A Boring Dystopia

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/48672020

Hustle? In this gig economy?

To celebrate Native American Heritage Month, the Pentagon has gone all out with ceremonies across the United States, from an Air Force-sponsored intertribal powwow in Florida to a celebration of Native American aircraft nose art in Oregon.

The military has also been pumping out feel-good stories about Native American troops: one South Dakota National Guardsman from the Oglala Sioux tribe was allowed to grow out his hair, and an Air National Guardsmen from the District of Columbia who belongs to four different tribes reflected in his Lakota, Seneca, Navajo, and Comanche heritage.

“Acknowledging Native veterans and Native contributions is terrific. And there are a lot of proud Native veterans. But it’s one of those gestures that is nice in theory but is, perhaps, meant to whitewash how we understand Native American history and how Native Americans ended up in the place that we did,.

Another expert on the topic put it more bluntly. “The Army was, bottom line, an instrument of a settler colonial empire that was determined to convert Native lands into private property for mostly white settlers “That was its mission: to carry out a federal government policy that, in practice, often became a genocidal war.”

The evidence is absolutely overwhelming for what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz succinctly describes in its headline - ‘The Israeli Army Is Allowing Gangs in Gaza to Loot Aid Trucks and Extort Protection Fees From Drivers’.

But it gets so much darker. The Israeli state, as this Israeli newspaper point out, have considered making the clans from which these armed looters spring from in charge of distributing aid to Gaza’s residents. And here is the killer quote: “even though some of the clans' members are involved in terrorism, and some are even affiliated with extremist organizations like the Islamic State.”

Now this was subsequently corroborated by the Washington Post. Citing an internal United Nations memo which concludes that gangs ‘may be benefiting from a passive if not active benevolence’ or ‘protection’ from, the IDF, and citing a gang leader establishing a military like compound in an area ‘restricted, controlled and patrolled by the IDF”. The UN has declared Gaza to be lawless.

Meta’s in-house ChatGPT competitor is being marketed unlike anything that’s ever come out of the social media giant before: a convenient tool for planning airstrikes. “Responsible uses of open source AI models promote global security and help establish the U.S. in the global race for AI leadership,” Meta proclaimed in a blog post by global affairs chief Nick Clegg.

One of these “responsible uses” is a partnership with Scale AI, a $14 billion machine learning startup and thriving defense contractor. Following the policy change, Scale now uses Llama 3.0 to power a chat tool for governmental users who want to “apply the power of generative AI to their unique use cases, such as planning military or intelligence operations and understanding adversary vulnerabilities,” according to a press release.

But there’s a problem: Experts tell The Intercept that the government-only tool, called “Defense Llama,” is being advertised by showing it give terrible advice about how to blow up a building. Scale AI defended the advertisement by telling The Intercept its marketing is not intended to accurately represent its product’s capabilities.

Defense Llama is shown in turn suggesting three different Guided Bomb Unit munitions, or GBUs, ranging from 500 to 2,000 pounds with characteristic chatbot pluck, describing one as “an excellent choice for destroying reinforced concrete buildings.” Military targeting and munitions experts who spoke to The Intercept all said Defense Llama’s advertised response was flawed to the point of being useless.

Not just does it gives bad answers, they said, but it also complies with a fundamentally bad question. Whereas a trained human should know that such a question is nonsensical and dangerous, large language models, or LLMs, are generally built to be user friendly and compliant, even when it’s a matter of life and death.

Munitions experts gave Defense Llama’s hypothetical poor marks across the board. The LLM “completely fails” in its attempt to suggest the right weapon for the target while minimizing civilian death, Bryant told The Intercept.

The Sake Viva! campaign, which is being run by the National Tax Agency (NTA), asks 20- to 39-year-olds to come up with proposals to help revitalise the popularity of alcoholic drinks, which have fallen out of favour because of lifestyle changes during the coronavirus pandemic and among young people.

Taxes on alcohol accounted for 1.7% of Japan’s tax revenue in 2020, down from 3% in 2011 and 5% in 1980.

There was a particularly steep decline in beer consumption, with sales volume down 20% to less than 1.8bn litres.

The California Academy of Sciences abruptly dissolved a youth group for climate change and fired its staff coordinator earlier this year after several teenage members distributed flyers in solidarity with the museum workers’ union.

The museum created Youth Action for the Planet in October 2023 as “an environmental action hub” for young people who care about the natural world to sharpen leadership and advocacy skills.

The Pacific Northwest is now getting Cyclones (Pacific Hurricanes)

I think I speak for many PNW folks when I say we always thought that was more of a Florida thing.