Camerontw

The cause of a lot of AI hype is the infuriating adoption by the digital crowd of the word product (owner, manager, designer). Agentic-maniacs go about saying 'anyone can make any product anywhere anytime' forgetting that product just means 'website' or equivalent. Angenticism is not openclawing washing machines or bed linen or even cups of coffee.

@ipsquiggle also Graeber and Wengrow's _The Dawn of Everything_ about the different kinds of cities that have been tried over the millenia - also toward the end on communities that centred around games like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunkey

@ipsquiggle Dolores Hayden's _Grand Domestic Revolution_ on the feminists who almost got us 'sharing cities' at the end of the 19thC - see also https://www.jstor.org/stable/3173814

@AimeeMaroux This concern is what ended the French experiment with 'Personal Rapid Transit' https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Aramis_(personal_rapid_transit)

Listening to research that proves that if you want people to use your digital service, especially if chatbot based, make sure people can see how to get access to a person when needed. Investing in people is how you build confidence in the digital systems you want to save money through (in the longer term).

@Daojoan Though the prediction of catastrophe can contribute to helping things work out - the aim of the Precautionary Principle. And also just cherry picking, but the Simon-Ehrlich wager has followed eco-doomers around forever. And Zuckerberg et al seem to predict things like the metaverse will work out, waste resources and peoples lives, and no-one circles back on them.

When this is over, if ever, this nation will have, what, 200,000 people in the army and reservists?, who participated, even if only indirectly, in a few years of journalist, medic and civilian killing, if not genocide. How do you possibly reintegrate those people into your society? https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/the-hardening-of-youth-in-israels-nationalist-enclave,20863

every day another arrives...

Can someone explain why the researchers decided to get the agents they were researching (and discovered to have worrying levels of failure) to make the website with which they shared the research (see bottom of page): https://agentsofchaos.baulab.info/ The deliberate recursiveness is either an intentional undermining of the research ("but we still have faith in them") or just plain weird ("wouldn't it be funny if we used them to make a website it would have been pretty easy to do ourselves, just because we can?'").

Boosted this on other platforms but it is such a nice skewering of something tangential to the real sufferers of war https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/picture/2026/mar/03/expat-dubai-startling-revelation-the-stephen-collins-cartoon