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Cake day: June 27th, 2025

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  • What I’m describing is our current reality where policies are enacted for “safety” when really they’re to be abused. The news calls them “bad actors” or “rogue officers” but anyone who doesn’t see them as the expected results they are is fooling themselves. Stories like this are to normalize a system specifically being designed to vilify normal people instead of our actual enemies.

    We can’t have a discussion about what a moral government would do with surveillance until we have a moral government. It’s so far from happening that the idea that it will ever be used to provide more good than bad is concernedly naive.

    I’m not saying we shouldn’t take threats of violence seriously, I’m saying that a person’s private communications should never be publicly available, regardless of what dangers might go undiscovered, because the real danger of such a policy being misused overshadows that risk by orders of magnitude.


  • The issue with surveillance is that it relies on the assumption that the people with the privilege to access the information are honorable enough to only use it when necessary and only use it truthfully. I don’t trust our country or corporations not to have an AI “hallucinate” a death threat so that they have reasonable cause to detain anyone they want whenever they want.

    Plus, I didn’t really think it’s all that different between my sister and I and a teacher and their students. My wife was a teacher, and while she never said she wanted to shoot a student, she’s certainly said she wanted to strangle one. Most of the other teachers I know have said similarly violent things. I also used to work with doctors, and they often say similar things as well.

    People with tough jobs often release stress with violent candid statements about things that frustrate them, then go on to obviously never actually do anything violent. Again, it’s called hyperbole, and is a very common thing across all language. Even if this AI was completely infallible and couldn’t be used dishonestly, it would still have so many false positives that it would be nothing more than a boy who cried wolf.





  • To be clear, I wasn’t necessarily disagreeing about AI’s utility, just about how protein fold AI isn’t the same as LLM AI; we’ve used computer models for predictions of protein structure and genetic mutation severity for a while, though they have always been taken with a grain of salt that I fear is no longer being done - a prediction is still a prediction, after all. Doctors were already incorrectly confusing computer model predictions of genetic mutation severity for positive test results back when I was working as a genetic counselor in the 2010’s - my concern is that the widespread trust of “AI” is only going to exacerbate that.

    I’m a bit confused, though. The AI doing it was AlphaFold, which is shutting down. Shouldn’t your statement be AI was already doing it? Gemini is an LLM - not the same type of thing as AlphaFold, despite the fact that they’re both called “AI,” which was the cause of my original argument. The AI that was doing the protein fold prediction is being replaced with an “AI” that can’t. It looks like there’s still RoseTTAFold, but losing the frontrunner is still not great when it’s shutting down to focus more on LLM’s.



  • The wealthy have a huge incentive to want unskilled teachers. They’d probably rather go back to the days when only the wealthy were educated at all, but creating a bigger gap between the quality of education of the rich and the poor is a passable short term goal for now.

    Remember, the point of a company isn’t to make a product, it’s to make a profit. It’s more profitable to have a dumb population that unquestioningly buys whatever you advertise to them, and if you sell a few crappy AI teaching robots along the way, that’s just a cherry on top.