WW - 10.25.23 - Superfog

90s Gun Violence, Shit Farming, and deadly-to-AI Nightshade

October 25, 2023

‘Superfog’ near New Orleans blamed for highway crashes that killed at least 7 (AP) Superfog sounds like a weapon bad guys hold a city for ransom with, but given the 160+ car & truck pile up, we are clearly unprepared for this level of climate-based villainy.

We’re back into gun violence rates that we haven’t seen since the early 90s. (USAFacts) In 2021, 81% of all homicides were due to fire-arms. This equates to a 44% jump in firearm related homicides, with blade related homicides dropping 17% and asphyxiation related homicides dropping by a third. Americans love guns.

Car Owners Fall Behind on Payments at Highest Rate on Record (Bloomberg) More than half of the car loans given out in 2020 & 2021 didn’t have any form of income verification. Now that stimulus checks, credit cards, and summer temp checks are gone, the repo rate for this holiday season is about to be abhorrent.

Nightshade, the tool that ‘poisons’ AI models with corrupted training data (VentureBeat) Hey artists, I’ll just leave this here.

Exclusive Data: Twitter Is Shrinking Under Elon Musk 13% drop in daily users! (Big Technology) & Shitposting, Shit-mining, and Shit-farming (Programmable Mutter) Power users and blue-check-as-growth strategy accounts will remain on the platform, but not only did we call the X rebrand as completely destructive, Threads remains pointless, referred to as a “nonfactor” in the write-up. The Shit-Farming metaphor is the best framework related to how social networks can death spiral by feeding off the worst of its users. This bit about the evolution of conservativism from political ideal to grift is exceptionally relevant:

Rick Perlstein has a classic essay on the conservatism evolution from cause to business into racket. As he describes it, political entrepreneurs like Richard Viguerie discovered the profitability of mailing lists aimed at kooks in the 1960s. The expensive part was sending out mailers to possible prospects to identify gullible individuals who would donate to ward off this or that threat to the American Way of Life. But once you’d identified them, you had a steady reliable stream of income. If a punter responded to a mailer about one threat, you could send them another, and likely get a little more money back by return of post, and then another, and then another. Over time, the grift expanded to the vast enrichment of people like Alex Jones. People who were gullible enough to believe conservative hucksters warning about the Socialist Menace might have all sorts of other beliefs about gold, cryptocurrencies, diet supplements and what-have-you that could also be milked for profit. This discovery was not good for the conservative movement, but it was very good indeed for some prominent conservatives.

The point is this. Some people are quite happy to be kept in the dark, well fertilized with horseshit. And that is the foundation for a business model. Not a rapidly expanding one of the kind that could allow Twitter’s massive debt burden to ever be paid off. But it can keep on producing its cash crop, year in, year out.

Where have all the creatives gone? (MATTE) Is your city feeling a bit less cool these days? Your creatives might have decamped to…elsewhere. The no-brainer duo of Berlin & Barcelona is joined by Mexico City, Santa Fe, Detroit and Lisbon.

Trust & Safety Tycoon! (TechDirt) Try your hand at running a social network! None of the salary or benefits, but a lot of the stress. Fun and informative, especially if you’ve never experienced the joy that is content moderation.

Tinder now lets mom pick your next date (The Verge) Hi Tinder, tell me you’re trying to launch in India, without telling me you’re trying to launch in India.

Swift, an AI drone pilot beats the best human pilots (hackster.io) It makes sense that flight and piloting will come easier to intellects not connected to inner ears or brains that are affected by g-forces. As Counter Strike players used to say “aimbot does not miss.”

Quote of the week

I don’t try to intimidate anybody before a fight. That’s nonsense. I intimidate people by hitting them.~Mike Tyson

Poem of the week

Vibe of the week

MICA might be familiar to you. Either way, take this mood with you and soar through the rest of the week.

Keep your head up,T