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nosrednaydujsolarbirdHave you ever noticed that every projection about “AGI” and “superintelligence” has an “and then a miracle occurs” step?
I have.
I shouldn’t say every projection – there are many out there, and I haven’t seen them all. But every one I’ve personally seen has this step. Somewhere, sometime, fairly soon, generative AI will create something that triggers a quantum leap in capability. What will it be? NOTHING MERE HUMANS CAN UNDERSTAND! Oh, sometimes they’ll make up something – a new kind of transistor, a new encoding language (like sure, that’ll do it), whatever. Sometimes they just don’t say. Whatever it is, it happens, and then we’re off to the hyperintelligent AGI post-singularity tiems.
But the thing is … the thing is … for Generative AI to create a Magic Something that Changes Everything – to have this miracle – you have to already have hyperintelligent AGI. Since you don’t… well…
…that’s why it’s a miracle. Whether they realise it or not.
I’m not sure which is worse – that they do realise it, and know they’re bullshitting billions of dollars away from productive society to build up impossible wealth before the climate change they’re helping make worse fucks everything so they can live like feudal kings from their bunkers, or whether they don’t, and are spirit dancing, wanking off technofappic dreams of creating a God who will save the world with its AI magic, a short-term longtermism, burning away the rest of the carbon budget in a Hail Mary that absolutely will not connect.
Both possibilities are equally batshit insane, I know that much. To paraphrase a friend who knows far more about the maths of this than I, all the generative AI “compute” in the universe isn’t going to find fast solutions to PSPACE-HARD problems. It’s just not.
And so, sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, I think of…
…I think of putting a short reading/watching list out there, a list that I hesitate to put together in public, because the “what the actual fuck” energies are so strong – so strong – that I can’t see how anyone could take it seriously. And yet…
…so much of the AI fantasia happening right now is summed by three entirely accessible works.
Every AI-fantasia idea, particularly the ideas most on the batshit side…
…they’re all right here. And it’s all fiction. All of it. Some of it is science-shaped; none of it is science.
But Alice, you know, we’re all mad here. So… why not.
Let’s go.
1: Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
This is the “bad end” you see so much in “projections” about AI progression. A new one of these timelines just dropped, they have a whole website you can play with. I’m not linking to it because why would I, holy shit, I don’t need to spread their crazy. But there’s a point in the timeline/story that they have you read – I think it’s in 2027 – when you can make a critical choice. It’s literally a one-selection choose-your-own-path adventure!
The “good” choice takes you to galactic civilisation managed by friendly hyperintelligent AGI.
The “bad” choice is literally the plot of The Forbin Project with an even grimmer ending. No, really. The beats are very much the same. It’s just The Forbin Project with more death.
Well. And a bioweapon. Nukes are so messy, and affect so much more than mere flesh.
2: Blindsight, by Peter Watts (2006)
This rather interesting – if bleak – novel presents a model of cognition which lays out an intriguing thought experiment, even if it … did not sit well with what I freely admit is my severely limited understanding of cognition.
(It is not helped that it directly contradicts known facts about the cognition of self-awareness in various animals, and did so even when it was published. That doesn’t make it a worse thought experiment, however. Or a worse novel.)
It got shortlisted – deservedly – for a bunch of awards. But that’s not why it’s here. It’s here because its model of cognition is functionally the one used by those who think generative AI and LLMs can be hyperintelligent – or even functionally intelligent at all.
And it’s wrong. As a model, it’s just wrong.
Finally, we get to the “what.” entry:
3: Friendship is Optimal, by Iceman (2012)
Friendship is Optimal is obviously the most obscure of these works, but also, I think maybe the most important. It made a big splash in MLP fandom, before landing like an absolute hand grenade in the nascent generative AI community when it broke containment. Maybe not in all of that latter community – but certainly in the parts of which I was aware. So much so, in fact, that it made waves even beyond that – which is when I heard of it, and how I read it.
And yes… it’s My Little Pony fanfic.
Sorta.
It’s that, but really it’s more an explicit AI takeoff story, one which is absolutely about creating a benevolent hyperintelligent Goddess AI construct who can, will, and does remake the world, destroying the old one behind her.
Sound familiar?
These three works include every idea behind every crazy line of thought I’ve seen out of the Silicon Valley AI crowd. These three works right here. A novel or a movie (take your choice, the movie’s quite good, I understand the novel is as well), a second novel, and a frankly remarkable piece of fanfic.
For Musk’s crowd in particular? It’s all about the model presented in Friendship is Optimal, except, you know, totally white supremacist. They’re even kinda following the Hofvarpnir Studios playbook from the story, but with less “licensed property game” and a lot more more “Billionaire corporate fascism means you don’t have to pay employees anymore, you can just take all the money yourself.”
…which is not the kind of sentence I ever thought I’d write, but here we are.
You can see why I’m hesitant to publish this reading list, but I also hope you can see why I want to.
If you read Friendship is Optimal, and then go look at Longtermerism… I think you definitely will.
So what’re we left with, then?
Some parts of this technology are actually useful. Some of it. Much less than supports the valuations, but there’s real use here. If you have 100,000 untagged, undescribed images and AI analysis gives 90% of them reasonable descriptions, that’s a substantial value add. Some of the production tools are good – some of them are very good, or will be, once it stops being obvious that “oh look, you’ve used AI tools on this.” Some of the medical imaging and diagnostic tools show real promise – though it’s always important to keep in mind that antique technologies like “Expert Systems” seemed just as promising, in the lab.
Regardless, there’s real value to be found in those sorts of applications. These tasks are where it can do good. There are many more than I’ve listed, of course.
But AGI? Hyperintelligence? The underlying core of this boom, the one that says you won’t have to employ anyone anymore, just rake in the money and live like kings?
That entire project is either:
A knowing mass fraud inflating a bubble nobody’s seen in a century that instead of breaking a monetary system might well finish off any hopes for a stable climate in an Enron-like insertion of AI-generated noise followed by AI-generated summarisation of that noise that no one reads and serves no purpose and adds no value but costs oh, oh so very much electricity and oh, oh, oh so very much money;
A power play unlike anything since the fall of the western Roman empire, where the Church functionally substituted itself in parallel to and substitute of of the Roman government to the point that the latter finally collapsed, all in service of setting up a God’s Kingdom on Earth to bring back Jesus, only in this case, it’s setting up the techbro billionaires as a new nobility, manipulating the hoi polloi from above with propaganda and disinformation sifted through their “AI” interlocutors;
Or an absolute psychotic break by said billionaires and fellow travellers so utterly unwilling and utterly unable to deal with the realities of climate change that they’ll do anything – anything – to pretend they don’t have to, including burning down the world in the service of somehow provoking a miracle that transcends maths and physics in the hope that some day, some way, before it’s too late, their God AI will emerge and make sure everything ends up better… in the long term.
Maybe, even, it’s a mix of all three.
And here I thought my reading list was the scary part.
Silly me.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
annathepiperMy next playthrough post is going to be another one from Nona’s playthrough, and I am super behind on her in particular. I left off in the middle of running Carved Brink with her.
Y’all may recall that I put up a review post about that mod, as well. But here’s the thing: since I ran Carved Brink originally with Nona, I have since run it a few more times as Tuxborn has continued to develop its builds, and since I’ve been doing playtesting for Tuxborn, that by definition included re-running Carved Brink. This led me to discover some additional things about it that I’d missed the first time, and which honestly made me enjoy playing it more.
So at this point, I’m rather more kindly disposed to it than I was on the first playthrough. And I felt it was appropriate to put up an addendum to the original review.
Most of the commentary I gave in the original review still applies, and I’m not going to recap points where my opinion hasn’t changed. But I do have some additional stuff I like about Carved Brink, and which I want to note here.
Read more on Anna Plays Skyrim.
solarbirdGreater Northshore Bike Connector Map 2.0 – 15 July 2025 – is now available on github, as is MEGAMAP 2.0.0.
The big update this release is making City of Seattle street labels legible when printed. This was a pretty big project, for several reasons, and involved patching many parts of the map by hand. This project is one of the reasons there are many small corrections in City of Seattle this release.
While yes, I can edit their PDF directly and change sizes that way, they use an $1850 typeface and I do not have that money, at least, not for this project. Also, their PDF is optimised… presumably for something… but whatever way in which it might be optimised, it’s in a way that makes it a nightmare to edit. So the hard way it is.
Additions and changes since 1.8:
All permalinks continue to work.
If you enjoy these maps and feel like throwing some change at the tip jar, here’s my patreon. Patreon supports get things like pre-sliced printables of the Greater Northshore, and also the completely-uncompressed MEGAMAP, not that the .jpg has much compression in it because honestly it doesn’t.
Thank you! ^_^
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
annathepiperI got Ashoshah started as a character on ESO nearly a whole year ago at this point, and have I posted about her more than once since then? No, no I have not. So here’s a post to try to get caught up on what I’ve done with that character.
Read more on Anna Plays Skyrim.
nosrednaydujnosrednaydujsolarbirdThe last couple of posts I’ve made with images didn’t have their alt text make it to the Federation. It made it to Dreamwidth, but didn’t federate.
Let’s try this one:
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
nosrednaydujsolarbirdGrok went gone full Hitler-supporting Nazi today. At first it was slightly hidden, but since I boosted this around, it’s just gone full-bore literal Nazi, calling for National Socialism and talking about what Hitler would do and why it would be good.
I don’t have time to write a long version of this, much less edit it to a good short version of this, so I’m just gonna dump my thesis:
I don’t think anyone changed Grok’s startup prompt.
I think they shifted weightings on sources until it started agreeing with Elon about all the shit he was mad at it about, and that meant…
…full-bore Nazi time.
Unintentionally.
But inevitably, since he’s literally a fucking fascist who literally threw a Hitler Rally-identical Nazi salute at the fucking inauguration.
Think about this, think about that, and think about who Elon is.
Today is a very good day to protest at a Tesla dealership. Find a protest near you. Get out, show up, do shit.
And it’s always a very good day to leave X behind forever.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
solarbirdMy hold at the library came up, so I finally got to read Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams’s memoir about her time at Facebook.
You should read it.
No matter how bad you might think Facebook/Meta and its leadership might be, it’s almost certainly worse. Even if you know all of the pieces – all of the events discussed in the book were covered by the press in various forms before her memoir dropped – her presentation really pulls it all together.
Wynn-Williams doesn’t come off real great either herself, mind you. Early on, I found myself reacting with combinations of “…how did you expect this to play out?” and “this is both psychotically abusive and incredibly compromising, you should’ve walked. I literally would’ve walked out right here, and I know, ’cause I’ve done it.” (Tho’ to be fair, there have been a couple of times when I didn’t. But mostly, I have.) The recountings alternated between funny and hard to read, but in a way most people would mostly find funny – I think.
That was before it actually got to any of the worst parts, though, the parts where it went from a combination of entertainingly naive, occasionally pathetic, and often appalling to frankly revolting and rather deeply grim but still compelling as the… honestly, as the evil… crystallised.
But, well.
No matter how badly Wynn-Williams might come across in this memoir, Facebook comes off much, much worse.
So much worse.
So you should read it. No one other than Meta have contested the contents. Even they refer to the contents as “out of date” and “previously reported,” which worlds away from “lies” – although they do insist some of her accusations of behaviour by upper-level executives are “false.”
That’s probably about the sexual harassment, but I think we all know better.
More, Zuckerberg tried very hard to silence her and stop the book’s publication. He did manage to stop her – via binding arbitration – from promoting her work. That includes stating “orally, in writing, or otherwise any disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments to any person or entity concerning [Meta], its officers, directors, or employees.”
The book came out anyway, because the publisher was in the UK, and said they didn’t care what an American arbitrator had to say.
And that’s one of the reasons you should read it.
Because if you think there is anything redeemable within Meta… based on the uncontested facts of this book… you are wrong.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
nosrednaydujsolarbirdHere – here’s why I’m doing all this relabelling work in one photo of actual printouts of the same area of map, laid out side by side on a tabletop, and shot from above:
Look at the street names.
That’s why.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
solarbirdSo I’m redoing the text on the Seattle 2023 bike map, because I figured out that while in digital form on a phone or something it’s okay, printed, it’s REALLY not.
And since the printed poster is the biggest single part of the point of this whole exercise, if I want this actually usable on streets people don’t already know… I have to fix it.
And fixing it means new text everywhere important, and often that means having to block out existing text.
The problem with this is that this sometimes means covering up streets. Not important ones, but streets nonetheless, where the old labels crossed that road and still need to be removed.
Let’s take Mary NW here:
The original small label text for Mary NW crossed a road, probably… 95th street? Honestly not sure. It’s not labelled, so I’m not adding a label of my own.
To remove the old Mary Ave NW label, though, I had to block over it with the background colour. That removed part of a street line.
Now, sure, I could draw another line there and replace it. I’ve done that before and will do again if I have to. But that’s an extra step that I might be able to avoid, right? What if instead of labelling the road “Mary Ave NW,” I just labelled it “Mary NW” instead, and make sure the first vertical of the capital N lies where the street line should be?
There’s no Mary Street so there won’t be ambiguity, so why not?
N 90th Street lower and to the right is doing the same thing. So is NW 90th to the left, but it’s the leftmost diagonal bar of the W.
This isn’t a big flashy trick. If I do it right, nobody will ever notice that I did it. That’s the goal, really. It’s not something anyone should see.
But it is a good example of the delicate art of text placement. Particularly on a map.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
solarbirdOkay, so, one of my best friends still has people from her neighbourhood being disappeared. It’s not getting better. It’s getting worse.
I’m not going to ID her here, not with undead pieces of shit like Laura Loomer literally calling for feeding everyone like her to alligators. But and she’s been talking about what’s going on around her, and there are fundraisers for families (via GoFundMe). They’re linked below, but mostly… honestly, I just want to let her talk.
Here are some of her words.
I know it’s drowned out by bigger news, and there’s 10000000 other things going on that require attention, I totally get it, but
ICE raids are still happening daily in Los Angeles and people are getting taken off the street
It’s not really safe for me to walk around, especially in the mornings to get errands done around my neighborhood
so
this is small and just one person, but please consider donating to Reyna. She is a tamale vendor I grew up with. She would laugh with my family and knew us as kids. I’ve never been so heartbroken like this. She literally has never been in any trouble. Her only crime was going to work her regular route selling her food and not being documented.
These are Zapotec (indigenous Mexican) community members who got taken on the first mass day of raids. They’re still trying to reach their goal.
I know this is like moral outrage shit, but like this is my community. It’s personal and it’s still happening and it’s just getting more and more brazen cuz cameras aren’t on them anymore.
They are stopping people based on racial profiling alone, they have taken people even with proof of citizenship in their cars or on their person, and the conditions they throw you into are basically deadly in their mini concentration camps with barely any food/water, no access to medication or hygiene products and not even any proper beds to sleep in.
It feels like the only people being searched for are those with connections here and those are the lucky ones. Dozens of others have no family or relatives here so they get forgotten about.
And no one should be forgotten.
Do what you can.
It should go without saying, but to be clear – neither of these fundraisers are for her. That might matter for some people, so I’m saying it.
Do what you can.
Next big protest day is July 17th. But there are many more things you can and should be doing.
Do what you can.
Everywhere.
Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.
nosrednayduj - Good trouble; #10solarbird - sometimes, I think of poniesannathepiper - Mod review: Carved Brink, revisitedsolarbird - Maps Release: Greater Northshore Bike Connector, MEGAMAP 2.0annathepiper - In Which Ashoshah Takes a Contractnosrednayduj - Another bike ridenosrednayduj - Blog-worthy bike ridesolarbird - alt text issuesnosrednayduj - Trip report, pt. 2solarbird - Elon Musk’s Grok going full-Nazisolarbird - Careless Peoplenosrednayduj - trip reportsolarbird - why I’m doing all this worksolarbird - the delicate art of text replacementsolarbird - the media may not care, but ICE is still running roughshod over LA this July 4thtimeasmymeasure
