AI is hell

Can we just knock it off with the AI nonsense? Somebody is profiting off this colossal sinkhole of useless frippery, but I don’t know who. Look what it’s doing to our environment, all because people like Mark Zuckerberg have decided it’s cool, and the future of profiteering.

The amount of water that A.I. uses is unconscionable, particularly given that so many of its data centers are in desert regions that can ill afford to squander it. A.I. uses this much water because of the computing power it requires, which necessitates chilled water to cool down equipment—some of which then evaporates in the cooling process, meaning that it cannot be reused. The Financial Times recently reported academic projections showing that A.I. demand may use about half the amount of water consumed by the United Kingdom in a year. Around the world, communities are rightly beginning to resist the construction of new data centers for this reason.

Then there’s A.I.’s energy use, which could double by 2026, according to a January report by the International Energy Association. That’s the equivalent of adding a new heavily industrialized country, like Sweden or Germany, to the planet.

Microsoft’s own environmental reports reveal these immense problems: As the company has built more platforms for generative A.I., its resource consumption has skyrocketed. In 2022, the company’s use of both water and electricity increased by one-third, its largest uptick ever.

We should be asking what we gain from glossy shiny artificial artwork, or from bizarre texts cobbled together by machines that don’t actually understand anything. Search engines are already corrupted by commercialized algorithms, do we really need to add another complex layer that adds nothing to anything? Tell me one thing AI adds to improve the world.

Do we need this?

Dozens of fake, artificial intelligence-generated photos showing Donald Trump with Black people are being spread by his supporters, according to a new investigation.

BBC Panorama reported that the images appear to be created by supporters themselves. There is no evidence tying the photos to Trump’s campaign.

One photo was created by the Florida-based conservative radio show host Mark Kaye.

“I’m not out there taking pictures of what’s really happening. I’m a storyteller,” Kaye told BBC. “I’m not claiming it is accurate. I’m not saying, ‘Hey, look, Donald Trump was at this party with all of these African American voters. Look how much they love him.’”

Maybe what we really need is a Butlerian Jihad.

Moms For Liberty gets high profile interview, falls flat on face

I’d rather see less of bigots on TV, but if they have to brought on stage, it should be to expose them. Like this:

Two of the founders of the group, Tiffany Justice and Tina Descovich, sat for an interview with reporter Scott Pelley and had a difficult time answering pretty simple and direct questions.

“We love teachers. My children have had the best teachers. I’ve had the greatest teachers that have influenced and impact me. But there are rogue teachers in America’s classrooms right now,” Descovich told Pelley. Justice added, “Parents send their children to school to be educated, not indoctrinated into ideology.”

Pelley asked, “What ideology are they being indoctrinated into?” Whether something short-circuited inside Descovich’s brain is hard to say, but after taking a breath and swallowing, she slowly answered, “Let’s just say … children in America cannot read.” Huh?

Pelley repeatedly pointed out that the two were being “evasive,” and when Justice attempted to pivot to a handful of books with sexual content that may be inappropriate for certain age groups, his report was quick to point out that “Most people wouldn’t want them in a lower school. But in a tactic of outrage politics, Moms for Liberty takes a kernel of truth and concludes: These examples are not rare mistakes, but a plot to sexualize children.”

The pair of buffoons also claimed that Moms for Liberty was not anti-gay, which is transparently absurd. Pelley showed them tweets where they are accusing teachers of being “groomers,” which prompted them to quickly shuffle their papers and change topics.

You know, we might be in trouble someday if these right-wingers ever acquired any intelligent spokespersons. I guess intelligent people don’t fall for their lies, though.

By the way, they mad.

Was it actually a super Tuesday?

The chaos that is American politics began to gel a little bit yesterday. It’s still not pretty and it’s never going to be — it’s more like those terrifying Jell-O recipes from the 50s, but at least we’re seeing some progress towards the final boss battle.

You know that Joe Manchin had previously announced that he wouldn’t run in 2024. Well, now Kyrsten Sinema has also bowed out. I’m going to have to recommend this obituary by Albert Burneko.

Blessed by St. Collins. Now you know she’s evil.

What a horrible nightmare of a person Kyrsten Sinema is. That she might end up having been the signal political figure of our time—a period in which the day-to-day work of elected officials has become so hopelessly divorced from the material conditions their work nominally governs that “Looks like those clowns in Congress did it again. What a bunch of clowns” can function as the full ideological expression and sum total contribution of an actual senator—does nothing to redeem her, personally. At a certain point you could extend her a kind of sour grudging credit, I guess, for having pioneered a new depth of undisguised cynicism in politics, a dark idiocratic abyssal layer where nothing has any value except to the extent that it demonstrably foils one’s own political party and sells out one’s own voters in service to one’s patrons. This is the kind of credit you give when you walk into an apocalyptically ruined public bathroom, freeze, and say, “Whoa, somebody took one crazy friggin’ dump in here.”

This society’s total prostration could hardly find a better—which is to say worse—avatar than Kyrsten Sinema, the mandate that nothing may ever be allowed to disrupt its consumption (or even to facilitate the hope that it could be slowed) congealed into a sneering blonde Karen theatrically performing her own imaginary cuteness while she kills even mild and popular compromise initiatives toward a better future. It’s rare for a single person to hold that kind of power, and unspeakably awful and sad that it fell into the hands of an absolute F-minus of a human being.

In any case, if holding her spiteful, obstructive, nihilistic line turns out not to have benefited any electoral ambitions—there’s no real broad base for a program best described as “the most hateful possible centrism,” to the surprise of no one else—it’s also not clear that Sinema ever authentically had any, at least as such things might be said to exist separate from her own quest to get ahead. Which fits, since she also lacks any authentic political beliefs, convictions, or sympathy to or solidarity with humanity, at least as such things might be said to exist separate from her own quest to get ahead. Her constituents as electoral politics defined them hated her guts; on the other hand she all but explicitly did not consider them her real constituents. Her real constituency (assuming Literally Dracula doesn’t count here) is the class of rich freaks for whose benefit she will now even more openly serve. Few could promise to protect them with as little shame, or as much sheer sadistic glee. I wish her all the very worst, forever and ever.

In other news about hypocritical women flopping at politics, Nikki Haley has dropped out of the presidential race. Didn’t she announce last week that she was in it all the way? Unfortunately, even in defeat she didn’t manage the dignity of opposing the corrupt criminal who had stomped on her.

Trumpworld’s frequent insults of Haley—who the former president slammed as “birdbrain”—would indicate that the South Carolina governor is unlikely to be a surrogate or booster of the Trump campaign this election season.

Still, despite it all, Haley has already made the case that Trump is a better choice than Biden—even if she claimed both are dangerous. In an interview with NPR from Feb. 22, Haley said, “I have a lot of concerns about Trump regaining the presidency. I have even more concerns about Joe Biden being president.”

Mediocre.

In local news, Minnesota managed to cock a snook at stooge of the Israelis and Xian fundamentalists, Joe Biden, while still giving him enough votes to carry the state.

President Biden, who faces less prominent challengers, continued to win by larger margins than Trump. But as in Michigan last week, he ceded significant votes to such options as “uncommitted.”

That option was getting nearly 20 percent of the vote in Minnesota with about 85 percent of the vote counted, after pro-Palestinian activists sought to turn it into a protest vote again. The uncommitted share there should wind up being larger than it was in Michigan (13 percent) despite a less-robust effort — and despite Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.) taking another 8 percent.

Biden’s current 70 percent overall share of the vote in Minnesota means it could be his lowest share in any state, apart from the 64 percent he took as a write-in candidate in New Hampshire.

Come on, Joe. Grow a spine and stand up against the terrorist state of Israel.

I’m not complaining about some history being erased

Minnesota recently got a snazzy new flag. It’s much nicer than the cluttered (and mildly racist) mess that was the old flag.

The Republicans don’t like the change, so they organized a rally at the capitol to complain.

“I’m wearing a T-shirt today that says, ‘Erasing history never goes well.’ And that’s what we believe is happening here,” Minnesota Republican Party Deputy Chair Donna Bergstrom said. “As a Native American and tribal member, it’s exhausting to see Native Americans once again bearing the brunt of the short-sighted eradication of our shared history.”

That’s the same complaint Republicans made about tearing down Confederate statues. I think that went pretty well, actually.

The bring-back-our-hideous-old-flag rally happened today. Look upon the horde and be awed!

Perpetually growing meat!

This is mildly interesting: scientists have modified muscle cells in culture so that they produce their own growth factors. This is a major cost reduction, because now you won’t need to constantly supplement your vat of muscle cells with a relatively expensive reagent.

Cellular agriculture – the production of meat from cells grown in bioreactors rather than harvested from farm animals – is taking leaps in technology that are making it a more viable option for the food industry. One such leap has now been made at the Tufts University Center for Cellular Agriculture (TUCCA), led by David Kaplan, Stern Family Professor of Engineering, in which researchers have created bovine (beef) muscle cells that produce their own growth factors, a step that can significantly cut costs of production.

Growth factors, whether used in laboratory experiments or for cultivated meat, bind to receptors on the cell surface and provide a signal for cells to grow and differentiate into mature cells of different types. In this study published in the journal Cell Reports Sustainability, researchers modified stem cells to produce their own fibroblast growth factor (FGF) which triggers the growth of skeletal muscle cells – the kind one finds in a steak or hamburger.

Keep in mind that this works for cultured meat cells, which is completely different from the artificial meat made from plants that you can buy in stores right now. I have a few reservations about it.

This is basically a tool to remove a regulatory limit on muscle growth. When this happens in vivo, we call it cancer. I suspect the marketing department will balk at labeling it “tumor meat”.

The technique amplifies one cell type. Edible meat has texture and is made up of a mix of cell types, fat and connective tissue. This is a way to make large quantities of something that is equivalent to ‘pink slime’ or, as the marketers call it, ‘lean finely textured beef.’ We already do this! I guess it’s a good thing to be able to produce large quantities of protein in the form of ‘pink slime’ more cheaply, and without the need to slaughter animals to do it.

Without a regulatory limit on growth, though, don’t be surprised if a news headline later announces that Boston has been eaten by a giant ever-growing blob of immortal meat.

Every time the police are scrutinized, they look worse

I highly recommend this 3-part, thorough article about the police by Radley Balko. It’s central focus is on the Minneapolis Police Department (which is a horror) and on George Floyd, but it’s wide-ranging and indicts the corruption, racism, and brutality of police forces everywhere.

It’s a long series, and I can’t possibly do it justice, so I’ll just highlight one thing that leapt out at me. The police all around the country have resorted to a phony medical excuse for deaths in police custody. You’ll hardly believe it — it’s called excited delirium.

Excited delirium, on the other hand, posits that some people just spontaneously die during intense, high-stress interactions with police, through no fault of law enforcement. It’s also highly dubious and not supported by any major medical organization.

Over the last several decades, there’s been a concerted effort to pressure medical examiners to diagnose excited delirium when the real cause of death was positional asphyxia. This not only exonerates cops who kill, it encourages police practices that will lead to more deaths.

George Floyd’s death prompted renewed scrutiny of excited delirium and its origins. This was overdue.

The first reason to be skeptical of the condition is that it’s rarely if ever diagnosed outside a law enforcement context. If there really is a condition that causes people to die spontaneously during a mental health crisis, while under the influence of some drugs, or while panicked with no accompanying signs of medical distress, we ought to see it under other high-stress, volatile scenarios like street or bar brawls, or when people are forcibly admitted to psychiatric facilities. This just doesn’t happen.

The origin of excited delirium is shonky and steeped in bigotry. But it doesn’t involve police or police restraint. The condition was first described in the mid-1980s by Miami medical examiner Charles Wetli after a wave of black sex workers were found dead under mysterious circumstances. Because some of the women had cocaine in their system, Wetli theorized that there must be something about the physiology of black women that causes them to spontaneously die after mixing cocaine with sex.

The phrase “physiology of black women” ought to have set off alarms all over the place. Yeah, this swarm of dead black women whose bodies are littering the streets…nobody killed them. They just drop dead when mixing cocaine with sex. Yeah, that’s the ticket. File those corpses away under “natural causes”. No way they were murdered.

Except…

Despite the absurdity of Wetli’s theory, it precluded homicide as a manner of death, which made it much more difficult for police to investigate the possible murders. It wasn’t until a victim was found in a similar state as the other bodies, but had no cocaine in her system, that the city’s chief medical examiner reviewed the doctor’s work in the other cases. He found evidence of asphyxiation that Wetli had overlooked. Police eventually arrested a serial killer named Charles Henry Williams for the murders. Williams is now believed to have killed at least 32 black women through asphyxiation.

Wetli was promoted and became a medical examiner in New York, where he continued to promote ludicrous, racist theories.

You might be saying right now that George Floyd was not a woman and wasn’t having sex, so how does this relate? Well, fact-free explanations can expand without restraint.

In the absence of any accountability, Wetli continued to develop his theory in ways that proved convenient for law enforcement. He expanded excited delirium to also include black men, particularly those who die in police custody. “Seventy percent of people dying of coke-induced delirium are black males, even though most users are white,” he once said. Instead of concluding that perhaps this was because police were more likely to use excessive force against black men, Wetli added, “It may be genetic.” The diagnosis has since expanded to include “exhaustive mania,” a form of excited delirium that, conveniently, occurs in people who haven’t ingested drugs or alcohol.

If I had a nickel for every instance of a racist saying “it’s genetic”, I’d be able to buy back Twitter from Elon Musk.

Excited delirium is even more useful for the cops. In addition to making their victims conveniently drop dead while leaving the police blameless, it has several other symptoms that play into the cop’s battery of excuses.

There is no diagnostic test for excited delirium. Instead, it’s become a catch-all diagnosis based on a broad range of symptoms and behavior that could be attributed to any number of conditions — symptoms like erratic behavior, psychosis, public nudity, and, weirdly, a tendency to propel oneself through glass.

But the most absurd supposed symptoms are an imperviousness to pain and “superhuman strength.”

There are obviously some drugs that can dull a user’s sensitivity to pain. And a rush of adrenaline can prompt a person to run faster or lift more weight than they otherwise might. But the idea that excited delirium can give people near-superpowers has been incredibly harmful. The claim doesn’t merely excuse brutality, it practically demands it. It also reinforces racist tropes about the brutishness of black men.

This isn’t merely old racist nonsense from the 1980s, it was part of the MPD’s training materials at least as recently as 2021.

You know, maybe it’s not true that all cops are bad. I think you could make a good case that many of them are racist, gullible, and not very bright. They’re not intentionally evil, they’re just so damned stupid that they stumble into badness.

Never mind the Vegas Eye, I want to see the Sludge Tunnels

The only reason to visit Las Vegas is for the exotic spectacles (don’t gamble, it’s a scam) and Elon Musk may have added another one.

Despite a decade of dreaming, Elon Musk has only built one tiny Hyperloop tunnel in Las Vegas — and the people who built it say it’s filled with dangerous chemical sludge.

As Bloomberg reports, the Boring Company’s scarce output — which thus far amounts only to driving Teslas around a few miles of neon-lit tunnel underneath Sin City as they ferry convention attendees at no more than 40 miles per hour — has also come with a massive buildup of waste, the consistency of a milkshake, that’s said to burn the skin of anyone who comes in contact with it.

In interviews with the news source, Boring Company workers who declined to give their names on the record for fear of retribution said that in some parts of Musk’s Vegas tunnel system, the sludge would sometimes be up to two feet high. If it got over their work boots or onto their faces, they said, it would burn their skin.

The article doesn’t say where the toxic sludge is coming from, which makes me wonder what is leaking. The Daily Mail — not a reliable source at all — is reporting that the sludge is made of chemical accelerants, and that the worker’s complaints were made while the tunnel was under construction.

It was a crap project anyway, and a poor solution to transit problems, so shut it down already. Hyperloop One, Virgin’s project, has already been declared dead. I hope somebody in Minnesota is paying attention to the news, and is ready to kill the Minnesota hyperloop project.

Once the Boring Tunnel nonsense is shut down, we can get back to the serious business of mocking Elon Musk’s Flaming Vehicles of Fiery Death.

Two men were left in serious condition after the Tesla they were traveling in went off an overpass and burst into flames on the 134 Freeway in the Griffith Park neighborhood of Los Angeles Sunday night.

See, it’s like a metaphor for Musk’s career and an entertaining fireworks display in one! (the occupants of the car survived, fortunately. Let’s not have the spectacle of drivers on fire or tunnel workers melting.)

The Explanation

If you’ve ever wondered how smart people can get suckered into religion or conspiracy theories, here’s the answer.

I’m just an ape in a post-religion, post-authority, post-trust society looking for a large man to organize my community and tell me who the enemies are.
SMBC

I am bearded and not balding, which hampers my ability to identify with one of the characters in the cartoon.

AI making the void look shiny, bright, and appealing

Last week, everyone was talking about this scammy entertainment fiasco in Glasgow — someone had thrown together an event built around the Willy Wonka IP called Willy’s Chocolate Experience, charged $45 admission, and then thought they’d sit back and rake in the money. Instead, they were laughed at and despised. It was such an obvious failure — they rented a warehouse, put up a few plastic props, and hired a couple of actors with no script and no plan to stand around and improvise. Where they figured they could really cut costs even further was to use AI to generate the advertising and some of the displays in the warehouse.

They didn’t even copy-edit their ads. It was a zero-effort effort that they thought they could mask with some garishly colored AI art. The appalling thing was how little substance there was behind the glitzy facade — kids showed up and instead of smorgasbord of chocolate they got one jelly bean and a cup of lemonade. That’s how I’ve felt about all the AI stuff being churned out right now. It’s mostly empty hyper-stimulus where the fantasy gets dressed up in an excess of colorful noise. The Glasgow thing was just an example of a few profiteers thinking that was sufficient. It’s not.

Then I encountered another illuminating example. Product photography is a whole genre unto itself, where you have to take photographs of things that are being sold in a way that makes them revealing and enticing. Food photography is a difficult art, because you have to take something that is kind of gross and drab if you think about — a lump of meat with sauces gooped over it, for instance — and make it look crisp and shiny and delicious and colorful (but not too colorful). The food photographed for menus and ads is already mostly fake, with condensation made of glycerin, foamy heads made with soap, cardboard padding to make a stack stand up, and ice cream made out of mashed potatoes.

Commercial food photography is actually pretty hard to do well, as you can discover on Instagram where amateurs are constantly taking photos of their luxury meals, and making them look generally ick. It’s expensive because that photograph of a plump hamburger covered in slightly melting cheese and bright red tomatoes and crisp green lettuce actually takes a team of designers and lighting experts and good photographers to shoot. So why not cut out that expense by using AI to assemble an image from all the hard work of real artists? It’s mostly fake anyway.

These mass market ghost kitchens are doing exactly that.

Dozens of Ghost kitchens, restaurants that serve food exclusively by delivery on apps like DoorDash and Grubhub, are selling food that they promote to customers with AI-generated images. It’s common for advertisements to stage or edit pictures of food to make it look more enticing, but in these cases the ghost kitchens are showing people pictures of food that literally doesn’t exist, and looks nothing like the actual items they’re selling, sometimes because the faulty AI is producing physically impossible food items.

In a way, it’s kind of cool. I look at their products with the eye of a biologist, and their crustaceans and molluscs definitely seem to be alien.

The more I look at those things, the weirder they are. What’s going on with that shrimp’s terminal segment? Those telsons don’t make any sense. Would you eat meat that looked like it had been recently imported from Arcturus, or came from animals cultured downstream from a nuclear power plant?

I guess it may not matter, because we don’t generally scrutinize the photographs in a menu that carefully. They’ve got the color and shininess and appearance of an expected plate of food, so that’s good enough. I might be the only person who’d send the meal back, complaining that these are mundane terrestrial bits of cooked animal flesh.

They better not disappoint me with the beverage, though. I really want my glass of radioactive diet Sprite.

Dune 2

It was time to venture to the movie theater to see Dune 2 last night.

It was gloriously visually beautiful, and morally complex. I had a grand time. I do have a few reservations, and they’re based more on the source material than the movie.

On the way to the theater, my wife (not a big SF fan) asked how she could tell who the good guys and the bad guys are. I answered that you’ll have no problem spotting the evil antagonists in the movie, and that is definitely true. The Harkonnens reek of cartoonish villainy throughout. It’s a whole family of slimy psychopaths, they look like it, they act like it, if we had Smell-O-Vision, they’d stink like it.

What’s trickier is that the ‘good guys’ are all gray and ambiguous, with nasty qualities that are the key conflict in the story. It’s more than rebels vs. the evil empire, it’s the protagonist wrestling throughout with his choices that will enable the darkness in his own side. The movie made one major change from the book that I appreciated: Chani was the voice of reason against fanaticism, and made the underlying conflict clear. I was definitely on Team Chani, although I also felt like Team Paul had his choices stripped from him and he had little else he could do.

Now if only we had some opposition to Team Eugenics (the Bene Gesserit) somewhere in the movie. The idea of genetic determinism was unquestioned and was simply an assumption.

Do go see it, it’s well worth the experience.

There’s talk that there may be a third Dune yet to come, which worries me a bit. There are studio executives dreaming of a franchise now, I’m sure of it, but I have to warn them that that is a path destined to lead them into madness and chaos. The sequels are weird, man. Heed Chani and shun the way towards fanaticism and corporate jihad.

Ooh, just saw this summary of the Dune series. I agree with it. I should have stopped with Dune Messiah, years ago.