I sometimes wish I cared little enough about the ethical implications of the things I use to not hate everything LLMs represent right now. It feels like my world view is constantly under siege... Under siege by people with more money than god, using this technology to make the biggest attempt at enclosing mental commons I've seen in my lifetime. Under siege by people who never look further than the next shiny toy, seemingly ignoring the damage that using that toy, or even just tolerating that toy, has on the world.

It's just making me very tired...

GenAI's real alignment problem: We don't need its solutions and we can't handle its intrinsic problems

https://parsingphase.dev/tech/LLMs/theAlignmentProblem.html

A work in 4000 words of progress. Turns out there's no concise way to catalog this mess.

this is a comment under a video about dumping slag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhJF_hTJ2Rw

Great video clip. I had a job once at the US Steel Pipe Works, Geneva Plant, Utah where I took "slag temperatures" before they sprayed "devils liquor" sump water on it to cool it down. I wore wooden shoe "clogs" to protect my shoes from melting (the same kind coke oven operators wear when servicing the ovens). 24 hours after a "thimble car" dump of red-hot slag was made, I went out and traversed the dump-site, measuring congealed slag surface temperatures, sometimes up to and often exceeding 600 degrees F. I wore thick canvas over-clothes, but anywhere my body came into pointed contact with the canvas (elbows and knees) I would get "burned" because of the heat transferred from the canvas material through my regular clothes. The heat at breathing height was about 200 degrees F. I wore a face shield (clear) to protect my face from the heat and had to wear a scarf over my nose to prevent breathing in super-heated air. As it was, I still singed the hairs inside my nose if I inhaled a little too quickly.

Imagine walking around inside a pizza oven, that is what it felt like. It dried me out, like desiccating me from the inside out breathing in all that super hot and very dry air.

Watching the thimble cars dump slag at night was one of the most incredible visual experiences I have ever had. The second after they tip a thimble, when the splash of red hot slag boiling down the slope glows intensely red, there follows milliseconds later, a "blast" of intense infrared radiation, that hits you in the face like a gust of hot wind.

The sea-gulls around dusk, would often ride the intense thermals created by the super-heated air, drawing cooler air up from below the slag pits, combining with the hot air whoosh it would go, rushing up the precipitous cliffs, man-made mini-mountains of slag, there they would fly along the thermals updraft about 100 feet up and nearly parallel to the rail car dump line. Their white underbelly's "glowing" brilliantly orange, phoenix like they hovered there almost motionless reflecting the bright yellow-orange and red hues of the cooling slag. It was like they were on fire it was so bright in the fading light of the day. It was the only beautiful sight to see in an otherwise desolate and foreboding wasteland of glassy rock-like congealed blast furnace slag.

Geneva Works is now defunct.

mrc109

One of my favorite quotes ever, from why the lucky stiff:

"when you don't create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."

In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen

https://www.colincornaby.me/2025/08/in-the-future-all-food-will-be-cooked-in-a-microwave-and-if-you-cant-deal-with-that-then-you-need-to-get-out-of-the-kitchen/?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=jetpack_social

Ed Zitron takes an axe to the AI bubble hype:

"ChatGPT is a very successful growth product and an absolutely horrifying business. OpenAI is a banana republic that cannot function on its own, it does not resemble Uber, Amazon Web Services, or any other business in the past other than WeWork, the other company that SoftBank spent way too much money on.

"And outside of ChatGPT, there really isn't anything else."

LONG (and detailed) evisceration of the hype mongering here: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-haters-gui/

The Good Law Project is fundraising to challenge the UK Supreme Court's recent ruling on in the European Court of Human Rights.

If you are unaware, the ruling of the UK Supreme Court was that under the Equality Act 2010, 'sex' was to be interpreted as 'biological sex', rather than gender. This upended over a decade of existing practice and interpretation.

If you are able to contribute, please do: this ruling was devastating blow to the community, undermining our expectations and safety.

https://goodlawproject.org/crowdfunder/supreme-court-human-rights-for-trans-people

Boosts would be welcome - the more people see this, the better the chances of them hitting their goal.

#Trans
#TransRights
#CrowdfFunding
#UKpol
#SupremeCourt
#Discrimination
#EqualityAct2010