The Packbats' Weblog

Reading the Sandia National Laboratories nuclear waste warning messages report - specifically the Team A apprendix, the one with the famous passage. We made a post about that passage a while ago but now we're thinking about the task they were set.

Like, any D&D player will tell you that a big warning sign with a clear map pointing to the exact place you're being warned about is enticing as all getout. But what are you even supposed to do?

Like, that's the thing, right? Imagine you, the reader of this post, were supposed to make it so some rando looking for treasure a thousand years from now - as far from now as "Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in gēar-dagum/þēod-cyninga⁠ þrym gefrūnon" is from now - would see the notice-board you put up and go, "Oh, I shouldn't dig that up"? How do you make it seem like a bad idea to try and get at something which clearly was made hard to reach? Even knowing it was a trash heap wouldn't help - archaeologists love trash heaps, love seeing what people had and threw away! It says here in this warning message that there's machine tools in that pit! We could use some machine tools! So what do you do?

And what do you do if you have to get that message across for ten times a thousand years?

It's easy to crack jokes about "this place should be shunned and left uninhabited" but there's something very compelling about looking at a manifestly impossible task and asking, "okay, but if we had to, what do we do?" It's a kind of bravery, to consider a horrible situation honestly and forthrightly, and do your best to manage it.

We don't have a solution for nuclear waste. But maybe we can try something. And maybe we can learn something from trying, even if we fail.

And maybe there's something comforting about spending time in a world where we do try, where we don't throw up our hands and say "it would mean a smaller yacht for Jeff Bezos so there's nothing we can do". A kind of grounded science fiction, not about starships but about dirt, and rock, and salt, and public health.

A suggestion we saw in the report that never really got turned into a joke was the visitor's center. The place where people visiting this very expensive public works site could go look at some placards, talk to museum staff, learn about the society that made nuclear waste and the society that tried to protect its children from it. Maybe watch a looping video with a CGI representation of the site and its design. Buy a hat with a picture of the berms embroidered on it.

Or not. Who knows what a visitor center would look like after ten thousand years?

Packbats' policy on AI content generation, one swear

Any machine built by scraping massive amounts of training data off the Internet without permission can get fucked.

Any machine designed to divert income from artists, writers, musicians, and other creators to companies, likewise.

That is to say: Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, Adobe Firefly, ChatGPT, Bard, and so on - all of them can go straight to hell.

If we share or boost something that uses these tools, please let us know. We will never make anything with any of those.

The thing is, "AI", in its modern deceptive usage, mostly means "neural net". And that makes things a little difficult for us as people who get hinky about the literal meaning of words, because the campaigners we agree with are saying things like "generative AI" and "no AI" and making Human Made logos for humans to put on human art that isn't made out of theft and exploitation ... and yeah, we support that, but that's not what we would say?

Like, we keep pointing to Adam Neely's collaboration with Dadabots. This was a neural net acting as a generative AI creating art ... that is based on two hours of bass playing by a musician who volunteered to have his work used this way, and that creates music that no bass player would ever play at a gig. It's not stealing anyone's creations and it's not stealing anyone's jobs. And it's not stealing credit - for as long as it existed, it had Adam Neely's face plastered on the thumbnail, it was explicitly made with his permission, and had a link to his video about it in the description. And, well, we said what we have to say about a hyperfocus on humanity.

So, like, the AI bubble is toxic but we don't have a pithy way to say it. Except maybe to call them plagiarism machines.

Anyway I don't think we made a post here on Dreamwidth about that shit, so let us say again that these plagiarism machines deserve to be destroyed. And as great as nuance is, it just lends emphasis to that conclusion.

the question "is this human" has expired - it has become a torment of con artists and cash grabbers

the one, perpetually remaking their machines to deceive us

the other, perpetually demanding that we become harder to fake so they can keep selling us to advertisers

the doppelgangers yell, "I am human!"
the marketers yell, "Prove you are human!"
we all tuck ourselves into corners trying to find respite from the noise

why? why are we being yelled at? why for humanity are we being yelled at?

Alan Turing started with "can machines think?" and went from there to "can machines make humans think they are humans?" but listen to his imaginary machines

his machines talk about poetry, arithmetic, chess, Mr. Pickwick and winter's days

his machines speak honestly to their interrogators, try to understand, try to help

our phone makes a noise after half an hour, because we asked it to in a way it understood

our friends speak honestly, because they want to us to know that they miss clubbing, they like umbreon, they think of a sunrise as a sun, rising

why should we put the people who traumatized us in the category with the friends who help us survive? why should we put the machines that exploit us in the category with the machines that help us survive? why is this the split we are asked to make?

why "are you human" instead of "are you good"?

why not "are you good"?

can you tell if something is good to you over a teletype connection? are you good to it?

(edit: followup)

So apparently Omegle only just died this year.

( alluding to the heavy details )

So, that sure is a thing.

Yesterday, we posted a fediverse checkbox poll on indiepocalypse.social asking, "Are .md Markdown files plaintext?". The poll received 49 votes, with eight respondents additionally replying to discuss details of the question, and the final percentages including 71% yes, 31% no, and 16% I don't know, with substantial overlap between all three of these.

(Also, 12% spiderman. Because Mastodon injokes.)

I think what makes it an interesting question is the term "plain text" (which apparently has a space, apologies). What is, and what is not, plain text? Let's run through some possibilities.

Are .md Markdown files .txt text files?

No. The extensions are different, so your computer treats them differently.

Are .md Markdown files encoded as binary?

Okay, technically, all binary computer files are binary, but no - the whole format is designed around extended-ASCII text encoding like UTF-8. You can edit it in Notepad or KWrite or TextEdit or gedit or vi or, I don't know, whatever you want.

Are .md Markdown files completely unformatted?

I mean, no, clearly. When you have, for example, *asterisks* being used to indicate words that are emphasized, that is a kind of formatting.

Are .md Markdown files readable in plain text editors?

Kinda? The link formatting - [link text in square brackets](immediately followed by url in parentheses) - is not very friendly to the eye, tables often get very nasty to read, probably other issues we weren't reminded of - but it's mostly readable. Not as readable as a 1998 GameFAQs guide, but mostly readable.

Are .md Markdown files designed for styled presentation?

Yes. This was news to us Packbats, but when we installed Linux, we got Okular with it, and when we opened a .md file with Ocular, we didn't see asterisks for emphasis and square brackets and parentheses for links and so on - we saw italics text, underlined link passages, headers, bulleted lists, and so on. It looked like how it looks when we write something in HTML and open it in a browser. Windows 7 didn't have anything for viewing Markdown that way.

Are .md Markdown files .txt text files?

No. In a .txt file, formatting is idiosyncratic, driven by aesthetic and pragmatic judgments about what the audience will want to and be able to parse. In a Markdown file, formatting has to comform to a sta—... okay, stop laughing. In a Markdown file, there is theoretically a standard, and the file is promising with its extension that a computer which will never even try to understand the writer or the writer's motives can produce a styled output by implementing the standard, even if it probably has to recognize some extensions to actually guess right on what it looks like.

So, yeah. I think the moral of the story is that it's not obvious what "plain text" means, but hey ... it was fun asking.

been frustrated a lot lately

but also have been trying to try more, lately

to take chances on folks we don't know and folks we do, speak up even when we're not guaranteed to feel heard

to do new things that are hard and not just give up

so yeah

been frustrated more lately

1.

okay so the big problems with the modern wave of generative AI are that:

• it is designed to steal jobs from artists and writers
• it was manufactured using titanic amounts of stolen work from those selfsame artists and writers
• it required and requires titanic amounts of electricity and other computing infrastructure in the middle of climate crisis

...but an additional problem is that, because they are intended to be used without warning, they force people to try and find intention, worldview, meaning, all the things we expect from our fellow writers and artists, in material which contains none of that.

and that's just abusing our assumption of good faith.

2.

like, okay

imagine a friend mentioned something bad that happened to them, and we replied "oh no!"

this is as nearly an automatic and thoughtless response as we can think of ... but consider what it would mean to our friend

at the very least, they can infer that:

• we have been paying attention to their speech
• we recognize, whether we understand the details or not, that something unfortunate has happened
• we care that something unfortunate happened, and would rather it had not

if they had said the same thing to ChatGPT, and ChatGPT had said, "oh no!", would it have anything like the same effect? ChatGPT doesn't know them and won't remember them, it only understands that "oh no!" is a thing that is said frequently in its corpus in this kind of context. it is simply and utterly hollow.

Simplicio: Computers are magic.

Sagredo: There's nothing magical about it; computers are simply sophisticated mathematical machines. Magic, by contrast, is supernatural - an independent force with its own logic that acts upon the world, and is merely channeled or controlled by those with magical power.

Simplicio: So, in your opinion, computers are not magic because they are not supernatural, not independent, not logical, and don't act upon the world. Shall we take these in reverse order?

Sagredo: Gladly. And yes, of course computers act on the world, and do so through logical calculation - that is the entire reason we created them. But they are not independent of it, they are part of it.

Simplicio: The logic of a computer is hardly the logic of a landslide or river or growing tree, however. All of these are straightforward and natural, whereas computers are constantly seized with their own caprices. You have a telephone, so surely you have seen it decide your text means something entirely different than your intentions.

Sagredo: You underestimate the sophistication of trees, but you are again merely describing the difference between nature and artifice. My telephone and your grandfather clock are alike unnatural, in your sense, and the errors of autocorrection in the one are much the same as the slipping minutes of the other: reflections of our limitations.

Simplicio: Do not try to distract me with the miracle of clockwork timekeeping - I can argue for the magic in that another day; your telephone is a much clearer example. Its errors of autocorrection happen within it, from its own memories and caprice, independent - independent! - of temperature or setting.

Sagredo: Only as independent as a book that remembers what is written on its pages. It acts because it was programmed to, because it stored this data and processed it in the way it was designed.

Simplicio: It acts because it was commanded to, by one with the power to channel its force in a direction - but even then, the magician wanted it to guess infallibly, did they not? Certainly an autocorrect without error would be quite a selling-point.

Sagredo: They did - but such a thing is impossible.

Simplicio: The computer acts on its own internal logic, independent of what its controller demands.

Sagredo: Independent of their intentions, but not their work - its actions spring from what it is told to do, nothing more.

Simplicio: Can you remind me what you had to say about DNS? I remember you spoke at some length the other day.

Sagredo: When many voices are speaking, the results can become confused, but it is still the result of how it was made and shaped, nothing more.

Simplicio: Can you remind me of what you had to say about free will?

Sagredo: I can - I said that we are also machines, defined by our history and origins, our nurture and nature, but able to shape ourselves, changing even our goals and desires. Are you about to claim that my telephone's autocorrection is as independent? Perhaps it should be granted citizenship.

Simplicio: As, no ... but independent, yes.

Sagredo: It is not supernatural.

Simplicio: Sagredo, you are a cunning arithmetician, but let me ask you: why should I care? We are surrounded by forces that we do not understand, that listen to sounds we can hear and sounds we cannot, that remember what they encounter, and that respond according to arcane and unpredicable intentions. They imbue us with tremendous power, if we can control them, but are terribly dangerous if we cannot. Lives are saved and lost because of what flows through these channels. You yourself wield this power, turning it to answer your astronomical queries and mine, to prove and to refute our theories. Do you not see what it does?

Sagredo: Your contention is that I am a wizard, unwitting.

Simplicio: It is.

Sagredo: I don't know how I can accept that.

Simplicio: Heavens help me. Sagredo, you know that you are capable, no matter how much you insist on downplaying it.

So, lately we've been reading a lot of travel blog posts from Hundred Rabbits, and it makes us want to blog more. Not daily, but like ... ever, y'know? To create something that people can read.

As the subject line says, this week's been very unfocused because this has been specifically a rest week - and I mean "we told our fellow mods we'd be gone until Monday" rest, we have no unfun obligations at all. (Well, almost none - we posted on our TTRPG patreon and our TTRPG ko-fi, but shh.) Lately we've been in a state of staring at each obligation blankly and wondering if this is ( okay this got a little dark )

, so we really needed some time when we did not have to do that.

(...okay, the unfun obligations thing is almost twice - we did set ourselves a goal to get or make a cover image for an itch.io jam. It's not made, and that's okay - the jam is not gonna be until February.)

So, what did this rest week look like?

( ...I mean, I don't know, we weren't paying attention. But [...] )

So, like, a lot is happening? But most of it is what we want to do in that moment, and we can drop it whenever. And we do, regularly.

We'll see what happens tomorrow. For today, that's where we're at.

okay, but for real now

depending on genre, fantastical elements are approached in different ways

in much of the ~speculative fiction~ umbrella - sci fi, fantasy, superhero stories, blah blah blah - there's prolly an answer to how it works, and knowing the answer can help people deal with the challenges they face

for example, one of the characters in the 1999 Mystery Men movie, Invisible Boy, can make himself invisible when no-one (including him) is looking at him

like, obviously, that's funny - like, how do you even know

but also that's the rules, that's how it works, and that's how he saves the day later in the movie

in that story, knowing how things work is how you win

...but in other genres - something something magical realism? - how it works is simply not considered interesting

if Hobbes is a person, a walking tiger who can demolish Calvin at snowball fights, you can make humor and story out of it

if Hobbes is a toy, a plush animal that Calvin plays with, you can make humor and story out of it

if none of Calvin's magical nonsense is real, then he's a kid, using his imagination to create stories that feel real

but also for a lot of kids, especially neurodivergent kids, toys are a kid of real which matters

but also Calvin isn't real, none of this is real

Hobbes makes sense to us, reading a newspaper comic, because a kid and his tiger friend makes sense, and a kid and his tiger plushie makes sense, and living in a different world than the people around you makes sense

and if you want to tell a story with that? choose which one you want to tell