AI is only reliably used if the outputs can be vetted. This means any user of AI needs to be more knowledgeable and experienced than the work being asked. The user needs to know the correct answer before AI is asked the question. Anything less than this is use through ignorance. When placed into any business environment, ignorance only does harm. That ignorance will destroy a business. And as these high experience, very knowledgeable people retire out of the work force, no one will be there to replace them. The loop closes, and all that's left is complete and total ignorance full-circle.

Two fun Ask Reddit threads, What's something you're pretty sure only you do? And People do the least amount of work as possible at their job, how do you get away with it?

And Matt sends this article with a cool idea: An Age-Based U.S. House Ends Gerrymandering Once and for All:

Just as now, each state would receive a number of representatives based on its population -- but everything after that would change. States would divide their voters into state-wide, age-based voting blocs of equal number, and each of which would elect a representative to Congress. Representatives need not themselves come from the age group they represent; we would leave it to voters to determine who best represents their interests.

I've heard the haha-but-serious joke numerous times that you can't have a security department that's not trans and furry friendly. Thing is, I completely believe that. Those groups are disproportionately represented among the security community, and I personally would not work somewhere that my friends in those groups would feel unwelcome. That's a quite common sentiment even among us straight cis non-furry men.

Polymarket gamblers threaten to kill me over Iran missile story. People are gambling on public events and threatening journalists who report it the wrong way. This is part of the endgame of capitalism, a culture in which the most sacred freedom is the freedom to turn money into more money, where money is a fungible token of power over others.

Stop Sloppypasta, a really well written article about the cognitive labor created by AI text: "Previously, effort to read was balanced by the effort to write. Now LLMs make writing 'free' and increase the effort to read due to additional verification burden."

And something good: Wired headphone sales are exploding. The thread is about people noticing that many high-tech conveniences actually make stuff harder. Related: from my readings folder, Ivan Illich on Cars.

This book is like Earth Abides, a slow-paced post-apocalypse classic. It's like Hatchet, with a single character surviving with no help from civilization. It's like My Side Of The Mountain in that solo survival turns out to include relationships with animals. It's like Walden, with deep ruminations on the mental state of being closer to nature. And while it's not technically an example, it totally anticipates the ______ genre.

But the book it reminds me of the most is The Curve of Time by M. Wylie Blanchet. They were written about the same time, both of them about independent middle-aged women living on the fringes, facing challenges, and getting you hypnotically into their mind space. I understand why people think this is boring. There are a lot of descriptions of scything hay and moving cows around. But you have to read that stuff to slow your head down enough to understand what this book is doing.

Also, I disagree that this is dystopian. A dystopia is a bad human society, and this book contains no human society whatsoever, except memories of our own dystopia which no longer exists.

The recent release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein did not shake the world because they revealed something entirely unknown. They shook it because they confirmed, with documentary coldness, a truth usually spoken only in whispers: that absolute power does not live within common morality, but creates a parallel morality of its own.
...
The untouchability of these figures is not a flaw of the system, but its highest achievement. It does not arise from the absence of laws, but from their excess; not from a lack of evidence, but from the fragmentation of truth. The public receives enough information to be shocked, but never enough to demand real accountability. Scandal turns into spectacle, and spectacle into fatigue.

For decades we have known that two tricks to help you lucid dream are looking at your hands or trying to read text because dreams don't do hands or text well and can be clue that you are in a dream.

Why the fuck are dreams and AI suffering from the same glitch?!?"

Under that are a ton of comments and some half-baked theories. I think it's just that those are both cognitively difficult tasks, and AI and dream consciousness both struggle, unless you burn a lot of computing power or you're a talented dreamer. By the way, I rarely manage to lucid dream, but I do have a test that works every time. I jump up, and try to delay coming down. In a dream I can always do it. In the physical world, not yet.

Another big sub-thread about the ability to diagnose sickness by smell. This is a real thing. The reason we don't have smell test clinics is that the medical industry would have to develop a whole system for certification, and probably training, and there's no incentive with the present system bringing in so much money.

A shorter sub-thread about relationship scams, in which the OP, who fell for one, is not paranoid enough, and the featured comment lays out the whole process of how it works. This reminds me of stage magic, in that the audience can't imagine that the magician would go to that much trouble.