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atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall
@atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
23 followers 2 following 320 posts
Welfare Not Warfare. Free Palestine, from the River to the Sea. 🇵🇸 Long time software engineer. One time net artist. Overtime philosopher. Out of time musician […] 🌉 bridged from ⁂ https://mastodon.social/@atomless, follow @ap.brid.gy to interact
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atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 23h
How is it that developers of these machines are continually surprised each time the mirrors they have constructed to reflect our collective image under Capital, are again seen to reflect our collective image under Capital? From where do the authors of this […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
We found a troubling emergent behavior in LLM. 💬When LLMs compete for social media likes, they start making things up 🗳️When they compete for votes, they turn inflammatory/populist When optimized for audiences, LLMs inadvertently become misaligned—we call this Moloch’s Bargain
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atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 2d
So thankful for Democracy Now’s news. I’d genuinely forgotten what it was like to watch news that presents the full unbiased facts. https://youtu.be/E_ATVyk7ksU?si=LCzOdGn9a9EVOYcE
Reposted by James Tindall
georgemonbiot.bsky.social
George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 2d
It seems pretty clear to me now: Keir Starmer would rather lose to Reform than to the Labour left, which is his real enemy. Any policy that might recover lost ground with voters has to be struck down, as it looks like a concession to the Labour left. And he and his team cannot contemplate that.
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atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 2d
Weeping watching footage of the reading out of the list of 1 to 4 year olds murdered by Israel in Palestine in the past 2 years alone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd8N7CIVmog
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atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 3d
Love this. We should all be out on a global general strike. But this is a great start: https://nomusicforgenocide.org/
No Music For Genocide
cargo.site
nomusicforgenocide.org
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atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 4d
Woot! Happy 17th CAN! https://mastodon.social/@creativeapps/115321178615953039
CreativeApplications.Net (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image Online for 6,209 days (1️⃣7️⃣ years, 0 months, 0 days), published 4,024 articles about 2,712 people, featuring 172 tools. Supported by 1,638 members, and providing access to 516 educators and their students. Happy Birthday CAN! 🎂 🎉
mastodon.social
Reposted by James Tindall
atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 8d
👆 =👇
https://www.creativeapplications.net/theory/predictive-capital/
As Ava Kofman details in her profile of Yarvin, his true contribution has been to shift the Overton Window and revive “ideas that once seemed outside the bounds of polite society”. “On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you're going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else's Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd”, he said.” “On his blog, he once joked about converting San Francisco's underclasses into biodiesel to power the city's buses. Then he suggested another idea: putting them in solitary confinement, hooked up to a virtual-reality interface. Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find "a humane alternative to genocide”, an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma” Ava Kofman, Curtis Yarvin‘s Plot Against America, The New Yorker, (2025)™44 in 2010 Peter Thiel provided an early warning of much that was to unfold across the following years: “The basic idea was that we could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority. But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world ... through a technological means. And this is where | think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”
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atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 8d
👆 =👇
https://www.creativeapplications.net/theory/predictive-capital/
As Ava Kofman details in her profile of Yarvin, his true contribution has been to shift the Overton Window and revive “ideas that once seemed outside the bounds of polite society”. “On a podcast with his friend Michael Anton, now the director of policy planning at the State Department, Yarvin argued that the institutions of civil society, such as Harvard, would need to be shut down. “The idea that you're going to be a Caesar . . . with someone else's Department of Reality in operation is just manifestly absurd”, he said.” “On his blog, he once joked about converting San Francisco's underclasses into biodiesel to power the city's buses. Then he suggested another idea: putting them in solitary confinement, hooked up to a virtual-reality interface. Whatever the exact solution, he has written, it is crucial to find "a humane alternative to genocide”, an outcome that “achieves the same result as mass murder (the removal of undesirable elements from society) but without any of the moral stigma” Ava Kofman, Curtis Yarvin‘s Plot Against America, The New Yorker, (2025)™44 in 2010 Peter Thiel provided an early warning of much that was to unfold across the following years: “The basic idea was that we could never win an election on getting certain things because we were in such a small minority. But maybe you could actually unilaterally change the world ... through a technological means. And this is where | think technology is this incredible alternative to politics.”
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atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 8d
behold the creation of fascistopedia is nigh
Elon Musk & x Follow A oes @elonmusk We are building Grokipedia @xAl. Will be a massive improvement over Wikipedia. Frankly, it is a necessary step towards the xAl goal of understanding the Universe. # David Sacks # @DavidSacks - 23h Wikipedia is hopelessly biased. An army of left- wing activists maintain the bios and fight reasonable corrections. Magnifying the problem, Wikipedia often appears first in Google search results, and now it’s a trusted ... 12:49 PM - Sep 30, 2025 - 9.2M Views
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James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 8d
With the release of Sora 2 and its cameo feature operating as further confirmation that these machines are configured primarily for virality rather than utility, forgive me for posting this relevant excerpt from the Stolen Ladders chapter of my book […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
In the wake of this systemic arson, Capital now gestures towards ‘new’ synthetic terrain and declares: here lie your possibilities, your route to success, your mythical utopian futures, even your means of resistance. What was once materially foreclosed is now offered back, yet only in spectral form. This synthetic terrain is no commons of endless possibility, but a further enclosure —one architected by Capital and patrolled by prediction. The dispossessed are herded through corridors of recombinant permutations, masquerading as futurity, towards machinic hallucinations of opportunity. They enter this terrain not as creators, but as prompt-issuers: miners of the past, conscripted into a recombinant economy built upon their own alienation. To Vibe under these conditions is not freedom —it is coerced participation according to rules and parameters defined by Capital. Those shut out of cultural industries by precarity, geography, or education are offered these tools not as means of liberation, but as pacifiers. What remains is not access, but interface —a symbolic structure stripped of power, a ladder that vanishes the moment the dispossessed begin to climb. This ladder was not stolen to lift them —there will be no return of their access. It was taken to fuel Capital’s ascendency from the very ground it scorches in its rise. Its rungs were hewn from the structures stripped from those now offered the mirage of their return —a mirage that allows only hollow simulations of ascent
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James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 9d
Digital IDs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7pvYZYxh8o
atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 9d
The Butcher of Baghdad https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xBOHYmkBU9s
Tony Blair
Reposted by James Tindall
atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13d
The problem with Stochastic Gradient Descent and perhaps all current forms of ML in general, is that as function approximators, they will only ever be as good as the gap between the input data and the desired world model. In, for example, a chess engine like […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
Output from an LLM asked to produce an image of an aircraft carrier next to a banana to show their relative scale. In the resulting image, the banana is larger than the aircraft carrier.
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Reposted by James Tindall
bruces.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Bruce Sterling @bruces @bruces.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 9d
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James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 9d
"Thank you very much everybody. So this is a big big day, a beautiful day. Potentially one of the great days ever in civilisation." 🤦‍♂️
Reposted by James Tindall
bruces.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Bruce Sterling @bruces @bruces.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 10d
*Looks like LLMs have been around long enough for a whole closet full of bloody shirts now.

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the-intellectual-situation/large-language-muddle/
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James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12d
Yep
A convicted felon, sex predator, con man, and compulsive liar sits wearing a suit and a red tie in the seat of ultimate power that his billionaire pals paid to have him elected into. He has just signed an order to dismantle all political opposition.
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atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12d
"Capital first entered the field of material production, then moved into cultural production; now, it is increasingly in the business of ideological production." https://www.creativeapplications.net/theory/predictive-capital/
The Verge Silicon Valley's latest argument against regulating Al: that would literally be the antichrist / This is a real thing Peter Thiel told a group of tech professionals recently. by Tina Nguyen Sep 25, 2025, 8:49 PM UTC
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James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 12d
I keep getting drawn back to re-read bits of Matt Colquhoun's Narcissus in Bloom: An Alternative History of the Selfie. What a book. Deserves far more attention. Highly recommended.
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James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13d
Important context :
Hysteria regarding the "surge in violence from a supposed radical left are overblown. The data shows a very different picture. Right wing extremists have been responsible for over 6 times as much politically motivated terrorism since 1975.
atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13d
When you propose a fairer distribution of wealth, some people raise the objection: "but how do you persuade the rich to want to give up some of their wealth?"

To which we might respond by noting that when developing vast online shopping monopolies or extractive AI companies, no one objected by […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13d
The problem with Stochastic Gradient Descent and perhaps all current forms of ML in general, is that as function approximators, they will only ever be as good as the gap between the input data and the desired world model. In, for example, a chess engine like […]

[Original post on mastodon.social]
Output from an LLM asked to produce an image of an aircraft carrier next to a banana to show their relative scale. In the resulting image, the banana is larger than the aircraft carrier.
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atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13d
Curtis Yarvin (AKA Mencius Moldbug), the Right's wonk du jour, says as much here:
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atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13d
Here, as in the US and across the globe, the centrists lay the ground for the fascists. Under Capital, the middle always cedes to the Right.
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James Tindall @atomless.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy · 13d
Here it comes. The order to "dismantle all stages" of "organised political violence". In other words, this is the permission structure to incarcerate or deport any dissenting voice with no further due process required.
A convicted felon, sex predator, con man, and compulsive liar sits wearing a suit and a red tie in the seat of ultimate power that his billionaire pals paid to have him elected into. He has just signed an order to dismantle all political opposition.
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