A guy I follow on micro.blog, after having to go through four or five steps just to read a Substack post, posted “Substack? What are you for?” To which I replied: “As near as I can tell, it’s there to monetize the writing of Nazis, with enough non-Nazis to provide some cover for the firm.”
My brother chimed in to point out, “You can subscribe to nazistack blogs with an RSS reader,” which is something that I hadn’t really thought about.
I’ve been avoiding any newsletter on Substack for a couple of years now, because of the “Nazi bar” problem. Even so, I’ve ended up with a couple of subscriptions to Substack newsletters, because a couple of non-Substack newsletters I subscribed to moved there, and Substack let them just subscribe me without asking. And because I wouldn’t have subscribed if I wasn’t interested, I didn’t unsubscribe from every one of those.
Now, though, based on Steven’s good idea, I’ve gone in and added those newsletters to my RSS feed. Now I can unsubscribe from those newsletters, and still see their content—in my feeds, which is the best place to see it anyway!
AI firms are on the ropes, having spent way too much money building infrastructure for tools that are valuable, but not nearly valuable enough to support the money already spent, let alone what they’re planning to spend over the next two or thee years. This is bound to come to a bad end.
As Jerry Holkins puts it:
They can only loan each other money for so long. Then, they’ll socialize the losses through nationalization.
At least, that’s their plan. Oliver Jutel and Gil Duran have a name for this plan: “exit through the state.”
Because I’m at heart an optimist, I like to imagine a more hopeful solution—one where this plan fails. And I legit think it might.
If Congress changes hands, and Trump becomes even more toxic (two things that seem very likely), there might not be anybody in a position to lead the charge for socializing the losses. A toxic Trump trying to hand another bunch of taxpayer money over to billionaire tech bros might actually be very unpopular. And if a Republican minority in Congress can’t get it together to come up with a plan that a significant number of Democrats will support, socializing the losses just might not happen.
But it has to “not happen” right then—with a Democratic (or divided) Congress.
If the AI firms can hold things together (with circular financing, SPVs, and the like) until there’s a Democrat in the White House, that guy will probably not be able to resist the pressure to “do something.”
If—as I hope, and kind of expect—it comes to a head before that, the Republicans might well not be able to come up with a plan that meets the demands of all their different constituencies, while the Democrats refuse to join in any plan that a large subset of Republicans will agree to. The result might just be that we just let the sucker go down.
Letting the sucker go down is what George W. Bush wouldn’t do in 2008. Except, of course, he kinda did, as far as homeowners were concerned. Banks, investment firms, and insurance companies got saved. Homeowners got hung out to dry.
My point being that the government is totally willing to let some suckers go down. The Republicans would like those suckers to be ordinary investors, computer users, and (in particular) tax payers. But I like to imagine that there’s at least some chance that the politicians will simply be unable to cobble together an arrangement to accomplish that, with the result that the AI firms go down, a bunch of AI firm executives get prosecuted for investment fraud, and all that infrastructure (data centers and large language models) gets sold off in bankruptcy, ending up in the hands of people with a certain amount of rationality (and much less debt).
It was a very nice day today—moderate clouds, not too hot, no rain—so I decided to go for a run.
I haven’t actually compared it to other runs this summer, but I’m pretty sure it’s my longest and my fastest.
4.88 miles in 1h 18 min.
I really mean to do two runs a week, but I’m probably not managing even half that. But this run still felt okay. I was tired at the end, but not too tired. My joints felt fine during the run.
A few weeks ago, back before the Iran war heated back up, The Economist wrote a mia culpa, explaining why they’d gotten it wrong about the war being an economic disaster. Briefly, while the MOU was holding up, I was tempted to write my own.
I didn’t write a mia culpa. To be fair, part of that was just laziness. But part of it was looking at things and thinking I was still right. Maybe between some demand destruction and some dribs and drabs of oil getting through the strait, world markets had found a new equilibrium that wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d expected. But I didn’t think so.
The Economist thought so. They thought they’d gotten it wrong for two reasons:
First, we thought that America and Iran would hold out against a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz: America because Mr Trump deludedly thought he held the whip hand, Iran because its regime knew its people could be made to endure more pain. In fact, facing the fury of American motorists, Mr Trump all but folded, preventing a disaster. Since the two parties struck a provisional deal in June, enough oil has been getting out of the Gulf to reassure markets that supply is coming back online, even if the future of the strait remains uncertain.
Our second oversight was, like others, not anticipating the staggering degree to which China would be able to slash its oil imports. Crude imports are 5m barrels a day lower than a year ago, despite the fall in prices. China has cut its demand and shored up supply. Its oil reserves are opaque—many barrels are hidden from satellites underground, and there is a blurred line between official reserves and corporate inventories. But they have been shown to be a powerful buffer.
I pretty much bought their second point. China had produced a truly fantastic amount of demand destruction, and had done it with minimal impact on their own economy, by largely shifting the impact onto people in other countries who had bought their oil distillates, before China prohibited exports. They could probably keep that up indefinitely, removing their demand from the world market.
That first point, though, I found doubtful. I mean, yes, Trump always chickens out, which is why we got the MOU and the briefly partially reopened strait. But I think they were wrong in thinking that Iran would go along with what Trump wanted, or that Trump could settle for what Iran would (obviously) want to do. They tried to paper over the cracks for a few weeks. I mean, I believe Trump settling for whatever Iran did and pretending it was a victory was a thing that could happen. But I’m not surprised it didn’t work out. Too many other people in the U.S. government were simply unwilling to let Trump leave the strait in Iran’s hands. And, although oil prices were coming back down, they were not on a trajectory that would improve the Republican’s chances in the midterms.
So, I think The Economist was right in the first place, and wrong to imagine that Trump and Iran could agree that “preventing a disaster” was something they could do.
The oil price graphic above is already out of date. It shows yesterday’s closing price, and things have gotten worse already today. Brent crude is over $100 as I wrap up this post.
On Saturday my local HEMA group, Tempered Mettle Historical Fencing, had a guest instructor come to teach a one-day class aimed at “underrepresented groups.” The guest instructor was Kaethe Dundon, “a Chicago-based queer nerd whose major interests are in history, art, and textiles, and of course historical martial arts.” The class was pitched thus:
The primary audience of this workshop includes women, those of other marginalized genders, and those with physical disabilities. Those who are male and able-bodied are welcome to attend – but be aware that your experience will not be the focus of this class, and be ready to primarily take the “losing” role in reps.
I was down with that, so I went. It was a great workshop. A lot of the focus was on stance and footwork, which are two things you can never do too much of.
One member was taking pictures. Trying to be less of a distraction, he switched his camera to “silent,” which turned out to have an odd interaction with the LED lighting in our training space:
The posture with the sword across our shoulders was intended to get us to open our chest, so our arms and shoulders would be where they were supposed to be for longsword.
The notion that “SpaceX’s ambition to put data centers in space” makes more sense than putting them in North Dakota, Alaska, Siberia, and maybe Tierra del Fuego or the Falkland Islands suggests that a bunch of people have no sense at all.
I’m using “AI” here in the older sense, rather than the newer sense where it’s just another way to say LLM.
In this older sense, I don’t have anything against AI (even though I generally try to avoid LLMs). So, I thought I’d talk a little about the things I actually object to, when it comes to what people call AI these days. Specifically, what I object to (in order of objectionableness) are:
Using them to generate anything that looks like creative output. (It isn’t creative output, but it resembles it enough that I can waste a lot of time realizing that. That’s what I object to.)
The copyright theft at the base of LLMs. (I think half the profits (perhaps 40% of the gross revenues) of every AI company should be distributed to holders of the copyrights that were violated in the generation of the models).
The resource usage needed to run the inference engines. (Also the resource usage that went into doing the training, but that’s already sunk, so there’s no more point in complaining about it than there is in complaining about the resources that went into building your house.)
The fact that AI is unnecessarily used to do stuff that used to be better without it (such as web search).
I do also have some good thoughts. Generally speaking, there’s all kinds of stuff that (I hope) is going to get a lot better. Here’s an almost random sampling of ideas I’ve had. This list is most definitely not comprehensive. It’s not even the most important stuff. It’s just a few things I have been thinking of, because they’re things I want.
I would like an AI to keep track of everything I read (including whether I finish reading it, or give up part way through), and then (insted of trying to sell me something), guess what I’d like to read next. I’d pay money for this. (Not much money, but a little.)
I’d like an AI that picked up domain information what what I read. When I read an economics or finance article, I’d like it to put a little note over on the edge of the screen that I could click on, and then it would apply the information in the article to my situation. “That article, and three others that you’ve read in the past two weeks, suggest that European stocks might do better than U.S. stocks over the next year. Your portfolio is 43% U.S. stocks and only 16% European stocks. Click here for steps you could take to boost your European stock holdings.”
Of course, it should also track future results of each of those hypotheticals and compare them to both what I had before and what I actually did.
I’d like an AI to look at a blog post I’ve written and then from the taxonomy of categories and tags I’ve already created, suggest which ones I should use for that post. (There have long been “tag recommending” plugins for WordPress, but the last time I checked, none of them preferred the tags I’ve already got. Most of them seem intended for a completely different purpose from supporting your own internal tagging system. It seemed like maybe they were intended for finding keywords for maximizing ad revenue?)
I couldn’t think of a good picture for this post, but didn’t want to post it without a picture, so I thought I’d use this picture of my dog. It’s been hot here.
My brother asked me today, “Which author do you think best immanentizes the eschaton?”
Not being a moron, I immediately replied, “Obviously it’s Charlie Stross.”
Before I could finish typing that, he suggested a Mastodon poll to ask people, to which I replied, “The poll should be ‘After Charlie Stross, what author next best immanentizes the eschaton?'”
We speculated a bit, throwing out names like William Gibson, Bruce Stirling, Neal Stephenson, and Cory Doctorow.
I assume this was all prompted by the most recent Pluralistic, in which Cory Doctorow says, after explaining why, if their AI is so close to having god-like powers, anyone would be asking for money for their AI, when they could just be using the AI to make money for them, says:
So it’s not surprising that we don’t ask why these AI god-botherers need our stupid money while they’re immanentizing the eschaton. Why would they operate a hospital if they could go meta and sell the doctorbots to the MBAs running the hospital?
Anyway, at this point I put the question to confer.to (so I don’t know which AI model responded), but it gave me a great reply:
The Core “Eschaton Immanentizers” (Closest to Stross)
1. Vernor Vinge ⭐
Why: He literally coined the term “technological singularity” in his 1993 essay. Stross stands on Vinge’s shoulders.
Key Works:A Fire Upon the Deep (zones of thought = different physical laws based on intelligence density), A Deepness in the Sky, Marooned in Realtime.
Vibe: More optimistic than Stross, but equally committed to the idea that superintelligence changes everything, including physics.
2. Greg Egan ⭐⭐
Why: If Stross is the journalist of the singularity, Egan is the mathematician. He goes harder into the ontological breakdown. His characters upload, fragment, merge, and cease to be human in ways that make Stross look cozy.
Key Works:Permutation City (simulated reality, consciousness as substrate-independent), Diaspora (post-human civilization across dimensions), Quarantine (reality modification).
Vibe: Colder, more rigorous, less humor. The eschaton isn’t just immanentized; it’s proven.
3. Hannu Rajaniemi
Why: Writes about societies that already live in the post-singularity world Stross describes arriving.
Key Works:The Quantum Thief trilogy (solar system transformed by post-human technologies, memory as currency, gogolized consciousness).
Vibe: Dense, playful, requires work—but depicts the aftermath of eschatonization brilliantly.
4. Ken MacLeod
Why: Stross’s contemporary and friend; they share a intellectual milieu (Edinburgh SF scene). MacLeod explores similar themes but often from a more political/ideological angle.
Key Works:The Fall Revolution series (The Star Fraction, The Stone Canal), The Execution Channel.
Vibe: More focused on how ideologies (libertarianism, socialism, etc.) interact with singularity tech.
I mean, really, I don’t know why we didn’t have Verner Vinge in mind, or Greg Egan. I’ve read both, and I’m sure Steven has as well. They’re obviously on top.
I don’t know if Steven has read Hannu Rajaniemi, but I’ve at least read The Quantum Thief, and, yes, I’d put him on this list.
The AI also rather dismissed our guesses:
Your Guesses, Evaluated
Author
Verdict
Notes
William Gibson
Adjacent
Cyberpunk is pre-singularity. His later work (The Peripheral) touches on it, but he’s more about near-future tech’s social impact than ontological rupture.
Bruce Sterling
Adjacent
Same as Gibson—cyberpunk pioneer, but more interested in design, aesthetics, and near-term futures than the actual singularity event.
Neal Stephenson
Partial
The Diamond Age and Snow Crash have elements, but he’s more interested in memes and social structures than the hard break of singularity. Anathem gets closer.
Cory Doctorow
Partial
Writes about these themes (especially in Walkaway and Makers), but with a more accessible, activist, optimistic lens. Less “reality breaks,” more “how do we organize after tech changes?”
The AI actually goes on a bit, mentioning several other authors including Richard Morgan, Ted Chiang, and others, but I’ll just go hang my head in shame rather than copy and paste more AI output.
(Normally my posts are entirely my own writing. This post is an exception, in that it includes a bunch of copy/pasted AI output. I think it’s adequately tagged, though, and it’s clear that I’m not trying to pass off AI output as my own writing. Because I thought it was funny, I also generated an AI image to be the “featured image” for this post. Once again, I hope it’s clear that I’m not trying to pass off AI output as my own.)
Do you use an activity tracker? I have an Oura ring, a Google Pixel watch, and a phone which runs Google Fit. All of those count my steps, and each one does some additional activity or sleep tracking. I find them all fun and interesting, so I’m always amused when yet another article comes out warning of the dangers of activity tracking.
I mean, sure. If you’re really foolish, you can be seriously led astray by one of these. But you’d have to be really foolish. It’s like the early days of GPS map software, where they’d be giving you directions and say, “Turn left!” but if you turned left you’d end up in a creek. Sure, you could do that, but all you had to do was look where you were going, and you could avoid it pretty easily.
Although the article has five items, there are, I think, two fundamental issues that Bakr is warning about. The larger one is outsourcing our good sense to some external device. The smaller is an excessive focus on step-count as the measure of fitness activity.
Letting a device tell you to push hard when you’re feeling crappy is just stupid. (It is perhaps somewhat less stupid to let a device tell you to take it easy when you feel great. I have several times decided to push hard because I felt great, even though one of my devices was warning me that I wasn’t fully recovered. More than once when I did that, I ended up having a crappy workout, because the device was right and I was wrong.)
With their fixation on steps (because that’s easy for a device to measure), devices have a pretty limited insight into the full scope of your movement practice. This means that they’re never going to know if your strength training is covering all the major muscle groups, or if your volume and intensity are on point. But that’s not really different from training without a device. Really, it only makes things worse if you’re so foolish as to imagine that it’s got some insight into stuff other than your steps and heart rate (or whatever else its measuring). Just like it doesn’t know enough about your strength training to provide useful advice there, it also doesn’t know much about your skills training or your flexibility training.
A lot of my training is focused on specifically increasing the sort of fitness I need for my HEMA practice. None of my devices even tries to guide me as to whether I should do less lunging practice in favor of overhead pressing practice or vice versa. (And if they did, I wouldn’t pay much attention, unless they’d started getting me to upload my sparring footage. And maybe not then.)
Getting back to the fixation on steps, the device makers want to pretend that step counts gives them some sort of deep insight into a human’s movement practice, with a one-size-fits-all target of 10,000 steps.
Weirdly, I don’t think that’s crazy. I mean, steps are by no means the only aspect of a human’s movement practice that’s important, but it’s actually not a bad proxy.
Over an evolutionarily long period, walking and running have been critical to human success. Running and walking were key to our successes in both hunting and gathering, and probably led directly to our big brains.
All three of my devices count steps. All three track walking and running. (They all try to track other activity—cycling, swimming, gardening, housework—but do so pretty poorly. Walking and running, though, they pretty much have nailed.)
In my mid-20s I was working in an office, but getting out to hike at every opportunity, which didn’t come frequently enough. I remember thinking, “If only I could get out and hike a few miles every day! I’d be in great shape!” That turns out not to be true, but it’s not completely false either.
My point here is simply that step counts are by no means a terrible proxy for one’s overall activity level, and 10,000 steps is by no means a stupid target—it’s mildly ambitious, without being out of reach for anyone with a reasonable level of fitness and some spare time. (I admit that I might well think this because I’m a weird outlier. I’m a walker from way back. I’m retired, so I have all the time in the day to walk if I want to. And I have a dog who likes to walk a lot. The upshot is, my daily steps hit 15,000 nearly every day.)
All of which is to say that I find these devices useful. In particular, they’re good at observing that I’m not fully recovered, meaning I should take it easy, even if I’m feeling okay. I find them (mildly) motivating, in that I pretty much never fail to hit 10,000 steps (unless I’m sick, the dog is sick, or the weather is terrible). I find them somewhat entertaining, especially when their praise is so for stuff I consider pretty minimal. (“You’ve met your activity goal for the day!” My Oura ring will say at 10:00 AM.)
In any case, I find them quite harmless. They don’t make me feel anxious or shamed. I’ve seen no sign that they are prompting disordered eating. I’m amused by their fixation on step counts, but not troubled by it. (I occasionally miss my 10,000 steps, usually when I’ve spent the day sitting in a plane, train, or car. I am not bothered when my devices observe that this is the case.) I care deeply about getting in my mobility work and my strength work, even if the devices don’t track it adequately. I take great joy in my movement—click any of the tags over there with “movement” in the name and find yourself taken to dozens of places where I’ve celebrated my movement practice, starting from before I had any devices, and continuing to this day. Finally, I am merely amused if my device dings me for not doing enough, as my Oura ring does if I sit for more than 50 minutes. (In fact though, these past few years, I can only barely sit still that long anyway.)
The key paragraph from the article:
For users, the first shift is to treat tracking as information rather than instruction. A watch can tell you what it has measured. It cannot tell you what your body needs today.
I mean, I know I’m a movement weirdo, but really? Who would do anything else?
If your website has a “See more” link, I assume that indicates that the rest of the article or site is unimportant or uninteresting, so I basically never click on it. Why would I?
Now, if you share 20 or more full posts and then have an “Older posts” link at the bottom, that’s different. (And much better than having a script to make the page endlessly scroll.)
