journal Archives - Page 6 of 13

2024-03-19

Listened: Black Box: Prologue: The collision
- Woman begins dating an AI, finds genuine positivity from it. She suffers from CFS/ME and has to shield from COVID. Presenter talks about ‘AI vertigo’ – dizziness is what is coming with AI. The ‘collision’ of the title refers to the collision between artificial intelligence and us humans. We being the first generations to truly experience it.
Listened: Black Box: Episode one – The connectionists
- Potted history of AI. Perceptron. AI winter. Geoff Hinton. The connectionists. ImageNet victory by AlexNet. AlphaGo.
Listened: Black Box: Episode three – Repocalypse now
- Replika, the AI companion app. What happens when they update it and mess up people’s companions. A bit like site deaths but even worse.

Read: The digital revolution has failed
- “as the web declines, we need to consider what a better alternative could look like and the political project it would fit within”
- Right on. That would be digital ecosocialism in my view.
Generative AI has a ferocious environmental impact.
Generative AI is further concentrating power with Big Tech.
Watched: Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain
- Shocking, the violence that was meted out by the police on picketing miners. Seemingly premeditated.
- Then perjury.
- All seemingly coming directly from the wishes of Margaret Thatcher.
- The media apparently complicit, a piece of state apparatus.

Listened: Medium Anxiety
Listened: How an infamous ransomware gang found itself hacked
- Fun story.
- Ransomware.
- I did not know that WannaCry was by the North Korean state.
Listened: What do the Tories consider extreme?
Distributed digital gardens.
Watched: Ant-Man.
I can’t seem to find an IRC bouncer that you can easily install on YunoHost…

What would AI for the people look like?
- My biggest problem with AI are its environmental impact and the fact that it is in the hands of a cabal of big tech firms using it to turn a profit.
- Is there a way it could be retained? Publicly owned, democratically governed, socially useful, and existing within planetary boundaries?
Watched: Miners’ Strike 1984: The Battle For Britain
- Episode 2. Focuses on the Battle of Orgreave.
- Police brutality. State violence.
Read: A Modern Anarchism (Part 1): Anarchist Analysis

Listened: How to talk about avoiding waste, with Keep Britain Tidy
- Most people think recycling is all you need to do to prevent waste.
- Reframe the message and move people’s consciousness up the waste hierarchy.
- Buy Nothing New Month.
- Really interesting discussion around societal norms and reuse (e.g. what happens when you give second-hand presents at kids’ birthday parties…)

Kickstarted the spacemacs / spacemacs packages update dance.
- Because of the error “Invalid type in command series” from org-super-agenda.
- As always, kind of wish I hadn’t. Updating spacemacs 2024-03-12.
I created a quick function to help extract bold sections from text into bullet points.
- Most narrative text is usually just verbose prose around a few relevant points.
- So when I’m parsing some text, I bold the relevant bits.
- Then I pull those out to review them as bullets.
- This function helps quickly pull the bold text into bullets.
- Love the fact you can so easily configure Emacs to do this kind of thing!

Listened: Brian Merchant, “Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech”
Spam.
- Our website is experiencing an uptick in spam over the last few days.
- Incredibly irritating.
- With comments like 1*if(now()=sysdate(),sleep(15),0).
- We have Akismet and a honepot enabled. Adding a very noddy manual captcha (e.g. 4+8 = ?) helps. But if it continues, we’ll probably have to enable ReCaptcha. Which I’d prefer to avoid if possible.
- Seemingly emanating from the same IP address.
- The host lists an abuse@ address. But when I contact that address, the mailbox is reported as being full