👁️ ChatGPT Cannot Solve Homelessness

Gruesome Gavin Newsom Test-Runs the Technology of Automated Domination.

Hello, and welcome to your Tuesday Dark Markets news roundup. If you missed it, supporters this weekend got a new Sam Bankman-Fried preview installment.

In this roundup: Gruesome Gavin bends the knee to the robots; Mixed jobs numbers leave downside Fed surprise in play; Was Calvin Ayre Craig Wright’s biggest victim?; LBRY founder vomits racists pseudoscience on main; Friend.tech leaves investors on read; Libertarians sued Honduras for having laws.

Gavin Newsom “asks” GenAI to “solve” the Homelessness Problem

One of the ideological tenets of the techno-authoritarian TESCREAL bundle of ideas is that artificial intelligence is going to come up with completely novel, innovative answers to humanity’s problems. This is why AI people don’t care about climate change, and was highlighted by Yuval Harrari’s recent statements about AI bureaucrats making decisions about jobs and loans that “will get harder and harder to understand.”

Now, California Governor Gavin Newsom, seemingly following such declarations, has issued a call for LLM developers to find an answer to the state’s problems, “including the housing and homelessness crisis,” at an “LLM Developer Showcase.”

This is, of course, some mix of cynicism, indoctrination, and stupidity.

California Governor Gavin Newsom disposing of the personal belongings of his subjects.

It’s particularly notable that they’re leaning in to the “LLM” designation, since if any AI will ever come up with a new and interesting idea, it’s unlikely to be an LLM probabilistically regurgitating text strings. It might help to have, like, knowledge about the world, which LLMs do not.

But the cynicism and indoctrination here can’t be ignored. Superficially, of course, Gavin Newsom hates homeless people, which means he hates you, and anyone else who doesn’t have a robust safety net. More subtly, the ideological project around “artificial intelligence” is warming up to get us to simply accept what is coming from the black box - a black box programmed by our technological overlords.

Much like Uber or Airbnb before them, “artificial intelligence” really amounts to a kind of arbitrage: If we can program a machine to tell us to do things we already wanted to do, we don’t have to take responsibility for doing them. It’s a method for laundering authoritarianism.

Harrari and others are warning us that we “won’t understand” the instructions we get from the AIs, but the same group is also constantly reassuring us that the AIs are intelligent, that they even have empathy - the genre of “LLMs have Minds” fake research has only expanded since I first sounded the alarm 18 months ago.

And now here is the tech-backed neoliberal Governor of California, astroturfing the “usefulness” of AI, the tech industry’s only growth idea, by sacrificing the homeless to the whims of the black box. For now, the automated decision trees are only being handed dominion over the weakest and most vulnerable - but like all technologies of power, they will come for the rest of us, too.

Read More: The Generative AI Bubble is Over

Rate Cut Could Get a Bump After Middling Jobs Report

The U.S. saw 142,000 new jobs created in August, against a projected 165,000, with the unemployment rate dropping from 4.3% to 4.2%. These are confusing signals, and markets were broadly down, but there’s a major upside scenario here. While markets are already expecting a 25 basis point drop when the FOMC meets next week, there is still a possibility of bigger 50 bip drop. The probability of a higher cut is low, but it would be an upside surprise for the stock market - especially given how much hinges on an increasingly fragile and debt-dependent AI sector.

The Full Craig Wright Scam Can Finally Be Told

Craig Wright’s nine-odd years of pretending to be Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto had innumerable victims, including retail investors in the misbegotten BSV chain, and more than a few talented people who wasted years on BSV or nChain-related development projects.

Another victim, though one who deserves absolutely zero sympathy, is Calvin Ayre. Though from the outside he looks like a partner or ally of Craig Wright, Ayre was duped by Wright’s claims of controlling huge amounts of Satoshi’s BTC. Wright was motivated to seek a savior like Ayre (even if that meant conning him) after being caught what appears to have been quite major tax fraud in Australia.

Calvin Ayre in the process of getting tricked out of tens of millions of dollars by one of the dumbest men to ever live.

Wright’s con against Ayre was a form of “advance fee fraud,” based on his claim to have control of a huge hoard of bitcoin (BTC) mined by Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. Ayre was meant to fund Wright’s activities only long enough to get a slice of that pie, as he has stated outright. This was based not just on Wright’s false proofs of having been Satoshi, but also a bonkers legal theory that a court could compel the transfer of the Satoshi coins, even if Wright didn’t have the keys. This was and is, of course, false.

All that and more is laid out in this rundown of the Faketoshi grift timeline by James Thompson, a.k.a. Cryptodevil, one of the most pathologically focused chroniclers of Ayre, Wright, and their many craven hangers-on. Thompson also helped Arthur Van Pelt with the insanely detailed “Faketoshi: The Early Years” series, and I’m told they’re seeking a publisher for their chronicle of the Wright debacle.

Read More: Literacy was Faketoshi’s Kryptonite.

Ex-LBRY Head Spouts Racist Nonsense

This is tragic. LBRY was an interesting experiment in decentralization, and I was among those who mourned its very stupid courtroom loss. But now Jeremy Kauffman, the creator of the tech, is a race scientist. Not only does his post about Haiti imply he was suckered into the whole fake cat eating thing, his regurgitation of an IQ-based reading of the history of Haiti is among the most brain-dead applications of that bankrupt idea.

If you’re still in sway to the pseudoscience of IQ, listen to the most curmugeonly of your heroes, Nassim Taleb, on why it’s bullshit: “‘IQ’ is a stale test [that] in fact mostly measures extreme unintelligence (learning difficulties), as well as, to a lesser extent (with a lot of noise), a form of intelligence, stripped of 2nd order effects — how good someone is at taking some type of exams designed by unsophisticated nerds."

For the record, Haitians have been subject to two centuries of dispossession and chaos as punishment for the temerity of rising up against slavery. That has included political interference and economic sanctions that have left as many as 1/4th of Haitian children severely malnourished. To blame Haitians for their own global scapegoating and continuing economic strangulation is beyond the pale.

Friend.Tech Pulls the Rug/Decentralizes

Friend.tech is (was?) an attempt to build decentralized social media. It substantially copied Nader Al Naji’s “DeSo,” which was itself allegedly a front-end for a substantial embezzlement scheme. Now the Friend.Tech team, too, seem to have taken the money and run - roughly $44 million dollars, apparently, in “investor” funds.

Instead of continuing to build a social network with that money, the Friend.Tech team have announced they are locking the system’s decentralized code, meaning there will be no future upgrades. Protos has a fresh analysis here of what went wrong, though “what went wrong” really seems to amount to “we took your money then didn’t do anything.”

Friend.tech was headed by a figure known psuedonymously as Racer, who may want to find their way to a non-extradition country.

Libertarians Sue Honduras for Having Laws

Here’s an extremely depressing little story from earlier this year, which pretty much sums up what “libertarianism,” as a functional ideology, is really about. In 2009, Honduras suffered a military coup. During the subsequent period of authoritarian chaos, one of the post-coup governments created “economic development zones,” or “ZEDEs,” with reduced taxation, and with the law itself almost entirely in the control of corporations.

The creation of these zones was not the will of the Honduran people, and as democracy returns, the ZEDEs are being rolled back. And of course, the carpetbagging expats are using the provisions of a free trade agreement to sue the Honduran government and … prevent them from imposing the democratic rule of law.