I wore the Apple Vision Pro. It’s the best headset demo ever.
The video passthrough was similarly impressive. It appeared with zero latency and was sharp, crisp and clear. I happily talked to others, walked around the room, and even took notes on my phone while wearing the headset — something I would never be able to do with something like the Meta Quest Pro.
‘The Machines We Have Now Are Not Conscious’
What we have with these LLMs isn’t low-level intelligence but rather high-level applied statistics that creates the powerful illusion of low-level intelligence.
I predict that in short order, our collective consciousnesses might become indistinguishable from “high-level applied statistics.”
Maybe we are just meat machines with anxiety.
What Happens After the Worst Happens?
Stories in nature are once-upon-a-time stories, with slow, winding plots and surprise twists that evolve in the telling and are never finished. Once upon a time, Mount St. Helens came as close as a mountain can get to earthly perfection. And then the worst happened. But the land never stopped telling its stories. Fortunately, there were people on the ground who knew how to listen, who could make sense of what they heard, who pondered its implications and understood that they were entrusted with knowledge of the most miraculous kind. They’ve been writing the sequel to the eruption for nearly four decades now and counting — trying to answer that crucial question, What happens after the worst happens?
Thought Cloning: Learning to Think while Acting by Imitating Human Thinking
Whoa.
The secret push to bury a weedkiller’s link to Parkinson’s disease
In another example of a company tactic, an outside lawyer hired by Syngenta to work with its scientists was asked to review and suggest edits on internal meeting minutes regarding paraquat safety. The lawyer pushed scientists to alter “problematic language” and scientific conclusions deemed “unhelpful” to the corporate defense of paraquat.
Syngenta’s decision to involve lawyers in the editing of its scientific reports and other communications in ways that downplayed concerning findings potentially related to public health is unacceptable, said Wendy Wagner, a law professor at the University of Texas who has served on several National Academies of Science committees. “Clearly the lawyers are involved in order to limit liability,” she said.
America. Where everything is for sale. Even you.
Watch brute force attacks in real time.
America Is Headed Toward Collapse
The long history of human society compiled in our database suggests that America’s current economy is so lucrative for the ruling elites that achieving fundamental reform might require a violent revolution. But we have reason for hope. It is not unprecedented for a ruling class—with adequate pressure from below—to allow for the nonviolent reversal of elite overproduction. But such an outcome requires elites to sacrifice their near-term self-interest for our long-term collective interests. At the moment, they don’t seem prepared to do that.
Will a Dollar General Ruin a Rural Crossroads?
Some say they recognize that the county needs tax revenue. “But are we going to sell our soul for anything that comes along?” said Bobby Conner, who grew up in Ebony and now works on tourism initiatives for Brunswick County.
Welcome to America, where everything is for sale.
Over Memorial Day weekend, nine people were killed with guns, and another fifty were injured.
Chicago is my home city. I grew up going to the Loop on weekends. Hell, I learned to drive on the Dan Ryan. What’s happening there is heartbreaking.
(Be warned: the map is difficult to use on mobile.)
Notes apps are where ideas go to die. And that’s good.
That’s the true value of notebooks, notes apps, bookmarking tools, and everything else built to help us remember. They’re insurance for ideas. They let us forget.
Weblogs, too.
Reddit announces new API pricing
The end of an era, and perhaps the end of my time spent on Reddit. Third-party apps like Apollo made Reddit a joy to use, unlike their first-party app. If Apollo disappears, so do I.
A.I. Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn
Some skeptics argue that A.I. technology is still too immature to pose an existential threat. When it comes to today’s A.I. systems, they worry more about short-term problems, such as biased and incorrect responses, than longer-term dangers.
But others have argued that A.I. is improving so rapidly that it has already surpassed human-level performance in some areas, and it will soon surpass it in others. They say the technology has showed signs of advanced capabilities and understanding, giving rise to fears that “artificial general intelligence,” or A.G.I., a type of artificial intelligence that can match or exceed human-level performance at a wide variety of tasks, may not be far-off.
This just isn’t a path humanity needs to go down. What is it with us humans? Why can’t we stop? What motivates us to do this shit?
Maybe you think our self-destruction isn’t inevitable, but deep in my gut, that feels naive and ignorant of human nature.
Is there a word for the feeling of being deeply ashamed of my species, yet complicit in some of our worst behaviors? That shame, that fear of what feels inevitable, undergirds my entire life and has since I was an adolescent. I describe it as the awareness we’re all tethered together and collectively running toward a cliff, yet most everyone seems not to see the edge. A few of us are trying to slow down — we see what’s coming — but we can’t stop the lot of us.
I want us to slow down. I want to not wake up each morning with this itch behind my eyes, this breathlessness in my gut, this primal suspicion that we’re all fucking ourselves.
Again and again, the phrase that comes to mind is “it doesn’t have to be this way.” And yet it feels inevitable.
Make it make sense.
Siobhan Roy might be horribly selfish, emotionally stunted, and out of her league, but I’m still rooting for her.
Some people are just too nice, and they wreck the relationships. They think, “Oh, it’s not a big deal, it’s just one little thing, not worth having a big argument about it. I’ll just give in.” Well, that seems generous, but it’s a really bad idea. You have to ask yourself, “Are you really, completely, 100% over this? You’re giving in? No animosity? You’re not secretly hoping that maybe they’ll do something for you in return or a little behavior change here or there?”
No one would ever accuse me of being “too nice,” but I am guilty of this, mainly out of fear of being considered petty.
Driver’s Licenses, Addresses, Photos: Inside How TikTok Shares User Data
Poll: 61% of Americans say AI threatens humanity’s future
The poll also revealed a political divide in perceptions of AI, with 70 percent of Donald Trump voters expressing greater concern about AI versus 60 percent of Joe Biden voters. Regarding religious beliefs, evangelical Christians were more likely to “strongly agree” that AI poses risks to human civilization, at 32 percent, compared to 24 percent of non-evangelical Christians.
Strange bedfellows.
Tomorrow afternoon, I have to put down one of my dogs. I'm heartbroken, which is no surprise. I've had him for sixteen months, though shortly after I adopted him, I was told that he had between two and six left. I had been volunteering at the shelter where the manager kept him behind the front desk — the spot for special animals that don't deserve the frazzled nerves of being back in the kennels. As we left for a walk, we stopped at my car for a leash and he propped his two front feet up on the runner. I knew then and there.
An elderly man with mobility issues, he could never jump, but he's done a damn good job of using his front legs to compensate. For much of our first year, he would pull himself up the steep stairs of my 130-year-old home, insistent on sleeping upstairs. (I didn't protest.) I would lift his front legs onto the bed, then run my hands along his sides and down his back legs, grabbing his back ankles and lifting those into bed, too.
Shortly before I adopted him, he had surgery to remove eight or so tumors growing in his body. Shortly after I brought him home, an x-ray showed a grapefruit-sized tumor growing under his intestine and the vet said he likely had only a few months left. Almost since the beginning, I've been preparing for death.
The last sixteen months haven't been easy. He's a 14-or-15-year-old dog with mobility issues, which means he wasn't able to come hiking with me and my other dog. The two of us would venture out only for the day, always sure to be home to hang out with Vito. He forced me to compromise, to grow up a little. It was brutally hot for several weeks last summer, and I did something I had long been morally opposed to: bought an air conditioner. Anything for that dog.
After many months of him being relatively mobile, his back hips started to get worse. I decided to let him sleep downstairs on his heated bed, and I put a gate up at the stairs to make sure my other kept him company. I did my best to cover my wood floors with something to make it easier for him to walk. I bought traction socks. He takes pain medication each night, usually wrapped in some lunch meat.
But time takes its toll. The grapefruit is now a football. He no longer stands at the window and barks at the neighbors as he once did incessantly. He can no longer control his bowels, so he goes when he needs to. (This hasn't be a problem as it's easy enough to clean up.) His back left leg goes out if he stands too long while eating or getting a drink. His dark skin is beginning to show as his soft winter undercoat has started shedding. A few days ago, I came home to him collapsed by the back door, unable to get up.
I know it's time, yet I'm unprepared. How am I unprepared?
I've been preparing for this for the last sixteen months. I've been emotionally on edge most of that time, if I'm honest, and I'm exhausted by it. My life has radically changed — my world gotten much smaller, more contained — because of him. In the literal sense, he's been a labor of love.
Now it's time to send him on his way. To put him down. To have him killed. To let him die.
I called the vet yesterday and scheduled it for tomorrow. Now that I have, I'm both relieved and anxious, sure that I'm doing the right thing punctuated by moments of doubt. His eyes haven't changed since the day we met and he's every bit as "in there" as he was 16 months ago. Yet his body is giving out, his breathing labored. He's tired.
I wonder what his life was like before me, all those 13 years. I was told a story about his past, though I presume much of it is apocryphal (as stories in small towns like these tend to be). Did he seem so thankful to be home with us because he had been neglected, abused? On the eve of our last day together, I want him to lay next to me and tell me his life story.
He has been such a good friend. I'm going to feel lost without him.
Rather than doing the thing we want, neoliberal economists insist we must unleash “markets” to solve the problems, by “creating incentives.” That may sound like a recipe for a small state, but in practice, “creating incentives” often involves building huge bureaucracies to “keep the incentives aligned” (that is, to prevent private firms from ripping off public agencies).
This is how we get “solutions” that fail catastrophically.
She’s fast becoming my favorite writer.
Online age verification is coming, and privacy is on the chopping block
Google’s new Magic Editor pushes us toward AI-perfected fakery
The McMansion as harbinger of the American apocalypse
In the wake of the recession, the United States declined the opportunity to meaningfully transform the financial system on which our way of life is based. The breach was patched with taxpayer money, the system was restored, and we resumed our previous trajectory. The McMansion survived what could have been an existential crisis; it remains an unimpeachable symbol of having “made it” in a world where advancement is still measured in ostentation.
One day we will look at five-thousand-square-foot McMansions and Hummers and desert golf courses the same way we look now at thalidomide: a ginormous fuck up. That’s assuming we manage to plan for the future and come through a political fight antithetical to the mortal coil of capitalism: late, fossil, or otherwise.