In Austin… yesterday… during SXSW2025:
(L-R: Christopher Brown, Bruce Sterling, Himself, Jon Lebkowsky)
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And unnamed dog.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/12/epistemological-void/#do-your-own-research
[Fuckface] won office in part by insisting that America’s institutions were not fit for purpose. He wasn’t lying about that (for a change). The thing he was lying about was his desire to fix them. [Von Clownstick] doesn’t want honest refs – he wants no refs. To defeat [Clown]ism, we need to stop pretending that our institutions are just fine – we need to confront their failings head on and articulate a plan to fix them, rather than claiming “America was already great”:
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/13/electronic-whipping/#youre-next
The future is here, in Amazon warehouses, and every day, it’s getting closer to Amazon’s technical offices.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/15/altering-the-deal/#telescreen
The Echo is an internet-connected device that treats its owner as an adversary and is designed to facilitate over-the-air updates by the manufacturer that are adverse to the interests of the owner. Giving a manufacturer the power to downgrade a device after you’ve bought it, in a way you can’t roll back or defend against is an invitation to run the playbook of the Darth Vader MBA, in which the manufacturer replies to your outraged squawks with “I am altering the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further”
But how can this be legal? You bought an Echo and explicitly went into its settings to disable remote monitoring of the sounds in your home, and now Amazon – without your permission, against your express wishes – is going to start sending recordings from inside your house to its offices.
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My SIL offered to buy our kid one of the kid’s echo dots. To keep in her room and be able to talk to cousins long distance.
We politely declined.
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Book review.
https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/17/actual-malice/#happy-slapping
In taking on the libel-industrial complex – a network of shadowy, thin-skinned, wealthy litigation funders; crank academics; buck-chasing lawyer lickspittle sociopaths; and the most corrupt Supreme Court justice on the bench today – Enrich is wading into dangerous territory. After all, he’s reporting on people who’ve made it their life’s mission to financially destroy anyone who has the temerity to report on their misdeeds.
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The concept is valid, it’s just the implementation that is the problem. This seems approachable as a DIY project. With a few more iterations on something like this
I bet something could be created that is relatively easy to use, inexpensive, and privacy-respecting.
Building something on top of Meshtastic or similar could be interesting, but would be less straightforward due to bandwidth limitations and the relative scarcity of LoRaWAN as compared to the Internet.
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That implementation lacks robustness over longer distances, I’m afraid…
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And I’m not convinced of the privacy-respecting either, as someone who did in fact play with that set-up as a child.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete
AI can’t do your job, but an AI salesman (Elon Musk) can convince your boss (the USA) to fire you and replace you (a federal worker) with a chatbot that can’t do your job
ETA (cuz learned a new word! empahsis mine):
AIs want the future to be like the past, and AIs make the future like the past. If the training data is full of human bias, then the predictions will also be full of human bias, and then the outcomes will be full of human bias, and when those outcomes are copraphagically fed back into the training data, you get new, highly concentrated human/machine bias
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I have found many stray animals, mostly cats, wandering in my neighbourhood. I once had a dog come right to the front door, but the oddest was a homing pigeon on the front porch. I knew of two people in the area who owned them, but I wasn’t sure of the house numbers, so I put it in a box and went door to door asking people “Is this your pigeon?”. I finally located one of the the people, who grabbed the bird out of the box, looked at the leg tag and said; “This is one of Joe’s”. So I was able to return it. Turns out this was it’s first race, and it got a little lost; from the air, my house and yard resemble it’s coop and yard, but a block north.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/19/selling-out/#destroy-the-village-to-save-it
[Fuckface von Clownstick] and his fascist movement won’t let up on their assault against institutions that support free inquiry, care, justice and openness. Rolling over for them now will not keep you safe tomorrow. But with every betrayal, these institutions alienate more and more of the public, without whose support they are ultimately doomed. Supporters will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no supporters.
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https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/20/birchpunk/#cyberspace-is-everting
Book review.
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374615369/wheretheaxeisburied/
In Naylor’s world, we there are two blocs. “The west,” where the heads of state have been replaced with chatbots called “PMs.” These PMs propose policy to tame, rubberstamp legislatures, creating jobs programs, setting monetary and environmental policies, and ruling on other tricky areas where it’s nearly impossible to make everyone happy. These countries are said to be “rationalized,” and they are peaceful and moderately prosperous, and have finally tackled the seemingly intractable problems of decarbonization, extreme poverty, and political instability.
In “the Republic” – a thinly veiled version of Russia – the state is ruled by an immortal tyrant who periodically has his consciousness decanted into a blank body after his own body falls apart.
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