extremely mad because my relative in American prison has let me know that from now on, instead of being charged once per book or per song and having the files added permanently to his account, he's going to ALSO be charged by the minute to read or listen to music on the tablets that are the only things they're allowed to use.

reminder that paying prisoners (vastly) less than minimum wage is legal in the US because they're defined as an exception to anti-slavery laws.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@petrillic/116337502667369228

I can’t have a conversation with any genAI boosters that is remotely productive precisely because of this.

RE: https://mastodon.publicinterest.town/@b_cavello/116338207761349739

@b_cavello there are things that we can only make incremental progress on divesting from (coal, oil, cars, non-renewable energy, most plastics) because we’ve already made immensely costly errors in the past that make them largely unavoidable for many people. GenAI is different in that it’s completely avoidable, right now, and we are well positioned to simply… not let it happen.

There may be a world where the technologies involved in genAI find their use without being deeply ethically compromised, and I believe we may very well find that niche in due time. Tbh I think it’s more a matter of when, not if. Take cars, for example: consider a world in which they became local, low speed, last-mile transportation infrastructure primarily used by those with additional mobility needs/emergency responders and which shared primarily pedestrian infrastructure or in smaller towns that had not yet built out more robust transit, and where regional and arterial transportation had been structured around public transit. We could’ve made that choice back then. We were already on track for it, too, and actually reversed course in many places.

In the meantime, I can choose to not put my dollar into funding and my voice into promoting something that is harming the world as much or more than so many of the Big Ones.

I really like how watching the uxn channel on the concatenative discord has really left a permanent mark in my brain. Me and the rest of the mods basically let it operate as an automous zone in the discord. I even had it muted for the most part. Unbenounced to everyone outside that channel however, an AI booster and vibecoder had joined.

In a matter of a month or so, he killed the whole channel. Strangled it with his refusal to think. Every word someone said was feed straight into an LLM. Then, thrown back at chat cause the LLM could predict the correct code, and he could understand anything.

Eventually everyone grew so tired they began leaving. One fucking person leeched off a whole community. Never. Again. Ever inch you cede to LLM contributions in your community is another step towards its implosion. There is a reason so much of the art community has vehemently rejected whole sale.

But programmers need their new toys. And programmers demand every space follows industry trends and recommendation. And programmers cannot handle the idea of someone saying "no, we don't do that here". Cause nobody gets to say No in the software world. Things are always forced to evolve, consequences be damned.

I made the mistake once. I will not be making it twice. Do not help build the new car depedent infrastructure or everything you care about will be paved over.