Angelos Arnis 🏴

@arn.is

Designing for the last earth • Opinions are my own, I think... (he/him/hän) 📌 Helsinki • 🇫🇮 (from 🇬🇷) Portfolio: https://arn.is/ Cofounder: @jointfrontiers.com Practice: https://mesa.fi Thoughts: https://collectivefutures.blog

Friendly reminder that these things aren't impacted by closing the Strait of Hormuz so maybe, just maybe, we should implement them to avoid being impacted by future conflicts: -Solar panels -Wind turbines -Battery storage -Electric vehicles -Bicycles -Natural fertilizers -Electric heat pumps

Freedom is a complex concept and not even close when it comes to promises of emancipation through technology that billionaire techbros are trying to sell to us. Read my latest on freedom and the tech industry. If you like it, do share - it helps a ton! collectivefutures.blog/whose-freedo...

Whose freedom is it anyway?

Artificial Intelligence and the old promise of the emancipatory machine, from the washing machine, the personal computer, the internet, and social media.

collectivefutures.blog

Reading this essay was a great way to start the day, recommended… “None of this would matter much if words were ornaments. But they are not, because words often become verdicts a priori. They settle quietly, before any argument has been made about ownership, accountability and liability.”

Angelos Arnis 🏴@arn.is · 2w ago

Freedom is a complex concept and not even close when it comes to promises of emancipation through technology that billionaire techbros are trying to sell to us. Read my latest on freedom and the tech industry. If you like it, do share - it helps a ton! collectivefutures.blog/whose-freedo...

"A great deal of what reaches us as technical inevitability turns out... to be a sequence of decisions about people: who is exempted from which law, whose property may be taken without payment, which tier of government is permitted to ask a question" some banger stuff from @arn.is

Angelos Arnis 🏴@arn.is · 2w ago

Freedom is a complex concept and not even close when it comes to promises of emancipation through technology that billionaire techbros are trying to sell to us. Read my latest on freedom and the tech industry. If you like it, do share - it helps a ton! collectivefutures.blog/whose-freedo...

Freedom is a complex concept and not even close when it comes to promises of emancipation through technology that billionaire techbros are trying to sell to us. Read my latest on freedom and the tech industry. If you like it, do share - it helps a ton! collectivefutures.blog/whose-freedo...

Whose freedom is it anyway?

Artificial Intelligence and the old promise of the emancipatory machine, from the washing machine, the personal computer, the internet, and social media.

collectivefutures.blog

The type of person Ketan describes here is the typical case of "cyberlibertarianism" as David Golumbia sets it. They may hold firm egalitarian views on housing, healthcare, labor etc, but the moment the subject turns to software, they begin reciting the same gospel as billionaires.

Ketan Joshi@ketanjoshi.co · last mo.

A fun preview of a bad-faith misrepresentations that'll be in Andy Masley's upcoming 'data centre climate concerns are fake' post that Sam Altman will be surely repeating within days Adding EVs, for instance, is a net reduction in GHGs. So they're completely different to data centres

Before reading this post, I think it would be really useful for you to write down your own climate ethics rules that are consistent with each other, and that together explain why each of the following statements is wrong, even though the carbon claims are factual. I've chosen each to force you to consider a specific ethical problem with dealing with climate I think is important:
"Because electric cars will rise to emit more than data centers, we should try to end the electric car industry before the data center industry."
"New York City emits about ten times as much as all global yachts. Before asking people to sell their yachts, we need to find ways to shut down New York City and have people move elsewhere."
"A new popular candy bar has appeared that a lot of people are buying. It's a new industry, so making the candy bar is adding new emissions to the air that wouldn't have happened otherwise, and we're already in a climate crisis, so we can't afford any new emissions right now. Because the candy bar is new, it deserves special attention and condemnation."
"Catholic environmentalists have gotten together and found a promising place to cut for the environment: Protestant churches. Not only do they emit around 10 megatons of CO2 in America alone each year, but they also add no social value because they're promoting a false religion, so literally all their CO2 emissions are wasted on something bad and cutting their emissions also makes society better for other reasons."
"There's a new movie that 20% of people love and 80% of people hate. Showing it everywhere is using a lot of emissions. You personally hate the movie and think it's adding no artistic value, so all of those emissions are wasted, and only a small number of people like it anyway. This makes it worse than other things we do, because at least other things add some value with their emissions, so you should put special effort into stopping the movie from being shown for the sake of the climate."
I chose the…

I was in two intensive week-long workshops this year with neuroscientists, philosophers and computer scientists and not *one* thought LLMs are conscious, or that anything is ‘mysterious’ in a model trained on scifi and Internet chat doing woo-woo musing about self-consciousness. And do you know why?

Drew Harwell@drewharwell.com · last mo.

Claude's ‘spiritual bliss’ attractor state features a lot of woo woo talk and blue spiral 🌀 emojis @nitasha.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

No, we do not wish to live in the sterilised world of AI and LLMs. We choose human messiness. Lived-experience. We refuse to be statistically robust models. You can’t convince us this planet-killing, thieving nonsense is the way forward. We are humans and we know bullshit when we see it.

In case you are living through a heatwave without an AC, take consolation in knowing that at least your local data center is cooled with AC. So not all things are bad.