in case you want to know why i am like this.
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in case you want to know why i am like this. this is what radicalized me. heat light love. twitter oss showed me you can change the way people think and work for the better https://opensource.twitter.dev/
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d@nny "disc@" mc²replied to d@nny "disc@" mc² last edited by
i learned so much from remy decausemaker and alan velasco. alan was an intern but he regularly did my job better than me and i am still learning from his ideas and implementations. remy showed me that love is more than just an academic concern in building lasting infrastructure.
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d@nny "disc@" mc²replied to d@nny "disc@" mc² last edited by
it was rocky at times. it chipped away at all of us. but nothing lasts forever and we damn well made the most of those electric months and years together
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d@nny "disc@" mc²replied to d@nny "disc@" mc² last edited by
nobody ever thanked me for it but when people found the twitter autocropper (which used statistical methods) was racist (focused on white people and not Black people) and misogynist (highlighting cleavage), i was incredibly, unbelievably annoying about open sourcing it in the internal slack, so users could trust what we were telling them about how the software worked (and so i as an employee could trust what they were telling me and others about how it worked and why it was used)
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d@nny "disc@" mc²replied to d@nny "disc@" mc² last edited by
a few weeks later, comms announced it would be made open source, and later that year the twitter META ethical AI team hosted a groundbreaking "AI" safety hackathon at DEF CON
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d@nny "disc@" mc²replied to d@nny "disc@" mc² last edited by
that was 2020. at this point "open source" "AI" has been whittled down to meaninglessness. and as i've expanded my thinking outside of free software's narrowly technical focus, i see that software like LLMs serves the purposes of accumulation via austerity and deskilling. they are extremely skillfully and carefully designed to achieve this, because "democratizing" their access requires fundamentally restructuring society around them. i gasped
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d@nny "disc@" mc²replied to d@nny "disc@" mc² last edited by
i think figuring out what and how to measure is the very purpose of science—using domain expertise to identify what to quantify, so you can employ all these powerful numerical methods we have to solve problems. to my dismay i've come to believe most scientists instead believe that wielding numerical methods imbues them with a sort of intrinsic righteousness that others are unable to grasp
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d@nny "disc@" mc²replied to d@nny "disc@" mc² last edited by
my paper comparing distance metrics for cell signalling took two years to be published (no i'm never going to shut up about this), because the scientific establishment only understands progress in terms of the accepted canon of artificial benchmarks. new ways to measure and compare become new axes of hierarchy—and that sets the existing hierarchies off balance. how presumptuous!
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d@nny "disc@" mc²replied to d@nny "disc@" mc² last edited by
the open source program office (OSPO) at twitter showed me how to frame arguments about societal organization within the narrow terms of bureaucratic efficiency—and succeed in making change
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d@nny "disc@" mc²replied to d@nny "disc@" mc² last edited by
twitter was too late to unionize—or put another way, its management skillfully avoided creating too much pro-union sentiment, so it was left unprepared for the takeover. so outlets like the OSPO can also be used to placate and stimy organized labor. but i think they can also form the seeds of it too
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Asta [AMP]replied to d@nny "disc@" mc² last edited by
@[email protected] I really wish I had the patience to develop this skill… and the faith that it wouldn’t just be ignored. Which means the skill is probably worth developing so that I can deploy it when I think it’ll work
boooooo I just wanna tell corporations to fuck off though
(But seriously, that is an important skill)
