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fiat_lux

@ fiat_lux @lemmy.world

Posts
2
Comments
96
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • The Only Solution Capitalism Has Is to Sell Us More Useless Junk: Ad makers will never say the quiet part loud, but they increasingly know that we're unhappy and looking for solutions.

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  • I have a few issues with substack, but truth be told, I dislike requiring handing over information to multiple services without seeing value upfront - and getting rid of obtrusive pop-ups does not qualify as value. Their willingness to platform Nazis just sealed my unwillingness into a conscious refusal.

    In a similar vein, the corporate relationship adjustments you mentioned are also steps I've taken, but I'm inclined to agree with Naomi Klein's perspective on consumer boycott being insufficient to address systemic problems. The general advice is to change what is within your power, but when you have close to zero power, does that advice then imply that you should try to do nothing or that you simply can affect nothing?

    My substack qualms and the corporate relationship adjustments topics tie in quite nicely with a phrase from your substack that has been bothering me all weekend. It critiques my usual instincts for what to do as first steps, but it also articulates a problem I've struggled with for a while: "Documentation without transformation".

    Now I'm not of the opinion that we've ever truly been able to trust the information we consume as being objective truth, but AI has certainly suddenly increased the scarcity of reliable information.

    The larger issue for me is that transformation is clearly necessary, but the scale of transformation required is so immense that it's not something I've seen happen historically without also incurring immense suffering. This is not to say that the majority of humanity isn't hugely suffering now, just that this kind of systemic change is one of those "this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better" type situations - in an acute way.

    The usual trigger for change at this scale seems to be when realised losses of resource scarcity for too many exceeds the risk of setting what's left on fire.

    So we're left with a situation where there's potentially neither reliable documentation nor positive transformation. This does not spark joy.

    I suppose my questions for you are then:

    • what actions do you think would be sufficient to effect the systemic change necessary?
    • how do you remain optimistic about this whole thing?

    "I don't know" is a totally valid answer to either too, in the spirit of acknowledging honest uncertainty.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • Oh hey. I remember this. I was confused at the time how it seemed to almost come out of left field, and how some of the names ended up on the same letter.

    Now I recognise all those names from the Epstein files, although some were only mentions rather than direct participants.

  • The billionaires' eugenics project: how Epstein infiltrated Harvard, muzzled the humanities and preached master-race science

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  • There's one aspect to this writeup that makes me deeply uncomfortable about it, besides the obvious horrors of Epstein , everyone in his circle, eugenics, racism, sexism, etc.

    The author seems intent to hammer the "illiterate" insult. Epstein definitely seemed to have some form of language-related disability, but that's not what made him (and certainly not the academics who surrounded him) a horrific person. By casting people who experience literacy related disabilities as somehow inferior, it perpetuates a similar form of social stratification as the article rallies against.

    The first targets of eugenics are often people with disabilities - and linguistic ability is frequently used as a proxy of intelligence as a whole. I hope the author considers adding "disability theory" to her reading list in the future, alongside the already present feminism, postcolonial theory and queer studies.

    Because it feels almost like she stopped slightly short of the problem: Non-men and non-white non-straight people are considered inferior by these people due to (supposedly) being innately less able. They are using ethnicity and gender as proxies for determining intelligence as a whole. Using the ability to read and write as the proxy is not a huge improvement on that, if at all.

  • What do you cook when your left arm doesn't work?

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  • Mashed potatoes seems like it would be pretty hard to stir one handed, so credit to you for that. Thinner soups or things you can boil and drain would probably be an easier choice, so you don't have to keep hold of a pot while stirring.

    Things which keep their shape and that you can fry in a large flat pan and use tongs to move about, like the spam, are probably going to be much easier and safer overall though.

    If you can afford one, a mandoline that is heavy or you can fix to a surface is something that will be useful even if your arm improves, they make chopping vegetables fast - but can be risky if you're not paying full attention. I have one similar to this, but the more industrial ones are even sturdier.

    If that isn't an option, pre-cut frozen veg are usually not hugely more expensive than fresh, and are often more nutritious than stuff on the supermarket shelves. Tinned tomatoes or sauces are easy to throw on pasta too, which doesn't need any real stirring - just be sure to only cook smaller pots so they're lighter to deal with. Tinned beans are also great, my go to meal is that plus tinned tomatoes, a bunch of dried herbs/spices, and whatever veg I've got around at the time. You can fry some meat, throw in the rest, let it heat through and you're good to go.

    If you have an oven, a whole cob of corn in-husk is 30 mins. You can throw it in there, walk away, then after 30 take it out of the oven. Just gently tug the silk out from the top, which will now come out easily with no real mess, and you can then pull down the husk to use as a handle while eating.

    Don't write off microwaves either. Washing a few potatoes and nuking them for a few minutes per potato will get you a perfectly good meal base that you can load up with whatever. Microwaves are my go to for the frozen veg to help bulk out anything else I cook too.

    My speciality is not arm-based problems but I've had to change a lot about how I cook for medical reasons, so hopefully some of this is helpful to you too. Good luck and I hope you don't need to adapt for long!

  • 'Later found dead': Dem lawmaker flags explosive Trump allegation in Epstein files

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  • For anyone who doesn't want to click through to rawstory and then Twitter (why does Lieu still use this?), the document in question is EFTA00020517 (redacted version). Trigger warning for both rape and murder although it does not go into significantly more detail than the rawstory link. I think this document was from the batch at least a month ago though.

    It also claims that the coroner ruled the death a suicide even though officers on the scene said there was no way it could have been.

  • The Only Solution Capitalism Has Is to Sell Us More Useless Junk: Ad makers will never say the quiet part loud, but they increasingly know that we're unhappy and looking for solutions.

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  • I haven't got a substack account, or I would have subscribed, but I hope you keep writing. You've given me a lot to think about. While I don't quite know what to do with these questions yet, or if there is even something I can do about them, they're salient and framed extremely well.

  • Waymo self-driving cars, powered by AGI — A Guy Instead

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  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • This snippet at the bottom of the NASDAQ link partially explains why:

    Engineered by Benzinga Neuro, Edited by Pooja Rajkumari

    The GPT-4-based Benzinga Neuro content generation system exploits the extensive Benzinga Ecosystem, including native data, APIs, and more to create comprehensive and timely stories for you.

  • What are we being distracted from?

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  • The Epstein files obviously contain a lot of information about rape and trafficking, which is very understandably and rightly in the spotlight. But what the files also contain is very detailed information about exactly how our laws and financial systems are being actively exploited to maintain the power of a select few. That is something that is much harder to write a quick article about, by design, but we haven't even seen some of these names mentioned in the media:

    • de Rothschild (with a very illustrative diagram in EFTA01114424)
    • Thiel
    • Rockefeller
    • Murdoch
    • von Habsburg

    And those are just individuals, not companies. We haven't heard anything about JP Morgan Chase, Sotheby's, Goldman Sachs... Or even the universities like Harvard.

    You can't usually pull a single short damning quote from an email for them because it's not as simple as the horror of one person raping children, but it lays the foundation of how this horror was allowed to continue at such a large scale by so many people.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • That's fair, the propaganda is intense and I often forget that my upbringing on a strict diet of cynicism is not something others have to experience.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • Another research poet drops, this time Zoë Hitzig from Open AI https://archive.is/dfuzP Are research poets a thing I just didn't know about?

    She's quitting because of the introduction of ads, but falls short of either realising or just admitting that OpenAI never cared about safety - they cared about hedging expensive legal risk.

    Is buying into the idea of corporate principle declarations something people do as a mental health protection mechanism?

    Are they genuinely naive enough to think self-governance works in a capitalist system?

    Is this a political long play to maintain her desirability as a future hire?

    Someone should write both a paper and a poem about that.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th February 2026

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  • Especially for a guy named Sharma living in the US. It doesn't take too many footsteps outside the Bay area for him to be in literal physical danger right now.

    He also less cryptically posted his plans and resignation letter. (Edit: memory lapse) xcancel version of resignation letter post. Tl;dr moving to the UK (understandably) and doing a poetry degree (I didn't accidentally critique someone into quitting, did I?)

    Honestly, I hope he finds both what he's looking for and also what he's not looking for but still equally needs. For example, a personal perspective not entrenched in institutional ontological frameworks.

  • You know who's not in the Epstein files?

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  • Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem is going to be very surprised when he hears about his conversion.

  • Epstein revelations have toppled top figures in Europe while US fallout is more muted

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  • Oh yes, I understand how they go about smoothing everything over.

    But, given the details we know, don't you think:• one corporate resignation,• one months-prior bureaucrat firing, and,• one investigation into a former PM, is pretty far removed from could be considered a proportional fallout?

  • Epstein revelations have toppled top figures in Europe while US fallout is more muted

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  • This is the theme of almost all of the "toppling". Mostly they've just... resigned. They probably keep all the perks, and then take up a corporate advisor position once there's less heat.

    Headlines like this make it sound like there's been real impact beyond generating articles about a few of the more public figures. But reading article, it's really just a few politicians and bureaucrats resigning. Mandelson's firing was already months ago. The investigation into a former Norwegian PM sounds like that's as harsh as it's got so far for politicians this time. And nothing except one law firm board member resigning for private companies?

    They're all getting away with it, and all the victims get is a hundred headlines about Musk being named in the files, and having their lives endangered from the terrible Don-centric redaction.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th February 2026

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  • I assumed billionaires could afford better signs. Were all her EAs on leave that week?

  • The Plutocrats Who Rule Our World Aren't Even Enjoying Themselves

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  • The difference was that he fired his PR agents in 2020 who stopped him from ruining their carefully created advertising. He never was that person.

  • The long awaited Gerard/Zitron crossover: I'm on Better Offline saying the stuff I always say, about OpenClaw, Moltbook and the coming Great Depression 2

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  • Perhaps something like this: https://lemmy.world/post/42528038/22000735

    Deferring responsibility for risk and compliance obligations to AI is bound to lead to some kind of tremendous problem, that's a given. But the EU has been pretty keen lately on embedding requirements into their newer digital-realm laws about giving market regulators access to internal documents on request.

    This is not to suggest it's anywhere close to a certainty that an Enron will happen though. There is still the exceptionally large problem of company executives are part of the power structures which selectively target who to prosecute, if their lobbyists haven't already succeeded in watering the legislation down to be functionally useless before they're in force. So it will take a huge fuck up and public pressure for any of the countries to make good on their own rules.

    Given that almost all the media heat from the Trump-Epstein files has been directed at easy target single public personalities, completely ignoring the obvious systemic corruption by multiple corporate entities, I don't have high hopes for that part. But if the impending fuck up and scale of noncompliance is big enough, there's a chance there will be audits and EU courts involved.

  • Flock CEO calls Deflock a “terrorist organization”

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  • It's a wonder people haven't started throwing water balloons filled with mud and flour at the cameras. Perhaps he should be grateful that's not a trend?

  • AI coding makes you worse at learning — and not even any faster

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  • I read both of these and what struck me was how both studies felt remarkably naive. I found myself thinking: "there's no way the authors have any background in the humanities". Turns out there's 2 authors, lo and behold, both with computer science degrees. This might explain why it feels like they're somehow incredulous at the results - they've approached the problem as evaluating a system's fitness in a vacuum.

    But it's not a system in a vacuum. It's a vacuum that has sucked up our social system, sold to bolster the social standing of the heads of a social construct.

    Had they looked at the context of how AI has been marketed, as an authoritative productivity booster, they might have had some idea why both disempowerment and reduced mastery could be occurring: The participants were told to work fast and consult the AI. What a shock that people took the responses seriously and didn't have time to learn!

    I'd ask why Anthropic had computer scientists conducting sociological research, but I assume this part of output has just been published to assuage criticism of trust and safety practices. The final result will probably be adding another line of 'if query includes medical term then print "always ask a doctor first"' to the system prompt.

    This constant vacillation between "it's a revolution and changes our entire reality!" and "you can't trust it and you need to do your own research" from the AI companies is fucking tiresome. You can't have it both ways.