> “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
> A politician’s home was shot at 13 times over a data center vote.
> A shooting at the home of an Indianapolis city councillor is bringing new attention to a fight that's been building in communities across the country: the growing backlash against new AI-focused data centers.
But the incompetent far outnumbers the competent and they've been seeing AI and datacentres as symbols of the forces that are harming their ability to feed their families. An easy way out of this is universal basic income and universal mortgage/rent freezes now.
> An easy way out of this is universal basic income and universal mortgage/rent freezes now.
Of all the unlikely things to happen, these seem like the most unlikely. There's a bigger chance of a violent mob blowing up every datacentre on the planet than there is of UBI being implemented within the next century.
Then again you're not trying to enter it (potentially) illegally to (maybe) distrust day-to-say service and be a general annoyance (protest)? It's hard to leave the super market quickly when there's a long queue, but if you're shoplifting then you're out in a flash.
A family member of mine is mayor of a provincial town. She has to deal with protesters reenacting the Neurenberg rallies, angry drug dealers and the run of the mill psychiatric melt down citizen.
There is a panic button in her penthouse.
Nobody is crying about Jihad and ten years from now she will be living in the green zone.
This was hard to read; the writer really did not come from the school of succinctness. If the writer is reading this, please try making an edit where you remove as much of the fluff and rephrase sentences like:
> When I read this detail, tucked away near the end of a Guardian article, I winced to see another of my predictions come true; that the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ would soon enter public life not as mere literary metaphor, but as a kind of political vocabulary, one destined to spiral into paranoia and violence.
Into something like:
> This idea of the "Butlerian Jihad" horrified me. We are misunderstanding Herbert's subtle warning about humans being forced to become like machines as a rallying cry against AI companies. I fear that this will lead to paranoia and violence.
I think that if the entire article was edited like that it would be a lot more readable.
I find that the first paragraph tells a better narrative. I prefer it muchly. The second paragraph doesn't make sense and is saying more than the first. It feels both dumbed down and more confusing.
They’re saying that the popular conception of a “Butlerian Jihad” is a pale shadow of what Frank Herbert outlined over the course of four novels, all of which are… look, have you read any of them? Whatever virtues you care to ascribe to Dune, “succinct” is not one of them.
The author did not say they felt horror, nor fear, nor misunderstanding.
They winced at repetition and predictability, and they let the reader experience their own emotion that followed.
As well intentioned as it is, these kind of edits subvert the author's intent -- and in this case, also erases evidence of a culture that uses apostrophes for quoting.
It's what people write like when they think that using lots of big words and flowery phrasing makes them sound clever. It makes them sound like stuffy 15-year-olds who have just moved beyond looking up all the rude words in the dictionary.
Its' greater sin in my view was attempting to present simple pedantry as politically relevant. The literary criticism I found enjoyable, convincing, and devoid of actionable political insight.
A few things (written on my phone, forgive the SEO list):
* One idea per sentence, more than one tends to make massive run-on sentences that go too far.
* Removes irrelevant details. Why does it matter that a Guardian article was the thing that gave the writer the missing link?
Essentially the trick is to take your ideas down to the bare minimum required to express them portably and then write that. It makes things much easier to write (you don't have ans many words to put in the document) and the end result is much easier to read (there's less irrelevant details to scan through).
>> Why does it matter that a Guardian article was the thing that gave the writer the missing link
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the name of the magazine — and the fact that it is a magazine — matters very much when we are talking about something that is "entering public life".
If the author had read this little tidbit on a "daily dune fan blogpost", he wouldn't have any ground to claim that butlerian jihad is a part of relevant political vocabulary.
>Why does it matter that a Guardian article was the thing that gave the writer the missing link?
Why? Isn't that kind of obvious? He says he fears that it will enter public life as a kind of political vocabulary. It was in the Guardian, read by millions, shaping discourse. It already entered public life at that point. It's relevant.
He's also implying that the original Guardian article missed the significance of the detail - indeed, this alleged inattention from mainstream media sources is part of the justification for writing the piece at all.
Your version is considerably worse, and imo, more verbose. It misses a multitude of subtleties that the author packs into a single phrase, and frankly, doesn’t even come close to saying the same thing.
I chalk it up to an American technical class who consider the height of good writing to be an O’Reilly book.
In particular, GP's version reads as introducing a defense of "AI companies", and this piece is not that.
To the extent that the article has a political thesis (the author was pretty careful to avoid one), I think it's "don't throw the LLM baby out with the OpenAI bathwater". But it's pretty clear to me that OpenAI being bathwater is taken as near-fact.
It probably feels this way if you're terminally online, but the US government recently revealed the existence of UFOs and no one even blinked or cared. A minority cares, but most people have zero interest.
I think the French theorist Jean Baudrillard hit the nail on the head in the 1970s (Essay: In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities). He argued that modern media and technical systems neutralize political will through saturation. As a result, the public has essentially become a massive psychological black hole that absorbs political discourse and flattens it into inertia and apathy. The public is no longer a 'proletariat' or a political class that can be awakened; instead, the masses are a silent majority that will accept every iPhone upgrade or political speech and do nothing with it.
There's not going to be an uprising, few, if any will even put their phones down for a minute.
But they didn't reveal the existence of ufo's in any sense that anyone would ever be interested.
Especially because the ufo's they did "reveal" have always been known and acknowledged. The term ufo has always been a term of art, stolen by conspiracy theorists. What's been revealed has strengthened the term of art, not the conspiracy theorists. Why would anyone be interested in more of the same?
It is kind of hard to "awake proletariat" if you advocate mass genocide aganst them. In past the revolution were ususlly in favour of majority, not againet them!
"Butlerian jihad" comes from a science fiction novel from 1965 (Dune, by Frank Herbert). They didn't know about current political correctness 60 years ago.
The comparable word is "crusade". If it's OK to use the word crusade, it's OK to use the word jihad.
(My opinion is that neither should be used, but a majority of Americans disagree with me).
To be pedantic, crusade means "holy war" and jihad means "to struggle", so jihad should be more acceptable than crusade, but in English, jihad essentially only has the holy war meaning.
> “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible.”
Right.
2 months ago also:
> A politician’s home was shot at 13 times over a data center vote.
> A shooting at the home of an Indianapolis city councillor is bringing new attention to a fight that's been building in communities across the country: the growing backlash against new AI-focused data centers.
https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/politi...
Belgian action group "Code Rood" (Code Red) is planning to occupy a data centre next week... https://code-rouge.be/
I predict that they will be as effective as Extinction Rebellion : lot's of noise, some protesters arrested and no results.
Extinction Rebellion did not have popular support, in fact they were very annoying to the general public, by blocking roads and trains.
Nobody will shed a tear for a blocked data center.
Rebellion by the incompetent will not lead anywhere
But the incompetent far outnumbers the competent and they've been seeing AI and datacentres as symbols of the forces that are harming their ability to feed their families. An easy way out of this is universal basic income and universal mortgage/rent freezes now.
> An easy way out of this is universal basic income and universal mortgage/rent freezes now.
Of all the unlikely things to happen, these seem like the most unlikely. There's a bigger chance of a violent mob blowing up every datacentre on the planet than there is of UBI being implemented within the next century.
Good luck. It's hard enough to get into a data centre when you're authorised to be there.
Then again you're not trying to enter it (potentially) illegally to (maybe) distrust day-to-say service and be a general annoyance (protest)? It's hard to leave the super market quickly when there's a long queue, but if you're shoplifting then you're out in a flash.
You just do the good old medieval siege - nothing gets in, nothing gets out.
lol
We need broad antifa action????(++_
A family member of mine is mayor of a provincial town. She has to deal with protesters reenacting the Neurenberg rallies, angry drug dealers and the run of the mill psychiatric melt down citizen. There is a panic button in her penthouse.
Nobody is crying about Jihad and ten years from now she will be living in the green zone.
Extremely verbose and unpleasant to read.
It's not human written, it's LLM.
This was hard to read; the writer really did not come from the school of succinctness. If the writer is reading this, please try making an edit where you remove as much of the fluff and rephrase sentences like:
> When I read this detail, tucked away near the end of a Guardian article, I winced to see another of my predictions come true; that the ‘Butlerian Jihad’ would soon enter public life not as mere literary metaphor, but as a kind of political vocabulary, one destined to spiral into paranoia and violence.
Into something like:
> This idea of the "Butlerian Jihad" horrified me. We are misunderstanding Herbert's subtle warning about humans being forced to become like machines as a rallying cry against AI companies. I fear that this will lead to paranoia and violence.
I think that if the entire article was edited like that it would be a lot more readable.
I find that the first paragraph tells a better narrative. I prefer it muchly. The second paragraph doesn't make sense and is saying more than the first. It feels both dumbed down and more confusing.
They’re saying that the popular conception of a “Butlerian Jihad” is a pale shadow of what Frank Herbert outlined over the course of four novels, all of which are… look, have you read any of them? Whatever virtues you care to ascribe to Dune, “succinct” is not one of them.
I strongly prefer the original to your edit.
The author did not say they felt horror, nor fear, nor misunderstanding.
They winced at repetition and predictability, and they let the reader experience their own emotion that followed.
As well intentioned as it is, these kind of edits subvert the author's intent -- and in this case, also erases evidence of a culture that uses apostrophes for quoting.
Why not ask an LLM to summarize it for you if you don't have the patience to sit with some prose for a bit.
It's not prose, it's logorrhea.
It's what people write like when they think that using lots of big words and flowery phrasing makes them sound clever. It makes them sound like stuffy 15-year-olds who have just moved beyond looking up all the rude words in the dictionary.
I disagree, I thought it was well-written.
Its' greater sin in my view was attempting to present simple pedantry as politically relevant. The literary criticism I found enjoyable, convincing, and devoid of actionable political insight.
Maybe he should run it through AI to get a more readable version.
Your proposal does not mean the same thing as the original paragraph.
Style is a thing. Your version is not better.
Why would you argue yours is better?
A few things (written on my phone, forgive the SEO list):
* One idea per sentence, more than one tends to make massive run-on sentences that go too far.
* Removes irrelevant details. Why does it matter that a Guardian article was the thing that gave the writer the missing link?
Essentially the trick is to take your ideas down to the bare minimum required to express them portably and then write that. It makes things much easier to write (you don't have ans many words to put in the document) and the end result is much easier to read (there's less irrelevant details to scan through).
>> Why does it matter that a Guardian article was the thing that gave the writer the missing link
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but the name of the magazine — and the fact that it is a magazine — matters very much when we are talking about something that is "entering public life".
If the author had read this little tidbit on a "daily dune fan blogpost", he wouldn't have any ground to claim that butlerian jihad is a part of relevant political vocabulary.
>Why does it matter that a Guardian article was the thing that gave the writer the missing link?
Why? Isn't that kind of obvious? He says he fears that it will enter public life as a kind of political vocabulary. It was in the Guardian, read by millions, shaping discourse. It already entered public life at that point. It's relevant.
He's also implying that the original Guardian article missed the significance of the detail - indeed, this alleged inattention from mainstream media sources is part of the justification for writing the piece at all.
Sounds very Hemingway.
OP might benefit from using https://hemingwayapp.com/
Your version is considerably worse, and imo, more verbose. It misses a multitude of subtleties that the author packs into a single phrase, and frankly, doesn’t even come close to saying the same thing.
I chalk it up to an American technical class who consider the height of good writing to be an O’Reilly book.
In particular, GP's version reads as introducing a defense of "AI companies", and this piece is not that.
To the extent that the article has a political thesis (the author was pretty careful to avoid one), I think it's "don't throw the LLM baby out with the OpenAI bathwater". But it's pretty clear to me that OpenAI being bathwater is taken as near-fact.
It probably feels this way if you're terminally online, but the US government recently revealed the existence of UFOs and no one even blinked or cared. A minority cares, but most people have zero interest.
I think the French theorist Jean Baudrillard hit the nail on the head in the 1970s (Essay: In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities). He argued that modern media and technical systems neutralize political will through saturation. As a result, the public has essentially become a massive psychological black hole that absorbs political discourse and flattens it into inertia and apathy. The public is no longer a 'proletariat' or a political class that can be awakened; instead, the masses are a silent majority that will accept every iPhone upgrade or political speech and do nothing with it.
There's not going to be an uprising, few, if any will even put their phones down for a minute.
But they didn't reveal the existence of ufo's in any sense that anyone would ever be interested.
Especially because the ufo's they did "reveal" have always been known and acknowledged. The term ufo has always been a term of art, stolen by conspiracy theorists. What's been revealed has strengthened the term of art, not the conspiracy theorists. Why would anyone be interested in more of the same?
It is kind of hard to "awake proletariat" if you advocate mass genocide aganst them. In past the revolution were ususlly in favour of majority, not againet them!
This author sure has an ax to grind against an imaginary online "Left" strawman
I don't think this is true at all, if anything, the tone is "c'mon, guys, you're better than this".
If the Magnifica Humanitas is the germ of the Orange Catholic Bible, that's OK by me.
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"Butlerian jihad" comes from a science fiction novel from 1965 (Dune, by Frank Herbert). They didn't know about current political correctness 60 years ago.
I know that. Just pointing out your double standards compared to the holocaust.
The comparable word is "crusade". If it's OK to use the word crusade, it's OK to use the word jihad.
(My opinion is that neither should be used, but a majority of Americans disagree with me).
To be pedantic, crusade means "holy war" and jihad means "to struggle", so jihad should be more acceptable than crusade, but in English, jihad essentially only has the holy war meaning.
"Nuclear holocaust" is a somewhat common expression both in and outside of fiction.
Fun fact 1: "jihad" does not exist in Villeneuve's "Dune" adaptation.
Fun fact 2: what happens after The Butlerian Jihad? Return of the empire!
> Fun fact 1: "jihad" does not exist in Villeneuve's "Dune" adaptation.
Abomination!
Even if? It’s from a book if you’re wondering. We’ve all read it.
I think the word has been twisted a bit, to compare it to holocaust is imo insane. I've known people named Jihad.
> I've known people named Jihad.
I have known Indian / SE asian Ice cream shops named Hitler.
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Every time I see "Butlerian Jihad", I know the person is more familiar with Brian Herbert's atrocious books than Frank's.
This essay does call Brian Herbert a failson so I don't think he's endorsing those books
This is a great example of commenting on the headline without reading the article.
i would contact local antifa cell. they have broad experience with this type of actions. For my part I am occupied.
I'm trying my hardest at local vc
And we will lose.
Like dinosaurs lost to mice, and like chimps lost to humans.