Links and Notes for March 1st, 2024
Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.
[1] Emphases are added, unless otherwise noted.↩
[2] Annotations are only lightly edited and are largely contemporaneous.↩
Table of Contents
Public Policy & Politics
The CIA in Ukraine — The NY Times Gets a Guided Tour by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)
“This piece is not journalism and should not be read as such. Neither do Entous and Schwirtz serve as journalists. They are clerks of the governing class pretending to be journalists while they post notices on a bulletin board that pretends to be a newspaper.”
The Last Child of My Lai by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“Calley knew what Medina wanted and began to move the group of several dozen women and children toward a ditch, when he spotted one of his privates by the side of the road, clutching a woman by the hair. His pants were at his ankles. The woman was on her knees, an arm around her child. The private, a soldier named Dennis Conti, had his rifle jammed to the head of the young girl, while he demanded oral sex from its mother. Calley testified at his trial that he ran over to Conti, shouting: “Get your damn pants on and get over where you’re supposed to be.” There would be at least nine women raped that day, several of them children. The sexual assaults didn’t bother Calley. What bothered Calley was that the rapes delayed the implementation of the plan. And the plan was to kill. To pile up the dead. To accumulate a body count. “If a GI is getting a blow job,” Calley told journalist John Sack, “he isn’t doing his job. He isn’t doing what we’re paying him to do. He isn’t destroying Communism. He isn’t combat-effective.””
“The My Lai killings weren’t indiscriminate. The GIs weren’t killing just anyone. They were killing everyone. They were killing everything : chickens, pigs, dogs, rabbits, cows, water buffalo, grandmothers, and children. Young girls, wounded boys, toddlers, infants. More than half of the 504 people murdered in Pinkville that morning were minors. The GIs were following orders and the orders were: to kill everything. Kill everything that breathes. Kill everything that moves. Looking for a precedent? See Wounded Knee. Think things have changed? See El Mozote, Fallujah and Mosul.”
“[…] what happened at My Lai was not a mystery. The only ones kept in the dark were the people who funded it: the American taxpayers. Everyone on the ground that day knew what happened and why. Everyone in the air saw the slaughter below and the lack of enemy fire. Hugh Thompson and his crewmates tried to stop the killing and reported it as a war crime within hours. Ron Haeberle photographed the atrocities as they were committed. An Army reporter, Jay Roberts, watched civilians being sexually assaulted, killed and their bodies mutilated. The local Vietnamese counted the dead and buried the bodies the next day. Within forty-eight hours, the Census Grievance Committee in Quang Ngai City reported that US troops had massacred civilians “both young and old.””
“The Pentagon closed ranks and made Rusty Calley–the semi-literate second lieutenant on one of his first patrols–the scapegoat for an atrocity whose ultimate architects went to the very top of the command structure. The brass thought they could control the damage, and keep the court martial quiet. A colonel told Calley everything would be okay if he kept his mouth shut, and stayed silent: “There’s no need to publicize this thing. The US Army won’t publicize it, if you won’t.” But it was Calley whose name would be attached forever to My Lai. Calley who would be tried for the pre-meditated murder of what the indictment called “111 Oriental human beings,” Calley who would be convicted, sentenced to life in prison and, after spending only four months in the stockade, have his sentence commuted by Richard Nixon, who called Calley “a good soldier” who was “getting a bum rap” for an “isolated incident.””
“When Medina finally called the ceasefire, he sat down with his platoon near a pile of bodies of women and children, and began to eat lunch in a cloud of smoke from a nearby hooch where the inhabitants had been blown up by a grenade and the thatch roof set on fire with a Zippo lighter. The smoke stank of burning flesh. There was silence as they ate. Then a burst of gunfire ripped the quiet.”
“As Haeberle focused his camera lens on the wounded, silent young boy now in front of him, he heard another GI coming along the trail. The soldier stopped, knelt next to the trembling kid, took his M-16 off his shoulder, aimed and shot him three times. The last child of My Lai. Then he stood, flashed Haeberle “the coldest, hardest look” and continued down the path, into the silence.”
We Should All Abandon Biden and the Two-Party Junta He Rode in On by Nicky Reid (Exile in Happy Valley)
“I saw the effects of this campaign of cultural terrorism firsthand on the faces of my own friends and family. I also saw the craven way in which the Democratic Party used this fear to hijack their votes without doing a goddamn thing to earn them. Suddenly, Joe Biden, the pitiless architect of a prison system that targets a higher percentage of transwomen of color than nearly any other demographic in the country, became our only hope, the straight white savior who could shelter us from Donald Trump and his hordes of bible-swinging backwoods savages. Sadly, it worked. Again.”
“I believe that this clusterfuck might actually have the potential to become something way bigger than 2024. One of the most marginalized minorities in the country has recognized their untapped power and announced that they aren’t willing to sell it for empty promises anymore.”
“With an increasingly incoherent Joe Biden trailing the openly racist Donald Trump in the polls by wider and wider margins, minorities are leading the exodus. According to the Roper Center, Biden’s support among the Black voters who handed him his Hail Mary against Bernie in 2020 has shrunk from 87% to 63% in less than four years. Among Donald Trump’s favorite scapegoats in the Hispanic community the plunge has been even more perilous, dropping from 65% to a downright pitiful 39%.”
“The various fucked-over classes in this country are sick and tired of being pandered to every few years and then left to swing from the branches like strange fruit until the next election cycle.”
“But this all begins with abandoning Joe Biden and the two-party junta that thinks we owe them anything but a kick in the ass. All power to all the people because all the people deserve power.”
Mea Culpa on Ukraine by Craig Murray (Scheer Post)
“[…] until I saw the positive enthusiasm of leaders of the Western states for massacre in Gaza, I was not convinced they could not have been addressed by diplomacy and negotiation. I now have to reassess that view in the light of new information, and I now think Putin was justified in the invasion.”
“Putin was not wrong about history (apart from the dodgy bit about origins of the second world war). But the correct question is whether any of this matters. It is not whether Putin’s historical analysis is broadly correct, it is whether this matters. I am inclined to the view that Putin is correct that there is little evidence that the people living in Ukraine, hundreds of years ago, ever considered themselves a distinct national entity. But they are all dead, so they don’t get a vote. The only thing that matters is the opinion of those living there now.”
Exactly. People who are living where they’re living get to keep living there if they want to keep living there. It doesn’t matter where they came from or how they got there—unless they’re the ones who invaded. After a couple of generations, you have people who have never known anything else but life in that country. They get to keep living there if they want to keep living there. They don’t have the right to keep living the lifestyle to which they’ve become accustomed, though. If their lifestyles are contingent on the subjugation of other people, then they’re going to have to give that up. That will possibly—or almost certainly—drastically affect their lifestyle in their location of choice, but that’s another matter. No-one should be forced to move unless they’re being punished for a crime.
“It seems to me beyond dispute that there is now a Ukrainian national identity. I know several Ukrainians who consider themselves joyously and patriotically Ukrainian, just as I know patriotic Ghanaians and even patriotic Uzbeks. The question of how this identity was forged and how recently is not the point. I should add there are undoubtedly a great many Ukrainians whose sense of national identity is not linked to Nazism. There is a historical and a current strain of Nazism in Ukrainian nationalism, and it is far too tolerated by the Ukrainian state; that is certainly true. But to claim all Ukrainian nationalists are Nazis is a nonsense.”
Another excellent point. People are not their government, even if they do live in an ostensible democracy. Living in a democracy means that you’re going to occasionally live somewhere whose official position on one or more issues is opposed to yours.
“Much of modern Ghana was the old Ashanti kingdom, but that extended much further into now Ivory Coast. The coastal areas were never Ashanti. In the east, the Ewe people’s lands are cut by a completely artificial boundary with Togo. To the north, largely Muslim populations live a much more rural lifestyle. Yet Ghanaians are fiercely proud of this imposed state of Ghana. They are proud it was the first African state to attain independence, they are proud of its heritage of supporting African liberation movements including the ANC, they are proud of its education system. They have a real sense of national identity that goes far beyond the passionate support of its sporting teams.”
“In Central Asia, the boundaries of the “stans” are again colonial boundaries that cut right across the pre-existing Khanates. The boundaries of these ex-Soviet republics were carefully designated by Stalin not to be ethnically or culturally coherent, to guard against the development of national opposition.”
“There is now a Ukrainian national identity, and those who subscribe to it have the right to their state. That they have a right to the former boundaries of Soviet Ukraine is a different proposition. Given the reality that it is plain that a significant minority of the population do not subscribe to Ukrainian national identity, that civil war broke out, and that this relates to historic geographic fracture lines, it seems that division of territory is now not only inevitable, but desirable.”
I suppose that there should be two countries there, but do we stop there? What about other territories that want to be on their own?
Here’s where I have other ideas. I don’t know that anyone has the right to a Westphalian state. I think that they have a right to be part of a political union that reflects their views and allows them to participate and have their ideas heard, but I am no longer confused that that needs to a nation-state. Nation-states are arbitrary and fraught—and they’ve so often led to conflict.
Burning All Illusions by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch)
“You can get rid of Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich and Gallant and you’ll still be left with this: more than two-thirds of Israelis, according to the most recent polling by the Israeli Democracy Institute, oppose giving humanitarian aid to Gaza.”
“Consider the vicious rant of Tzufit Grant, an Israeli actress and ex-wife of Chelsea manager Avram Grant, who offered her opinion on Palestinians in Gaza: “The scum of the earth, for God’s sake. Liars, whiners. Disgusting stinky losers. They walk with flipflops. Repulsive. Really repulsive people. There’s nothing human about it. But it’s amazing how the world is able not to see it…They murdered a part of me, a humanitarian part of my brain. This sweeping compassion, like we’re all human beings. No! No! People are the fruit of the education they are raised on. And if they raise you like vermin, that’s what you’ll become. A gutter vermin. A human that is filth son of a filth.””
Racism always sounds the same. And it’s often so self-righteous.
It is unfortunate that we’re forced to remember that not everyone has the basic attitude that all humans are … well, … humans.
“We’re not far off from the Biden crowd rationalizing the gunning down of starving Palestinians in Gaza as a form of mercy killing.”
This is where they’re headed, I think. It will be the humanitarian thing to do to move them all out of Israel. It will never occur to either Israel or the U.S. that they could maybe just bribe the Palestinians to move? Some probably would. But you can’t pay anyone for something you want when you can plunder it instead. The results will be the same, but the perception will be different.
“Sam Haselby: “A lot of American liberals want you to believe that Hamas somehow represents 14 million Palestinians, even though most of them never voted for Hamas, while Netanyahu doesn’t really represent Israel, even though they have elected time and again him for at least a generation.””
Yeah, well, then the same logic applies to Americans, who’ve consistently elected one murderous regime after another for decades, going on a century. The U.S.‘s murderous rampages leave Israel in the shade, to be honest. Israel’s are fresh and in your face right now, but their numbers are small. They’re really quick out of the gate and the degree to which they cheerily tell the world they don’t care is a bit jarring, but the end result is the same.
“In one West Bank village, settlers left fliers on Palestinian farmers’ cars, reading, “You wanted war, now wait for the great Nakba. . . . This is your last chance to escape to Jordan in an orderly fashion before we forcibly expel you from our holy lands, which were given to us by God.””
I just read something in Joe Sacco’s book Palästina (I read it in German) that said that there was no way that two deeply racist and animosity-filled people could ever live together in one society. This is probably still true, even though the book is over 20 years old and detailed the events of over 30 years ago. The animosity has only gotten worse, with the Israelis having the definite upper hand. But that shouldn’t blind us to the distinct possibility—if not fact—that Palestinians would do the same to the Israelis if they could. After so many decades with the boot on their neck, it’s hard to imagine that they could forgive and forget everything. The hatred of Israel is so virulent—and it’s almost certainly reciprocated, no matter how Palestinians who are interviewed by sympathetic journalists protest to the contrary. The well-read and well-educated ones will claim that they could reconcile whereas the vast majority will not.
“Former State Department official Barrett Rubin: “I don’t see how the ‘international human rights regime’ or the U.N. Charter survive this. The most powerful actors in the international system have shown with great clarity and precision that there are some people they don’t consider human. I don’t know what to do with this.””
Clarity. No more bullshit. They still try to lie about it, but it’s so transparently false now. As Žižek says: we knew before, but now we know.
“Let’s give the last word this week to Jan Egeland, Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, on his impressions of Gaza: “I have never, in my many many years of work, seen a place so bombarded for such a long time with such a trapped population without any escape. People are traumatized beyond belief. They live under the most horrific conditions. I met today with 50 people sleeping in a small classroom, where 150 to 200 people are sharing one latrine and no real clean water…The Israelis are letting extremists block aid to the women and children, the innocents, on this side. It’s beyond belief that people who are mourning the worst massacre in the history of Israel on the seventh of October would believe that taking away food from children and women, completely innocent, nothing to do with the 7th of October, could in any help the poor hostages here….The chaos around the aid lines is becoming worse and worse because there’s so little aid getting in. I’m pretty shaken, actually, from what I saw.””
US soldier Aaron Bushnell, Israel embassy, Washington DC by rasstrelyat (Reddit)
Aaron BushnellThe link above is to an unedited and unredacted video of Aaron Bushnell’s last act. While it’s amazing how long he managed to remain standing while completely engulfed in flames, it’s more amazing that he died seven hours later, in the hospital. Those must have been hours of incredible agony.
He was not insane or disturbed. His final words were,
“I am an active duty member of the United States Air Force. And I will no longer be complicit to genocide. I am about to engage in an extreme act of protest. But compared to what people have been experiencing in Palestine at the hands of their colonizers—it’s not extreme at all. This is what our ruling class has decided will be normal.”
These acts seem meaningless and futile—until they become very meaningful. Thích Quảng Đức’s (Wikipedia) self-immolation in protest of the Vietnam War has been immortalized.
If the link above doesn’t work, then you can download it from here.
Aaron Bushnell’s Death Can’t Rightly Be Called An Act Of Suicide by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“There is no indication that he was mentally unwell, or under any psychological stress beyond that which was inflicted upon him by the moral quandary of being a member of a war machine that is backing an active genocide. From what we can tell about his internal state given the information available to us, Bushnell would have been perfectly happy to go on living. He just prioritized peace and justice over his own life. He was no more suicidal than a rescue worker who died trying to save the lives of others.”
On Palestine And The Worthlessness Of The Western Liberal by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“[…] that isn’t what the liberals in question are talking about instituting when they say they oppose Israel’s atrocities in Gaza but “support Israel’s right to exist”. What they are saying is they want Israel to remain the unjust and tyrannical apartheid state that is has always been, but for the killing to stop. They want the injustice to continue, but they want its most overt manifestations to stop causing them cognitive dissonance. They want the status quo, without the murderous savagery that is necessary for the status quo’s existence.”
“In order to make this fantasy seem more believable, liberals will pretend that the violence we are seeing can be blamed entirely on the Netanyahu government, as though things would be fine without Bibi in office despite the fact that Israel’s abusiveness began long before he showed up, and despite the fact that Israel’s atrocities in Gaza have the approval of the vast majority of Israelis. Israeli violence isn’t the product of Netanyahu, Netanyahu is the product of Israeli violence. He built his political career upon sentiments that were already in place.”
“[…] this isn’t just what liberals do with regard to Israel-Palestine; it’s their whole entire position on everything. On every issue their position is little more than “Maintain the status quo, but make it pretty and psychologically comfortable for me.” They never want to do what’s right, they just want to feel like they are right. Theirs is an imperialist, militarist, tyrannical oligarchic ideology with a bunch of feel-good social justice bumper stickers slapped on top of it.”
Nobody With Real Power Cares If You Refuse To Vote For Biden by Caitlin Johnstone (Caitlin's Newsletter)
“The unelected empire managers who actually run the US power structure also don’t care who wins the election. They know they’ll still get their murder and militarism and capitalism and imperialism no matter who gets sworn in next year, whether it’s Biden or Trump or Harris or someone else. Nobody with any real power cares about your vote.
“And that’s the real issue. That’s the real point that keeps getting missed here. The problem is not that the wrong people keep getting elected, it’s that the elections don’t matter and voters don’t have a say.”
“Too many people have been successfully propagandized into believing the status quo works and their government is basically good, or successfully manipulated into giving up on politics altogether and throwing their attention into other things.”
“Before the people can begin using the power of their numbers to force real change, they’re going to have to be awakened to the reality that everything they’ve been told about their government, their society and their world is a lie. They’ve got to come to the understanding that the mainstream news media are nothing but propaganda and they live under the most murderous and tyrannical regime on this planet. They’ve got to realize that this power structure does not ultimately serve their interests, or the interests of their fellow human beings around the world. Only when enough eyes open to this reality can revolutionary change via direct action become possible.”
Economy & Finance
What’s Left 5: Let’s Declare War on Economic Insecurity by Ted Rall
“Wages high enough to cover basic expenses are only the beginning of the Left’s struggle to eliminate economic insecurity. We must also fight for workers’ rights on the job as well as a robust and sturdy social safety net to protect people when they find themselves out of work. Americans suffer the worst worker benefits of major developed countries; we are tied with Botswana, Iran, Mexico, Pakistan. Our safety net also comes in dead last.”
“Globalization has exacerbated this imbalance; an apparel company like Nike may manufacture goods in low-wage, anti-union countries like Vietnam or Indonesia and ship them to high-income/high-price markets like Europe or the United States on container ships whose expenses are subsidized by taxpayers of the latter.”
“As much as an ambitious worker might be willing to abandon her family and native culture to move to a higher-wage place like Norway or Qatar, however, it is nearly impossible to obtain the necessary working permits, much less citizenship. Capital is fluid; labor is stationary.”
“As we’ve seen with robotics and are seeing with artificial intelligence, disruptive technologies destroy entire lines of business at once, rendering hard-earned education and experience worthless overnight. The heartland has plunged into despair and drug addiction after decades of deindustrialization fueled by pro-globalization policies. Surely we could use the lost productivity of these millions of fellow citizens who have filed for federal disability checks because they have no hope of ever being gainfully employed! Those who are willing to take classes to be retrained for positions that will be needed in the near future must currently bear all or most of the cost themselves. Retraining programs should be gratis, and the government should pay them a living stipend so people can focus on their studies.”
IMF, White House applaud Milei’s “shock therapy” as Argentina’s poverty rate nears 60 percent by Andrea Lobo (WSWS)
“the “shock therapy” they praise and helped engineer is strictly aimed at causing “pain” to cheapen labor and plunder the public treasury, natural resources and healthcare and pension funds. Milei himself warned of “painful sacrifices” in his inaugural speech.
“Concerns in ruling circles and on Wall Street are not about suffering, but about preventing a social explosion as they turn the former richest country in Latin America into a sweatshop.”
“Today, Argentina is being governed from offices in Washington D.C.
“Moreover, Milei’s promotion in western media, his embrace by the Biden administration and his rockstar receptions at Davos, in Israel and Rome, and at Trump’s CPAC rally in Washington demonstrate that imperialist global finance has chosen Argentina as a key battleground and testing site to spearhead a dramatic escalation of the war against the working class internationally.”
Surge in gold and bitcoin prices points to concerns over stability of US dollar by Nick Beams (WSWS)
“Bitcoin contains no intrinsic value. Its only “contribution” to the economy is the consumption of massive amounts of electricity to power the computers necessary to “mine” new bitcoins in virtual space.
“The latest rise in bitcoin has pushed the market value of all cryptocurrencies to past $2 trillion for the first time since November 2021.
“It has been fuelled with the recent approval by US regulators to exchange-traded funds in cryptocurrency set up by Wall Street hedge funds, including the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock. The flow of money into the market has led to an increase of 60 percent in the bitcoin price since the start of the year.
“Since January when the nine funds began trading, investors have pumped in $15 billion, with BlackRock accounting for more than $7 billion.
“As the speculative bubble grows ever larger—as reflected in the bitcoin and stock market surge on the back of the expectations of a profit bonanza from artificial intelligence—the real economy is on a downward trend.
“Germany, Britain and Japan, together with much of the eurozone, have been in recession throughout the winter.
“The world’s second largest economy, China, is mired in deflation and ongoing crisis in the real estate and property development, which has been responsible for as much as 25 percent of the gross domestic product in the past decade.”
Philosophy, Sociology, & Culture
“Think of the Poorest Person You Have Ever Seen, And Ask Whether Your Next Act Will Be of Any Use” by Freddie deBoer (Substack)
“We live in a world where fighting racism has gone from fighting for an economy where all Black families can put food on the table to white people acknowledging the land rights of dead Native Americans before they give conference panels about how to maximize synergy in corporate workflow. In a world of affinity groups, diversity pledges, and an obsession with language that tests the boundaries of the possible, we have to ask ourselves hard questions about what any of it actually accomplishes. Who is all of this shit for?”
“I’m in favor of race-based affirmative action in principle under the older justification that such programs help ameliorate the negative effects of the ongoing reality of racism − they’re an attempt to create a more equal playing field through an acknowledgement that racial minorities still face artificial hurdles to success. In practice, racial preferences at elite universities tend to simply be a different way to harvest parent and alumni donations.”
“It’s also the case that affirmative action programs, in real life, help precisely those Black and Hispanic and Indigenous students who are already the most prepared and upwardly-mobile. Remember, getting into college generally is not at all hard, as almost all accept more students than they reject and many will take anyone with a high school diploma who’ll sign a promissory note; getting into the exclusive ones is what’s hard, and a tiny percentage of high school graduates even apply to those. Who affirmative action ends up serving is a) Black and Hispanic high school graduates who b) apply to college and c) apply to elite colleges specifically who d) have good enough resumes to be worthy of consideration but e) aren’t so good that they’d get in without affirmative action.”
“What I do object to is the fact that we have limited political resources and time and attention in this world, and the last decade or so has been a festival of appearing to do things to the detriment of actually doing things.”
“What always gets to me is how often every single person in the chain knows that this stuff is total horseshit, but it’s in nobody’s interest to say so. The sheer aggregate wasted time of corporate trainings must be unfathomable. The most passionately social justice-minded people you know are still often cynical about these social justice pantomimes. The average anti-bigotry corporate training is not just going through the motions, it’s going through the motions of going through the motions.”
“As I said in my recent book (makes a great gift!) What I want is Black people in stable homes and Black children in clean and well-resourced schools and Black mothers surviving childbirth and Black men employed and Black families in environments free from lead and the Black race freed from fear of unequal and violent policing. Today, each of those essential human goods are rarer and harder to secure for Black Americans than for white; anyone who does not comprehend this reality, and is not willing to do what it takes to fix it, should not be taken seriously. Racism and racial inequality are real, they hang a heavy burden over all people of color, and in both statistical terms and through a basic apprehension of the world around us, no group suffers more from these problems than Black people.”
Croissants to Die For by Justin Smith-Ruiu (Hinternet)
“I will only do the work I am constrained by force to do; otherwise, you can expect nothing but Bartlebian refusal from me. Censuses, customer-feedback solicitations, grant-application portals, payment-processing platforms, manuscript-processing platforms, all that low-level hum of the motor of our mad mad world, running on the fuel of the data we keep feeding it: I’d rather not .”
“Honoré de Balzac, La Cousine Bette , 1846-47. Just absolutely gutting — this is the human comedy at its most extreme, hilarious, and disconsoling. Everyone in this great farce (except the pious Adeline) is a self-serving ridiculous animal on the make. Every time you think one of them is expressing something like human fellow-feeling, decency, kindness, you can draw a deep breath and probably hold it until, just a few pages later, the vanity and amour-propre and self-interest that lay behind that seeming will come clear.”
“Here, for example, is his 1937 recording of plantation-worker Uncle Rich, born circa 1860, singing “ Alabama Bound ”. That old man’s quaver, I swear to you, is humanity itself: freedom under constraint.”
LLMs & AI
How the “Frontier” Became the Slogan of Uncontrolled AI by Nathan Sanders (Jacobin)
“The gold rush mentality associated with expansion is taken by the new frontiersmen as permission to break the rules, and to build wealth at the expense of everyone else. In 1840s California, gold miners trespassed on public lands and yet were allowed to stake private claims to the minerals they found, and even to exploit the water rights on those lands. Again today, the game is to push the boundaries on what rule-breaking society will accept, and hope that the legal system can’t keep up.”
“Modern frontier AI models are trained using data, often copyrighted materials, with dubious legal justification. Data is like water for AI, and, like the fight over water rights in the West, we are repeating a familiar process of public acquiescence to private use of resources. While some lawsuits are pending, so far AI companies have faced no significant penalties for the unauthorized use of this data.”
“The inaction of Congress on AI regulation threatens to land the US in a regime of de facto American exceptionalism for AI. While the EU is about to pass its comprehensive AI Act , lobbyists in the US have muddled legislative action. While the Biden administration has used its executive authority and federal purchasing power to exert some limited control over AI, the gap left by lack of legislation leaves AI in the US looking like the Wild West — a largely unregulated frontier.”
“The potential of consumer applications of AI, from personal digital assistants to self-driving cars, is irresistible; who wouldn’t want a machine to take on the most routinized and aggravating tasks in your daily life?”
Jesus Christ. That’s not what they’re for.
“We don’t have to cede all the power and decision making about AI to private actors. We can create an AI public option to provide an alternative to corporate AI. We can provide universal access to ethically built and democratically governed foundational AI models that any individual — or company — could use and build upon.”
Sounds nice. We are in the darkest timeline, though.
“More ambitiously, we can choose not to privatize the economic gains of AI. We can cap corporate profits, raise the minimum wage, or redistribute an automation dividend as a universal basic income to let everyone share in the benefits of the AI revolution. And, if these technologies save as much labor as companies say they do, maybe we can also all have some of that time back.”
“And we don’t have to treat the global AI gold rush as a zero-sum game. We can emphasize international cooperation instead of competition. We can align on shared values with international partners and create a global floor for responsible regulation of AI. And we can ensure that access to AI uplifts developing economies instead of further marginalizing them.”
“Wherever you fall on the spectrum of AI conversation, one thing is clear: we must all equip ourselves with new critical thinking skills.”
Such a broad statement. It’s true generally, I think.
The Growing Environmental Footprint Of Generative AI by David Berreby (Undark)
“Two months after its release in November 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had 100 million active users, and suddenly tech corporations were racing to offer the public more “generative AI.” Pundits compared the new technology’s impact to the Internet, or electrification, or the Industrial Revolution — or the discovery of fire.”
“[…] the European Union’s “AI Act,” approved by member states last week, will require “high-risk AI systems” (which include the powerful “foundation models” that power ChatGPT and similar AIs) to report their energy consumption, resource use, and other impacts throughout their systems’ lifecycle. The EU law takes effect next year.”
“AI can run on many devices — the simple AI that autocorrects text messages will run on a smartphone. But the kind of AI people most want to use is too big for most personal devices, Dodge said. “The models that are able to write a poem for you, or draft an email, those are very large,” he said. “Size is vital for them to have those capabilities.””
But is that an efficient use of the energy? To use such large models to write a paragraph in an email? Do we even care anymore? About anything that offers a scintilla of convenience?
“One reflection of that efficiency improvement: as AI usage has increased since 2019, its percentage of Google data-center energy use has held at less than 15 percent. And while global internet traffic has increased more than twentyfold since 2010, the share of the world’s electricity used by data centers and networks increased far less, according to the IEA.”
““Jevons paradox”: Making a resource less costly sometimes increases its consumption in the long run. “It’s a rebound effect,” Ren said. “You make the freeway wider, people use less fuel because traffic moves faster, but then you get more cars coming in. You get more fuel consumption than before.” If home heating is 40 percent more efficient due to AI, one critic recently wrote, people could end up keeping their homes warmer for more hours of the day.”
Critical Thinking in an AI-Powered World by Khalid Abuhakmeh (JetBrains .NET Tools Blog)
“Most LLMs have settled on a chat interface with a feedback loop designed to refine a particular task set by the user further.”
Wait, what? Did you write this with an AI? I had to read that sentence three times.
“Models typically have three distinguishing factors: Tokens, number of parameters, and training dataset cutoff dates.”
“[…] more isn’t always necessarily better, as a smaller model trained for a specific use case may outperform a more extensive model on task results and time taken to respond.”
“This solution is good, but you should immediately become skeptical whenever you see numbers in a response. Ask yourself the following questions: Do I understand what the mathematics are doing? Are the values correct or precise enough for my use case?”
This is so far from TDD that I don’t even know what to say. This is an improvement only for the most junior and process-free of programmers.
“Next, you’ll notice that the value of 9.8 is not that precise. Let’s continue our chat session with the prompt: “Set the value of Gravity to Earth’s gravity up to four decimal places of precision” .”
Why the heck would you write all that? So you can say you wasted time getting an AI to write it? I still haven’t seen an example that’s not faster with a web search. You’re going to have to verify the answer with a Wikipedia check anyway.
“I use the prompt: “Comment each line with valuable information that explains what’s happening” . It makes a detailed description easier for a layman like me to follow.”
Great. Superfluous comments instead of clean code. If you understood the code, you’d use methods instead of comments. That is, people who know what AI can do have figured out how to ask it for help that it can give, but we have to consider whether that’s the kind of help that we want.
Comments can become obsolete. Comments are usually not automatically refactored. It’s considered better practice to use sub-methods that describe what’s happening instead.
For example:
public bool DoSomethingCool(string textCode)
{
if (textCode.IndexOfAny([',', ';', '.', ' ', '\t']) != -1)
{
return textCode.ToUpper() == textCode;
}
return false;
}I would refactor this to something like the following:
private static bool ConformsToISO7546(string textCode)
{
return HasKnownSeparator() && IsCorrectCase();
bool HasKnownSeparator() => textCode.IndexOfAny([',', ';', '.', ' ', '\t']) != -1;
bool IsCorrectCase() => textCode.ToUpper() == textCode;
}AI-supported code kind of gets there, but you have to carry it part of the way. On the other hand, the IDE tools offer exactly what you need, each step of the way.
“Writing clear and concise instructions for the first time is challenging. You’ll likely have to iterate in a session to find an acceptable solution. You should always be skeptical about numbers . Values could need more precision or be wrong. Refactor any or all constants into variables with meaningful names for a clearer understanding of the code. Make sure mathematical equations are accurate. You can check this using other sources and the JetBrains AI Assistant to find problems. Asking the AI Assistant to comment on lines within complex methods can help you better understand the steps in a method.”
This is a contrived example that illustrates the limits of AI—it’s a gimmick—by what it doesn’t attempt. It can write code that you’re unlikely to ever need. I find it also suspicious that they recommend writing comments to explain code—because you should always check what the AI has generated. But how can you check it if you don’t understand the code yourself? I would be careful with that.
