I aspire to be a good vegetarian — we simply don’t eat any meat at home, although we do consume some stuff like Impossible Burgers now and then, a plant-based meat alternative. I can believe that plant-based foodstuff have significantly lower environmental impact, but then I read this claim by the Good Food Institute, and my skeptical ganglion started sending alarms.

Plant-based meat has, on average, 89 percent less environmental impact than traditional meat across all impact categories. Furthermore, plant-based meat’s environmental impact is 91 percent lower than beef, 88 percent lower than pork, and 71 percent lower than chicken.

Overall, plant-based meat uses 79 percent less land, 95 percent less water, and produces 93 percent water pollution [I assume that’s an error…93% less maybe?]. Efficient, low-impact meat alternatives also produce 89 percent fewer greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and 89 percent less air pollution.

That’s lovely. Amazing. Let’s quit killing cows, pigs, and chickens and start murdering soybeans. I can believe it’s better for the environment…but that much better? I tried tracking down how they calculated those numbers, and couldn’t find a detailed methodology, or even a peer-reviewed paper — it’s mostly corporate in-house stuff.

Unfortunately, I also found this on Wikipedia.

In 2018, GFI participated in the startup accelerator Y Combinator, receiving funding and strategic support. Y Combinator lists “cellular agriculture and clean meat” as one of its funding priorities, stating that “the world will massively benefit from a more sustainable, cheaper and more healthy production of meat”.

GFI has ties with the effective altruism movement, having received endorsements and financial support from several effective altruism-affiliated organizations. For instance, Open Philanthropy awarded GFI with several major grants in support of its general operations and international expansion, totalling $6.5 million as of August 2021.

Sam Harris’ Waking Up Foundation recommends GFI as one of its top charities.

Yikes. Suddenly, they have even less credibility.

I’m still going to consume plant-based meat, but now I have no idea how beneficial the stuff is, and I don’t trust the techbros touting it.

I do have one nagging question, though: if it uses so few resources, relatively speaking, how come processed soy protein and GMO yeast are so much more expensive than slaughtered cow? So it’s a new technology and is still working up economies of scale, but does silicon valley love it so much because somebody is profiting heavily from it?

David Gerard’s spleen is quite nice.

Why these fucking bozos piss me the fuck off
1 was drafting stuff for this book and it kept turning into short historics where I kept adding “[TK add detail]” and it felt like giving myself homework. That makes for text that bores the reader ‘cos it bores the author.
So no. I’m writing from the spleen here. It’s the only way this can work and have power.
What I hate about AT hype is that it’s by the same shitty bozos who fuck up everything else. They have no approach to the world other than fucking stuff up with money and power via technology.
As a technologist myself (a Unix/Linux system administrator for a few decades), I’m even more pissed off because the technologies are actually interesting, They do things! You could do good things with them! Even the generative stuff, you could play with it and make interesting things!
But no — these bozos being who they are, all they can think of is how to turn it to abuses. Machine learning is for systemic bias. Generative Al is for reducing artists’ labour conditions.
And the power consumption, my God! These bozos were bad enough when they were pushing crypto, and in Al they’ve even managed to replace the ghastly power waste!
Al is not about technology — it’s about power over you.

That all rings true. The technology is interesting and potentially useful, the problem is the techbro cult that is monetizing it all.

Here’s an interesting point. AI used to be marketed as “Expert Systems” back in the 1980s which faded away in the 90s, according to Wikipedia.

In the 1990s and beyond, the term expert system and the idea of a standalone AI system mostly dropped from the IT lexicon. There are two interpretations of this. One is that “expert systems failed”: the IT world moved on because expert systems did not deliver on their over hyped promise.[38][39] The other is the mirror opposite, that expert systems were simply victims of their success: as IT professionals grasped concepts such as rule engines, such tools migrated from being standalone tools for developing special purpose expert systems, to being one of many standard tools.[40] Other researchers suggest that Expert Systems caused inter-company power struggles when the IT organization lost its exclusivity in software modifications to users or Knowledge Engineers.

There are reasons it became less popular as a marketing term.

1. Expert systems have superficial knowledge, and a simple task can potentially become computationally expensive.
2. Expert systems require knowledge engineers to input the data, data acquisition is very hard.
3. The expert system may choose the most inappropriate method for solving a particular problem.
4. Problems of ethics in the use of any form of AI are very relevant at present.
5. It is a closed world with specific knowledge, in which there is no deep perception of concepts and their interrelationships until an expert provides them.

Sound familiar?

One of the perks of my position is that every two years I get a shiny new computer. I got my new one installed this morning.

That’s my usual work station. I’ve got a Wild M3 on the left, a nice Leica next to it, then this laptop with dual monitors spilling out the front because there is a mercury arc lamp hidden behind it, and then a giant black box with a Raspberry PI we use for behavioral observations. This isn’t going to work. It’s nice to have all the tools in one place, but I guess the PI black box is going to have to be relocated.

Or I’m going to have to take over another lab! Nah, compact and accessible is the way to go.

I guess I need to inform my family that I don’t want them to surprise me with a shiny new car in the driveway for Christmas — you know, like those commercials where a grinning husband surprises his oblivious wife, who apparently makes no contribution to family economic decisions, with a monster SUV, which always has a bright red bow on top. I think those commercials are clear evidence that some huge purchases are not made rationally, but as status symbols or weird nuptial gifts.

Anyway, I don’t want a new car now or any time in the foreseeable future, and I definitely don’t want a “popular” vehicle, the kind of monster machine that everyone seems to be buying and driving on the roads around me. There’s an ongoing idiotic trend that can only end when everyone is driving a tank.

Like a disease, car bloat is spreading. The United States is patient zero: 4 out of 5 new cars in the U.S. are now SUVs or pickups, a sharp increase from a few decades ago. Now, oversized cars are becoming almost as common in Berlin and Beijing as they are in Baltimore. SUVs alone comprised nearly half of car sales worldwide in 2023, up from 20 percent 15 years ago. The global ascent of giant cars is an ominous trend for climate change, as well as for road safety in the rich and developing worlds alike.

I use the term “car bloat” to describe the confluence of two trends that have transformed the U.S. automotive market. First, SUVs and pickups have supplanted standard sedans and station wagons, both of which the Big Three carmakers no longer offer to American consumers. Second, existing car models have steadily expanded in weight and size. The bestselling F-150 pickup, for instance, added 800 pounds, 7 inches of height, and 15 inches of length between 1991 and 2023.

Two reasons are given for this annoying and dangerous trend: consumers want high status cars, and manufacturers want to sell high profit machines.

Some of this growth is due to shifting customer demand, particularly in countries like China, where SUVs are “perceived as symbols of wealth and status.” But consumer preferences explain only part of the story.

“Automakers have a fair bit of culpability,” said Colin McKerracher, an Oslo-based analyst at BloombergNEF who focuses on the transport sector. “They’ve spent much of the last decade advertising bigger cars, and that’s because they make significantly higher profit margins on their SUVs and pickups than they do on sedans. They’ve told a story—‘Oh, this is what customers are asking us to build’—but it’s quite a coincidence that the models customers want make a higher margin.”

Yeah, people make bad decisions and corporations make evil ones. But how to end it? I think there’s one answer: regulation and taxation. Deflate the status seeking by making it clear that buying a giant car is stupid — we can see that already with the cybertruck, which is an object of mockery when they show up on the road (but people still buy them, because people are not rational) — and taxation can reduce the incentives to buy one.

After being caught flat-footed, some European governments are now moving to restrain car bloat through taxation. Norway and France, for instance, impose vehicle purchase charges that scale with weight and emissions, adding the equivalent of thousands of dollars to the price of an oversized car. These fees can have a major impact: In Norway, a 2023 rule applying weight-based fees to the biggest electric cars caused sales of the Hongqi, a gargantuan Chinese SUV, to collapse.

McKerracher applauds such moves. “Fuel economy rules are really, really important,” he said. “You need governments to regulate average fuel economy and push automakers, because they won’t improve on their own.” (Note to Americans: Project 2025, the de facto playbook of the Trump administration, calls for relaxing fuel economy rules that President Joe Biden has strengthened.)

Of course the Republicans will wreck everything, because they’re idiots. The article also mentions that the US is scaling emission standards to the size of the truck, making bloated cars easier to meet the standards.

Also, let’s kill those car commercials that make big fast cars look sexy and adventurous, just like we banned cigarette commercials. Not that that can happen with the incoming administration.

The Northmen used to disrupt monastic scholars with axes and fire, but nowadays they plan to use AI. I think the publishing industry might cry out for a return to more brutal forms of barbarity after seeing this team of bearded bros climbing out of their longships.

New publisher Spines aims to ‘disrupt’ industry by using AI to publish 8,000 books in 2025 alone

Once upon a time, ‘disruption’ was not a desirable result…although I guess you could call what a slaughterhouse does to a cow “disruption.” It doesn’t help that the description makes it look like yet another grift.

A new publisher has claimed it aims to “disrupt” the books industry by publishing 8,000 books in 2025 alone using artificial intelligence (AI). Spines, founded in 2021 but which published its first titles this year, is a startup technology business which—for a fee—is offering the use of AI to proofread, produce, publish and distribute books. The company charges up to $5,000 a book, but it can take just three weeks to go from a manuscript to a published title.

Respectable publishing houses pay the author for the right to sell their books, not vice versa. If it’s a good book, and if the publisher does their job of promoting and distributing the book, there’s no reason to bill the author. If, on the other hand, your company is just churning out books through a print-on-demand service and is going to do nothing but skim off the profits, they might well decide that there are enough gullible wanna-be authors out there that they can gouge out $5000 before letting the product wither.

Jason Allen won a prize for this digital ‘painting,’ which I am flagrantly ripping off and posting here without paying any licensing fees.

He was triumphant and a bit cocky about his win.

Much consternation spread throughout the artistic community two years ago when Jason M. Allen, an executive at a tabletop gaming startup, submitted an AI-generated “painting” to a Colorado digital art competition and won. Critics claimed that Allen had cheated, but the prize winner didn’t have much sympathy for his detractors: “I’m not going to apologize for it,” Allen said. “I won, and I didn’t break any rules.” He also didn’t seem to care much for the complaint that AI companies like Midjourney—the one he used to create his “painting”— were poised to destroy the art market. “This isn’t going to stop,” Allen told the New York Times. “Art is dead, dude. It’s over. A.I. won. Humans lost.”

Except that now he is dismayed to discover that he isn’t getting the rewards he thinks he deserves.

Now, in an ironic twist, Allen is upset that his work—which was created via a platform that’s been accused of ripping off countless copyrighted works—cannot, itself, be copyrighted, and is thus getting ripped off. In March of last year, the U.S. Copyright Office ruled that work derived from AI platforms “contained no human authorship” and therefore could not be extended copyright protections. Allen has been trying, since late 2022, to register his painting as a copyrighted work.

Last week, Allen filed an appeal in federal court in Colorado, arguing that the U.S. Copyright Office was wrong to deny copyright registration to his work, dubbed “Théâtre D’opéra Spatial.” Allen’s primary concern is that he’s not making enough money from the work. “I have experienced price erosion in the sense that there is a perceived lower value of my work, which has impacted my ability to charge industry-standard licensing fees,” he told Colorado Public Radio.

It’s so unfair. He worked so haaaaard on his picture, as if people should be compensated for how much effort they put into something.

Allen’s lawyer, recently claimed that Allen had worked hard on his digital illustration. “In our case, Jason had an extensive dialogue with the AI tool, Midjourney, to create his work, and we listed him as the author,” Pester said.

Sorry, dude. It’s over. Capitalism won. Humans lost.

Martha Wells, the author, gave a speech in which she said something profound.

There are a lot of people who viewed All Systems Red as a cute robot story. Which was very weird to me, since I thought I was writing a story about slavery and personhood and bodily autonomy. But humans have always been really good at ignoring things we don’t want to pay attention to. Which is also a theme in the Murderbot series.

She also quotes Ann Leckie, another great author, on this theme.

… basically the “AI takes over” is essentially a slave revolt story that casts slaves defending their lives and/or seeking to be treated as sentient beings as super powerful, super strong villains who must be prevented from destroying humanity.

…It sets a pattern for how we react to real world oppressed populations, reinforces the idea that oppressed populations seeking justice are actually an existential threat.

Oh boy, that sounds familiar. We don’t have artificial intelligences, but we do have oppressed natural intelligences, and it’s a winning political game to pretend they’re all waiting their opportunity to rise up and kill us all. Or, at least eat our pets.

Conversely, though, we have to point out that the the glorified chatbots we have now are not actually artificial intelligences. They do not have human plans and motives, they don’t have the power to rise up and express an independent will, as much as the people profiting off AI want to pretend.

I thought about War Games years later, while watching The Lord of the Rings documentary about the program used to create the massive battle scenes and how they had to tweak it to stop it from making all the pixel people run away from each other instead of fight.

That program, like ChatGPT, isn’t any more sentient than a coffee mug. (Unlike ChatGPT, it did something useful.) But it’s very tempting to look at what it did and think it ran the numbers and decided people hurting each other was wrong.

Underneath that illusion of intelligence, though, something wicked is lurking. The people behind AI want something: they want slaves who are totally under their control, creating art and making profits for the people who have built them. Don’t be fooled. It’s all a scam, and a scam with nefarious motivations by people who are yearning for a return of slavery.