markjgsmith

2024/05/21 #

• The past 2 days shop staff in multiple different stores in different locations have a bee in their bonnet about something. It appears to have started when I asked for a bigger plastic bag at checkout rather than the small plastic bag the shop staff was trying to give me.

  Since then staff all over the place have been shouting 'lie' at me randomly, calling me a 'liar' when I'm literally just sitting quietly listening to a podcast. For some reason it's literally the most important thing in the universe that they can deny me a slighlty larger plastic bag.

  The way it looks to me is that it's just another manufactuted incident, which then gets used everywhere to righteously blame me for everything. It's been mostly instigated by women, though men have been doing it too, though one gets the impression they are having to, perhaps against what they would otherwise do.

  I call all this type of behaviour being 'on the war path', because they are constantly instigating conflict. #

• Worth mentioning the following in relation to the plastic bag war path from the past 2 days...it's perhaps not a complete coincidence then that the final denoument of last week's starvation campaign was a gift, from a passer by during a rain storm, of a rain poncho which looks like it's made from black plastic bin bags. It's not the greatest poncho in the world, but I have been using it, despite the resemblance. Yet somehow I'm still to blame for everything in the universe.

  It's mind boggling to the power of mind boggling once again. #

• Gavin Woods: "My feelings on AI are pretty pessimistic I’m afraid. I see blockchain as a potential mitigating factor that humanity might have against AI, but ultimately I think AI is an incredibly centralising force. Everything I understand about AI tells me it’s basically the anti-web3.

  It’s totally based on a single economic actor having enough GPUs and enough data, that they can out think all of their strategic competitors. It’s fundamentally not something that is shareable, that is consensus based." #

• Gavin Woods: "The trajectory they are on is for the AI to intermediate all human communication.

  AI brings us into a new form of communication: Totally intermediated by a machine in a non-linear way. This is extremely scary. We haven’t been on this path before.

  It’s almost like we have a single centralised translator sitting in between all our inter human conversations. And we don’t know what interests or biases they have. We don’t know how Microsoft have lobotomised their model or training data, how they have re-trained it when it said the wrong thing.

  [...]

  We are just the medium, we are just the substrate on which the AI lives." #