They just want researchers in the enclosure to feel enriched and stimulated. ('The Enclosure' is what archivists call the shadowy world outside their archives in which so many people are trapped.)
It’s been a rough ass three weeks, and we could all use some levity. To that point, I bring you an absolutely hilarious and delightful press release from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s union, all about a visit they received from the incels of DOGE.
The entire thing straight up disappeared from the site not long after it was published — coincidentally right around the same time that the wee DOGE employees came back a second time and started screwing with everything again.
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On the evening of February 6, three minions of professional Twitter poster and Jeffrey Epstein confidant Elon Musk appeared in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) internal staff directory.
The unelected Musk recently announced plans for a new payments platform run jointly by Visa and “X” (formerly Twitter). Now, he’s moved his power grab to the CFPB, in a clear attempt to attack union workers and defang the only agency that checks the greed of payment providers, as well as auto lenders like Tesla.
CFPB Union members welcome our newest colleagues and look forward to the smell of Axe Body Spray in our elevators. While Acting Director Bessent allows Musk's operatives to bypass cybersecurity policies and wreak havoc with their amateur code skills inside CFPB's once-secure systems, CFPB Union members fight to protect our jobs so we can continue protecting Americans from scammers with conflicts of interest like Musk.
###
The National Treasury Employees Union organizes federal employees to work together to ensure that every federal employee is treated with dignity and respect. CFPB Union NTEU Chapter 335 was chartered to represent employees at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). CFPB workers have returned over $20 billion to millions of American consumers who've been preyed upon by greedy hucksters like Musk.
CFPB Union NTEU 335
10/10 no notes.
But, worse still, the entire website for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — which has so far saved Americans $20 billion, and not by cutting off services anyone actually needs — is now offline. Surely there is nothing sketchy about that! Surely there is no reason to think that Musk and Trump want the CFPB gone so that they or their friends can have an easier time defrauding Americans. And they’re being cheered on by all kinds of idiots on Xitter who trust them pretty much exclusively because they are incredibly racist.
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The history of this industry is full of technological advances that – at least first – include a few (seemingly) inherently difficult things at the margins, and those rough edges give rise in turn to a sometimes large-ish service industry of companies that want to make that difficult thing simpler or easier, and make a few bucks doing it.
Sometimes – for a while, at least – there’s real money to be made in businesses like this. But soon those edges get sanded off; devices get a more powerful, their interfaces and designs settle out or standardize as user needs are better understood. The tools get easier to use and all the things that were difficult before become easier, sometimes trivial, for the uninitiated to navigate; pretty soon the market starts shrinking, and soon after that the market vanishes.
Earlier this week, a company called DeepSeek released new language model, in large and small sizes, that’s as good as either the big players’ and is claimed to have cost just six million dollars to make.
Earlier this week, a company called DeepSeek released new language model in large and small sizes, that’s as good as either the big players’ and is claimed to have cost just six million dollars to make. If you’ve got a newish computer you can play with the DeepSeek model right now for free. The download is about the size of a DVD. Remember those?
I say again: in 2007, ringtones – ringtones! Not even a whole song, just a few second of tinny audio carved out of a song! – were a one point one billion dollar business. They were ten percent of the entire music industry! And five years later that business model didn’t exist. Today you’d have a hard time convincing anyone under thirty that it had ever existed, the whole idea sounds ridiculous. I mean, does this chart make any sense at all to you?
One distinction in this whole exercise, obviously, is that people actually wanted custom ringtones. It was a market that existed because a technology was meeting a demand. Humans who wanted their interactions with a device to be a bit more pleasant paid money for something and received it. Artists got paid, if (as usual) likely not enough. The AI market doesn’t look anything like that, mostly because there isn’t an obvious way to use a ringtone as a weapon against the working class. But it’s a pleasant change of pace to see efforts to weaponize commodification against the working class and the forces of commodification themselves fighting each other for once.
Ringtones still have a place in the world; we don’t all always have our phones on silent. But that place isn’t a business, much less the industry it briefly was; the technology matured, the market evaporated and today custom ringtones are one bullet point on a long list of boring standard features, so universal they’re not even mentioned on the boxes of the cheapest phones you can buy.
There’s a place in the world for automatic pattern recognition and repetition, and mechanical translation, too. But that place also isn’t going to be an industry or a business; the technology is maturing fast, the market is evaporating just as quickly, and I think I know where the AI/ML space is going. These tools will be one bullet point on a list of features soon, one you build for a few hundred bucks with some carefully selected training data and a few dozen of last year’s graphics cards, because that’s all it takes.
Hiring really good librarians to curate your training data is going to be the hard part, good curators are expensive.
Someone I know not well enough to voice my opinion on the subject said something like why didn’t God make potatoes a low-calorie food so I am here to say: God made them like that because their nutrition density IS what makes them healthy. By God I mean Andean agricultural technicians. Potato is healthy BECAUSE potato holds calories and vitamins. Do not malign potato
For all evolutionary history, life has struggled against calorie deficit… So much energy goes into finding food that there is no time for anything else. Our ancestors selectively bred root vegetables to create the potato, so that we might be the first species whose daily existence doesn’t consist of trying to find the nutrients necessary for survival. One potato can rival the calorie count of many hours of foraging… Eat a potato, and you free up so much time to create and build and connect with your fellow man. Without potato where would you be?? Do not stand on the shoulders of giants and think thyself tall!!
I nearly teared up reading “Andean agricultural technicians” bc fuck yes! these were members of Pre-Inca cultures who lived 7 to 10 thousand years ago, and they were scientists! food scientists and researchers and farmers whose names and language we can never know, who lived an inconceivably long time ago (pre-dating ancient civilizations in Egypt, China, India, Greece, and even some parts of Mesopotamia) and we are separated by millennia of time and history, but still for thousands of years the fruits vegetables of their labor and research have continued to nourish countless human lives, how is that not the most earthly form of a true miracle??? anyway yes potatoes are beautiful, salute their creators.
There are approximately 4000 varieties of potato in Peru. I’ve seen an incredible variety of corn and tomatoes, and root vegetables I’ve never seen before, on the local farmer markets. Yet some expats insist on buying only imported, expensive American brands of canned veggies… 🤷🏼♀️ Peruvian potatoes 👇🏼
It is long since time for us to start viewing plant domestication as the bioscience that it is. Because while the Andeans were creating potatoes, the ancient Mesoamericans were turning teosinte into corn:
And then there’s bananas, from Papua New Guinea:
These were not small, random changes, this was real concerted effort over years to turn inedible things into highly edible ones. And I’m convinced the main reason we’re reluctant to call them scientific achievements is, well, a racist one.
And it’s such a shame too, cause this was probably the most impotrant scientific effort in human history, it bought us the time to do everything else we do, to go from just trying to get enough calories every day to everything we do now, it game people the freedom to do other things with their lives, human society would not have existed as it is today without this
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