The last angel

Only in the USA, I think. I’m in the UK and don’t have ‘trash apps’.

Unless you mean Facebook and YouTube, thinking about it, which yeah is annoying.

Brother, there are so many logical errors in your thinking.

Number 1, as people keep saying: exponential growth is limited. Unlimited growth is slow and unsteady. There is literally nothing in the whole of creation that has grown exponentially and continued to do so. That is not how anything works. Even theoretically, scenarios like ‘the more energy it receives, the more it gives out, so one day this one steam engine will power the world!’ and ‘the more people buy these stocks, the more popular and expensive they will get, which will lead to more people wanting to buy them, making them more popular, so buy now while they’re still £1000 a pop!’ still keep fooling people who get caught on the ‘logic’ of exponential growth and dont see, understand or remember those boring facts we learned in school: What goes up must, and will come down Every action has an equal and opposite reaction Every force is restrained by at least two opposing forces There are no exceptions.

Literally every week, somewhere in the world someone is convinced that this time they (or their guru of choice) has found the exception, the line that can only go upwards, the perpetual energy machine, the product that everyone is going to want if they buy it now, and it has never ever been true because nothing is exponential unless one factors in the countless opposing forces and reactions and pressures that will come with extra growth.

And so far, we haven’t even managed to find a way of calculating that.

Don’t assume that Usain Bolt smashing the world records for speed (which themselves smashed the previous records, which smashed the people who said it was physically impossible for a human to run a mile in 4 minutes) means the next big thing is going to be running gear that protects the wearer from the as-yet-uncalculated cardiac effects of breaking the speed of light. He’s fast, but not ‘breaks the laws of physics before anybody has even calculated a way for that to happen’ fast, and it’s unlikely that his children or grandchildren - or anyone - will be.

Also: bro, even if it grew exponentially and kept doing so, we can’t pretend that means it’ll obviously go in these directions that aren’t a part of it or its development.

Human intelligence has increased as we’ve evolved, and the brain has grown with it. You can chart the growth of both over the millennia. Now that doesn’t mean you can just continue the line to see how intelligent humans will be in 1000 years, because of the exponential growth problem, but it also doesn’t mean the skull sizes of proto and early humans mean we will soon live forever.

See, even if past performance was a reliable indicator of future results (hahaha), projected growth does not, and never can, include chains of causation. That’s just fiction.

So yes, as humans get more intelligent and our brains get bigger we’ll probably continue to understand medicine and biology and tools and nutrition which will continue to improve brain health and wisdom, which will > increased intelligence and brain size, > better understanding of medicine and biology and tools and nutrition > continue to improve brain health and wisdom, etc.

And yes, we do not currently have the intelligence or understanding or technology to enable us to live forever.

But that doesn’t mean that increased intelligence or brain size, or better medicine or tech or tools or nutrition, logically lead to ‘discovery of the secret to eternal life’. Y can only follow X, but X does not lead to Y. And exponential growth of AI does not magically mean it gains the ability to do random things it couldn’t do before, for the same reason.

Does that make sense? It’s the same as ‘she’s a successful model but she couldn’t be a supermodel because she’s only 5’3".’ It does not follow that her gaining 6 inches logically makes her a supermodel.

Many domestic cats are vicious, deranged little fuckers, but they aren’t a threat to humanity because they’re too small and generally prefer to live with humans. Removing those limitations does not create a threat to humanity. An absurdly large domestic cat with an attitude problem would (probably) not end mankind, but would (maybe) make it onto a few TV shows and get a meme. And AI is not a threat to humanity because it can’t think or operate independently. Even if you removed those limitations, it would no more spell the inevitable dominance of fascism (odd endpoint you chose there but hey ho) than a gigantic tabby cat who didn’t like his dinner. Because, again, logic doesn’t work like that.

TLDR: many thousands of people throughout history have got rich by convincing people to buy into Pot number 5 because obviously, 3 + 3 = 6 and as soon as the -1 happens, that’s where we’ll all be. The maths isn’t wrong. It’s the fact that the sums have nothing to do with reality, the future, or anything except the weird game of ‘Bet the Pot’ that nobody else is playing.

Did anybody ever figure out more on this? Because the whole instance does have a kinda… tankie takeover vibe going on

To be fair, I prefer apples form of innovation over most other tech companies. iPhones haven’t got much flashier, just a bunch of incremental improvements. The battery lasts longer. It’s a bit faster. The OS works with more third party apps and systems. Minor tweaks. They aren’t exciting, but they’re steady.

2 provisos: my newest iPhone is like, 5 years old. It does not have AI or any of the weird shit they’ve been pushing recently. And: it’s my spare phone. Because lol fuck apple. I like their products but not as much as I like having a decent phone in my daily life

Oh, I’m more of a pacifist, and someone on this platform recently convinced me that it’s kinda difficult to occupy the moral high ground while also laughing at jokes about killing the ‘right kind’ of people. It’s annoying, but if The Axis Of Evil are whipping up violent rhetoric about what a threat women / minorities/ experts / lefties / non conformists are, it wouldn’t really help to put up stickers about killing them.

Bit counterproductive.

(I absolutely reserve the right to keep proclaiming ‘eat the rich’ on a regular basis, because that’s not violence so much as a communal nourishment from the glorious circle of life).

‘Keep calm and convert nazis’ is more accurate, but it does sound a little like I’m pushing catholicism (weird) or the gay agenda (would be funny but best not encourage the delusion that sexuality is a choice). ‘Keep calm and re-educate / deradicalise / discourage’ also works, but gives the distressing impression that I’m aiming for more intelligent, moderate or temporarily glum nazis which, not really.

‘Keep calm and get off the internet’ would probably be the most helpful, concise message but somewhere between aspirational and hypocritical.

‘Keep calm and defend diversity’ captures the main problem with nazis, but it sounds a bit ‘placards and knitting’.

I’m struggling to find much beyond ‘keep calm and eat the rich, the intolerant, and the men who seek to enfeeble other men by creating a dependance on thinking machines which inevitably lead the newly unthinking masses into the servitude of the men who made the machines’, say which point it may as well just say ‘Join The Butlerian Jihad, meetings Thursdays at 19:00’.

Which actually works, but it is quite a long way from the original message.

Jesus, are people using the Express as a reliable source of anything nowadays?

I would honestly kinda like to print out a bunch of these and put them everywhere those knobs have put a flag.

But then it occurred to me that this pretty much how Elon and trump have wound up a bunch of mouth breathing idiots into a racist frenzy that is literally hell bent on destroying the country, and I’d need to write “mad about the racist fuckwits and government complicity”, which would rather dilute the message.

It also leads to uncomfortable questions like ‘hang on, is anger actually transformative or helpful, or does it just lead to more angry people’ and ‘hang on hang on, aren’t Musk and Tommy Ten Names spending an awful lot of money telling people to get mad? Isn’t that the driving force behind the most toxic social media platforms? Isn’t that just what rage bait is?’, and anyway long story short between the time I wrote the first paragraph and now, my view has changed to -

• Antisocial media and pro-nazi agitators want us to get angry (or ‘mad’, in American English) Zen the fuck up to resist. Wield calmness like a weapon. Refuse to emote on command

“look alright I’m sorry about the petty fraud thing but I was a victim of sexism. They wouldn’t let me have equal access to the accounts, which can only be explained by an old boys club (look I said I’m sorry about the fraud thing, alright?!)”

I was ready for another smear campaign, so at this point it seems obvious that this whole fiasco is a media set-up. Either ZS is a hostile plant playing the long game to discrete the left, or the email list has been hacked and all this is coming from Russian bots.

We’ve clearly passed the stage of things needing to be realistic or evidenced, I give up. This is a deliberate farce to test the faithful, Davids Attenborough and Bowie founded the party and are taking to announce their little jest soon, musk is lashing out on anger because he only has weeks to live after being infected by a rat bite, and those surgery rumours about Zuckerberg are true.

It doesn’t matter. I’m going to do all the right things and follow the rules, but nobody can stop me concocting am alternative reality and it’s going to be more ridiculous and imaginative every time I see nonsense like this.

If we make it as a country, probably invest in the mental health market. I suspect it’ll have a lot of business

So peacefully projecting an unedited picture that doesn’t breach anyone’s privacy or spill any secrets, is ‘malicious communication’.

And telling thousands of rioters-in-waiting that they need to ‘kill or be killed’ isn’t.

We’re all eager to see the quality of letters you’ve written to the Prime minister with your urgent plans to save national security.

And you needn’t worry about posting it here, because I doubt anyone (else) would find bizarre flaws to pick at in an achievement they could never really hope to achieve. That would be statistically unlikely.

This week has passed in about 24 hours. I swear it’s still July, maybe August. I don’t wish to alarm anyone, but I think there’s something wrong with the passage of time.

(Why yes, I am getting old, why do you ask?)

Fun thought experiment: have you ever met anyone who has replied to opinion polls?

I asked my dear 80 year old mother that a while ago, she hadn’t. I haven’t.

They are generally conducted by phone, cold calling landlines, or by someone going door to door with a clipboard.

Many unofficial (but still very influencial, including gov.uk) polls are online, and users have to complete hundreds of them to get a nominal payment, £5 I believe.

Now imagine the sort of person who answers their ringing landline/ door and says ‘why yes, stranger, yes I do have 10 minutes to discuss my voting intentions’, and you have the entire ‘over 40 years old’ demographic represented in these results.

Imagine someone who has actively sought out survey websites and sits though at least 100, over 6 months or so, for a tiny amount of pocket money - or even weirder, someone who just decided to do it anyway - and you have the entire ‘under 40 years old’ demographic in these results.

And now, thinking of those door-answerers and survey-clickers, imagine how colourful and exciting their lives must be, and then ask yourself what possible incentive they have to tell the truth when absolutely nobody will ever know if they liven up the tedium slightly by claiming to be a 45 year old self made millionaire with 12 lovely children all planning to vote Jedi in the next election.

And that is why opinion polls always come out way, way more fringe than the reality ever is. Because normal people do not answer them unless they have a strong opinion or an incentive, and those with an incentive generally have no incentive to be honest.

(For reference, I’m not dunking on people who have done these things. I spent about a year answering yougov surveys until it dawned on me that it worked out at less than 5p an hour. If you’re bored or just want to contribute to the national knowledge pool, awesome, but you probably already know you’re not exactly an average voter)

we aim to reflect voices in the UK proportionally to current voting intention

Was there a national poll that I don’t recall? Because the last one I was aware of, a majority of people voted Labour, and the BBC have never, ever been pro-labour. Maybe they’re claiming that tons of people intended to vote for Farage and co but couldn’t figure out how ballots work, which is remotely credible, but it would take some serious research to back that up so I don’t think that’s it.

How on earth are they claiming to know people’s voting intentions in the first place, let alone the rather groundbreaking idea that the election was wrong.

This has a worrying air of the Trump style, post-truth ‘any official, scientific, pro-equality and / or leftie information is fake news’ that we saw before trump was elected. I remember being amazed that a public figure could so blatantly, confidently lie about important constitutional processes and not be arrested for - Idk but if fraud, libel, aiding and abetting, misrepresentation etc are crimes, then misleading an entire country to disenfranchise them and mis-sell a political position must be quite serious.

We are all legally obliged to pay the BBC if we want to watch live news. That is quasi-governmental, and hella powerful. If I want to watch live TV in this country and don’t want to pay to fund a corporation that’s flagrantly misrepresenting the existence/ validity of an actual national election, I kinda feel there should be more recourse than ‘Dear Sir / Madam, we have received your complaint and will take it on board if and when we ever have the slightest reason to’.

The BBC are telling the world that most people in the UK ‘intend’ to vote for Farage. That is not just untrue, or biased, or impossible for them to know. It’s such an absurd claim that I think the scariest part is the fact that they are getting away with it.