astroboy's posterior
For most of human history, around 50% of children used to die before they reached the end of puberty. In 2020, that number is 4.3%. It’s 0.3% in countries like Japan & Norway.
This dramatic decline has resulted from better nutrition, clean water, sanitation, neonatal healthcare, vaccinations, medicines, and reductions in poverty, conflicts, and famine.
Before ~1800, almost every parent lost a child; now it’s such an uncommon experience that people have forgotten and want to ban vaccines.
Some people are desperate and insecure. They are losers, in an objective and nonjudgmental but very real way. They know this inherently but humans cannot function for long with that awareness intact
So they trade performance and theatre for a sense of belonging. They do this in their communities, they do this in their churches (which is why there is no alignment between Christianity they practice and Jesus’ teachings – they’re not their for humility and growth, they’re there for acceptance and ease)
So along comes Trump, just like a million similar men before him and a million more that will come after him. It doesn’t matter if what he says completely contradicts what Jesus or anyone else they’d ostensibly look to for direction. Because they’re not interested in coherence in a logical sense, they’re looking for acceptance and ease and belonging
And he delivers that. He would satiate a glutton. An American glutton who consumes the most empty vapid calories in existence and never has enough
You are great simply because you exist. Because you vote for me. Because you aren’t like them. You see things they don’t. You understand things they don’t. You’re a winner. It doesn’t matter if by all accounts you’re a loser – none of that’s your fault. It’s their fault. And we are going to stick it to them. Because that’s what winners do.
Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees.
$30 per seat per month.
$1.4 million annually.
I called it “digital transformation.”
The board loved that phrase.
They approved it in eleven minutes.
No one asked what it would actually do.
Including me.
I told everyone it would “10x productivity.”
That’s not a real number.
But it sounds like one.
HR asked how we’d measure the 10x.
I said we’d “leverage analytics dashboards.”
They stopped asking.
Three months later I checked the usage reports.
47 people had opened it.
12 had used it more than once.
One of them was me.
I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds.
It took 45 seconds.
Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations.
But I called it a “pilot success.”
Success means the pilot didn’t visibly fail.
The CFO asked about ROI.
I showed him a graph.
The graph went up and to the right.
It measured “AI enablement.”
I made that metric up.
He nodded approvingly.
We’re “AI-enabled” now.
I don’t know what that means.
But it’s in our investor deck.
A senior developer asked why we didn’t use Claude or ChatGPT.
I said we needed “enterprise-grade security.”
He asked what that meant.
I said “compliance.”
He asked which compliance.
I said “all of them.”
He looked skeptical.
I scheduled him for a “career development conversation.”
He stopped asking questions.
Microsoft sent a case study team.
They wanted to feature us as a success story.
I told them we “saved 40,000 hours.”
I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up.
They didn’t verify it.
They never do.
Now we’re on Microsoft’s website.
“Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot.”
The CEO shared it on LinkedIn.
He got 3,000 likes.
He’s never used Copilot.
None of the executives have.
We have an exemption.
“Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction.”
I wrote that policy.
The licenses renew next month.
I’m requesting an expansion.
5,000 more seats.
We haven’t used the first 4,000.
But this time we’ll “drive adoption.”
Adoption means mandatory training.
Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches.
But completion will be tracked.
Completion is a metric.
Metrics go in dashboards.
Dashboards go in board presentations.
Board presentations get me promoted.
I’ll be SVP by Q3.
I still don’t know what Copilot does.
But I know what it’s for.
It’s for showing we’re “investing in AI.”
Investment means spending.
Spending means commitment.
Commitment means we’re serious about the future.
The future is whatever I say it is.
As long as the graph goes up and to the right.
-@gothburz
There are two kinds of empathy humans experience: Cognitive Empathy and Emotional Empathy. These are unrelated to interoception (or alexithymia), or the ability to recognize your own feelings and emotional control.
You can be very empathetic and still have trouble controlling your emotions. I’m autistic and work with adults on the spectrum, and while it for sure is a spectrum, most of us struggle with cognitive empathy but are highly sensitive with emotional empathy.
Dziobek et al. (2008) utilized the “Multifaceted Empathy Test” to prove that autistic adults showed deficits in cognitive empathy but no deficit in emotional empathy compared to controls.
Mazza et al. (2014) replicated these findings in adolescents, showing that autistic participants had difficulty interpreting mental states (cognitive) but were fully capable of empathizing with the emotional experiences of others (affective).
Bird and Cook (2013) argue that the emotional symptoms often attributed to autism (like dysregulation) are actually due to co-occurring alexithymia.
Mul et al. (2018) found that alexithymia mediates the relationship between interoception and empathy, supporting your claim that these are distinct but interacting mechanisms.
You can be highly intelligent and have high Emotional Empathy (feeling everything) but low Interoception (not knowing what you’re feeling), leading to a meltdown rather than ‘Emotional Intelligence.’
Minority Report and “pre-crime” IRL
Once limited to policing the nation’s boundaries, the Border Patrol has built a surveillance system stretching into the country’s interior that can monitor ordinary Americans’ daily actions and connections for anomalies instead of simply targeting wanted suspects. Started about a decade ago to fight illegal border-related activities and the trafficking of both drugs and people, it has expanded over the past five years. … * This active role beyond the borders is part of the quiet transformation of its parent agency, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, into something more akin to a domestic intelligence operation. Under the Trump administration’s heightened immigration enforcement efforts, CBP is now poised to get more than $2.7 billion to build out border surveillance systems such as the license plate reader program by layering in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies. The result is a mass surveillance network with a particularly American focus: cars.*
“(…)you know we’ve all got alcohol in our bodies… sort of natural alcohol? Even if you never touch a drop in your life, your body sort of makes it anyway… but Captain Vimes, see, he’s one of those people whose body doesn’t do it naturally. Like, he was born two drinks below normal.”
“Gosh,” said Carrot.
“Yes… so, when he’s sober, he’s really sober. Knurd, they call it. You know how you feel when you wake up if you’ve been on the piss all night, Nobby? Well, he feels like that all the time.”
“Poor bugger,” said Nobby. “I never realized. No wonder he’s always so gloomy.”
“So he’s always trying to catch up, see. It’s just that he doesn’t always get the dose right.”
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