onfocus

Helping Nazis grow subscription newsletter businesses is ultimately best for the world, reasons Hamish McKenzie.

Nazi sympathizers going bankrupt is ultimately best for the world. Please delete your Substack account and encourage people using it to go elsewhere.

I link to the Substack domain here a lot. There is a bunch of good indie writing there but I can’t link to it anymore. I know this site doesn’t drive any traffic anywhere, so no loss to Substack. But it is a loss to me to support these awful people in any small way. Anyway, the people at the top of these venture backed Silicon Valley companies are not helping create a better place for us.

The Colorado Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that former President Donald Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency under the Constitution's so-called insurrection clause and ordered the secretary of state to exclude his name from the state's Republican presidential primary ballot.

Finally some consequences for the top traitor. We should do the same for members of congress who provided support for the insurrection.

When one hears about the rise of elimination, one wonders how it was allowed to happen. How did people permit it? I think it looks exactly like the Huckinses. Perfectly nice people I’m sure, who have decided that the existence of other people is a danger they shouldn’t have to endure, and who, rather than paying the costs of creating a sustainable society that supports all, demands the elimination of everyone who compromises their comfort.

A.R. Moxon dissects the false equivalency the media uses to discuss political polarization. Once you buy into the idea that some people are victims because their violent demands aren't being met you're empowering supremacists.

“I think we’ve been conditioned, and we have no way of countering the idea” that crime is rising,” Asher said. “It’s just an overwhelming number of news media stories and viral videos — I have to believe that social media is playing a role.”

Crime is down but the perception of rising crime is up. Thanks a lot, media.

Paxton’s office petitioned the high court just before midnight Thursday, after a Travis County district judge granted a temporary restraining order allowing Kate Cox, 31, to terminate her nonviable pregnancy. Paxton also sent a letter to three hospitals, threatening legal action if they allowed the abortion to be performed at their facility.

Absolute ghouls. This is your regular plea from me to please vote for people who care about other people and want to make their lives easier.

In this 5 minute video linguistics professor Emily M. Bender talks about AI as a marketing term. She proposes replacing the term AI with automation to avoid making mistakes about responsibility.

The subpoenas were approved following a contentious meeting in which Republicans accused their Democratic colleagues of attempting to undermine the Supreme Court by targeting private citizens.

Undermining how corrupt Supreme Court justices are beholden to billionaires is exactly the point.

AIs are not people; they don’t have agency. They are built by, trained by, and controlled by people. Mostly for-profit corporations. Any AI regulations should place restrictions on those people and corporations. Otherwise the regulations are making the same category error I’ve been talking about. At the end of the day, there is always a human responsible for whatever the AI’s behavior is. And it’s the human who needs to be responsible for what they do—and what their companies do.

This talk is exactly how we should be thinking about AI, algorithms, technology in general. Technology doesn’t spring from the Earth fully formed, it’s the result of people designing it and making decisions that they should be responsible for.