Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen18h ago

I have read lot of documents about #nuclear criticality accidents. There's a fundamental fascination to the whole field of nuclear science and engineering, because in dealing with fissile materials one must now be extremely conscious of such things as the geometry of containers and the presence (or absence) of certain substances and other factors that are of comparatively negligible importance in dealing with ordinary physical materials. One must be scared of unintuitive things, in working with fissile systems, e.g. substituting one structural material for another, or sloshing a bit too much liquid around in a container. Unenriched uranyl nitrate solution looks the same as heavily enriched stuff...I could go on. It's a field that, as with professional aviation, is exceptionally unforgiving of shortcuts.

I wonder how many of the #tech geeklords who worship the power of the Atom—for, as I think most hep persons know, the nuclear bomb is surely a widely venerated proxy to God as an idol of ultimate power—get into the gritty details of those criticality accidents. They may very well do so, but only in that carefully detached way common with the geek culture, which thinks of such accidents as "Darwin's Award" moments and not as a tragic breakdown in the pretensions of human civilization.

Such accidents always have an avoidable quality...either that breaks your heart every time, or you always think of it as a grand joke, funny because it's happening to someone else, someone remote, some stooges in a news clipping.

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen18h ago

It's very important to mainstream nerd culture: be detached. Don't care too much; that way madness lies. Take a sort of quiet and self-deceptive faith in luck and "the genetic lottery", and tell yourself that nobody dies who doesn't really deserve it in some way, perhaps because they weren't smart enough, or dispassionate enough, or because they were [insert slur here].

All such distinctions ultimately blur into each other. To be "low IQ" is to be crazy is to be criminal is to be unfit, et cetera, ad infinitum. The truly sound people, the people who deserve to win because they are "objectively" the best, don't have to worry about failure and ruin.

Needless to say...that attitude isn't conducive to peace of mind. Thus the elite-class geek culture tends always to seem defensive, paranoid, apt to revolve furiously around a tight complex of emotional problems: insecurity about sanity, insecurity about good health and being perceived as "fit" in a gross physical sense rather than some nebulous evolutionary abstraction, contingent insecurity about sex and sexual performance...which has led certain elite geeks (cough #ElonMusk and Lex Fridman cough cough) down embarrassing rat-holes when it comes to tender passions in the domain of Cytherean Aphrodite.

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen18h ago

In sum, they have been forced into the position of regarding the enjoyment of sex as a symptom of failure, proof that mere animalistic lusts are at work, whereas proper alpha-male nerd sex is...extremely intricate and all about genetic optimization and so forth. It's about making an investment in the future, not about pleasing anyone, not even oneself—which helps to rationalize unsatisfying encounters I'm sure, but which probably leaves Musk and Fridman et alii feeling just a bit mystified by why they feel so perpetually unslaked and lonely. But there are other ways of dealing with such ennui—like, for example, extreme detachment and dissociation, and taking refuge in the grandest of abstractions. Elon Musk loathes human beings, but he loves the idea of "spreading the light of consciousness" and "making life multiplanetary", so he says anyway.

From such a remote and grandiose viewpoint, it must seem unthinkable to care very much about a few dead people, or even a few millions. Isn't death a reality of the world? But they simultaneously believe that their own lives can be extended indefinitely. Indeed they clearly believe that they're "biologically" justified to take any measures necessary to prolong their own lifespans and keep up their present-day lifestyles into perpetuity. After all...they're "objectively" the most successful, the smartest, the best. It would be a sin to hinder such existences; they do so very much good for humanity.

(eyetwitch)

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen18h ago

And that, I suppose, brings us to the heart of the self-contradiction in the geeklord mindset: they pretend as hard as possible to be extremely detached and unmoved by emotions, they say they care for nothing but such abstract and "objective" virtues as meritocracy and rationality and so on, they mock others for their lack of detachment—and yet these people do still HAVE emotions, very powerful ones revolving around a few hot-button topics, most especially their sense of entitlement to their own eternally perpetuated existence.

They remind me of pulse-jet motors, somehow. Periodically they must get hot enough to explode, but in a contained way, and the rest of the time they cruise on the momentum gained by each burp of impulse. Maybe once in a while they need bigger than usual explosions to get them going again after a stumble.

#Startup culture, the #entrepreneurlife, the perpetual chase after unsound exponential growth, gives them the most socially acceptable way of powering themselves through contained explosions. They try to provoke explosions in #stock prices and #crypto gambles and so forth. They talk perpetually as if every single possible business opportunity or investment must necessarily be revolutionary, ready to "go to the Moon", but I point out....they're starting to get restless about going to the REAL #Moon, not just a symbolic one.

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen
But behind all those contained explosions of #business and finance lies a physical thing: #nuclear explosions. Not for nothing did Dr. Louis Slotin, famous Canadian Jewish radiochemist and nuclear-bomb expert (and casualty of The Atom), allude to #money when he came up with a practical unit to refer to the difference in fissile reactivity between a "delayed critical" and "prompt critical" fissile system: he called that unit a dollar, divisible into a hundred cents. The difference between delayed criticality and prompt criticality is what allows nuclear reactions to be contained and controlled. One should try NOT to accumulate more than a hundred cents of fissile reactivity. Above that dollar limit, the fissile system is prompt supercritical and its power will increase exponentially until the system dismantles itself.
Mar 28 at 5:15amWeb
Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen17h ago

Curiously, exactly the same thing happens when you heap too much money in one place. The businessmen love to talk about "growing wealth" exponentially, and indeed because U.S. and "Western" society have decided that (a) loans ought to accrue exponential interest and (b) such exponentially accruing interest on a #debt was "growing wealth" which ought to be made a bedrock principle of the global #economy, there's countless millions of human beings who really do seem to believe that money just...does this, and ought to do this, as though it were decreed by God in the same fashion as gravitation or "biological sex". For money NOT to grow thus, infinitely, would be an evil thing—it would be "socialism" or "communism" (which mean about the same thing to them) and thus incompatible with God and human happiness.

And thus the sober and serious leaders of "Western" #business and #politics all believe that accumulations of #money (such as corporate treasuries, or one's personal #investment portfolio) ought to grow exponentially into perpetuity, as a fixed law of the economy.

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen17h ago

#Cryptocurrency especially inflamed this simple faith in perpetual exponential growth because, for a while anyway, it seemed as if "anyone" could create a new #crypto thingummy and it would always grow exponentially—for a little while. Hence the exponential-growth model felt like it was always getting proved and re-proved, and nobody bothered to ask themselves too hard why no such exponentially accruing hoard ever STAYED that way forever.

At best, I suppose, it was possible for the ambitious #entrepreneur to persuade themselves that the fault must lie in not growing big enough fast enough, thus allowing too much time to pass so that a hot new financial prospect would eventually become stale, a "legacy" thing, thus necessitating the saviour of #capitalism—i.e. the One True Exponential Growth Curve, the one hit memestock or cryptocoin or #ElonMusk venture that finally triggered The Singularity™ and achieved infinite unchallenged Economic Growth™ (as proved to exist by #mathematics, remember!)—always to be something that was punted into the near future. It's been assumed that there would always be an infinite supply of candidates for the One True Venture.

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen17h ago

And now, at long last, I do truly believe, we have arrived at the point where the last-ditch hope of #capitalism and of eternal-growth #startup #entrepreneur culture, the last big gamble of the #technology sector to make good on their promises of eternal ease and plenty, is about to cough and die. "Generative #AI" is running out of runway. They haven't even come close to achieving takeoff speed, and to make matters oh so much worse: the #LLM and fraudulent claims about achieving the mythical state of "artificial general intelligence" has quietly become a load-bearing promise in corporate industry. They were banking upon the power of an autocratic GOP government to force the people to swallow the latest phony miracles from the tech sector; gawd help us all, they even picked out a few prize #tech execs and made them into commanding officers of the U.S. military. And they've got a big-name Democrat, Gavin Newsom, waiting in the wings as a backup political champion; you can't blame fascist tech execs for lack of trying. They'll do anything to keep their failing business models afloat.

But I believe they have, at last, overreached themselves.

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen17h ago

What are they going to do when the #AI bubble is finally out of puff? People (including myself) have speculated about what the next #technology fad might be—quantum computing, maybe?—but I doubt whether they can simply pivot away from the impending failure of the #LLM to gain a deathgrip on corporate tech. They've already been making too many promises contingent upon the purported triumph of "generative AI". Altman and Andreessen and the rest of that crowd have been pretending these things would revolutionize not just computing but everything.

They were going to cure diseases, make immortality possible, achieve massive breakthroughs in #mathematics, on and on. They wouldn't have been making such promises if they weren't running out of pretexts for optimism. "Just let us feed our stochastic parrot with more money and data and miracles will happen" has been the last-gasp daydream of the entire #tech sector to justify their inflated self-images: they have pretended to be not merely vendors of miraculous machines, but the makers of all miracles. The elite tech execs pose not merely as #computer and #software profiteers (which is all they are) but the custodians of all science and engineering...and yet all they've had on tap was fraudulent "artificial intelligence".

Show threadMx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen17h ago

So what indeed will happen if they #tech barons get scared enough? I can't honestly say. They might try to pull off some massive prank they've held in reserve up to now. They might simply exploit their ability to manipulate the technology of #money in order to sow chaos and hope to slip away from the mess; it's widely known (but little publicized) that a bunch of the high-tech elitists have been preparing bunkers and hidey-holes for themselves, fortifying themselves not merely with supplies and private armies but with ideologies that have prepared them (so they may hope) for the eventuality of an ultimate grand catastrophe. Hence they may simply try to create a catastrophe.

Or maybe aliens will show up. If this were a Phil Dick novel, aliens might well just show up apparently out of nowhere and yet in some fashion that's eerily appropriate, thematically.

Good thing this is Real Life™ and not a Phil Dick novel! Right?

Amirite? (laughs insanely, quietly but without stopping, whereupon Akemi Homura teleports in so she can lead Chara out, while condescendingly patting them on the shoulder)

~Chara of Pnictogen