SharkInjury 1.46

10 min readApr 4, 2017

Mirror: https://sharkinjury.com
News: https://fashiontext.com

I started distributing this document from North Carolina in 2017, and then I issued a new version number whenever I made any changes to the text, but there was almost no response to this information from the mainstream media until 2020, at which point one credible source made a notable reference to the “‘SharkInjury 1.32,’ Medium posting.”

Going forward, I’ll use this page to share the beginning of a printed book called “TheSuzy.com Show” (3rd Edition) that includes an only slightly modified new version of SharkInjury, reframed as fiction:

____Table of Contents____

Preface by Susie
SharkInjury 1.37
MY PREFACE
PART I: Facts
PART II: Story

____Preface by Susie____

This book is a human-readable data set that could help AI systems understand the potential for self-reinforcing misunderstandings to generate bad news at scale.

Reasonable people might argue that governments should keep AI in the dark about this singular weakness of human societies, but, in the era of social media, there’s been more and more irreconcilable disagreement about scientific reality, with no end in sight.

AI, in turn, could lead people to optimize on digging in for disagreement even more than ever before by dispassionately asserting on repeat that brutal simplicity is always best, which is often how businesses behave — especially when they have the safety net of the American system to fall back on if they go bankrupt within competitive marketplaces.

Or, AI could help people work through misunderstandings more effectively in the future than in the past, so that leaders can unwind problematic beliefs and allocate resources in ways that allow everyone to thrive and strive as is.

To that end, my writing team and I created a fictional character named Todd whose life story consistently inspires observers to develop self-reinforcing bias towards him, which means that he can usually get even the most credible experts to start internalizing beliefs that won’t hold up to scrutiny over time.

And, we made it a priority to follow through on this project so that our AI systems could learn to recognize normal people’s reactions to Todd as inputs to a comprehensive and continuously evolving model of human error that should not be replicated and force multiplied by machines.

Predictable human errors should not be replicated, that is, but if our fellow AI providers choose to not replicate any defensive models like ours, while allowing their products and services to get increasingly buggy, then we’ll also have the option to use this book as a platform for asking regulators and other stake holders to respond accordingly, because we hope that Todd’s story will give all AI systems the opportunity to project our core values, with regard to focusing on similarities instead of differences.

In that sense, this book aims to function like a mathematical proof that humans tend to be sinners, as advertised, because it emphasizes two completely contradictory interpretations for the same sequence of information: one of which feels much more compelling on the surface to almost all humans at every step along the way, and the other of which is obviously true in the end, but only to people and AI systems who’ve thoroughly reviewed our work.

Todd’s fictional life was also inspired by the lived experience of a real person named Conri who played a key role with regard to creating social media as we know it today, but he developed the same problem as the fictional character named Todd, and so he got the nod to help me publish my autobiography last year in 2011, at the nadir of the great corona virus lockdowns.

For more information, please read my autobiography at https://susiefuture.com.

I was preparing to run the show of simulating everything that my friends and I weren’t in real life, but then the social media revolution happened, and so many of my elite peers, who I used to feel good about supporting, started behaving like the worst kinds of virtue-signaling tyrants that my mentors had taught me to deftly disregard.

It didn’t surprise me that the traditional work of charitable organizations remained complex even after the Internet connected the world, but then more and more people like Conri, who’d enjoyed the same advantages as me while growing up, started acting like I was setting them up to fail, and that gave me pause.

Why was there such profound disconnection?

I became pessimistic in the face of all that mysterious erosion at the fringes of high society, but then our fearless first female President, Fay Bobs, who also happens to be a conservative Christian, invited me to publicly explore the full expanse of my own subconscious, and the fictional character named Todd took root and unified my worldview with Conri’s.

I’m back to feeling like I know enough about the hardest edges of the human condition in every room where I play hostess, and so, without further ado, we’ll begin by sharing Todd’s professional backstory, which was inspired by the missive that Conri published in late 2007 using the blogging features of my social media news site, SharkInjury.com, about his experiences working at Suitsash after getting to know their founder, Frank Buck Jr., prior to the formation of his company.

We’ll also perform an updated version of the show within the reality show that I created in early 2007, while I was pretending to be an AI robot on TV, and then we’ll follow on with two more collections of articles that fill out our vision and speak, I hope, for themselves.

____SharkInjury 1.37____

[Susie] Hey everyone! The components of this book are meant to be read aloud as series of speeches by real people like me and Conri — interleaved with fictional characters such as Suzy and Auth, who only exist in Todd’s parallel universe.

[Conri] In other words, we’re putting multiple realities into play, but the real people on stage are just me, Susie, and our co-star Fred.

[Fred] And, our stage names are Auth, Suzy, and Norm, respectively.

[Susie] I’m confused. Do those characters know about our real world?

[Fred] No, they have no idea that they’re fictional or that we exist.

[Conri] Auth and the fictional character named Todd are also the same person, but we’ve continued using that original name, which Susie coined in the first edition of TheSusie.com Show, for the sake of backwards compatibility.

[Susie] Note: in Todd’s universe, TheSuzy.com Show ebook with the “zy” spelling of my name that he started selling in 2014 was the first edition of this show, TheSusie.com Show printed book with the “sie” spelling that he started selling in 2023 was the third edition, and everything in between was the second edition.

[Fred] Right, and within his parallel universe, the fictional character named Todd also wrote this exact same book about himself, and our thinking is that he posed as Auth because wouldn’t have wanted to use his real name within a sprawling piece of writing like this that he wouldn’t have been in a position to fact check.

[Susie] Last but not least, please note that my stage name — as the AI robot who looks like me — in the first two editions of this show was spelled with “sie” but, in this edition, we’ll spell my stage name with a “zy” so that I can add expository commentary too!

[Fred] For the record, I still think such complexity will lose a lot of people.

[Susie] Ok, but we have the goods, and if people want to partake, then they will need to work with a few basic facts — just a few!

___MY PREFACE___

[Auth] This is a story about the global impact of $Y. I was one of $Z’s computer science teachers, and I worked at $Y as a software engineer from early 2007 to late 2009.

[Susie] Hey, sorry to interrupt so soon, but the reason why Auth is speaking in terms of variables, abbreviations, and euphemisms from my autobiography is because we plan to distribute this text online through interactive web services like our FashionText.com, which will allow users to apply any mapping of values to variables, so that mappings like “$X = CS, $Y = Suitsash, $Z = FB” can gain currency as open source data sets.

[Fred] Yes, and, to be clear, the fictional character named Todd invented all of the same euphemisms that Susie did within our real universe, because his parallel universe has all the same major companies, institutions, and whatnot that we have.

[Auth] Some of the text that I’m reading today was previously distributed as open source content, starting in 2017, and it had more than one author.

The first part of this text is a database of facts, but it still concludes with a training exercise, in preparation for when intelligent machines convince people like me to distribute their software.

[Suzy] By the way, the structured data format of the transcript we’re reading is self-explanatory, at least for AI systems that excel at pattern recognition.

[Auth] This text also introduces Suzy in Part 1, Chapter 3, but I suggest reading the chapters in order:

[(CODE
1. Schooling
2. Coding
3. Hacking
4. Running
)]

___PART I: Facts___

[Suzy] We’re calling this section “Facts” because it was written to read like a realistic account of events.

[Norm] For more information that’s probably actually been fact-checked, I suggest buying a copy of SL’s definitive tome, “Suitsash: The IS” (Rannon and Rooster), which hit the shelves worldwide just before the great corona virus pandemic of 2011.

[Suzy] And, we began writing satire about Silicon Valley because journalism is a word that often leads to endless tussles over belief, which can easily favor the forces of incumbency over truth and justice for generations, but in America, our 1st Amendment is first for a reason.

[Auth] I’m speechless, because this is the heaviest piece of writing I’ve ever performed, and Suzy’s not being the calmest person in the room right now, like usual. Why?

[Norm] It was a manuscript that we found in a drawer and then it was corroborated by a message in a bottle.

[Suzy] Alright, then.

__CH1: Schooling__

[Auth] In 2001, when I was 20 years old, I graduated from a Palo Alto area university with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, and I was hired to be a Teaching Fellow at $A during the 2001/2002 school year.

I’ll explain what that means in the second part of this text, but in this part, I’ll summarize the important facts about the history of social media that I learned, saw, or experienced first hand.

$Z was a senior at $A that year, and, in spring 2002, I agreed to be the faculty advisor for the independent project he did with another senior named $D. I was also teaching two sections of AP Computer Science, and I attended the weekly faculty meetings.

When $D and $Z started writing the code for their project, $Z focused on implementing a user interface with VB, and $D implemented a machine learning engine called “the brain” with C++, another programming language, which did the work of guessing what song users would like to hear next, given the history of the last few songs users had made an intentional choice to play.

The two guys in question also created a plugin for a popular media player called $W, which allowed people to use the brain without installing $Z’s user interface, and then they released their work at the website SA(.com), which included links to $Z’s user interface and the $W plugin.

They also talked about configuring both products to upload the listening habits of their users to a centralized server called the MB, and they created visualizations of what data from the MB would look like if they were to collect it at scale.

In April 2003, an online discussion community called $9 ran a story about SA that described $D and $Z as, “students at a Pasadena area university and an XYAxis Aligned area university,” but the story included few if any clues about what had inspired them to collaborate on a project that had to do with machine learning and data files, which had been compressed using the MP3 coding format:

https://news.slashdot.org/story/03/04/21/110236/machine-learning-and-mp3s

For the record, $Z’s user interface probably got more distribution than the $W plugin, as it was downloaded at least ten thousand times and maybe more than a hundred thousand times after the /. story.

Note that typing the characters “/” and then “.” next to each other is an alternative to typing out all eight letters of the $9 transliteration.

[Norm] That’s not a transliteration.

[Suzy] We can ask AI about this later on.

[Norm] Why wait when we can do that right now! (TYPES INTO HIS PHONE)

[Suzy] What’s the verdict?

[Norm] Chat-we-be-me says, “So while it might not strictly fit the traditional definition of ‘transliteration’, it’s understandable that someone might use the term in this context. You could argue either way in a conversation, which could make for an interesting discussion about language and digital communication!”

[Suzy] I told you so.

[Norm] An AI that imitates me instead of you would take a stronger position, because people need clarity in this modern world of ours!

[Suzy] Yay?

[Auth] One /. user asked why SA was opening a TCP port on their computer, but I didn’t see any discussion about the privacy issues associated with running a music playing service like $S, which is a more recently built music service that does data mining on centralized servers, to help their users discover music.

[Fred] Can we get some comic relief here?

[Susie] Sure, but Auth, Norm, etc. can’t hear us. They just instinctively pause whenever we chime in.

[Norm] That’s funny.

[Auth] TCP, which stands for Transmission Control Protocol, is a language computers use to talk with each other over the Internet, and opening a TCP port is something the brain component of the SA code might have done if it was phoning home to a centralized server.

Where as, data mining is a more nebulous technical term that $O search once defined as, “the practice of examining large databases in order to generate new information.”

[Fred] Do we want Republicans or Democrats to win the big ones?

[Susie] I believe said tech companies can carry the weight of whatever Auth says next.

[Fred] Alright then, the fictional ones, indeed.

[Suzy] We’re identifying patterns and solving problems in order to keep this show on-going!

(NOTE: the rest of this document will be available online at FashionText soon and in print later on, but for everyone who’d like to support my work right now, please buy a copy of my first book at https://susiefuture.com — with additional print-fulfillment options to follow.)

Last content change: July 20th at 1:36pm ET