Immorality
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Can’t keep a secret?
The orange baby just blurted out the number of nuclear weapons possessed by North Korea. It’s fifty-seven, by the way. This seems more than a little off for several reasons: • It seems like the number of weapons an extremely hostile nation has might be a secret worth keeping.• How did we get this information?… Continue reading
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Look to the rigging
I spent many years paying fairly rudimentary attention to “the economy.” It was never an academic subject that interested me, and a lot of what I skimmed by and about economists seemed to me poorly reasoned nonsense. People studying and opining about the subject seemed to me to be particularly prone to directed reasoning; they… Continue reading
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War games
The US has been at war for 93% of its entire existence. Let’s just take the most recent ones. Korean War, 1950-1953. Two whole years of peace after that; an aberration. Then Vietnam, 1955-1975. A bit more peace, until invading Grenada for some reason in 1883, invading Panama in 1989, invading Iraq for some reason… Continue reading
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Juneteenth
Today is Juneteenth. Not everybody knows that the official title is Juneteenth National Independence Day. It’s the holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the US. Slavery was declared over by Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, but it took another two and a half years for the traitorous slavers to be defeated. That… Continue reading
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Why the Super A*sholes Are Ascendant
Robert Reich compared Musk with the orange baby, pointing out that “Both are maniacally obsessed with increasing their own personal wealth, power, and control.“ And “Both have been willing to break laws, norms, and other social constraints in pursuit of these goals. Both have manipulated, bribed, conned, robbed, and bullied their ways to dominance.” He… Continue reading
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Less than zero
Is “economics” the worst, most egregious example of nonsense claiming to be some sort of science? It might not quite as far afield as, say, “ufology,” “astrology,” or “numerology,” but I think that’s because those other pursuits are not taken seriously except by their adherents. As far as I know, you can’t study or earn… Continue reading
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Why do we keep doing this?
I don’t know if it’s a uniquely American thing, or maybe a uniquely human thing, but damn, we fall for scams. All the time. Maybe it’s an off-the-charts ability that a few people have that make them able to come up with what they know is a lie, and get everybody within earshot to believe… Continue reading
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Weaponization?
The orange baby and its henchpuppets are planning to pay the January 6 traitors on the basis of having been prosecuted by a “weaponized” department of justice at the direction of Joe Biden. But hang on a second. Let’s look at an actual example, the “QAnon Shaman.” You remember, that shirtless oddball who stood out… Continue reading
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Oh spare us. No, really, I mean it.
I just found Dario Amodei’s apologia The Adolescence of Technology, from back in January. It’s quite long; Claude must have used tons of tokens writing it for him. Amodei can, of course, afford it. His essay is chock full of hand waving dismissals of reservations reasonable people might have about large language models (and the… Continue reading
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Everything learns
I don’t think it’s true that the orange baby isn’t rational. The problem it has is what it has experienced its whole life and career: getting away with everything it tried, no matter what. In some way you could look at it (the o.b.) as simply a statistical outlier, like an astonishingly lengthy string of… Continue reading
About Me
I’m Pete Harbeson, a writer (among other things) located near Boston, Massachusetts. In addition to writing my own content, I’ve learned to translate for my loquacious and opinionated pup Chocolate Bossypaws. No surprise, she mostly speaks in doggerel. You can find her contributions tagged with Chocolatiana.
Check out my newsletter, Artisanal Scribbles, where I’m grappling with writing, authentic human authorship, integrity, and the craft of beauty in the AI age. You can also find some of my old software projects at GitHub. Nothing very impressive. I mostly wrote tiny utilities in Python and shell scripts. I’m mostly retired from coding nowadays.
I find myself suddenly de-corporatized (their choice, not mine). To help keep the lights on, buy me a coffee!
Recent Posts
- Where does power reside
- Can’t keep a secret?
- Look to the rigging
- Ocean’s 128GB
- How much is that doggie in the window?
Categories
Artificial Intelligence
Chocolatiana
Essays
History, sort of
Immorality
Incompetence
Quotations
Resistance
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Tales from the Forest
Technicalities
Tragedy
Unanticipated Consequences