Shit like this is why I made https://nopilot.xyz and added it to my e-mail signature.If you value other people's writing and creative labor, please please don't open it in MS Word.https://mstdn.ca/@ned/113477469187444731

Hot take: AI as a category of technology should be understood as an advancement in the spam side of the eternal arms race that is the Internet. AI makes it easy and relatively affordable to custom-generate your own junk email or social media posts that are plausible enough to fool most filters and make it in front of human eyeballs.From that perspective, AI should be valued to the precise degree we value any other tools that seedy marketers use to flood our inboxes.

As a side note, politics gets a lot more critical and harder to ignore when you realize it ultimately comes down to disagreements over who gets to survive, over what timelines, and under what conditions.

@[email protected] low key tempted just to open my LinkedIn back up to be like "fuck you all, but especially you, Altman/Satya/Musk"

@xgranade I am so, so sorry.

@[email protected] @[email protected] I mean. It’s definitely a weird moment to drop it, but it’s nice that it’s backwards compatible?

@[email protected] @[email protected] exactly the same. First it happened with W’s second term, then so much worse with Trump.God. I wish my head didn’t hurt.

@[email protected] Huge load of corporate bought garbage. I wonder who their funders are, hmmm:https://opensource.org/sponsorsah yes. totally no conflict of interest here. This definitely isn't them using the term "open source" to launder the theft of the commons through "AI".

For the most part, though, the only preferences that can be expressed on a ballot are "more fascist" and "less fascist."That's an important fucking policy preference! Less fascism is good!But the other policy preferences matter quite a bit, too. Where's the party that wants COVID to be over? Can I vote for them?

I've personally watched the web I know and love almost disappear, broken into a thousand tiny apps that don't interoperate.When I look at new shit, I see all the ways it can go bad because I've lived through them. So have others, of course, but we respond to the same experiences differently? I'm tired and I'm frankly *scared* of new VC-backed platforms because of how wrong they've gone before.That's maybe not as rational as you might like, but it is real.

If I had time and support and didn't have better things to do, I'd definitely want to go actually do some of the "green cheese" disproofs and help put that whole nonsense on a firmer epistemological basis.As it is, though, I think intense skepticism and incredulity is warranted for *any* paper in the LLM space, given the problems mentioned above.

In many fields, these effects together with shoddy statistics that do not properly incorporate background information gives you stuff like the infamous "clowns help with IVF" paper¹. Those effects can be dangerous as hell, as they can corrupt medical knowledge needed to offer safe therapeutic prescriptions. What's happening in "AI," though, appears to be another step still of exploiting those systemic effects to turn academic publishing into PR.¹https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21211796/

@[email protected] shiiiiiiit that is... alright, I have to play with these ideas.

@[email protected] @[email protected] Let's find some open source email server, modify the block list code to also enable opt-in uses, then just trust our own non-corporate servers. Fuck em.Half the shit I get from google and other gmail accounts is trash anyway, it's just crap they paid google to send.

Learn about right-wing dogwhistles like "biological male/female," "groomer," "attack helicopter," and others. Call them out when you hear them, especially when it's just cis folks around --- when there's no one else around to stand up for us.Learn about etiquette when you or someone around you makes a mistake --- fixing honest mistakes with grace can help deescalate and prevent conflict.There's a lot of good resources out there, check them out and help!

@[email protected] @[email protected] oh, jesus. Fucking AI boosters have abused the fuck out of arXiv.

Even short of revolutionary, I do sincerely think that progressive movements need to really reckon with the way that fear of or discomfort with tech is used by the tech industry to reinforce monopolies and undermine progressive values.https://kolektiva.social/@sidereal/113351642334954719

Web frameworks are cool! Large stylesheets can do some amazing things! There's so much awesome stuff about the modern web!At the same time, I think it's really cool what you can accomplish using just a bit of handwritten HTML and CSS. Not everything needs to be a large app, and that's OK — that doesn't mean web apps are bad, just that I think we've treated them as one-size-fits-all when there's plenty of design space to explore at the very minimal end.

@xgranade Mine has absolutely cratered - but that's less about my job (which I'm happy at) and more about the state of tech in general.Coding used to be my own little refuge from the terrors of the world; now it feels like a grim reminder of the terrors of the world.

Holy shit, the inevitable burst of the AI bubble is going to be truly catastrophic.https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/113319524266088617