On this day I do hereby declare Panzergoth be mine.
Stderr
All the unbuffered error messages
On this day I do hereby declare Panzergoth be mine.
You probably already have heard of this; if you haven’t, I’m sorry.
The US is one of the most barbarous countries on Earth. Sure, there are worse – places that execute citizens in what amounts to Hammurrabi’s code – but we pretend to be an advanced democratic republic. Briefly, let’s jump down that rathole: in principle the United States is a state organized along the lines of State Legitimacy, i.e.: a social contract in which the state is allowed to enforce certain things on an otherwise independent populace, in return for the populace expecting certain things from the state. What sort of things might those be? A social safety net? Health care? Minimal pointless wars? The right of the citizen to be secure in their possessions and pursuit of happiness? Being cruelly put to death when the state follows its “due process” and eventually decides its time?
I enjoy playing with AI-based image generators, which are a source of constant surprises. Sometimes someone will come up with a clever concept and briefly everyone is enchanted with it. For me, the enchantement is “how did they do that?” and the subsequent pleasure of finding out.
There are lots of “influencers” who are kind of sketchy. Well, all of them. But for someone like myself, with a memory for past photographs, it can be a bit of a problem.
Blah blah AI no creativity, whatever, blah.
It’s still fun.
Right now, we are being treated to a fascinating mix of genius and antigenius, whipsawed between incredible stupidity and last-minute cancellations of the same – which is a form of genius. As Sun Tzu said, deception is the root of strategy – in which case just confusing the living fuck out of everybody has to be one of the fruit of the deception branch. There are so many things wrong, even with the mistakes being made, that the whole thing would make a great Monty Python skit, except the Pythons were trying to be funny.
I’m on both sides of the fence about things like the world cup. For one thing, it’s a joy to see that humans can perform at such a level, but on the other, it seems to me like a complete kill off of any joy in the sport. Joy, which is often replaced by the ugliest form of nationalism. [I just accidentally put my finger on why I found the Norwegian team to be so charming] I also found the World Cup to be a bit disgusting, given that some of the nations involved are cheerfully performing crimes against humanity, while the others appear to be setting that aside, because, yes, the players practiced a lot. I think none of that really holds much water, because the players aren’t amateurs who are giving their lives to sport – they are professionals, who are gambling that they will make millions of dollars if they perform well.
A lot of this is what I consider being from the Department of Obviousness Department, which I normally try to avoid, but sometimes, the timing is such that I appear to have powers above and beyond those of an ordinary ex-nerd thinking about the future. There was a time, once, when I was arrogant enough to reply – when someone asked me to predict the future – “I make the future, I don’t predict it.” Which was literally true but also JD Vance-level stupid.
This topic is, unfortunately, inextricably inter-twined with AI, so I could as easily be talking about one axis of the problem, as the other. But let’s start with the data centers.