Mano has posted the right take

Welcome to the fin de siècle, only a few years too late. According to Wikipedia:

Without context, the term is typically used to refer to the end of the 19th century. This period was widely thought to be a period of social degeneracy, but at the same time a period of hope for a new beginning. The “spirit” of fin de siècle often refers to the cultural hallmarks that were recognized as prominent in the 1880s and 1890s, including ennui, cynicism, pessimism, and “a widespread belief that civilization leads to decadence”.

“Period of hope for a new beginning…” that part doesn’t apply.

Also, the previous end of a century got some great art, but we’re just going to get some flaccid, dead-eyed AI art.

Ken Ham is greatly annoyed

How dare Joe Biden give Bill Nye the Medal of Freedom?

Ham doesn’t think he deserves it because Nye supports abortion, LGBTQ rights, and left wing liberal ideology. Nye encouraged his audience to follow reason, which is opposed to the word of God, and he left the world worse off. Nye also said that humans are animals, so Ham trots out a little girl and demands that Nye call her an animal — which is no insult, just a simple truth — and is irritated that Nye encouraged her to go to college someday. What a monster! Everything he says makes me think he was even more deserving of the medal.

Ham also says he wouldn’t want a medal from someone like Joe Biden with such a wicked anti-god worldview anyway. Gosh. Anyone think he would spurn a medal from Trump?

The 25th Amendment won’t save us now

Donald Trump held a press conference this week in which he once again threatened to invade and take over Greenland and Panama, and that Canada should be annexed as our 51st state. Trudeau replied to that by saying “There isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that Canada would become part of the United States,” while the French foreign minister said “Non,” the EU wasn’t going to sit back and let their borders be violated.

All of this is utterly bonkers — the delusional aspirations of a very stupid narcissist. That he’s the president is not sufficient grounds to justify this program of expansionist imperialism, and I hope that reality is going to crush his dreams in short order. Hope. That’s a threadbare belief at this point.

But I am most worried about the weird, pathetic obsessions of this rambling old man — the frozen strawberries of his career. He wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America…what? I know he doesn’t believe in history, but now he wants to reshape geography to fit his nationalistic ignorance? And then there are the Big Issues of the Trump campaign.

Perhaps Trump’s most consistent political position, since his first run for office, is his vehement opposition to windmills.

His latest comments came as part of extended criticism of environmental and energy efficiency — complaining about dripping showers, low-water dishwashers and electric heaters. (He railed against the water in toilets during his first term, saying in 2019, “People are flushing toilets 10 times, 15 times, as opposed to once.”)

On Tuesday, he blamed windmills for a sharp increase in whale fatalities across southern New England’s coastlines in recent weeks. “The windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously,” Trump said.

He said windmills “litter our country” and compared them to “dropping garbage in a field.” He said they are “the most expensive energy ever,” and that only those who build them with subsidies want them.

“We’re going to try and have a policy where no windmills are being built,” Trump said.

I can sort of understand the opposition to wind turbines — he’s in the pocket of the oil industry, and wants to increase our reliance on fossil fuels — but showers, dishwashers, electric heaters, and toilets? WTF?

When you buy a house that no water comes out because they want to preserve even in areas that have so much water, you don’t know what to do. It’s called rain. It comes down from heaven.

No water comes out of the shower. It goes drip, drip, drip. So what happens? You’re in the shower 10 times as long.

This is an imaginary problem. Trump doesn’t have to deal with trivial details like plumbing, so this is his idea of the problems the little people have. There aren’t any water restrictions in places that have lots of water, and in places with serious droughts, the first thing they’ll shut down is watering lawns and golf courses. No one takes a “drip, drip, drip” shower.

Likewise, washing machines, they want in your washing machine to have very little water coming out of the washing machine. So when you wash your clothing, you have to wash it four times instead of once you end up using more water.”

We’re a party of common sense. And things that I’m telling you now is really all about common sense.

Trump has never in his life operated a washing machine. That’s not how they work.

The Republicans are not a party of common sense. Nothing their president says makes any sense.

You know, the US Constitution has this 25th Amendment that allows congress to dismiss a president for inability or incapacity to perform the duties of his office. There is a clear case that Trump is not fit to be president — he’s demented, with delusions of grandeur, and an unrealistic grasp of the state of the world. Unfortunately, congress and the Supreme Court will never question the god-king, and even if they did, they’d put JD Vance in his place. We are so screwed.

Not as screwed as Canada, Greenland, Panama, the EU, and Ukraine if he gets his way, but still pretty goddamned wrecked.

TCL rhymes with hell

This is a screenshot from an AI-generated movie titled “Sun Day”. I’m not going to show you the short movie itself which is freely available on YouTube, because I like you too much. It’s terrible. The plot is absurd, the acting is wooden and silly, the events in the plot are ridiculous and unbelievable, and everything is cobbled together with awkward and unlikely transitions. It’s bad. This is AI if AI is a smug little child with access to daddy’s high-tech video editing deck, but no background in literature or film or even Saturday morning cartoons.

It’s from an overly-generous but still critical review of a whole set of AI-generated movies. There is a company, TCL, that makes televisions, but plans to break into the streaming services market by creating a whole channel of nothing but AI-generated movies. They were premiering a set of films that were supposed to generate positive buzz for the whole idea, so you might assume they’d pick the very best representatives of the medium.

They’re all awful.

You don’t need to see them to realize that, though, because here’s the company spiel on why their service is so cool.

Before airing the short, AI-generated films, Haohong Wang, the general manager of TCL Research America, gave a presentation in which he explained that TCL’s AI movie and TV strategy would be informed and funded by targeted advertising, and that its content will “create a flywheel effect funded by two forces, advertising and AI.” He then pulled up a slide that suggested AI-generated “free premium originals” would be a “new era” of filmmaking alongside the Silent Film era, the Golden Age of Hollywood, etc.

Catherine Zhang, TCL’s vice president of content services and partnerships, then explained to the audience that TCL’s streaming strategy is to “offer a lean-back binge-watching experience” in which content passively washes over the people watching it. “Data told us that our users don’t want to work that hard,” she said. “Half of them don’t even change the channel.”

“We believe that CTV [connected TV] is the new cable,” she said. “With premium original content, precise ad-targeting capability, and an AI-powered, innovative engaging viewing experience, TCL’s content service will continue its double-digit growth next year.”

Oh my god. The company is driven by advertising and AI; they’re thrilled with their ad-targeting capability; they think double-digit growth is a good thing. This is a nightmare fueled by the bloviations of MBAs, without a hint of art or creativity anywhere.

Die, TCL, die.

Less than a week until classes start again…and an upcoming podcast

Yesterday, I got my Genetics class all set up — Canvas page assembled, syllabus written, first lecture prepped. Today I’ve got to do some lab work, setting up another generation of the fly stocks we’ll be using in the lab in two weeks (next week’s lab is all statistics and probability tools that we’ll be using throughout the term, and it’s all ready to go). I’ve also got to get my writing class organized today.

Also on my agenda: on Saturday, 11 January, Dr Sarah and I will be discussing a pair of wonderful parenting books: Boymom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity by Ruth Whippman and Progressive Parenting: Harnessing the Power of Science and Social Justice to Raise Awesome Kids by Kavin Senapathy. I’m only a grandfather now, but I have memories, or concepts of memories, that might be relevant, and also all of my kids turned out perfect, so maybe I’ll have something to say.

If you’ve got suggestions for books in a similar vein, let us know about them!

Overthrow the technocrats!

Way back in the 1990s, I was writing lab software in my spare time, and I was working with a company in California for a while. I was coding exclusively on a Mac, but they mainly did PC stuff, so they bought me a cheap PC just so I could see the software they were developing. I think it was a Dell or something like that, and I set it up at my house. First thing that horrified me was that the computer was covered with stickers. Why? What are you advertising?

Then I tried running the thing, and had to wade through all the crudware that came pre-installed on the computer. Ads popped up. There were all these off-brand applications installed, and they didn’t want me to remove them — just cleaning up all the garbage took me several days before it was functional to run the tech software I had obtained the machine for.

That was 30 years ago. I guess the situation has gotten even worse, if you’re buying the inexpensive mass-market computers. Ed Zitron got one just to see what the average users experience was like. Now we’ve got the internet layered on top of everything.

The picture I am trying to paint is one of terror and abuse. The average person’s experience of using a computer starts with aggressive interference delivered in a shoddy, sludge-like frame, and as the wider internet opens up to said user, already battered by a horrible user experience, they’re immediately thrown into heavily-algorithmic feeds each built to con them, feeding whatever holds their attention and chucking ads in as best they can. As they browse the web, websites like NBCnews.com feature stories from companies like “WorldTrending.com” with advertisements for bizarre toys written in the style of a blog, so intentional in their deceit that the page in question has a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying it’s an ad.

As their clunky, shuddering laptop hitches between every scroll, they go to ESPN.com, and the laptop slows to a crawl. Everything slows to a crawl. “God damnit, why is everything so fucking slow? I’ll just stay on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube. At least that place doesn’t crash half the time or trick me.”

Using the computer in the modern age is so inherently hostile that it pushes us towards corporate authoritarians like Apple, Microsoft, Google and Meta — and now that every single website is so desperate for our email and to show us as many ads as possible, it’s either harmful or difficult for the average person to exist online.

This is our world now — the wealthy have control, and they’ve engineered everything to grow and make more money for themselves, and they’ve wrecked everything they’ve touched. I remember the early 2000s when Google was just a barebones text box that you typed things into and it bounced back with a list. It was clean and easy. But not any more!

The biggest trick that these platforms played wasn’t any one algorithm, but the convenience of a “clean” digital experience — or, at least as clean as they feel it needs to be. In an internet so horribly poisoned by growth capitalism, these platforms show a degree of peace and consistency, even if they’re engineered to manipulate you, even if the experience gets worse seemingly every year, because at least it isn’t as bad as the rest of the internet. We use Gmail because, well, at least it’s not Outlook. We use YouTube to view videos from other websites because other websites are far more prone to crash, have quality issues, or simply don’t work on mobile. We use Google Search, despite the fact that it barely works anymore, to find things because actually browsing the web fucking sucks.

The algorithm was never for you, the user. It didn’t make your interactions with the internet easier or better, it made it easier for companies, both legitimate and criminal, to sell you stuff. That has become the primary purpose of computers and the internet. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to even imagine using a computer for anything beyond convenient shopping…although it is becoming increasingly inconvenient as all the garbage piles up. One of the best examples of a growing obstacle to using the internet is all the “AI” trash being inserted.

The onslaught of AI-generated content — facilitated, in no small part, by Google and Microsoft — has polluted our information ecosystems. AI-generated images and machine-generated text is everywhere, and it’s impossible to avoid, as there is no reliable way to determine the provenance of a piece of content — with one exception, namely the considered scrutiny of a human. This has irreparably damaged the internet in ways I believe few fully understand. This stuff — websites that state falsehoods because an AI hallucinated, or fake pictures of mushrooms and dogs that now dominate Google Images — is not going away. Like microplastics or PFAS chemicals, they’re with us forever, constantly chipping away at our understanding of reality.

These companies unleashed generative AI on the world — or, in the case of Microsoft, facilitated its ascendency — without any consideration of what that would mean for the Internet as an ecosystem. Their concerns were purely short-term. Fiscal. The result? Over-leverage in an industry that has no real path to profitability, burning billions of dollars and the environment – both digital and otherwise – along with it.

Do you need AI? Do we really want some weird capitalist-created interface in front of everything that babbles and confabulates and tells us even more lies? Again, this isn’t something added for our benefit — we have to ask who profits from these layers of new crap tossed unto our computers. I don’t think it’s the users. We really don’t need ChatGPT for anything, and it literally makes everything worse.

Ed Zitron names names.

  • Sam Altman is a con artist, a liar, and a sleazy carnival barker who would burn our planet to the ground, steal from millions of people and burn billions of dollars in pursuit of power, and I believe the same can be said of people like Dario Amodei of Anthropic and Mustafa Suleyman of Microsoft.
  • Tim Cook is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, slowly allowing the rot to seep into Apple’s products, slowly adding bothersome subscription products and useless AI features to chip away at the user experience. Apple’s app store and its repeated support of exploitative microtransaction-laden mobile games built to create gambling-like addiction in adults and children alike, making it billions of dollars a year. Because Apple’s products are less shitty, it gets a much easier time.
  • Sundar Pichai is the Henry Kissinger of technology — a glossy executive that escapes blame despite having caused harm on a global scale. The destruction of Google Search at the hands of Sundar Pichai and Prabhakar Raghavan should be written about like a war crime, and those responsible treated as such.
  • Satya Nadella has aggressively expanded Microsoft’s various monopolies, the most egregious of which is the Microsoft 365 suite — a monopoly over business software that everybody kind of hates that Microsoft prices to undercut the competition, effectively setting the conditions of most business software as either “cheaper than Microsoft” or “slightly better than Microsoft.” Nadella has overseen layoffs of tens of thousands of people in the last three years alone, and despite his bullshit “growth mindset” culture treats his employees and customers as equally disposable.
  • Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul that has overseen the growth and proliferation of some of the single-most abusive and manipulative software in the world. Meta has grown to a market cap of $1.5 trillion dollars by intentionally making the experience on Instagram and Facebook worse, intentionally frustrating and harming billions of people.

I’m willing to call these people crooks and corrupters, profiteers and parasites. They are getting rich off of our growing inconveniences. We really need to fight back somehow, and tell these people we don’t want ChatGPT or whatever pointless energy-sucking leech they want to attach to us. Unfortunately they’ve got all the money and power and have monopolized everything.

I didn’t devolve, I just got angry

Did you know that Darwinists are devolving, according to the Discovery Institute? They even have a picture of this devolution, so it must be true.

I guess they haven’t noticed that if you talk to any evolutionary biologists today, they all consistently rebuke the old cartoonish illustration of the ‘descent of man,’ so it’s silly to use that against us. But then that’s all they’ve got, the enshrinement of antique notions that they can attack without ever having to deal with the reality of modern biology. They’re claiming that the proponents of Darwinism seemed to be shrinking in stature unaware of the irony of demanding that we defend Darwin — Darwinism, the narrow set of ideas that formed the core of evolutionary theory in the 1800s, is obsolete and outmoded. We aren’t defending those any more. We’ve got better, more complete models of how evolution works nowadays, and they don’t include illustrations of linear trajectories of changing individuals.

But this article from John West isn’t about the science, it’s about crowing over the defeat of their adversaries, even when no defeat occurred. So he marches through a small set of individuals, bashing them and claiming victory.

Consider Brown University biologist Kenneth Miller, author of the anti-ID polemic Finding Darwin’s God in 1999. Miller was a gifted debater, but his arguments all too often relied on citation bluffing and critiquing straw-man versions of the ideas of Michael Behe and others.

Miller is still fighting, why is West using the past tense? Miller was part of the team that achieved possibly the greatest, most decisive defeat of the Discovery Institute’s agenda in the Kitzmiller trial. “Citation bluffing” seems to be the term they use to dismiss the fact that Behe’s claim of no scientific publications on the evolution of the immune system could be addressed by presenting book after book after book on the subject he claimed didn’t exist.

As for the claim of straw-manning creationists, I think it’s pretty silly to do that in an article where West constantly harps on Darwinism.

Francis Collins, in his book The Language of God, was even shallower in his critique. Indeed, if you read Collins’s book today, you’ll find that many of his arguments, including junk DNA, have been increasingly thrown overboard by mainstream science.

So who was left to champion the old time religion of Darwinism?

They have this delusion that junk DNA doesn’t exist, and that citing a few articles that have rightly shown some function for some tiny fraction of junk DNA means that the whole of it must be functional, and that their perspective is supported by “mainstream science.” It’s not. And why should they care? Mainstream science says that evolution is true!

Once again, they bring up this claim that Darwinism is a religion. We can criticize Darwinism all we want without being thrown down into the pit of Hell.

Then, oh boy, they remember little ol’ me:

You also had biologist P. Z. Myers at the University of Minnesota Morris. He too could debate, although the quality of what you got was decidedly second rate. His preferred mode of discourse was invective. As he once instructed his fellow evolutionists, they should “screw the polite words and careful rhetoric. It’s time for scientists to break out the steel-toed boots and brass knuckles, and get out there and hammer on the lunatics and idiots” — by which he meant, of course, anyone who dared to criticize Darwin’s theory.

John West has been crying about that quote since 2005. The Discovery Institute used it in their promotional materials. The suggestion that we stop being polite to known liars, frauds, and incompetents was so terrifying to them that they’ve spent the last 20 years whining about it. I’m kind of impressed with myself.

He still gets it wrong. Please do continue to criticize a theory that was assembled in 1859. I don’t mind that at all. But stop thinking that your primitive, poorly understood comprehension of an old idea is at all relevant or sufficient to rebut modern evolutionary theory.

Also, don’t expect me to be courteous when you dump a bucket of that bullshit on the podium in lieu of debating the science.

We’re home at last!

We’re back from our excursion to Madison — a day driving there, two days with Iliana, and a day driving back, but totally worth it. You may recall that I mention the distinct change at the border with Wisconsin (“adult novelty stores, billboards for cheese, and roadkill as far as the eye can see”), but we also saw something in common: so many “Pro Life Across America” billboard spread across both Minnesota and Wisconsin. They’ve gotten more condensed over the years, at least. Nowadays they’re just a photo of a cute, plump 6-month old babies with the words Heartbeat 18 Days. That’s all. Not even grammatical. We’re just supposed to leap to the conclusion they want.

I have a much more interesting statement: Poop 19 Seconds.

That’s from Bethany Brookshire’s Insomniac Academy of brief YouTube shorts with fascinating facts about anatomy. Check it out!