Back on my theme of trying to understand why LLMs have taken off:
Puzzle piece 1: LLMs are, in Frankfurt's sense of the term, bullshit machines. To him, a core component of bullshit is "indifference to how things really are".
Puzzle piece 2: Managerialism, a dominant business philosophy, holds that managers are universal. They can manage anything without regard to the topic. Without truly learning "how things really are".
Puzzle piece 3: On average, the larger the company the higher the density of bullshit. CEO statements, managerial presentations up and down, customer comms, etc. Related is the density of office politics, careerism, etc.
So putting this together, it seems like our corporate hierarchies have a hard time understanding the weak point of LLMs because standard corporate culture has the same weak point: valuing many other things over the truth.
Back on my theme of trying to understand why LLMs have taken off:
Puzzle piece 1: LLMs are, in Frankfurt's sense of the term, bullshit machines. To him, a core component of bullshit is "indifference to how things really are".
Puzzle piece 2: Managerialism, a dominant business philosophy, holds that managers are universal. They can manage anything without regard to the topic. Without truly learning "how things really are".
as a friend pointed out in a followers-only post, @bob 's Epicyon activitypub server is a non-toy implementation that does not use a database but renders posts as flat files on disk!
The newly hired professor in the area of “Post Internet Praxis” will shape the English-language Master's Major in "Art:ificial Studies" (to be launched in 2025). The new major curriculum at the MA level is designed for students who are interested in the intersections of art, artificial intelligence technologies, and society.
People have been talking about the attention economy, trying to argue that we are building systems that never forget, that keep accumulating, because we can, because it is our instinct. And as a result, we're building our own panopticon, where the archives of our deeds are there for everybody to see, to ingest, to transform and to barf forth as AI slop. The records we keep only ever benefit our enemies, never ourselves. That's why I like automatic expiration of everything on social media.
Sometimes, archives are worth it. My blog is better curated than this feed you're following. I rarely delete blog posts. Maybe I should… If you're an organisation, you might want to keep archives. If you hold public office, official acts should certainly be archived. So there are some instances where archiving is OK. But for you and me, for most of us? Maybe not. And the hard-core record keepers can always run their own instances. Then again, I run my own instance and it can't automatically expire all posts, which is a bummer! That day will come, however.
As I'm thinking of this and as I'm talking to people, however, I'm starting to realize that perhaps the term attention economy is no longer true. I am living in the spoon economy.
I just don't have the time and energy for so many things. We are, collectively, mostly, out of spoons.
People have been talking about the attention economy, trying to argue that we are building systems that never forget, that keep accumulating, because we can, because it is our instinct. And as a result, we're building our own panopticon, where the archives of our deeds are there for everybody to see, to ingest, to transform and to barf forth as AI slop. The records we keep only ever benefit our enemies, never ourselves. That's why I like automatic expiration of everything on social media.
@Lazarou@skinnylatte It's understandable. History, as I was taught it in a good school in England:
The stone age happened. Then a few other ages involving metals, which were a bit better. No one had a flag and so they probably didn't matter. forging Iron was probably invented in Britain because who else would be clever enough?
The Romans invaded Britain. They invented plumbing and were generally awesome. Pay no attention to the slaves or the fact that it was often worse to be plebian than a slave: in theory the punishment for killing a plebian was worse than for killing a slave, but who would enforce it? The slave owner at least was rich enough to get some form of justice (killing your own slave was fine, of course). The good ones stayed and became British.
Some time passed, and Britain was ruled by baddies. William the Bastard, uh, sorry, Conqueror came along and defeated them. We got an amazing new ruling class of Normans. Anyone who can't speak French is a peasant and not worth paying attention to. For some reason, Alfred the Great was omitted.
And then the Tudors and Stewarts happened. There were some things in between William and Henry VIII (presumably six Henrys, if nothing else) but they weren't important. There were some exciting wars, but the important thing is that we're better than everyone else. Mostly because of Queen Elizabeth I, who worked out that taxing people who didn't go to church made more money than burning people who went to the wrong church. Oh, and then we discovered most of the world and put flags on it. It's ours now, sorry. Oh, and Shakespeare demonstrated that we're better culturally than everyone else, it isn't just that our navy was better.
Did I mention we beat the Spanish? They thought they had a better navy, but we set fire to them. By being awesome. And the best at everything. Including bowling, apparently, which was important for some reason.
Then, shortly after that, we demonstrated that we were the best democracy in the world by chopping the head of the King. It turns out that Puritan fundamentalists weren't actually the best rulers, so we also chopped the head off our non-royal dictator and put control of the country back where it belonged: with the aristocracy.
Then the French chopped the heads of their monarchs too, but because they're less good than us they got carried away and their revolution was just not really cricket, so we had to put them in their place. We single-handedly defeated Napoleon (okay, some Russians were there too, but they mostly ran away and let the winter kill off his soldiers). We didn't do it quite right the first time, so we had to properly defeat him again at Waterloo, but the important thing is that Trafalgar and Waterloo are when we showed the French we were just better than them, repeatedly. We have squares and things named after the battles, so they must have been good!
Around this time, we revolutionised agriculture and pretty much everything else too. We invented all technology.
After that, nothing bad happened for about a hundred years. We definitely didn't exploit India or profit hugely from the slave trade. Oh, and you probably imagined the opium wars (and we definitely weren't the drug pushers, if you did hear something about that). Pay no attention to the Anglo-Afghan war[1], for example.
But then the Germans started causing problems. They didn't have an empire, because they were less good than us, but they wanted one because they were bad people. So we had to defeat them. Some Americans turned up at the end of the war to take credit, but it was mostly us. Definitely not the ANZACs or any Indians, they weren't involved at all.
And then the Germans did it again! Apparently it was slightly our fault for the Treaty of Versailles that helped Hitler come to power, but it has a French name, so it's probably the fault of the French (who, once again, needed us to come and rescue them and should be grateful today). Oh, and there was a depression in the middle, but that wasn't our fault (and we can blame that for Hitler as well, so the second world war was definitely not our fault!). So then we had to defeat them again! This time because our air force and navy are better than everyone else's. Our army was pretty good too. Some Russians and Americans helped out a bit but it was mostly us. Oh, and we invented computers as a side project while winning the war. Everything in the rest of the 20th century is basically built on stuff we did because we're that awesome.
With this kind of history teaching, it's understandable why someone might have a somewhat rosy view of English history and a slightly skewed perception of international relations.
[1] Okay, this is the one that makes me honestly think history might be entirely made up. On our side, the ruler was Queen The Winner, their side was led by King The Greatest. You'd never get away with that in a novel.
@Lazarou@skinnylatte It's understandable. History, as I was taught it in a good school in England:
The stone age happened. Then a few other ages involving metals, which were a bit better. No one had a flag and so they probably didn't matter. forging Iron was probably invented in Britain because who else would be clever enough?
I posted this a few weeks ago on the hellsite and it went viral. Obv it made no difference: after bombing the crossings into Syria, #Israel is now threatening all of Baalbeck, east #Lebanon.
*All of it.* people are desperately trying to leave in panic right now.
"As the planet warms, new authoritarian movements in the West are embracing a toxic combination of climate denial, racism and misogyny. Rather than consider these resentments separately, this article interrogates their relationship through the concept of petro-masculinity, which appreciates the historic role of fossil fuel systems in buttressing white patriarchal rule. Petro-masculinity is helpful to understanding how the anxieties aroused by the Anthropocene can augment desires for authoritarianism. The concept of petro-masculinity suggests that fossil fuels mean more than profit; fossil fuels also contribute to making identities, which poses risks for post-carbon energy politics. Moreover, through a psycho-political reading of authoritarianism, I show how fossil fuel use can function as a violent compensatory practice in reaction to gender and climate trouble."
Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire
Cara Daggett https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818775817
Get the full paper from wherever you get your papers from… 😇
"As the planet warms, new authoritarian movements in the West are embracing a toxic combination of climate denial, racism and misogyny. Rather than consider these resentments separately, this article interrogates their relationship through the concept of petro-masculinity, which appreciates the historic role of fossil fuel systems in buttressing white patriarchal rule. Petro-masculinity is helpful to understanding how the anxieties aroused by the Anthropocene can augment desires for authoritarianism....
You know what promotes innovation? No, "intellectual" "property" laws, and the promise of passive income. Not the pressure of the shareholders to deliver growth forever. Not even the investment of capital.
It's quality free time. It's when people have the time to experiment and try things. It's when they have access to tools and resources not being fully used. It's when they are not stressed and can freely explore on their own. And when they can do things that don't bring immediate profit.
I think ephemeral posts should be the default. It definitely should be the default for bots. It absolutely should must be the default for bots that repost feeds from elsewhere. I have such a bot and its purpose is to be news, not an archive.
I'm the opposite. Nothing should ever be ephemeral. Everything you post should exist forever by default. If I wanted something to be ephemeral, I'd call or say it in person.
If you tell the story of the burnt ballot boxes in Portland and Vancouver this week (an important story that warrants attention), also tell how good fire-suppressant design saved all but three ballots in the Portland box, and the efforts of the election workers who contacted those three voters and arranged for replacement ballots.
Things are scary and bad, and often literally on fire. But there are good people and good systems too. Making us forget that is always a win for the worst ones.
Today is the 50th anniversary of women gaining the right to have mortgages, business loans and credit cards in their own names.
I am 47 years old. My mom did not have access to her own credit card without her husband or father's approval. People like to think that this stuff happened in the ancient past. It didn't. People you know were directly affected by anti-women systemic oppression.
@Lana In a well known Spanish fiction, Velvet, which played in the 50s (therefore, in Fascist Spain) a woman inherits a department store and runs it, which would have been impossible in that time and place.
Is there a word for the act of cleaning up the nastier bits of history for the sake of creating happy melodramatic fiction stories?
@Lana my sister and her (then) fiancee bought a house. She worked at a bank, was the one with the higher income.She couldn't get the mortgage (from her own employer) on her income alone, because it only counted for 5 years "because woman". 1989, Netherlands
The botsin.space Mastodon server has been a huge part of the fediverse, and while it's sad it's being retired, I trust that the creative botmaking community will continue to thrive.
"So, given two choices -- asking for more donations so I can pay for more hardware to keep the instance running, or retiring it and encouraging people to support more community-oriented instances, I'll choose the second option every time."
The botsin.space Mastodon server has been a huge part of the fediverse, and while it's sad it's being retired, I trust that the creative botmaking community will continue to thrive.
"So, given two choices -- asking for more donations so I can pay for more hardware to keep the instance running, or retiring it and encouraging people to support more community-oriented instances, I'll choose the second option every time."
@stefan Unfortunately, I had to block/purge the domain becase sidekiq was giving errors every day, no ill intent and I do know you host your bots there. I do hope those users find a better home to host them.
That being said, why don't you host YOUR bots on your server? Is it the costs? Traffic too high? Just curious and trying to understand here.
EDIT: ah, I see the issues here, hardware lacks to run those.
@stefan This explanation is likely why the mastodon art masterworks instance was shut down earlier this year. It filled my feed with works from all the masters I subscribed to and gave me breath of fresh air. Since then, other instances with live artists have come on-line to fill that void.
Thanks for the hosting and contributing to the community.
To put a billionaire in perspective, it's more interesting to think about the income than the capital. You can get a 5% annual return from some fairly low-risk investments (and you can further reduce risk by spreading your money across a load of these). You can often get higher, but 5% is a fairly good baseline.
If you start with $1bn and do nothing clever, you can get an income of $50 M per year by doing nothing. Even with the kind of 95% tax rate that we had for the highest income levels when The Beatles sang about it, that leaves you with $2.5M/year in income.
That's enough to buy a nice house every year, with no mortgage. It's a disposable income of almost $7K. It's enough to take a first-class transatlantic flight every day.
And that's just one billion.
Even with a 95% tax rate on investment income and a conservative investment strategy, someone with a billion dollars would have a daily disposable income that's more than the monthly income of anyone in the bottom 99% of earners, without having to work.
Now try these calculations again with real tax rates and Musk or Bezos' wealth.
To put a billionaire in perspective, it's more interesting to think about the income than the capital. You can get a 5% annual return from some fairly low-risk investments (and you can further reduce risk by spreading your money across a load of these). You can often get higher, but 5% is a fairly good baseline.
Copyright has outlived its usefulness and needs to die with the Boomers. I don't know what replaces it, but this is a "collapse, not reform" situation.
Another view of #Venezia from the top of the Campanile di San Marco 🦁 Here you can see the winged Lion of #Venice, which, as Italian researchers have recently discovered, was originally from China! Cast during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) 🪽
@aw I make local copies the remote server to my laptop using rsync. As I'm slowly starting to use more sqlite, I really need to add skipping of sqlite files and using sqlite-rsync. This is perfect! The only problem is that I now need to know all the sqlite files on my server! 😬 Maybe keep a list of known *.db files in a file, run sqlite-rsync for the files in this list and warn about all the *.db files not in this list, with an option to silence that warning for known not-sqlite .db files… Do you already have something like this?
@aw I make local copies the remote server to my laptop using rsync. As I'm slowly starting to use more sqlite, I really need to add skipping of sqlite files and using sqlite-rsync. This is perfect! The only problem is that I now need to know all the sqlite files on my server! 😬 Maybe keep a list of known *.db files in a file, run sqlite-rsync for the files in this list and warn about all the *.db files not in this list, with an option to silence that warning for known not-sqlite .db files… Do you...
Fascism is pure emotional negativity so to argue against it or to call the great leader fascist to someone who is in the thrall of fascism sounds like complete nonsense to them. It's as rational as proving a negative.
Most people are not able to process that argument. Which is why a positive message of what you or your candidate will do is more effective.
You cannot be more negative than Trump. But he cannot be more positive.
I believe the fascist rally today at Madison Square Garden had two goals:
1) further mobilize the Trump cult to flood the polls (disrupting Democratic voting in the process).
2) demoralize Harris voters into thinking it's all over.
It may succeed on the first, but my hope is that it completely backfires on the second -- that everyone who doesn't want a fascist government will turn out and swamp the extremists.
The whole thing will backfire. They're the party of anti-vaxers and anti-maskers an a lot of them are as dead as Herman Cain. Sane Republicans are joining Democrats to vote them down, and that's not happened before. The leading edge of the Live Gunman Drills generation are now eligible to not only vote but run for office, and that wasn't the case before. Of course they'll try anything at this point because their bag of tricks is now empty and that's all they got.
@dangillmor What it looked like to me was stirring up the troops for a repeat of 06Jan. Which is actually a hopeful sign because it means they know they are about to lose the actual election.
Gregory's Server
@williampietri
And yet people still worship #capitalism and believe it leads to rational decisions because everyone acts in their own self interest.
@williampietri
Two other things:
Technology that reduces need for specialized knowledge or skills tends to get widely embraced.
The bullshit LLM AI produces is bad at details but good at "executive summary" and high-level hand-wavy spew of the c-suite.
@williampietri They're the perfect corporate predator!