beholden to none…& in a position to hang with the movers & shakers in a way the shakers never looked like being in danger of doing

     …sure…MAGA is like the dan brown version of opus dei…& there is a reality that has an opus dei…&…it might not be great that that’s a real thing…but also it’s not the bleedin’ templars, is it?

     …palantir…on the other hand

     …not to sound like I’m hitting the road to damascus to make “crusade” happen with an expectation of having a moment I can parlay into my 15mins…but…like…if chicago pope could go on ahead & squelch that?

     …how does the pretty lady in the catsuit put it in the movies where the bad guys lose…at least in the endgame?

     …it would go a long way to wiping out some of the red in that ledger

     …sounds about right, anyway…even if I don’t really think I mean the pope could make palantir’s house fall down like he was the big bad wolf & thiel was a straw-manlittle pig

     …there’s too many ways it’s infuriating to enumerate more than a few at once…but…the part that I think again is touched on in the stuff that joshi bloke isn’t joshing about is that “AI” in the hype-miracle sense that’s worth all this spend/build because of the there that’s somewhere nobody quite seems to point to but are very sure is because is *that* pervasive & all-encompassing in terms of where we’ll feel the difference…is specifically engineered for *in*-efficiency…even as the increased efficiency of the hardware & development side ups that sort…so more of the other sort is a non-linear scale for your resource/power demand…&…really a lot of that on a traffic basis is…made to incentivize using the *most* tokens to perform the *least* work…just…as a fundamental function…&…fully loads of the stuff people actually think they might find it useful for…a thing that’s arguably closer to the same thing than either is to “AI” like you find in a book where those are just “a thing”…could do that for them with basically no more traffic than regular web browsing if you just had the bits you’d actually find useful instead of whatever chrome filled several GBs of a folder you don’t see with full of something that supposedly puts gemini onboard for everything…without noticeably asking…for…probably not everyone that uses chrome…but…a decent chunk

     …the guy called it more like cryptocurrency than…something…on account of the inefficiency-baked-in-by-design thing…& makes the point that once you build the shitty gas-fired power plant to run the donald j trump centre for artificial thought or whatever it was called that seems to have folded like most of his “enterprises” have a habit of doing after a bunch of people get paid & it never really does the thing the money was “for”…still leaves a gas-fired power station looking for a grid hook up to wash its face with that wasn’t there before…so even if it’s true the people pointing sat-cams at sites say maybe 10% of all that shit is being actually built at present…& at least some of that goes the way of orange shit…or that colossus one that’s also got a dodgy power hook up that’s fucking with people that are a color he thinks people don’t come in that you need to think of as people…that he just got anthropic to pay him through instead of having to pretend he ever knew what grok was supposed to mean…& anywhere up to 90% of the additional fossil fuel collateral budget stays off the ledger…we aren’t not-using-more-of-that-faster-&-not-the-other-thing

     …nah…we set fire to oil reserves we were talking about not having the carbon budget to burn…so now the stuff in the ground we didn’t need because there were already more reserves than it made sense to run out of…is economic to extract

     …monkey smart like that

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     • Shorter me on “justice”:

       Historian of abolition here, history tells us how we got here, to put it succinctly “John Brown was hanged for treason and Robert E. Lee was not.”

       — Manisha Sinha (@profmsinha.bsky.social) 2026-05-11T13:59:13.406Z

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