General Discussion

Last edited Mon May 4, 2026, 07:50 AM - Edit history (3)

I feel the heat like a physical thing.
This is a must read:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/staring-at-the-pointing-hand

It is terrifying to me as someone living in a hotspot in the global south where the obscenity of actual climate change and the fallout of perverse stuff like “data as oil” (fueling unsafe garbage tech) are clearer daily and yet things get worse every single day.

The movie “Don’t look up” correctly skewered our fatuous media, solipsistic billionaires and populace. Today saying something like “ ask not what your country can do for you..” seems inconceivable as the leadership, with the exception of necessary climate hawks like Sen Sheldon Whitehouse appears to have tacitly dropped the issue.
My worry is that more cheap stuff strip mining more and more will be the solution.

Troy Farah gets it as well:

https://www.salon.com/2025/12/31/against-trumps-climate-sabotage-a-different-future-is-still-possible/

Facebook is a company that parasitically used data as oil as did Google. They were carrying out a quiet coup against civilian academia using RetractionWatch, Elizabeth Bik, Ioannidis, Fanelli, Kent Anderson etc constantly fear mongering about publically funded science where the rates of misconduct are low. Where they are high it is people who work at the top and are in bed with Epstein, Google etc or do fluffy bs where I cannot tell if it is misconduct or not since it is such fluffy junk anyway:
Facebook emotion drivel, MIT Media Lab, Aaron Elkins etc and lie detectors, Bschool drivel, Ariely, Gino, Haidt, Pinker, Freakonomics.

The general public does not seem to always separate hard science from quality soft science versus the stuff that sells books and TED tech talks.
Quality soft science tends to be done by people who are poorer and are genuinely interested in such things. DU has people like that.
This is likely to be quality soft science. I trust Current Affairs as a resource, but one can’t be sure these days:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/notes-of-an-economist-on-food-stamps
Still it is unlikely to be like “power poses” and that type of stuff. Otoh, I trust Nathan Robinson but I have no idea who that author is and as with many things a cursory glance was all I had time for before returning to my unpaid profession of brooding.

The tech bros don’t get the value of the work done by honest therapists and shrinks where caring is part of the profession.
The two shrinks and one therapist I met in the US clearly cared about their patients.

A place like Stanford Psychiatry otoh has people who want to make money, but are either too lazy or too incompetent to work in neurosurgery or some area of medicine where you cannot as easily get away with errors.
Such people imo are at a disadvantage in a real sense in being actually atomized.
Some of us are asocial or loners by choice. That is not atomization. The Margaret Thatcher thing is really not giving a shit and as long as people are polite about it, your “bread” will keep flowing in. Less so when “data as oil” metaphorically leads to change in humans as the earth reacts to fossil fuel.

Humans unlike earth respond faster and target their attacks better.
I have survived hell and the planet may or may not. But no one will survive without a living planet and factory farming, ventilation shutdown etc are our own death knell.

I am sick of bullshit jobs destroying my life:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2022/09/why-you-hate-your-job


Most of this economy is bullshit. Bullshit like Facebook, Google, OpenAi. They don’t have products anyone wants or needs. Even Tyler Durden would get that.
I didn’t hate my job. I loved it. I was bad at it.

The postdoc to pi transition in hard science is damn near impossible. In a sane world Yan Lecun wouldn’t work for Zuckerberg, he would work for something Max Planck which is by now probably the only place (minus spooks) to handle this type of data and Zuckerberg would be scammer who got caught and sent to prison.

These are all bullshit jobs. General intelligence isn’t groveling to mediocre tech people who take everything hostage nor is it joining a mob or reinventing oneself as an influencer.
It is pushing for criminal liability at this dire a time for fossil fuel and data as oil companies.

Earth cannot target climate change as usefully as humans can target the change in human behavior data as oil ultimately results in. Lina Khan should push for criminal liability next time especially as exploiting narcotics laws and immigration status carelessly is unprincipled and unsustainable.

This population explosion everywhere (worst of all in the global south - please don’t send your edtech etc guys here so people like me can be exploited in two countries. Please keep them over there) is a menace:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/there-are-many-threats-to-humanity.-a-low-birth-rate-isnt-one-of-them

https://www.counterpunch.org/2026/03/20/nandita-bajaj-confronting-patriarchy-pronatalism-and-population-denial/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Room!_Make_Room!

Peter Kalmus and Chris Ketcham get it. Sen Whitehouse gets it. The tech bros do not and nor does their third rate a”i”:

https://peterkalmus.net/

https://www.christopherketcham.com/

The intelligence is artificial not to mention imaginary. The stupidity is real. That ass Trump likes to say “lock her up” a lot. That is bs but criminal liability for guys like Andreessen that cannot be gamed by incompetent technocrats may be the only solution.
What an utter idiot:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advance-man

Adam Becker gets it. Andreessen is also one of my least favorite tech mediocrities:

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-mad-religion-of-technological-salvation/

Lots of fun reading material on both types of climate change 👆. 👇
Yan Lecun and that economist are too polite:

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/godfathers-of-ai-are-fighting-over-ai-wiping-away-millions-of-jobs-yann-lecun-says-dont-listen-to-geoffery-hinton-as-ai-scientists-are-brilliant-be-they-are-/articleshow/130680712.cms

Prof Lecun is pretty much the only heavyweight in ai I pay attention to as saying anything remotely honest and not solely intended to make critics parrot silly arguments so the tech bros can call straightforward people “suckers” and gullible rather than merely not convoluted and perverse. Not everyone is a vicious curmudgeon in agreeable drag. Some people are nice not simplistic. Dostoevsky got it.

I am not. I was roleplaying nice and it is too much work and not worth it.

My post got truncated. These were always cannibalistic professions. Prof Lecun himself lost his job to that ass Alexandr Wang. I agreed with Prof Lecun. I feel far worse about using WhatsApp now and hope he still has some tied with the company as he is the only researcher I would trust at Meta:

https://www.inc.com/leila-sheridan/zuckerbergs-former-top-ai-researcher-goes-scorched-earth-on-meta-in-a-new-interview/91285233

I was an early casualty to this fraudulent bloodbath and it was not machines but humans behind them who will themselves be more embattled. It is cannibalistic. An artificial we with no returns on an investment one never made: