Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

"A study from UCSF’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative last year was one of the deepest dives into California’s crisis in decades. It found that drug use and mental health problems are not the driver behind people losing housing; the primary reason is the increasing precariousness of the working poor."

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2024/12/the-us-embrace-of-incarceration-for-the-homeless-is-a-win-win-for-the-plutocrats.html

https://kolektiva.media/w/wfzLtwhG9nVeLHqawUFYRc

We invite you to join in organizing festivals of resistance on the weekend of January 18, immediately before Donald Trump takes office.
https://crimethinc.com/festivalsofresistance

By organizing ahead of Trump’s inauguration, we can seize the initiative and set our own timeline rather than being caught flat-footed and forced to react. We need to welcome new participants into these struggles and foster a revolutionary perspective that can orient us through the challenges ahead.

In collaboration with @CrimethInc

Taught this in a class on "ghosts in the machine" in Science Fiction, in order to supply some "real-world" ghosts and displace the hype-based idea of "AI" students are carrying around at present. Found this because one of the Internet's Great Sages, Cosma Shalizi, recommends Mitchell's writing on the subject. No surprise, I liked it; also (in hindsight) no surprise, Mitchell was Douglas R. Hofstadter's graduate student. She has a "fluid analogies" kind of perspective on intelligence, and writes well, in the popular-science mode, about developments in the field from the earliest days. Her examples of the failure modes of the various breakthrough neural nets are entertainingly compelling—and made a real impression on some of my initially AI-happy students. However, in the way of such things, some of her failure modes have since turned into (apparent) LLM successes, like Winograd schemas. She also maintains a level of calm in writing about "the Singularity" (while shredding the arguments about it) that I truly admire. Recommended for your students and/or your aggressive relations who want to tell you over the holiday table that the humanities are obsolete now.

(comment on Artificial Intelligence)

In response to a thread by @flancian, I just wrote a long rant about the value technoskepticism as applied to generative AI:
https://hub.netzgemeinde.eu/item/e3e54544-956e-4ca8-99a3-21fa999a0331

I think it might be more digestible in thread form, so I'm also transcribing it as a thread here.

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