I been noticing more smarter AI in customer service these days.

A recent example: I docked my BIXI but the thing glitched and the ride didn't terminate. I only realized when I tried to get my next bike out.

In the past when this happened to me, I just called up BIXI support, went through a short phone menu, and explained the situation to someone on the phone. They verified my identity and manually terminated the ride so I could go on my way.

Basically, the ideal phone-based customer support experience. The wait wasn't long, the procedure was efficient, each step made sense, and it solved my problem.

This time, the app prompted me to ask for support via "chat" first. Historically, this could have meant all sorts of things: a naive keyword recognition program that would recommend FAQ entries to me; a tech support worker from a country with a low median wage pasting in responses from a script, 5 tickets at a time; occasionally, the type of person I'd been talking to on the phone, but over text.

This time, it was some sort of LLM. It dynamically and patiently walked me through the identification and triage process. It handled my typos and information I sent bit-by-bit.

Eventually, it concluded the issue needed human involvement. Presumably at the end of its instructions it has a "If asking the customer to jiggle the bike doesn't fix the problem, request that they phone a human." part of its prompt.

This was fine. The trouble was that I then had to do all the same stuff with the human. The same identification process, the same identification of the nearest street intersection, the same bike jiggling. Finally, the human terminated my ride.

It would clearly be better if I could call the human and have them say "I see you've already gone through all the steps with our AI. I'm going to unlock the bike now."

Better yet (though not something BIXI alone can implement), identifying myself is done via a two-factor prompt on my phone (get on this, governments!) and I can use text-to-speech to compose my messages to the AI. Maybe we'll even eventually find them reliable enough to let LLMs terminate rides themselves!

As it stands, the experience feels like costs are being cut. It doesn't need to. Automated customer support could be faster, cheaper, and more convenient than the best phone support I've had.

I'm still skeptical of this future. The companies that have already automated as much of their customer support as humanly possible are miserable to deal with, even though in a sense I'm grateful for the downward pressure they put on prices. These are typically companies of enormous scale. The BIXIs of the world might be able to take a different path.

A lot of people on Mastodon are there because they believe decentralized and open-source techologies are essential tools for resisting coercive power. The fediverse is innately resilient to censorship, advertising, and hostile takeovers.

For these reasons, I made the switch from twitter sometime in the early 2020s, but I think it's important to remind ourselves that these virtuous properties are not a panacea to all the ills of social media.

It doesn't matter whose database the posts exist in: we can all still be ragebaited. It's a fundamental vulnerability of our psychology, with or without Elon Musk intentionally exploiting it.

I've maintained for a long time that the good part of Mastodon is that it's kind of shit by default. You have to put quite a bit of effort into finding people to follow and tweaking your settings to get it to surface a lot of interesting content. I haven't done this. I follow a few randos and some bots that post clipart.

I like the fact that when I check the fridge¹, there's just the same head of cabbage that was there last I checked. Paradoxically, the better Mastodon gets, the more I'll check it, the less good for me it will be.

Recently, someone I follow started boosting posts I found to be confidently wrong. I started getting emotionally invested in the thoughts of complete strangers. Getting provoked. I wanted to write replies to correct their misconceptions.

I've mostly been able to resist: it would not change anyone's mind. It would take a lot of time. I would get even more emotionally preoccupied by a hamster wheel.

Instead, I think I'll employ another cool thing about open-source technology: you can usually adapt it in ways to suit your needs². I can filter this person's boosts and hopefully that will be sufficient.

But there's a tension here. For the structural factors outlined in the introduction, I want the fediverse to grow. For it to grow, it needs to attract users that aren't already sold on the structural selling points - it needs to be better. For it to be better, if we optimize for engagement, it could easily become worse.

A ragebaiting machine that people can tinker with is still better than one they're forced to use, but I will maintain my wary distance in either case.

An honest answer is “all kinds,” but that’s also an annoying answer because then you are stuck wondering

“So is this guy a music fan or is he just undiscerning?”

I think a better answer is to say something like

“When I was a teenager I became obsessed with music and that’s never really changed. I liked Queens of the Stone Age and a math rock band called Hella. Now I listen to all sorts of things. I’ve been listening a lot to a folk musician named Hannah Frances recently.”

There. That gives lots of threads to whichever son of a bitch that’s trying to get to know me.

But the honest answer is also interesting to me, because as a teenager, I wasn’t as omnivorous as I am now. I once had a stronger sense that there was music I didn’t like, and it was important to signal as much.

It also felt important to recite genres in the way I’d learned to monastically catalogue them.

“Oh, you know, avant-garde hip hop, breakcore, tuvan throat singing.”

Reflecting on this, I think I was genuinely hopeful that people would continue to want to talk about music with me after responding in such a way. I just didn’t realize how pretentious it sounded (or maybe I did and I was simply a snobbish scoundrel.)

What’s changed?

For one, I don’t need my taste in music to make me feel unique among my peers. I moved to a country far away so now I’m unique for free!

I’m also just a lot more eager to find things to appreciate in any particular piece of music. Not because of some striving-patrician insecurity, but a curiosity about what it’s doing and how. Being a musician is a gift in that way. I love listening to music with someone and pointing out little details in the composition, arrangement, or production that make the music special.

That’s not to say I’ve obtained aesthetic enlightenment and love all music equally. Plenty of tunes I encounter make me go “Hm, kinda boring,” but I take that as a skill and/or effort issue instead of a reason to look down on it.

Is this all just some subtler flex? Some more impressive sensitivity? I don’t fucken know, man. I’ve been listening to Hannah Frances a lot lately. All kinds. There’s so much music to love.

There's nothing new to say in any of these "Americans Can't Read" pieces, yet still I read them with morbid fascination.

To zoom through the typical argument: if you count subtitled TikToks and Temu product descriptions, everyone still reads. It's just the novels and newspapers that are suffering. A literary elite reads more than ever thanks to e-readers and substack, but the global median trends downward. This is bad for our brains and our university professors' sanity, and portends a post-literate, thoughtless society.

If we've passed peak literacy, we're still literate enough to consider this a universal problem. We still hold in our minds the idea that everyone ought to read, and ought to enjoy novels, and that this grants capabilities valuable for the flourishing of the society we want to live in.

I note that there's a blindspot here. The counterfactual world where we felt this same way about maths, or computer programming, or herbalism, or animal tracking. I suspect there are few New Yorker writers who know how to program, so there aren't as many eulogies for this atrophying human capability, even though I have no doubts they would be accompanied by their own alarming neuroscience and test score crashes.

We don't often mourn the loss of a capability we never developed. Sometimes people regret not learning an instrument as a kid, but it rarely feels salient day-to-day that I'm lacking in appreciation for the abstract mathematical brilliance undergirding reality.

This is probably true of any intellectual specialization. Statisticians, musicians, physicists, mathematicians, historians, doctors - if I had to guess, they're all concerned by the second-order effects of thought delegation - it's just that reading & writing were once universal enough to be considered foundational for liberal society in a way that understanding physics never has been.

I'm not yet sure what to make of this. It's just something I try to keep in mind as we hem and haw about the future: there are selection effects at play to the crises we're concerned about, and loss aversion is a powerful cognitive bias.

Did you know that Fenix has started pretending that he speaks with a British accent because people said RUBBERZ sounded like a song by The Smiths? At one point in the Channel 5 interview, AI music booster Timbaland calls him up to strike a deal and he responds with an I'm Br-ish innit accent like he's Ali G from the mirror universe.^🇬🇧

This shameless opportunist is unwittingly creating Brass Eye in real life, a kind of performance art so deep that the creator isn't even conscious of it.

I'm fascinated.

AI and creativity

A week ago, I saw an experiment conducted with LLMs and generative video models. Each LLM was given a budget and told to make a music video for Bruno Mars' Uptown Funk. Cue four rounds of uninspired slop: hyper-saturated and clean, oneiric details that collapse upon inspection, never showing the same thing twice. To the extent that the directorial philosophy of these models shines through, it's "interpret the lyrics as literally as possible, every single shot."^📈

Fenix Flexin is the inversion of this experiment. A human-made music video for an AI-made song - the WAY better direction. For one, it's less exhausting to watch a video that has object permanence. For two, an actual human then has to make the stupidest lie on camera over and over.

Why can't he admit it? Because eating crow would be embarrassing. His biggest song ever was written entirely by AI. He struck gold by accident and has no talent. What he does have is some special blend of unconsciousness and hustle steering him down this path that goes nowhere good. Either he makes more AI music, which will expose him and not be as good as RUBBERZ. Or he makes his own music, which will expose him and not be as good as RUBBERZ.

In the meantime, man, so funny.

It's clear to me that we're on the cusp of a new genre of aesthetic achievements. I continue to support and admire artists who avoid touching AI in any shape or form, but they will in some sense be doing more of the same. Those that use it, or are in conversation with it, or are caught cheating with it will be doing the thing that I think will get more attention in the proverbial history books^📚 decades from now.

And so in 2026 came Fenix Flexin. In an era of bullshitters and brainrot, he won a race of sorts by crossing the lines of cheating, grift, microcelebrity, propaganda and hyperreality all into one enormous knot beyond his understanding. The marketplace of ideas had completed its transformation into a casino.

There's a viral tiktok song called RUBBERZ that is clearly generated by some low-rent generative audio model, presumably via the prompt "drake + pina colada song", where the artist behind it gave the most obvious lipsync ever to prove that the song isn't AI. He then did an interview with Andrew Callaghan where he atonally butchered his own lyrics.

It's like the whole world is getting Boratted except everyone can see through it and his brazen refusal to admit that he's lying only intensifies the spectacle.

This is the unholy dynamic powering much of the attention economy. Louis Theroux also studied it in his Manosphere documentary: the most shameless attention-maximizers can succeed because the algorithm lacks any ethical filter. As long as it's not illegal (or too close to kink), whatever captures people's attention is fair game.^🧊

I'm not plugged in enough to know if this is a tiny blip in the ocean of otherwise forgiveable content, or one bubble in a frothy wave of AI slop that is destroying our ability to understand reality. One data point is that comments left prior to @medasin's exposé seemed to earnestly enjoy Fenix Flexin's masterpiece:

So unless youtube comments are more of a dead internet ant nest than I want to believe, I worry for our illiterate and bamboozled teenagers.

This shit is straight out of the 80s and 70s 😂

As I always say, maybe it's fine. My generation had Friday by Rebecca Black and MLG memes and we're only somewhat fried and responsible for things like the current US administration.

There's something to the song: the fucked up metre, the vaporous clichés, the out-of-genre adlibs that Fenix actually ad'd himself.

Plastic smiles on Sunset Boulevard

Livin' fast and playin' every card

Broken hearts and bitter bills

Swallowin' these jagged little pills

Your messages are floodin' in (Floodin' in)

Thinkin' that you're gonna win (Gon' win)

I just let the rubber band snap

The Ouija board jelly-bean-guessing-game that is The Algorithm discovered something novel. Something ineffably noteworthy. It's given this rando his zero point five seconds of fame for it and will spit him out again shortly, giving all of us one more broken ceramic shard to make our mosaics of the 2020s with.

If it's not already happening, I won't be surprised when people start making art that intentionally emulates AI slop to argue that actually it's significant and interesting that a large fraction of people now think that the main thing about the 70s and 80s — two decades of complex, vivid, horrible and joyous human existence — is that they had particular cameras and instruments.

Klara and the Sun is a novel written through the compound eyes of a constitutionally ingenuous artificial intelligence. I inhaled it in a few days and have been pondering its questions on love, faith, contingency, and authenticity since.

I recommend it! But this post is about an aspect of the story that its author, Kazuo Ishiguro, chose not to interrogate very deeply.

Why will robots and renewable energy not massively improve our quality of life?

I can think of some reasons: climate-induced systems collapse, great power conflict, bioweapons, wealth concentration, various Yudkowskyian misalignments. These are plausible reasons, yet it often feels like the prevailing meta-reason underpinning it all is "because it would be inconvenient to the story that I want to tell." In Klara, this presents as a Nondescript Humanity Failure Mode. Gestured at, tastefully implied, a bullet unbitten.^🦷

Authors, I get it. We need our narratives to have conflict and adversity. Material prosperity deflates the stakes. But if we're uncritical about this bias, we overrepresent the bad outcomes and instill unjustified fatalism and declinism in the culture.

Look at The Pudding's excellent piece on the science fiction trends of the century.^🍮

We're in the Scared Straight! era of our collective imagination. The future is so potentially bad, the systemic forces so overpowering, we have to use every opportunity we have to show people how fucked-up Australia might become.

I don't think these fears are unfounded — they have a basis in our material reality — we're just overselling them. And so my fear is that we internalize this pessimism so deeply that even when a story isn't expressly concerning one of the plausible hazards of the twenty-first century, our writers backdrop them by default, and we ourselves reject the fiction if they're not there.^🐧

If you want to tell a story set in the future, why not show some of the possible nice things that could happen? Black Mirror does this a little, but almost always in a way that says the nice thing is clearly not worth it.

I want a White Mirror. A stage for exploring the problems we might face if things go okay.^🖖

For instance, to my bolded question, you might respond "automating human survival" is not flourishing. A world wherein no one has to work will be filled with ennui. Great! Show me that story. Show me how you think there's more to humanity than defiantly trudging through ashes.

Show me what happens in an immortal society if someone chooses to die. What do you do if your lover wants to completely change how they look? How does a democratic group of people decide how and whether they can eliminate an invasive species? What happens to linguistics once we all speak the same language?

Treat the future with curiosity. Reject scarcity and cruelty as the sole sources of drama. I sincerely believe it's possible to do without being didactic or propagandizing, and if done well, paradoxically, it might inspire us to actually bring it about.

Beyond its crux, the flippancy with which The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas' narrator invents the city is the most distinctive aspect of the story to me. There's a reading where the suffering child is optional - only necessary if you can't buy the first two and a half pages - because the narrator is only negotiating with our suspension of disbelief, not telling us about a place that Really Exists.

In that way, if you can imagine or accept that this miraculous little city could exist without need of suffering, without any catch, then the child doesn't exist. It's only if you read on (because of zero-sum thinking or narrative necessity or the fact that it's a story and the point is to read on past rhetorical invitations not to) that the child is placed in the cellar.

Conditional on the child existing, within that world, there are those that walk away, some of whom presumably envision a better, more just city free of sacrificial eight-year-olds. You like to imagine you'd be one of these people.

But they're only doing that because you, the recipient of this parable, prefer to accept that arrangement than the one where there are no strings attached.

It's a metafictional knot. How this reading influences my interpretation of what the story is saying we ought to do, I have no idea. I'm surely missing context on Le Guin's apparent exasperation with whoever her contemporaries were that considered Good Art to explore suffering and Bad Art to depict flourishing ("treason of the artist", "bland utopians", etc) but that seems pretty important here. Of course, historically, one innocent child suffering for all our salvation has been considered a pretty good deal.

I guess it changes one of the stories takeaways from "refuse utilitarian bargains" to something more like "repair the imaginative failure that made the bargain seem necessary."

I watched the TV show Plur1bus recently.

Most of my feedback for Plur1bus would make it a worse TV show.

Carol shouldn't be a Mary Sue. The show shouldn't be a platonic dialogue. Players optimize the fun out of their games.^💦

But we're on the cusp of new forms of entertainment that can provide alternatives to having to accept this blindly.

As you may know, I have a fascination with the idea of Superman. What if I used Claude as a savant scriptwriter whose quill can scratch my counterfactual itches?

Claude responds with gusto, immediately setting a scene like an experienced GM:

I tried to abduct the world's leaders and cajole them into reforming the world. It didn't go well. Everyone protested and co-ordinated to sabotage my attempts to make the world better for them. Russia threatened to self-nuke its cities if I abducted Putin. It was pretty intense.^⚖️

The second attempt I tried to be more diplomatic, but it still got stuck on "you are using your might to force humanity to do something and that is SO wrong that we won't cooperate."

The third attempt, my most successful, centered a citizen's assembly formed by the bystanders who witnessed me crash land in New York and stop a bus from crashing.

Its improvised cast was comically archetypal - a cop, a nurse, a student, a teamster, a journalist, a finance bro, a lobbyist, a veteran.

I'm still "playing it", but so far, Claude has been a lot more cooperative and hasn't escalated its pushback into full-on global resistance. Maybe because it's harder for it to disagree with itself, or maybe it really has tamped my tyrannical instincts. W alignment.

There's at least two games going on. One is the simulation, the "play to find out what happens" part. Another is the metagame with Claude, getting it to play along in the way I want, without telling it what to do in a way that spoils the fun.

It reminds me of being a child, where these two games were being played quite unconsciously. I'd be playing House, as Dad, and tell Child to go to bed, and they would. But they reserved the right to break kayfabe when the game was feeling unfun for them and suggest changes to the rules at any point.

It also just lets me nerd out super indulgently. I get to pretend to be Superman, doing a roleplay with a journalist who's explaining to me why I'll need media training. I ask her to give me an example that the press will hit me with and she asks me a tough compound question laced with gotchas. I get to write a laughably earnest and not at all alien-from-another-planet attempt at answering it.

It's not winning an Emmy, every character sounds identically unreal, but it resolves the common nitpick I have with TV - "Oh come on, it wouldn't happen like that. Reality would be way more boring and technical." With this, I'm finding out that, yeah, reality is boring and technical, but it can be more boring and technical than most TV and still highly entertaining to me.

I don't know if I'd actually enjoy reading anyone else's version of this. It's a bit like reading a dream, and a bit like reading self-indulgent worldbuilding. Even re-reading my own, once it's thousands of words long. Eh.

The key thing is the agency in each prompt as you're playing it. The ability to draft a response and to take it wherever I want.

The other key thing is that this technology is the worst it'll ever be. We're in the > Go North era of video games, so even if this doesn't yet appeal to you, it might when it's fully-rendered, sophisticated and infinite.

I checked out Twitter for the first time in ages to see if anyone had been finding anything in the Epstein files

Which, holy shit.

I'd heard journalists describe twitter as the place where narratives hatch, but it was surreal seeing the process happen so quickly.

Scrolling deeper and deeper down, I was hypnotized, feeling like I was wrapping my own red yarn around thumbtacked headshots, drawing my own connections as to what it all meant.^👨‍🍼

Little did I know, it's conspiracy all the way down.

Underneath any high traction tweet I saw, there would inevitably be 3 or 4 replies running interference on its narrative. One would discredit it. One would downplay it. One would distract from it. It's clear there's a bot campaign trying to astroturf the cycle, and whoever's behind it is trying to impede democracy.

Later in the week, on a YouTube video about changing the clawback mechanics for canada's old age security pension, someone claiming to have worked their whole life for their pension had left a much-upvoted comment that was opposed to the idea. I replied pointing out it would only apply to people over 65 earning more than 100k a year. There was some more back and forth - the research took me maybe 20 minutes. Once my replies started getting upvoted, the OP deleted the post and everything went away.

There's no way to verify this, but I really doubt @Jeanlz8zw is a real person.^🪒

How much of our sense of reality is steered by strangers who want us to be confused, mislead, misinformed, or angry?

Can anything be done?

Something I've wanted for at least 10 years now is for governments to offer identity verification services for social networks.

Here's how it could work:

1. When I apply for a passport, I'd also get an account at identity.gov
2. When I sign up for a social network account, I can link it to my identity.gov account

Now, whenever I post something, I'd get a few affordances.

(These next two blocks are interactive.)

Then, when I go on YouTube, I can filter comments based on these 3 properties:

Now. There are lots of concerns any reasonable person would have.

Won't this just lead to mass surveillance?

Not to be defeatist, but we already have it.

We can avoid making it worse, though.^📈

Zero-knowledge proofs are a cryptographic technique that allow people to make verifiable claims without revealing any other information about them in a way that can't be linked back to your actual identity in the government's registry.^🧑‍💻

The technical details aren't the emphasis of this piece. Just imagine that the government made a billion unique stamps, and handed out one to each of its citizens at random. Each citizen could then stamp their documents, readers could verify that the stamp was authentic, but the government wouldn't know which stamp belonged to which citizen, or what its citizens were doing with their stamps.

That's the gist of the thing I want. It is not a centralized government database that tracks all of our online activity and links it to our real identities.

Won't this chill speech?

Possibly! Though I think it being gradated and opt-in drastically softens the extent to which it would.

We also need to understand that speech is currently already chilled, just in a different way. I've stopped replying to people on the internet because I've lost confidence that they'll respond in good faith.

I worry for the world in which no one is anonymous online, but I also look forward to the day that I can read an angry man's comment on bike lanes and know that he's an honest-to-goodness ignorant Canadian and not a troll for a national disinformation department or PR firm.

Won't people just sell their tokens or let AI agents use their signatures?

I think all signatures will have to have a persistent identity such that you can always view someone's posting history.

So you'd get a stable pseudonym like human-xyz that is attached to all your human-signed posts.

Your citizen and personal signatures would get different pseudonyms, so that they can remain separate. This would have to be per-platform, so that you could have a different identity on Substack than AO3.

e.g. these would both be you:

• substack-citizen-123
• ao3-citizen-456

Though obviously if you signed posts on both with your full name, anyone could connect your accounts.

This would allow us to filter/tag/shame people who sell their accounts if we see that they're spamming.

Won't semantic analysis break anonymity anyway?

Yes, probably.^🕵️ If that becomes a real problem, I guess we'll get tone masking services that rewrite your original message to remove your idiosyncracies for the especially privacy-valuing people (who are probably already doing this)

Won't an opt-in system eventually become mandatory?

The scope creep objection. It starts out optional but norms develop that pressure us to sign everything and disregard anything that isn't signed - ratcheting society towards less anonymity.

This seems like a real possibility to me, but I can still see it happening democratically. A decade of experience with the system leads people to conclude that generally, this is a healthy norm that has been beneficial for society. Something that feels more like mandating seatbelts than Ring cameras becoming ubiquitous.

That's my idealism, though. Realistically, it's contingent on the government and society that's implementing this technology.

Won't this exclude people who can't get passports?

I have trans friends who can't return to the U.S. without getting their passport revoked now. They're fearing for their lives and freedoms, and it's incredibly tone deaf of me to propose that we further empower the state to identify them.

I guess I just bite the bullet on this one. My belief is that this US administration exists because we didn't have this system in place in 2015, allowing the US political discourse to get hacked by Russians on social media. Obviously there were lots of other factors, but it seems quite plausible to me that adverserial nation states tipped the balance in what was an extremely close election.

I wish the world was safe for everyone. I wish that all our governments were trustworthy and progressive, but they're not. We need to find approaches that can help incrementally improve them.

This proposal seems unlikely to happen by default, and I would really strongly oppose a system that would forcibly de-anonymize everyone on the internet. My hope in writing this post is so that people who oppose online identification systems have something else other than a total rejection of the idea to point to when they raise their concerns.

Why does a government need to run this?

Big political science question! What is the role of government? Can it be trusted? Do we need a semi-adverserial relationship between the public and private sectors to guard against creeping state totalitarianism?

I don't have a conclusive answer to this, but I do know that New Zealand's RealMe is really good. E-Estonia is really good. Governments can build digital services that are actually well-designed, and write legislation that gets the private sector to adopt it.

Why does it have to be centralized?

Can't we just write an open standard and allow anyone to become their own identity provider?

I guess? That just sounds a lot more complicated to me. Imagine pitching that to your auntie:

"Ah yes, well this commenter is verified by OpenRep which is mostly for academics, but they're responding to someone who's verified by VeriCoin which is a pay-to-play scheme. They're probably a real person, but people on MeYou say that they've been compromised...

Isn't this what WorldCoin is?

Yes and I think there are tonnes of other ideas and groups working in this space:

• GNU Taler for payments
• European Digital Identity
• eIDAS / EUDI Wallet
• W3C SSI Standards

Some of these are state-based (eIDAS), private (WorldCoin), or standards-based (W3C SSI).

Vitalik Buterin has written a good survey of the general problem (in response to WorldCoin specifically):

So there's a lot of activity here. Hopefully we get more applied implementations to learn from.

Okay that's enough

In all likelihood, the first implementations of systems in this space will be flawed and privacy-violating.^🤡 In the US and Canada in particular, when has any government service been on-time and best-in-class?

Nevertheless, I'm not giving into defeatism here. I'm completely energized by the potential upsides of an internet that has trust again. This is all the more important in our AI-suffused world.

Public sentiment towards technology and governance is in a trough, maybe rightly so, but technology and governance is also one of the best things we've got. We need to save it from ourselves to save us from ourselves.

Another More Perfect Union critique, I guess

This time, a video on government-run grocery stores.

I feel like if you're arguing in favour of government-run groceries, you should probably spend more than 15 seconds on the municipal case studies (that all failed!) instead of talking about military commissaries.

This part was interesting:

So maybe you take all this to mean that it's true: the secret to all this is that taxpayers foot the bill for some giant subsidy. But actually, the subsidy is quite small. The defense budget is almost $1 trillion, and the subsidy for DeCA is roughly 0.2% for the whole defense budget. This is for almost 250 stores serving 8.8 million households

Saying that the subsidy is small compared to the whole defense budget is a sloppy rhetorical move. What matters is is it cost-effective, how does it scale, etc.

Running the numbers: 1.5B subsidy for 8.8M households = $170 per household. If they're delivering on their mandate of 23.7% annual savings for households' grocery budgets (which tracks with the video's Walmart basket of goods comparison), that seems like quite a good deal! Toronto City Council seems to think so.

I wonder though, will that be possible for Toronto to replicate with four pilot stores? It seems like a really different dynamic:

• No subsidy (beyond eliminating the typical 3-5% grocery profit margin)
• Fewer economies of scale
• More competition
• Highly visible if it starts to fail
• Not a sacred cow in the way that military benefits are in the US

Best of luck to them! But I would imagine the odds of this pilot succeeding and growing over the next 5 years to be quite low.

One thing I've noticed in the last few months of intentionally monitoring it - the headlines on the homepage of Fox News are always focused on specific people and characters. They're obsessed with AOC/Mamdani/Sanders and anyone else they can paint as a Radical Leftist.

There's never a story that's framed in the Vox/Atlantic way: “here's what's going on with this abstract problem”, let alone anything longform or curious.

There's also usually one scam-adjacent story about some new remedy for the elderly (in the same way that the NYT always has a story about some yuppies buying a million dollar apartment).

A randomly picked example, if you dare

As I understand it, Fox News is the primary (if not exclusive) legacy news source for a majority of Republican voters and it's just crazy to me how intentionally out of touch it keeps them when it comes to the important things that actually affect their readers' lives.

Is it intentional though? I try to remind myself there's a difference between deliberately deceiving your audience and optimizing for engagement in ways that produce ignorance as a byproduct.

As Orwellian as I find their conduct, to humanize the Fox News editorial team, I doubt they're Evil. They disagree with my progressive diagnosis of the world's ills, and also believe that if they don't exploit their readers this way, someone else will. Maybe they publish the day's stories ruefully, wishing they could talk about solar power positively for once.

“If I don't do it, someone else will” is that terrible rationalization of the complicit, but it probably is true. Breitbart and OAN and Joe Rogan and Tucker Carlson are all vying for share in the competitive right wing media market. Maybe we should instead ask why is there so much demand for mean, negative-sum presentations of the world.

In any case, a lot of this is beyond their control at this point. TV, newspapers, even websites are declining in viewer share. Now anyone with a phone can tell us that's the way it is.

Everyone's got their bugbear and god knows democratic backsliding's not monocausal, but if there's any system in the world I could fix with a magic wand, it would be this: no two-minute hates allowed on TV. No ragebaiting anonymous twitter accounts spreading misinformation. No demonizing people you disagree with. A citizenry that factchecks every fifth claim they read.

How do we actually get there without violating the very liberal principles I'm trying to protect? I really don't know. We are so far away from any sort of consensus as to what the problem is.

Paul Bloom writes

Scarcity generates pleasure, anxiety, and purpose. But a world that is post-scarcity in the sense that there is more than enough material resources for everyone will still have another form of scarcity—people’s respect, admiration, attention, desire, and love.

The bad news about a post-scarcity utopia is that we will still be unhappy much of the time. The good news is that our lives will still have meaning.

One of my friends just sent me a voice note making a couple of points:

1. Visual generative AI is getting really good
2. This is starting to do weird things on our video and image-based social media networks
3. Influencers are nervously wondering if their industry will survive when brands can have individualized, hot & funny digital avatars market products to consumers directly
4. Maybe we shouldn't be posting photos of ourselves online if they can be used by bad guys to make deepfakes of us?
5. Awareness of all of this is a privilege: less-informed people will be exploited by these systems that they don't understand

I basically agree with all of that, though I'm very uncertain as to what the end state of any of it is.^🌦️

Governments are trying to clamp down on unfettered internet access: age-restricting websites, banning social media for teens. Maybe this leads to the beginning of a utopian society-wide detox from the internet:

Or maybe it births a new, worse-than-what-we've-already-got, adults-only internet with the legal system's blessing to be as X-rated as profitable^{👯‍♀️}:

As with all things, it's probably going to be a bit of both.

The consequences of AI are going to be massively systemic.^🫏 I don't think my efforts to unzuck myself will show up in any historian's account of the 21st century.

But locally, I think it makes a difference. All I really want to do is read and write and interact with my close friends. I have no desire to grow a following, or build a network, or develop my personal brand.

If you do, it's harder. You can use ActivityPub^🐑 or ATProto: own your algorithm and be selective with your privacy settings^🕵️, but these networks are still juvenile and the federated interoperative dream is still on its way. Most people still don't really get what Mastodon is and won't know how to follow you from the walled garden they're held captive in. "The internet" is just five websites that all look the same. It's asking an arm and a leg of someone to not use Facebook Messenger or to follow your travel updates via RSS.

But I'm okay with doing this because I also believe that being on those platforms myself is just bad for me. It's like, yeah, if you want to hang out you have to come jogging with me, but we should all jog more and jogging alone is still better than nothing at all.

And get this:

🤯

On my friend's point that "technology is unfair", yeah, it sucks. I get so mad whenever I help my mum with some tech thing and I see how confusing the experience is for her. Windows has changed for the umpteenth time, and half of her google search results are ads or spam, and her apps don't work anymore because her laptop is 5 years old.

Each of these things has a specific fix that I can implement, but I'm annoyed that I have to do it at all, and like the unzucking, it's not a systemic fix. There are billions of people out there without a tech support family member.

One thing I'm a little optimistic about is that language model assistants are probably going to help most people be safer on average. There will be accidents and exploits and prompt injections and all the bad things, but a world where the majority of people ask claude "Hey Claude, is this legit?" before doing something they're uncertain about probably has fewer life-ruining errors in it. Depending on how life-ruining you think it is to lose the ability to think for yourself.

No matter how hard they try, brain scientists and cognitive psychologists will never find a copy of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony in the brain – or copies of words, pictures, grammatical rules or any other kinds of environmental stimuli. The human brain isn’t really empty, of course. But it does not contain most of the things people think it does – not even simple things such as ‘memories’.

- Robert Epstein, The Empty Brain (2016)

Okay.

• What would it even mean to "find" Beethoven's 5th in the brain?^🔍 At best, you could take a perfectly precise measurement of someone's brain state and use that data to reconstruct their memory of the music. (In the way that scientists are reconstructing visual imagery via fMRI and machine learning. They haven't "found" a cat inside the brain, but there's clearly some information about the cat in the brain that is statistically useful)
• metaphors are inescapable. some are better than others.
• the evolution of metaphors for the brain (clay → hydraulics → machines → electrochemistry) traces a series of practical but incomplete models: other paradigms, with their own entities and rules, which allowed us to iteratively complexify our conceptual model of the brain^🧠. once the limits of the metaphor were reached, or new technology with more complex or expressive dynamics was discovered^⚙️, the paradigm shifts.
• it's not a bad thing to have an incomplete paradigm. it's a bad thing once it supresses a better, more explanatory one from coming along. Robert suggests that this is what the humours metaphor did, though I think there were probably many more significant factors at play if you want to talk about why it took so long for the renaissance to happen.
• there's a type of computer process that people colloquially refer to as "baking." the computer isn't literally putting bits in an oven at 180°C, but the metaphor is helpful because it quickly conveys that some ingredients were assembled, and now a process is about to occur that will take some time, and there will be some output on the other side that we care about. language is full of these and we have to make subjective calls about which metaphors are best at capturing the dynamics of a system that are relevant to us based on how well we think they strike the right balance between clarity, correctness, intuitiveness, etc.
• it's not clear to me that the information processing metaphor is stunting us. on the contrary, artificial neural networks are allowing us to interpret the brain more than ever before. materialist theories of cognitive science are giving us actually falsifiable theories of consciousness.
• his example of a "non-algorithmic" explanation of how to catch a ball is literally an algorithm. I think we have fundamentally different understandings of what "information", "processing", and "computation" means.
• his "metaphor-free" everything-is-operant-conditioning proposal is a theory that collapsed in the 70s?

Misleading headlines notwithstanding, no one really has the slightest idea how the brain changes after we have learned to sing a song or recite a poem. But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions. When called on to perform, neither the song nor the poem is in any sense ‘retrieved’ from anywhere in the brain, any more than my finger movements are ‘retrieved’ when I tap my finger on my desk. We simply sing or recite – no retrieval necessary.

Why don't we just say that that's retrieval, which is maybe kind of similar to other sorts of things that we call retrieval, and see if this helps us explain or make predictions about a system any better than before? "The brain doesn't retrieve. We simply sing." is not a predictive theory that could help us understand things, rather it suggests that we shouldn't even try.

I don't think this was a good representation of anti-representationalism, and I don't claim to have any answers as to how the brain works (I'm just a guy who really liked Being You) but I think if you're going to point out why the dominant paradigm doesn't work, you need to make a better case than this.

There's a good version on Standard Ebooks. Greg Wagland's rendition is also great.^👂

For thirty years, I've sailed the seas and seen good and bad, better and worse, fair weather and foul, provisions running out, knives going, and what not. Well, now I tell you, I never seen good come o' goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don't bite; them's my views—amen, so be it.

• It's wild to think how many of today's pirate tropes this popularized or influenced^☠️ Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum!
• Pew was a really menacing minor villain! I was genuinely scared of him.
• Despite the mutiny, everyone has a very strong code of honour. Jim makes promises to the pirates and desperately hopes to keep them, to his great personal risk.
• They didn't know what caused malaria back then. The doctor is going on about the quality of the air: low, boggy air was bad. dry, mountainous air was good. Cool to see some proto-science.
• The novel's awash with nautical terminology. How many of these words and terms did the average British kid know back then?

I think I might be entering my audiobook era. Going for a run getting lost in a story is a delightful double-dip, though I wish it were possible to highlight noteworthy excerpts while listening.

A friend just asked me this. Might as well write it down.

I stopped eating meat when I was 17 because my girlfriend at the time was vegetarian, and I knew that it was one of the remaining ways I could significantly lower my carbon footprint.

A year or so later I made the switch to veganism because of the same logic.

After a few years of being "outside" of meat consumption, it became possible for me to be able to think more critically about the moral aspects of breeding/farming/eating animals.^🧱

So now I stay vegan both to reduce emissions and habitat loss, and to try and absolve myself somewhat from the suffering.

The cruelty and pain is greater than anyone can comprehend. It is one of the most evil atrocities humanity continues to commit. I desperately hope for its end. I want children to grow up in a world where they're truly horrified to learn what we did to trillions of animals for hundreds of years.

Veganism is not a movement that has flattened the curve of animal suffering - I believe that will come from in vitro meat (which is decades away from being economically viable) and medium-term animal welfare reforms - but I cannot in good conscience participate in the system in the meantime.

this isn't merriam-webster, but i reckon it's when you're motivated by something other than what you should be.

say you come out of the cinema with your friends and you start raving about how many of the shots were inspired by some french new wave guy.

maybe you're authentically stoked about the cinematography (the pretense), but maybe you mostly just want to sound smart about movies because of how it affects your status in the group.

someone who loves film for its own sake should be happy to talk about the film at any level with their friends. people aren't familiar with godard? that's okay, you could also talk about the acting or the story. if you're incapable of meeting people where they're at, i think people will be rightfully suspicious that you've got an ulterior motive.

sometimes accusations of pretentiousness are just anti-intellectual. i've been called pretentious for referencing the history of a genre of music as part of my appreciation for a song. it felt genuine to me at the time, and i wish the person who said that had just said "i don't know enough about that to engage in the same way and i don't want to hear a lecture." or "yeah... i liked a different aspect of it." instead it was basically like "shut up, nerd."

it takes two. one to notice that their passion is alienating their interlocutor and one to engage supportively if someone seems excited to talk about a subject they love.

this stuff all gets worse if you're talking about disliking something. if someone's perfomatively liking something, it's easier to overlook that it's pretend. if they're being a hater, it's a bad deal: being persuaded to enjoy something less in order to feel insecure about my inferior taste.¹

pretentiousness doesn't have to be about taste or aesthetics. i was pretentious the other day when i got in a little back-and-forth with my driving theory instructor about whether or not he had explained something correctly. ostensibly i was speaking up to clarify for myself and my fellow students, but once he began to double-down on his confusing explanation and i started to try to explain to him why it was confusing, i could feel my motivation shift to something else: i wanted to outdo him and show that i was smart to the group.²

it's hard to know what the exact mix of any of our motivations is. i like to flex my vocabulary in a way that is a little pretentious, but i also genuinely enjoy finding the word that feels like it perfectly conveys what i'm trying to say. having multiple motivations isn't necessarily pretentious, but you should try to reduce the amount you decieve yourself or others as to what they are.

More Perfect Union released a video on automated truck drivers (which are now on the roads in Texas.)

They argue:

1. The "driver shortage" framing is industry spin on the fact that employers are deliberately underpaying workers to increase churn and keep the average pay grade low.
2. Automation will lead to further degradation of the trucking career that has allowed many men to earn a decent wage and quality of life. The consequences of this will be dire.

Is automation necessarily anti-labour? Is it possible to automate jobs while protecting the people who do them?

My supermarket installed 12 self-checkouts several years ago. In the pen, there's now one worker who harriedly flits between the stations, swiping their lanyard to authorize alcohol purchases. Repetitive and thankless. Pretty bad, as far as jobs go.¹

I assume most of people doing this job don't love it, but that doing it is still one of the better options available to them. Maybe they don't have any skills, or the skills from a previous career aren't valued anymore. Maybe they like the flexibility of part-time work.²

All I know is that I wouldn't want that job, and that I'm grateful for the privileges of my life that mean it's not yet been an option I've had to consider - privileges that I wish were extended to everyone.

It's all well and good for me to say that I wish for a world where everyone is so taken-care-of that we'd find it unconscionable to require labour that alienates³, but steering our shambling society towards such a utopia is really hard to do. How can we identify and agree on why we have "bad jobs", align everyone's interests to the collective cause of reducing suffering, and correctly triage the opportunities we have?⁴

Maybe the answer is to read more Marx, but I don't think it's possible to get the Good Automation that reduces toil, without also fundamentally lowering the value of the equivalent human labour and therefore the power of those workers' strikes.

i.e. the truckers are right to be concerned.

But I want jobs to be automated. I want humans to do things other than scan barcodes and drive along the interstate for the majority of their lives. If we still have warehouses filled with humans in 15 years⁵, I think that's because we've shambled wrong, even if it's because we've fought tooth and nail for labour.

Maybe there's a more middle-ground Scandanavian model. Companies that automate must invest some additional amount in continual retraining such that automation remains complimentary rather than rivalrous. I'm not actually sure if that approach will be able to keep up with the rate at which human skill is outcompeted.

In any case, I think it's going to be really hard to form a coherent story and set of policies to sell automation. Workers are proud of their worth, and are going to be skeptical that any self-sacrifice will contribute to a greater good, because the collectivist spirit is so dead in the West. Conversely, corporations will argue against paying redistributive taxes, because it's the profit incentive that drives the transition to full automation.

Yet, ultimately, I think automation will win. It's going to be hard for labour to globally impede technological progress, whereas tech companies will be able to easily relocate and improve, until they're so cost-effective that even the most labour-sympathetic regions will be unable to resist interfacing with the automated economy.

Whether or not that irreparably tears the social contract, idk. Hope not.

When people say "the problem is education" they tend to mean "I want everyone to have the same beliefs as me, but persuading adults is too hard."

I think it's naive to assume that agreeing on a national curriculum is any easier, but assuming that you could, it's even more naive to assume that students would internalize the lessons you want them to.

For example: in high school, I didn't understand our English curriculum's emphasis on literary analysis essays. They seemed mysteriously tautological: fill in the essay template to demonstrate to the person marking you that you can fill in an essay template.^😱

I don't mean to insist that the subject of english "justify itself" in that stembro way. I just don't remember anyone ever telling me why it was worthwhile to learn how to analyze literature. I have since read some greek plays and can say with confidence that this was a tragedy.

Here's an explanation that might have worked for me:

Stories are one of the main ways we make sense of the world. Writing is another. We write about stories to gain an ability to think about how they're written and what they mean. This allows to be more persuasive and less susceptable to bullshit. It also allows us to share our perspectives with one another, which is essential for democracy.

I smashed that out in 2 minutes. It's arbitrary and a thousand alternate justifications exist, but the idea is that, for each student, there is a justification that could appeal to them.

Why didn't we do this? Some ideas

• We did
  • but not often enough to remember 10 years later (wisdom has a luridness problem)
  • but I didn't like the justifications ("it'll be on the test", "it's needed for jobs that pay a lot of money")
  • but it doesn't work. Existentialism doesn't vibe with kids before they know their spelling, or, it doesn't make a measurable difference. (also, if every teacher was making the best case for their subject, wouldn't it all come out in the wash and students would drift towards their natural competencies as we currently do?)
  • but in the wrong way. Teachers mistakenly believe they are teaching purpose, simply because the purpose is so obvious to them that they don't realize how much more explicit articulation it needs.
• We can't
  • it's too politically contentious to agree on
  • it's too expensive to personalize per student, teachers are too busy, etc
  • teachers are lacking in real-life experience to know all the potential applications of what the kids are learning.
• We shouldn't
  • this is something you can only figure out yourself, and it can only ever be an ongoing process.

I suspect the answer is some combination of the above and more. ^🏫 It's clearly not "no one's ever thought of it before", but pretending that it is, what outcomes would I hope for?^🌏

If I was motivated to write literary analysis because I cared about democracy, maybe my teacher or I would realize that it would then be good to actually try to engage with the substance of other students' arguments. Let's actually test if it's working! It's wild to me how little time we spent as a class, or in groups, debating what V for Vendetta actually meant.

We never tried to persuade one another to adopt different beliefs about what a story was about, or whether it was good or bad. Our essays were written in a near vaccuum, graded more on their internal coherence than in relation to other people's arguments. It's astounding, really, how little dialogue there was. No opportunities to say "I don't think that makes sense" in response to someone's poorly constructed argument. No way to learn better ways of seeing things.^🧠

And now we're sleepwalking into education's purpose being entirely lost with language models. I see students at cafés copy-pasting to and from their moodles and can't help but think "Damn, if only you were a little better at questioning what any of this is for."

It's so parallel to the alignment problem that I'd argue it's a comedy.

Laura C by Big Supermarket is a song about Tomb Raider. I love it.

Part of the reason why, is that I cannot reliably hear the downbeat in the right place. There is a clear "right" way to hear it that my mind can snap into if I try, but most of the time I hear it spasmodic style.

In the "wrong" way of hearing it, the bass drum hits on the one, which is a ubiquitous convention of rock music, and something I am very biased towards hearing.

But by that counting, the rest of the beat makes no sense: there's a snare hit on the first "and" and then on the "four" - a non-ubiquitous unconvention.

By comparison, hearing it the "right" way (with the bass drum on the first "and") gives the song a natural, head-bumping groove. When my mind lurches over to hearing it this way, it immediately makes sense and I feel almost, like, relief?

This doesn't seem to happen to other people as much. Some get a little confused in trying to count it, though I think it often has more to do with the song's timing being kind of imprecise and wobbly, not due to an ambiguous downbeat. In my surveying, most people only ever hear it the "right" way, and struggle to hear it my way at all - if they do, it's usually with effort and incredulity.

It reminds me of the spinning dancer illusion. I used to be scared that I would lose my ability to perceive it one way or the other, but so far, it seems like I'm always able to oscillate between the two, unlike another kind of illusion that is famously one way.

It's been highly enriching to have a song that highlights instability of my subjectivity so reliably... and it bumps, too!