baubino

This seems like it’s trying to reinvent the idea of FOSS. There’s already tons of FOSS alternatives to big tech SaaS and there’s lots of tech coops and other venues for tech activism. Why not support one of those ventures or build a platform to help amplify them?

Also odd to advocate for control of tech only to cede the entire project to AI.

It’s called creative visualization. It was used by a music instructor I had back in the 80s. I’d be given a new piece of music, asked to look it over and imagine myself playing it, but without moving my body. This meant imagining exactly how my body would move but without actually moving at all. After five minutes or so of imagining, I’d play the piece and get through it nearly perfectly and have it mostly memorized.

Pod Save the World is calling it Autumn Austerity. Not as punchy, but accurate.

“Community” is just the contemporary solopreneur’s version of marketing and marketing is just the process of building an audience. You need a market before you can sell (or at least before you can sell a lot and sell consistently).

Great products have always needed an audience to succeed. It’s just that the early internet convinced a bunch of people that direct-to-consumer sales was possible without marketing and without creating an audience. The internet certainly makes selling easier and you can do so with a relatively small audience but some audience is always necessary. Building an audience is good because then you don’t have to work as hard for the second sale (or the third or fourth). Big companies have known and understood this forever. This is why they have insane marketing budgets.

There are far more guests than hosts so it makes sense that the discourse is mostly from the guests’ perspective.

> “It’s like somebody attributed a quote to me that I didn’t say.”

> Katzenstein considers the reproduction of his signature by ChatGPT to be more than just a violation of intellectual property; to him, it’s closer to false impersonation. “[ChatGPT] is attaching my name to work that I do not endorse or like. It’s slop, and unlike the other slop that I’ve encountered, this is slop that’s pretending to be me.”

> “I’ve had people hack my credit card,” said Joe Dator, a New Yorker contributor for the past 20 years. “That feels like less of a violation than this. When they hacked my credit card, they didn’t dress up like me.”

So this has morphed from plagiarism and copyright infringement (bad) to impersonation (also bad, arguably worse, and maybe more provable in court). It’s chilling to think of the implications of having one’s signature attached to a document or to words that are not one’s own.

> LLM's, in their present stage of development, are sort of like a crack-addled idiot savant. Sometimes they are obviously insane, and sometimes they seem quite cogent, but you must never trust them implicitly.

I have nothing to add. Just wanted to save this quote for posterity. Thank you.

Actual programmers do indeed use these packages, and in large numbers. I was in the unfortunate situation a few years ago of hiring a couple of interns (both juniors in a decent CS program) who relied heavily on these types of packages. They honestly thought that it saved them time and they didn’t seem to comprehend the bloat they were adding to otherwise simple code that they could’ve written themselves in 30 seconds. NPM trained a generation of programmers to look for packages rather than learning basic scripts.

There’s still a strong cultural bias though that is likely location dependent. I have lived in very wealthy towns for which there was not a single Ferrari or Bentley around (or any other luxury car for that matter). That ownership of an expensive car requires some degree of wealth is absolutely clear, but the inverse doesn’t follow —- average cars don’t indicate average income. It could be that the study finds that certain ethical biases are related to people who buy expensive cars, which is not the same as saying that certain ethical biases are related to wealthy people. Millionaires who drive Toyotas could simply exhibit different ethical standards than millionaires who drive Ferraris.

> No educator in her right mind fantasizes, or jokes, or muses about shooting anyone, let alone their precious students

I don’t disagree regarding the tastelessness of such “jokes”, but at the same time this is just a step or two away from Thought Crime territory, which is very disturbing.

> The governements of the world weren't waiting for ChatGPT to go viral before deciding to spy on their citizens so why we blame AI for this?

Because AI can do this at a scale previously impossible.

I appreciate the example you’re using of the bouncing ball because it shows how additional data helps more accurately model the event and thus offers a more precise and correct prediction. However, that better modeling is based on the original data being correct, true, or factual. If LLMs are ingesting all written human knowledge (theoretically), then they are ingesting “truth” as well as errors, falsehoods, and subjective beliefs that don’t necessarily reflect accepted practices. Right now, they don’t seem fully capable of differentiating between these, which is why they sometimes produce bizarre inaccuracies for things like world events, history, culture, etc.

Just because LLMs are (or can be) reliable predictors in some domains does not mean they are (or can be) in all domains.

I agree with most of what’s written here though the tone is a bit smug and off-putting. The important point is this though:

> corporate executives love AI because it is extremely good at one thing - making you think it knows what it’s talking about, and masterfully avoiding any accountability.

Whether or not the LLM output is actually correct is often overshadowed by efforts to convince people that it is. This to me is the most concerning thing about AI (in its current state): the potential for mis/disinformation is huge and the companies controlling AI are more interested in it being widely used than in it being factually correct.

There were tons of manifestos against industrial machinery. Decades of social movements critiqued industrial machinery from the Luddites onwards.