bunderbunder

Look, as long as nobody looks inside my .doom.d directory nobody has to get hurt.

That experiment also felt more cute than actually minimalist to me.

When I decided to take a break from being terminally online, I didn’t turn off the phone feature but leave Wi-Fi on so I could still check my socials on the office Wi-Fi; that wouldn’t have actually done much. I forced my phone off the bulk of the internet by turning off Wi-Fi and disabling cellular data for everything but a few core apps like Messages and Maps.

Yes, and it’s been a quarter century or so but this is how I remember BeOS doing it. Every window got a dedicated thread for handling events and GUI updates, and other code would communicate with it via message passing. The OS had a standard message passing system that was pervasive; if I remember right every thread got a mailbox by default.

But it was 90s era C++, so probably that was all just a polite agreement and the reality was that circumventing the message passing to directly call methods on objects that belong to other threads was common, and just as likely to happen by accident as on purpose.

I would guess it’s supposed to communicate a few things. One big one is, ”Our AI software factory didn’t do it. Don’t worry, letting Claude spin away with limited human supervision is still safe.”

Based on my own usage, one of the things that AI continues to be really, really shit at is data governance. And this is a place where a “move fast at all costs” attitude simply will not do. It is just so very easy to accidentally start leaking data in a way that undermines privacy safeguards.

There's nothing in the article to suggest that performance of his actual duties as an administrator have been called into question. The issue under contention, as the article frames it, is the University trying to dictate the details of how that work gets done.

There are some who would call that micro-management.

I don't think that projecting opinions that you don't think are reasonable upon someone who didn't actually say those things, or clinging tightly to the Goomba fallacy with phrases like "guys like the one in the article", will get you very far toward understanding what he actually said.

Which is self-defeating. If you don't make a good faith effort to understand what he said then you're leaving yourself in a poor position to credibly argue against it.

There is a really interesting point that I think you're getting at, but choosing well known and already politically charged examples undermines the discussion by bringing cognitive dissonance in at the ground floor.

What about an example where religious belief fundamentally excludes someone from doing the actual job? Suppose a Muslim wants a job as a bartender, but refuses to actually serve people drinks because they consider it a violation on the rule against alcohol. Should the bar grant them a religious exemption and just accept that they won't be serving alcoholic beverages when that person's the bartender on duty?

Or what if two different religious beliefs come into direct conflict? Suppose a Jehovah's Witness whose manager is also a JW decides to leave the religion. Jehovah's Witnesses consider shunning apostates to be a religious commandment, so their manager might feel obligated to fire them. Is that OK?

Depending on how we resolve those conflicts, perhaps people can at least agree that there should be limits to religious exemptions, even if they don't agree on the specifics. But perhaps that's at least a starting point for a conversation. And perhaps from there we can extend out to Durham's position.

The difference between the Sorites paradox and the continuum fallacy is explained right there in the section on the continuum fallacy that I linked to.

I realize that's embedded within a larger page on the Sorites paradox instead of being given its own page, but I'm not super interested in being that preoccupied with Wikipedia's editorial decisions.

By chopping out the first sentence of the quote, you lose the context of exactly what kind of labor he's talking about. Which is useful if you want to construct a strawman version of his argument by suggesting he might be morally opposed to four function calculators, too, but not so useful if the goal is to engage with the (presumably incomplete) version of his position that the article presents in good faith.

So let's look at that preceding sentence so that we can get a better sense of what kind of labor he was talking about:

> The process and work involved in thinking through situations, through my work, through my ethics, through the way I handle other people, is a key component in being able to develop myself as a moral person.

"thinking through situations", "my ethics", "the way I handle other people", "develop myself as a moral person". This doesn't read to me like he's taking a Butlerian Jihad-type position that humans have a moral responsibility to do their own arithmetic. We're clearly talking about higher-level, more abstract thinking and decision-making that might carry real moral weight.

And that brings us to a difference that I think he might be seeing but that you seemed to be claiming does not exist when you said, "My main issue with these people is that they think AI/LLMs are different than everything that came before them." GPT-style decoder LLMs are the first time we've ever really seen people trying to rely on computers to make abstract and open-ended decisions such as drawing up business plans, drafting memoranda, or doing deep research-type tasks on any sort of scale.

I think that you're probably aware that there is a a noticeable difference between how people are thinking about LLMs now versus how they did back when GPT 2.0 was the latest and greatest. The fact that we can construct a hypothetical continuum of possible models between GPT 2.0 and GPT 3.5 Turbo and suggest that, in this counterfactual scenario, it might not be possible to draw a hard line that cleanly separates the tech itself into two discrete categories, is fundamentally missing the point. His concern was never stated to be about the technology itself; it was about how he was being asked to use it.

I can remember a time when the Borg's famous catchphrase was understood to be the kind of thing that only the bad guys would say.