As intelligence becomes abundant, the most important question will be how we direct it. Some argue that superintelligence itself, or a small set of experts who control it, should decide what is best for humanity. I disagree. The history of democracy and economics has shown that there is no single objective answer to how people define the best life, and therefore the best approach is letting people decide what matters to them. Rather than centralizing this power, we believe that delivering personal superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question.

Healthy societies also recognize that safety requires checks and balances. If only a handful of institutions have superintelligence, they will inevitably exercise a controlling influence over economics, science and politics. Even with the best intentions, that concentration would limit people’s ability to choose their own future.

Famous enemy of software monopolies and tech oligarchies that have an outsized influence over politics, champion of distributed ownership of the means of computation Mark Zuckerberg

“Up to 7 billion” over a period of 10 years can hardly dig Oracle out of the hole it has dug itself into, though…

It’s as if, practically overnight, everyone went from, “we need to do everything we can to reduce our demands on the environment or we’re cooked” to “oooh, shiny new toy, and it only ruins everything around it, cool!”

Definitely this one for me. I can only describe it as some fucked up denial psychology, the way people are pretending the environment isn’t collapsing, and the LLM boom on top of that is like a bad joke. Even in discussions critical of the tech sector this is treated as almost an afterthought—the very real, very violent damage done to all of us from poor countries by people in rich countries to prop up their toy fantasy schemes. Even if LLMs did everything they claim to do, it would still be a moral imperative to form insurgent guerillas to blow up these datacentres, on the environmental damage they do alone which is not a minor detail Karen it’s kind of a big deal

“AI bet goes awry: Oracle fires 21,000 employees, then hit a $7 billion power hurdle”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/ai-spending-spree-hits-600b-as-oracle-fires-21000-employees-to-fund-boom/ar-AA28vWuD

“Oracle’s Worst Stock Crash in 25 Years” “Has Cost Larry Ellison $213 Billion in 10 Months”
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/oracle-worst-stock-crash-25-113002772.html

It’s going to be Oracle to collapse the house of cards, isn’t it. Come on Oracle, die and take down the USA economy with you. Make the people happy, Oracle.

“In short, Oracle’s 65% decline is historic, but the stock’s future depends less on its past and more on whether its AI investments produce durable cash flow”

well good luck with that, Oracle! :D

Codeberg bans slop

News the one: Alphabet quadruples profit to 112B thanks to “AI” investments

News the two: Alphabet hiding ~250B in “AI” debt

First impressions on this because I don’t have anyone else to talk about it and you pointed me to it,

big tech robot had literally the same task as a karakuri doll from 300 years ago and still lost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_czILDdOBc8

(more on karakuri for people who want to wach some actual technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU-kqpkZWjc )

Ursula is great! I love The Dispossessed. You can kinda read them in any order based on what catches your attention, except stuff like Earthsea that is best consumed in order.

if you like this kind of stuff I would recommend also:

• Margaret Killjoy (A Country of Ghosts is basically The Dispossessed spiritual successor; The Sapling Cage is fresh queer fantasy; also the Danielle Cain series has been published in audio as podcasts, it’s like, anarchopunk post-collapse Scooby-Doo)
• The Serpent Gates series (this starts exactly like the Tombs of Atuan, except Tenar is a lesbian orc and the equivalent of Ged is using her for his own purposes and the rest of the story goes very different but the protagonist is a lesbian orc so I automatically like it)
• The Wayfarers series (slice-of-life sci-fi, kind of like Star Trek at its best, exploring diversity imaginatively)
• The two Robot and Monk books by the same author (feel-good hopepunk about how society could be good after collapse)
• Octavia Butler is the other undisputed giant. Lilith’s Brood series for some genuinely creative sci-fi, or the two Parable books for collapse fiction that is so prescient it’s downright uncomfortable.
• A Memory Called Empire and it sequel (sci-fi about colonialism and the Empire; sophisticated handling of these themes that I appreciated as a Global South migrant)
• This Gilded Abyss. Fundamentally a CaitVi fixfic. If the previous sentence made any sense to you you must try this one. Otherwise: Picture the Titanic, but it’s a luxury submarine in a magical-steampunk type setting. Now add zombies. Now add toxic yuri.
• The Locked Tomb series (lesbian Warhammer 40k. my favourite book series in the world. spectacular audiobook narration.)
• This Is How you Lose the Time War—absolute hoot of a book, just a delight from start to end. Picture the Spy × Spy comics from MAD. Now make one spy a time-traveling agent from future biopunk ecogarden plant utopia, the other spy an agent from future mind-upload hypertech cyperutopia. Their mission is to shift the timelines to their respective visions. Alas, they’re both lesbian… (Sorry, I have a bit of a pattern in my interests)

First they came for rsync, and I cared nothing, for I do my backups with borg…

https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

lol at least the gringos are going to explode themselves and stop bothering the third world—

To avoid U.S. regulatory burdens, the company began working on deploying a test reactor in the Philippines.

ah yes of course

I never understand how these things aren’t simply stolen and dismantled for parts? Where I come from I bet that would happen within a fortnight. yes there’s cameras and GPS locators etc. but there’s ways around that, it’s not that hard…

ponzi scheme capitalists: and we’re going to hoard and burn all the RAM and nobody will be able to buy RAM anymore

me: pfff whatever computers suck anyway I would never buy a computer, besides they have too much RAM these days, 512MB ought to be enough for everybody

ponzi scheme capitalists: we’re also going to hoard all SSDs

me: great, maybe people will go back to writing things on sustainable and attention-friendly paper and leave a bit of a durable legacy, like old books

ponzi scheme capitalists: old books, you say? tell me more about those old books of yours

me: ｮﾟДﾟ)o

https://www.srf.ch/kultur/gesellschaft-religion/jagd-auf-alte-buecher-ki-firmen-kaufen-antiquariate-leer-und-vernichten-die-buecher

after calling the con about a super hacker AI the “mythos”, now they’re calling the next spiel “fable”? are they like, just taking the piss at this point?

A detailed look at what kind of slop code is being added to rsync and how exactly slop codes does, allegedly, “tests”. Somehow it’s just what I expected and worse than I thought.

https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116667218484408879

don’t give them ideas

Ah yes, the famous resistance that doesn’t destroy anything. Famously effective, the passive non-destructive inaction resistance

slop code in rsync timeline Ψ(･ω･ )Ψ

I mean, those sound like rookie numbers to me. I regularly spend like, less than five minutes between eye-contact-and-smile and wild hardcore sex, and most of the five minutes is the time to walk them down to the dungeon and negotiate limits. The only special trick is simply going to a space where everyone else also wants to have sex, it’s called a sex club.

Leaving aside all considerations of ethics, I cannot comprehend why the supposed bastions of rationality would waste time with baroque theories of psychological manipulation to try to coax randos during non-sexual situations into having sex, when if all you want is sex you can simply go have sex with the people who want sex. Or just pay for sex, or use grindr or whatever. You know, like, if I wanted to play boardgames I would go to boardgame night, if I wanted people to listen to me sing I would go to karaoke. I would not approach strangers in a bus stop and go, “hey wanna hear me sing?” The idea of doing that for sex of all things is bizarre to me.

(This is a rhetorical sneer, the pickup-artistry phenomenon is easily comprehendable; it’s because these men are not really trying to have sex, they’re trying to fulfil a gaping hole of unexamined, endless need for validation.)

Something seems to be lost on my peers today: it’s still easy to not use AI. The food we eat, clothes we wear, and every electronic device we touch may embody innumerable injuries to the world, and all this is inescapable. Eschewing AI is one thing that we can actually do to live out ethics that affirm values of human and environmental rights. It’s almost a gift! Just use a computer the same way you did three years ago!

https://www.eamoncaddigan.net/posts/ai-in-2026/