For The Love of God, Make Your Own Website. “It will only become more painfully clear how important sovereign websites are to protecting information and free expression.”

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“All together, the billionaires tapped for the Trump administration are worth at least $344 billion — higher than the GDP of 169 countries.” Plutocracy, pure and simple.

"They think your existence is a scourge? Then the best way to spite them is to keep existing." Geraldine DeRuiter (previously) has written the one thing that makes me feel better about what happened. Maybe it'll help you too.

Whether you live in the United States or not, this week’s election is going to have rippling effects on the tech industry for years to come.

Under the incoming administration, I expect a massive erosion in privacy, an increase in surveillance capitalism, a massive rollback of environmental protections, and the widespread destruction of inclusive norms.

Keep your eyes open.

At work, right now, a lot of the people you work with are going to be hurting badly (you might be one of them.). Things are going to get a lot worse for them. Pay attention to who they are. Look out for each other.

And some people are probably celebrating and bootlicking, like the CEOs of various tech companies. Pay attention to who they are, too.

Because all tech is political. You can either work to further entrench social inequality, or work to dismantle it.

Ted Chiang with a thought-provoking essay on Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art:

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

In the past few years, Chiang has written often about the limitations of LLMs — you can read more about his AI views on kottke.org.

Tags: art · artificial intelligence · Ted Chiang

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I’d missed that Ray Nayler, author of the excellent The Mountain in the Sea, came out with a short novel earlier this year called The Tusks of Extinction. “Now, her digitized consciousness has been downloaded into the mind of a mammoth.”

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