“The Big Web has users – a term Silicon Valley has borrowed from drug dealers to describe the people they addict to their services and exploit.”— @aral, “What is the Small Web?”
The criminalization of “Disturbing the Peace” is unjust.
In “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” MLK drew a distinction between a negative peace—where there is no protest—and a positive peace—where there is nothing to protest.
“Disturbing the peace” does not distinguish disturbing a negative peace from a positive peace, and thus it is weaponized to maintain negative peace.
“Like ChatGPT, he’s a know-nothing that, through deterministic measures completely detached from the meaning of the underlying ideas, picks the right words to say at the right time.”—Ed Zitron, “Managing Up”
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The business press has always loved to hagiograph-fy charlatans who seem like prophetic geniuses unless you happen to now something—or anything—about the subject being bloviated. At which point you have an “Oakland Stroke” and realize “there’s no there, there.”
What has changed lately is that we’ve recognized their superpower: They’re an LLM running on wetware that has been carefully trained to match the expectations and biases uninformed people may have for “geniuses.”
That doesn’t bother me in the least. What bothers me is the question that Rachel asks Deckard: “Did you ever take that test yourself?”
@raganwald I recently did a re-read of a bunch of classic SF that is thoughtful or provocative about AI (mostly Iain M. Banks); maybe it is time to do a moviethon—Blade Runner, Her...
“This is the management consultant mindset that dominates tech—trapping users in terrible experiences by monopolizing industries, then making their products worse once they know that their users can’t go anywhere else.”—“Managing Up” by Ed Zitron
A detailed, receipts-heavy walk through the enshittification (®️ @pluralistic) at Meta.
“Thank you for reporting this terrible situation. Which part do you want us to investigate first? The part where you knowingly entered into an international criminal conspiracy to launder the proceeds of fraud? Or the part where your partners cheated you out of the funds you advanced to facilitate that money laundering?”
Business magazines love articles about CEOs shaking up their leadership teams. It’s exciting! It’s aggressive!! It’s shifting into transformation mode!!!
Almost never do they ask if a shakeup serves to weaken those the board may tap as an interim CEO, should things not work out.
@raganwald shaking up the top and replacing modest performers with the CEO's loyalists also has a wonderful chilling effect that tends to silence dissent at all ranks and destroy bottom-up cultures nearly instantly
“It's not just that these weirdos can't tell the difference between imaginative parables about the future and predictions about the future – it's also that they keep mistaking dystopias for business plans.”
"The moat around a company isn't really to keep competitors out, it's actually to keep customers in. And the harder it is for them to escape, the more a company can and will abuse them for short-term gain."
"I'm too skeptical to hype AI, even if getting on the hype train will raise my profile and maybe get me a better paying gig."
Bob:
"We're falling into the Trough of Disillusionment, you should have no problem finding better gigs shortly."
Alice:
"Do you think companies will suddenly ask themselves, 'Which candidate did we pass over because they knew better than to go all-in on AI,' and call me?
Question: Is there something radically improved in the ChatGPT4 LLM such that it gets this right "organically?"
Or—pardon my cynicism—is there some exception code slapped into the system in response to a bug being filed, and this isn't actually "improved" so much as "faked to avoid embarrassment?"
Communities support each other with questions, answers and discussions. Communities are fundamentally about building bonds between people via cooperation.
Community was baked into the web via newsgroups, comments on old-school blogs, social mediums where people can help each other with everything from how to fly a glider to what's wrong with my JavaScript.
Today's attack on Community is using AI to answer questions, suggest code, and do everything in its power to get in between people so that the world stops relying on community and cooperation, and becomes fully dependent upon capitalism.
When blogs, search engines, and everything else can no longer be discovered, but their content is remixed and hallucinatified, how will community survive?
That is certainly what Dorsey says he’s obsessed with, but he’s no fool: He knows very well that if you can’t or won’t kick Nazis out of your bar, you become a Nazi bar, and the Nazis will kick everyone else into leaving.
This is 💯 about plausible denial. “Who me run a social media site facilitating genocide? Perish the thought! We embrace all civil discussion.”
“My big takeaway from this and every other Jack Dorsey news cycle is that I could easily get him to pay me $125,000 for a jug of something called Diarrhea Water in the understanding that it would ‘detoxify his beard.’”
— David J. Roth