Routine Revelations

Seems to me there ought to be one simple message broadcast large, wide, and far, and that is to not trust anything on X, the site formally known as Twitter. Nor trust Facebook, Instagram, or any other social network. If you read something that is making you angry, consider for a moment that is intentional to extract money and may nor not be based on fact. Either way, the best action to take is no reaction.

The epitome of a gray day.

Notice that the version of Feedland Dave is built to be hosted by Wordpress is at feedland.com.

Article recently published lists the metro Detroit intersections with the most crashes during 2022. I live near, and thus frequently drive through, numbers six and nine on the top ten list. Both of these intersections are rounds, which I like but note that nearly everyone drives through the rounds too quickly. If they really wanted to decrease the crashes at these points they would install cameras with automatic ticketing.

Apparently writing and maintaining a list of apps that one uses is a thing. Some folks are even publishing this info via RSS, although I am not sure that makes sense to me. A while back I created a page of technology that I use that has a section I call Every Day Apps that maps to this use case. I see that I never completed that list nor put in links, so perhaps I’ll spend some time updating.

I think this says that I am boring.

Is it just me, or does there seem to be server problems in micro.blog land today? Seems like external app access is available, I am able to access via lillihub.com but not the micro.blog domain.

Never before, in my life time, have I seen a person who ran for President of the United States and lost be nominated again by their party for the next election. Practically, once a person has proven to be a loser the power of the dollar moves on to a different person. In this context one can understand Trump’s continued insistence that he won the 2020 election, or at worst Biden stole it, for the sake of being relevant and gaining the money needed for him to run again. It appears many past Republican donors are holding out, probably because they really don’t want to waste their money on a loser. Pragmatically their decision will be on whether they become convinced Trump is the only person who can replace Biden, right now it appears they are not so sure.

I’ve come to the belief that religion may be the most dangerous of our instincts because of how it is used by those in power to gain and grow that power. Slavery was justified by religion. The Klu Klux Klan used religion to terrorize, Hitler used religion as the basis for genocide, and we see this cycle through out history onto the present. The “fight” over and the emergence of Artificial Intelligence is all about power, derived by wealth through religion. What I fear most about the religions of effective altruism and effective accelerationism is that their adherents are already extremely powerful, which makes them extremely dangerous. It’s not the technology of AI that scares me, it’s the people and the religion of those who seek to own it that scare me.

What OpenAI Shares With Scientology:

“The OpenAI saga is a fight between God and Money; between a quite peculiar quasi-religious movement, and a quite ordinary desire to make cold hard cash. You should probably be putting your bets on Money prevailing in whatever strange arrangement of forces is happening as Altman is beamed up into the Microsoft mothership. But we might not be all that better off in this particular case if the forces of God were to prevail, and the rationalists who toppled Altman were to win a surprising victory. They want to slow down AI, which is good, but for all sorts of weird reasons, which are unlikely to provide good solutions for the actual problems that AI generates. The important questions about AI are the ones that neither God or Mammon has particularly good answers for – but that’s a topic for future posts.”

The basis of my concern about AI and the saga that unfolded weeks ago is the knowledge that humans see the world in the simple binary of winners and losers; this is the true original sin that leads to the biblical story of Cain and Abel. The primary basis of our survival has been laws of restraint of our demons, but our demons fight against these laws and they are winning. Liberty is being taken from us out of sight and will close faster than we can react and without a shoot fired. We are simply unable to not do something, even if we can do it, and that will lead to our demise.

My first walk today was in the falling snow, the first of the season.

Have no fear…

I can’t help but feel that the big picture behind the OpenAI saga that occurred over the last fourteen days should be the recognition that the greed inherent in capitalism is dangerous and may ultimately lead to our undoing. We should remember that it is such greed that lead to the Great Depression, and even more recently to the 2008 financial crisis, and frankly is behind much of the current trend to move away from democracy in the United States. Our acceptance of the reality that it’s ok for people to profit off the suffering of others lead to big tobacco, the opioid crisis, and the continuing mass murders in the United States. I fear this will all continue so long as we continue to accept that the ends justify the means.

Finished reading: People of the Way by Kurt Struckmeyer 📚

I can’t be the only person to think that the Humane missed an opportunity when the designed the Ai Pin to be a square rather than something that looks more like the Star Trek communicator badge. Of course, one could stick to an OG flip phone / communicator. I wonder whether people will buy the Ai Pin, it seems too expensive to me.

Thunderstorms with 46 degree temperatures just doesn’t seem right, but yet that is what is going on outside right now.