Dude wrote an essay around infrasound being pseudoscience and chose to ignore the obvious, audible, constant hum.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo

I understand parents' concerns, though I think the price in terms of civic liberties we pay for these social media bans is too high.

This is a worthy tradeoff if you genuinely believe social media to be as damaging for your child as you say it is.

What's stopping you from doing this so far? Handing a child a smartphone is a decision parents can make, withholding access to a smartphone is also a decision parents can make.

Most EU politicians are aware of needing to lead from positions of deep unpopularity for the next 10-20 years, they're just setting the stage to have the tools to suppress dissent at their disposal. After encryption, my bet is on reduced rights to protest (see UK wanting to ban protests that repeatedly "cause disruption").

I think what made it stick for me this time is cycling. If I want to be up and hit the road, even one drink the night before will totally derail that, so the calculation completely shifted.

Drinking is really fun, being up to no good until 7am on a bender is really fun, but I much prefer my early mornings with a coffee and cycling nowadays.

Why is this necessarily a bad thing from the author's POV? I'm going to argue from the author's frame, as a self-described communist [1] and believer in Stafford Beer's views on purpose of systems.

Take Project Cybersyn [2], Stafford Beer's cybernetics engine for orchestrating socialist Chile's entire economy. An example of an equally a "political project" that did "shift power and agency away from people and organizations towards centralized power structures". The same system that was used to organise Chilean economy could've been easily repurposed to strip labour rights, quash strikes before they even happen or "squeeze the working class". This is at odds with the author's thesis that technological artifacts are inherently political, not that politics is applied to technological artifacts. A simpler argument can be made for cars and urban planning before and after the introduction of jaywalking laws.

> Democracy is not just about voting but about ensuring that all power – especially by the state – is used in accordance with the law and in a fair way. Stochastic “AI” systems break that promise. The “AI” just says that you do not get the support you need. No idea why, might be a bug or a deeply racist training data set or something else. Nobody knows.

Looking back at Project Cybersyn, which I assume the author, a self described communist, considers a system that would improve democratic participation in society, the central modelling function that Cybersyn used was based on Bayesian filtering, another stochastic method in the Generative model family.

In believe the author isn't actually at odds with LLMs or AI, but with who controls the technology, since he seems to appreciate stochastic centrally planned socialist systems created by the people he admires.

This makes me think that the article is written from a visceral response to deployment of AI, and a rationalisation of that visceral reaction, rather than from the author's principled views, again, as a self-declared communist and appreciator of Stafford Beer.

[1] https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn

Surprised others said they felt it.

The economic stagnation.

The discontent with the current bureaucratic and unelected elite that makes up 2/3 of the Trilogue.