The person who wrote that fancies themselves someone who can manipulate circumstances to their favor through means other than action, such as through social manipulation or persuasion, not realizing that sometimes conditions require changing hearts and minds and sometimes conditions require putting your body on the line.

I know, you should stop using Google

AI doesn’t understand anything, it’s just producing a linguistically coherent answer that may or may not be right. Stop looking to LLMs for answers if you care about whether those answers are correct or not

Reading anything without the help of AI will help you become a better writer because you’ll learn new ways of using words and sentences and syntax in a way that people write naturally. It seems weird to focus on Marxism, but if that’s what gets you reading, go for it.

Libertarian used to be a polite word for anarchist, it was a contrast to authoritarian. Libertarian socialists still see themselves as part of a historical tradition as an alternative to authoritarian socialists, though that’s more European than American. Then there was a political project of European and American conservatives to redefine libertarians to mean conservatives who believed in strong property rights and a weak state.

Anarchism is a broad ideology against authority. Anarchists are against private property rights because if there is private property, there must be an authority to enforce those rights. Instead, anarchists point to pre-civilization methods of carving out individual spaces from the commons so that people can live without having to “make a living.”

There’s been a massive propaganda push by governments and state powers to define anarchist as “bomb-thrower,” or to try and make anarchist ideas seem ridiculous, but anarchists are extremely invested in people recognizing themselves as moral agents invested in communal good while maintaining individuality. if you’re interested in anarchist ideas, try reading non-fiction like David Graeber, or fiction like Ursula K LeGuin, or speeches by Emma Goldman. Don’t let people on social media’s knee-jerk reaction against anarchism turn you off. Even if you end up not being an anarchist, you can at least engage with the ideas and maybe find some stuff that resonates with you.

If they’re still alive and still benefitting from said art and still harming people, no. Any time, money, or attention you give to them enables them to hurt other people.

A couple years ago I saw a band I really liked live. They were really important to me because their music helped me get through the collapse of one of my past relationships. Then it came out that the singer had hurt multiple people in multiple cities on their tour. So now if I stream their music, or buy their merch, or even just listen to their music alone, it’ll be materially supporting a person’s ability to hurt other people.

It’s much easier to separate art from people who are no longer around to hurt other people. I don’t feel bad for appreciating Guernica or reading Infinite Jest because doing so doesn’t support the artists behind them causing harm.

Going back through the game on my all bosses run and finding Ebriatas and Maria for the first time. Ebriatas isn’t the most fun fight, but her design is just so perfect. And learning the Maria fight is just so rewarding, like fighting Gehrman again but even tighter.

Ocarina of Time is my GOAT. Finishing it as a kid and realizing that games could be more than just killing time, that they could be epic journeys with satisfying endings, that they could be a whole art form was really transformative.

I saw someone in advertising a few days ago saying that using AI generated images in their ads kills their sales with gen Z. Gen Z can spot errors in shadows, inconsistencies in textures, small tells that boomers and gen X largely can’t. As a millennial, I can spot a lot of AI, though every so often something slips through. But when I see a youtube channel with an AI generated image, or a business with an AI generated advertisement, or a game on steam with AI generated thumbnails, I click the three dots and ignore.

I think most advertising companies are going to find that the more Gen Z and millennial customers they have, the less they’re going to want to use generated images.

Weird, people keep telling me that all the added energy costs of the blockchain, crypto, NFTs, and training AI/LLMs over the past ten years are overblown and not contributing to climate change. It’s so weird how all those things just happened to coincide with accelerated warming.

It’s good you’re being cautious about it but it would be better to not use it at all. A recent Scientific American article showed that AI autofill suggestions change how people think about a subject just through suggestion, even if they don’t use the autofill. And people who use it are often unaware of their own knowledge gaps, so self-reporting about effectiveness is useless. Using it even a little bit is probably putting metaphorical micro-plastics in your brain.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-autocomplete-doesnt-just-change-how-you-write-it-changes-how-you-think/ https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human-cognition-atrophied-and-unprepared-3/

Protect your brain

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My current list of reasons why you shouldn’t use generative AI/LLMs

A) because of the environmental impacts and massive amount of water used to cool data centers https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117

B) because of the negative impacts on the health and lives of people living near data centers https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy8gy7lv448o

C) because they’re plagiarism machines that are incapable of creating anything new and are often wrong https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/does-ai-limit-our-creativity/ https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2024/06/20/why-ai-has-a-plagiarism-problem/

D) because using them negatively affects artists and creatives and their ability to maintain their livelihoods https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2713374523000316 https://www.insideradio.com/free/media-industry-continues-reshaping-workforce-in-2025-amid-digital-shift/article_403564f7-08ce-45a1-9366-a47923cd2c09.html

E) because people who use AI show significant cognitive impairments compared to people who don’t https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/ https://time.com/7295195/ai-chatgpt-google-learning-school/

F) because using them might break your brain and drive you to psychosis https://theweek.com/tech/spiralism-ai-religion-cult-chatbot https://mental.jmir.org/2025/1/e85799 https://youtu.be/VRjgNgJms3Q

G) because Zelda Williams asked you not to https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0r0erqk18jo https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-10-07/zelda-williams-calls-out-ai-video-of-late-father-robin-williams/105863964

H) because OpenAI is helping Trump bomb schools in Iran https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/03/06/openai-pentagon-tech-surveillance-us-citizens/88983682007/

I) because RAM costs have skyrocketed because OpenAI has used money it doesn’t have to purchase RAM from Nvidia that currently doesn’t exist to stock data centers that also don’t currently exist, inconveniencing everyone for what amounts to speculative construction https://www.theverge.com/news/839353/pc-ram-shortage-pricing-spike-news

J) because Sam Altman says that his endgame is to rent knowledge back to you at a cost https://gizmodo.com/sam-altman-says-intelligence-will-be-a-utility-and-hes-just-the-man-to-collect-the-bills-2000732953

K) because some AI bro is going to totally ignore all of this and ask an LLM to write a rebuttal rather than read any of it.

“I’ve found the tool useful.”

Cool, have fun breaking your brain with the technology you don’t understand while ignoring every new study that comes out that says it’s bad for you while supporting billionaires whose stated goal is to sell knowledge back to you as a resource

It probably doesn’t help that the investors and management company pushed out a bunch of people from the art collective, leaving ZA/UM only loosely the same creative team that made Disco Elysium

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JGIGA8taN-M

The Epstein class spent 2022 and 2023 hyping up Trump as the economy president and he’s managed to knee-cap the economy three times in about a year

LLMs don’t have any historical knowledge, they produce reasonably coherent blocks of text. There’s a reason people call them slop machines, because their primary purpose is to produce a lot of text, not any kind of correct information. The fact that they’re sometimes correct is a coincidence, and is the reason why they’re incorrect up to 60% of the time. It doesn’t matter if a book was written in the 1600s or the 1950s or 2026, because the LLM is not going to have any cogent information about it that isn’t a statistical accident from smashing different sources together indiscriminately.

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/ai-search-engines-give-incorrect-answers-at-an-alarming-60-rate-study-says/

Google is evil. From the propagation of surveillance capitalism, to their selling of tech space to the highest bidder deteriorating the global knowledge base, to their suppression of information that US oligarchs find distasteful, they can’t be reasonably trusted to provide accurate information.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/11/20/1039076/facebook-google-disinformation-clickbait/

So you’re using autocorrect made by dishonest Larry to help you read about the rise and anatomy of fascism? You’re likely poisoning your own well and not even realizing it.

Trust me, I know. They won’t stop at people of color, they won’t stop at Jews, they won’t stop at trans people, they won’t stop at queer people, they won’t stop at white women, they won’t stop at poor white people. They’ll redefine whiteness and maleness and citizenship as many times as they need to in order to take as much power and wealth as they can. But the question was specifically about the people ICE had snatched up

Stephen Miller and Donald Trump and all of those people in the Epstein cohort are white supremacists, they want all nonwhite people to die or become slaves. They might deny that, they’ll say “Oh no, we just want immigrants to come in through proper channels,” but you can look at their treatment of Native Americans and see who they really are. The endgame is just that anyone who’s not white is no longer alive, no longer in the US, or no longer a free person.

Knowing what I know about LLMs and Google, using the Google LLM as a reading assistant seems like possibly the worst idea.