A mad nazi, driven by narcissistic compulsion, unable to formulate a coherent thought or to escape the ideology of his upbringing in the genocidal apartheid state of South West Africa.

David Simon, creator of ‘The Wire’, being interviewed by Ari Shapiro (NPR)

Someone asked if they could use my translations for a book published by Shambhala. Here’s my response. “I will not have anything to do with Shambhala Publications in any form. They were founded to promote the work of the rapist and pedophile Chogyam Trungpa.

“It looks like a bombed out landscape, but it isn’t, it’s an intentional one.”

Just turned down a project that uses AI. “It’s industry standard” — it’s an evil industry. “It allows us to save time” — it allows us to steal other’s work and profit from it. #banai

Translation: *not doing crime* would kill AI. Excellent. Don’t do crime.

Folks think the growth of China’s renewables is somehow *good for the plant*. Sure, renewables do *less harm* than FF, but every EV, solar cell, battery, harms the earth. It’s integral to the world’s most massive industrial machine, profiting from the burned and desecrated corpse of mother nature.

«is it rather the case that the [AI/LLMs] models’ inability to distinguish words from the world is precisely what makes them so useful to fascist aims?» www.liberalcurrents.com/deflating-hy...

“Terrible things are happening outside. Poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. Families are torn apart. Men, women, and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared.” Diary of Anne Frank January 13, 1943

Good to see these serious issues being raised. I don’t think there’s a simple answer, but whatever it is it has to involve plurality. Break up the corporate monopolies and enable multiple options via govts, communities, regions, etc. Maybe a hard limit on the size of social media networks.

It’s only just become respectable to explain how bad MAGA is by comparing them to Nazis. Time flies. Soon we’ll be telling kids, “That Hitler was so terrible, he was as bad as Trump”. And they’ll scoff and say that’s so extra, be serious.

Coal production continues to grow past its current vastly-excessive state …

Fun font fact: if you’ve noticed the nice serif font on Github recently, that’s Yrsa, which was designed by David Brezina’s Rosetta foundry, as was SuttaCentral’s Skolar.

A nemesis arose from the deep past, following me to a new platform. Before blocking, I quickly checked his feed. It’s choked with AI slop. Seems like I was right about the guy.

There’s still hope. Right now, “fascism” is losing. It’s no longer the top lookup on Merrian-Webster. Let this day be remembered as the day fascism was defeated by Chargoggagoggmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg.

We can’t separate climate chaos from immigration. The movement of people is the tip of the spear. It’s driving authoritarianism, and how we handle it will determine the future of humanity.

Does anyone else find it weird/disturbing how many US folks use the word “American” to mean “person deserving of rights”?

CO2 is 424.29 ppm, up from 421.87 ppm a year ago and 397.56 ppm ten years ago. Here's what today’s growth looks like plotted with the last 800,000 years.

I just pushed one the biggest changes to my translations since I started, changing puggala to “individual”. I’ve come to realize that it’s a technical term, used in a very specific way, and not just another synonym for “person”. 3000 instances! Also, I've completed my notes up to SN 22.

What kind of person is thrown in jail for stealing a few dollars? Someone who is poor, with few possessions and little wealth. What kind of person isn’t thrown in jail for stealing a few dollars? Someone who is rich, affluent, and wealthy. — The Buddha, AN 3.100

Here's the definitive website for refuting climate lies. skepticalscience.com

my talk last night, basically.

You know, religions like to talk a big game when it comes to the apocalypse, but when you get right down to it, nothing destroys the world like industrialized materialism.

more than strong regulation and enforcement, more than "ethical and responsible" AI research/product development, this right here is the kind of change in the world that I long for

“We shouldn’t be surprised if, very soon, there are no more democracies … India, Russia, the United States and China are not democratic countries. So you have to ask: what will remain?”

Other religions look to the heavens; materialists look to the dirt. Buddhism looks you in the eye. Tonight, 7pm, Crows Nest Center: - meditation - Pali chanting - Dhamma discussion - meet some people! Plenty of parking, Metro stop nearby, wheelchair access.

It’s not about autism. It’s about the idea that if a group of people can be identified as different, they are vulnerable and can be eliminated. It’s eugenics.

The loss of art is the loss of humanity.

“They’re born in chains and die in chains, and in chains they go from this world to the next.” — the Buddha, SN 22.117

I think people are getting that the oligarchic elites are evil, even that they’re stupid. But I think most people still don’t get just how insane they are. Like, blitheringly delusional. Disconnected from reality in ways that we don’t really hear because it’s too disturbing.

Here’s our Tipitaka translations on the shrine at Sarnath, the place where the Buddha gave his first teaching.

Great reporting on one of the moments that should have warned us. The Arab Spring saw a moment when we thought tech would liberate people, then like a dream that moment passed. Today Myanmar is sunk deeper than ever in horrors, riven by civil war, while countless people are pressed into slavery.

The thing with bigotry, it’s a path. If you fancy sexist or transphobic or racist or anti-immigrant views, does that make you the same as Hitler? No, it makes you someone who has started down the same road. Look ahead, see what lies there around the corner, in the shadows, behind the bushes.

Had to repost 😅 #noai

Depressing to hear of monks echoing the AI party line, “we will become obsolete”. We will never be obsolete, any more than a field of flowers is made obsolete by a car park. We may, however, be destroyed by Nazis and replaced with the endless, pointless churn of machines. If we let them.

So we didn't pay the server and now SuttaCentral is down. We're on it, and back soon. Sorry about that, time for some meditation!

We know what happens with three wishes. What if it were infinity wishes?

AI "disrupt[s] our apprehension of epoch + dislodge[s] thought from embodiment. If evrythng is everybody’s or nobody’s, [if] all humanities are treated as jumbled masses of info w/o regard for autonomy or ⌛, [we betray] the very idea of archives as repositories of human experience + layered memory"

AI is the wrong tool to tackle complex societal & systemic problems. AI4SG is more about PR victories, boosting AI adoption (regardless of merit/usefulness) & laundering accountability for harmful tech, extractive practices, abetting atrocities. yours truly www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/ai-...

Huh, never thought I'd get up this morning and work out an entirely new reading of a famous Buddhist sutta, but there you have it. Someone must bear the burden.

AI is inherently abusive. Its destruction of human beings is systematic and intrinsic to its ultimate goal of eliminating humanity.

Violence has its very own seat at the table, just as it always has. But when it happens, yet again people say “violence has no place”. The reality is, it’s so normalized that another school shooting barely registers.

I have reached this best of resting places; Heaven and Earth have shown me grace. May every quarter be free of foes for me! We do not hate you. May we all have peace and safety! — a prayer after victory, Atharva Veda 19.14

“But AI makes me productive” — it’s been plaguing me a little since someone asked this at a talk the other day, and I replied, “Studies show it doesn’t, it’s just a hallucination.” Which is true, but not really the point. What I should have said was …

“If anyone dragging around this body claimed to be healthy even for an hour, what is that but foolishness? So you should train like this: ‘Though my body is ailing, my mind will be healthy.’” — the Buddha, SN 22.1

Joseph Weizenbaum, Computer power and human reason: from judgment to calculation, 1976, p 255.

The idea that we can deny subjective consciousness and say anything interesting about the mind, not to speak of creating an artificial mind, is a deadly mistake, sustained only by the wilful denial of one’s own humanity. It leads directly to the mass inhuman delusion of technofascism. #banai

The US government is now straight up posting nazi propaganda.

Revisiting some old blog posts: how far back the outrage goes! You say whatever, no matter how spiteful or deranged, someone else has to broadcast your words, and if they don't it's “censorship”. “Right speech” builds meaning. It takes time and care and attention, wisdom and compassion.

‘The world is wanting, insatiable, the slave of craving.’ — The Buddha, MN 82:41.35