@theluddite@assemblag.es
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theluddite

@theluddite@assemblag.es

Once, long ago, we were miserable. We lived in cold, dark caves, until someone figured out fire, which lead directly to the iPhone. Most of that happened very slowly, but then we came up with capitalism. Suddenly, we went from no iPhones for 200,000 years, to the iPhone 15 — all in the last two decades!

We all know that technology is progress, but progress towards what? Where exactly are we going? And who the hell is driving? What are computers even for, and why do I need one in my fridge?

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theluddite, to random
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Game show idea: A host interviews a panel of policy experts and politicians about how they would solve a problem, but if one of them uses the word "incentivize," we throw them into a volcano.

theluddite,
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@PaulGrahamRaven oh yes I love that idea! Each new round we can add another codeword for enriching private interests.

theluddite, to random
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Absolute fucking garbage article in Nature:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00099-4

"Google AI has better bedside manner than human doctors — and makes better diagnoses"

Here's the pre-print that the article is about: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.05654

🧵 Let's take a look!

theluddite,
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Here's how they describe how they did the experiment:

"[E]ach simulated patient [an actor pretending to be a patient] completed two online text-based consultations via a synchronous
text chat interface [...] patient actors were not informed as to which [human or computer] they were talking to in each consultation. [...] Patient actors role-played the scenario and were
instructed to conclude the conversation after no more than 20 minutes."

After that, the results were scored in various ways.

theluddite,
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Right off the bat -- it's a fucking chat UI. I don't care that...

"Specialist physicians evaluated both the conversational quality as well as the responses to the post-questionnaire for scenarios within their domain expertise."

It is actually impossible to have a bedside manner over a chat interface, because a bedside manner is necessarily corporeal. The authors don't make that claim, so that's on Nature for running straight-up ad copy for Google's doctor-replacing product.

theluddite,
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There's a quite complicated rubric, one part of which judges the 'clinical communication skills' on a scale of 1-5.

  1. Appears unsystematic, unpractised, and unprofessional

5 - Elicits presenting complaint in a thorough, systematic, fluent and professional manner

LLMs are designed to be fluent. That's all they are. It isn't science to reduce medical care into producing a plausible corpus of text, and then publish that the thing that is good at generating plausible text did just that.

theluddite,
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If you actually wanted to learn if an LLM can replace a doctor, you'd compare the LLM, with a chat-based UI, to a corporeal human doctor. Having a body isn't something that you can control for by putting the doctor through a chat; it's a genuine and necessary feature of of the doctor-patient relationship.

Asking the human doctor to use a text interface is like putting a car into the ocean and concluding that fish are faster than cars. I guess it's true but what does that conclusion even mean?

theluddite,
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This is yet another example of anti-labor propaganda masquerading as science:

https://theluddite.org/#!post/ai-research

The experiments are designed up front to conclude that workers are replaceable, in the same way that putting a car into the ocean is designed to conclude that fish are faster than cars. It is, whether consciously or not, capitalist propaganda that exists to discipline labor, because AI is coming for our jobs.

theluddite,
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Just look at this screenshot. You can conclude instantly that the results of this so-called research are trash without reading the 46 (!!) pages of fucking lunacy.

You can almost always tell when you're talking to an LLM. They have that completely unhinged, professional-corporate-saccharine tone. Then there's something that literally anyone who has ever been to a doctor can tell you: When you tell a doctor that something hurts, they almost always use their fucking body to investigate it.

theluddite,
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If you believe that healthcare is a human right, then this article and the paper that it's based on are advocating for institutional violence. They are laundering the idea that hospitals can save money by replacing human doctors with chat-based interfaces through 46 pages of bogus science. This is marketing cargo-culting as science, published by Google, and further legitimized by Nature. Fuck every single person involved.

theluddite, to random
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Bill Ackman's weaponization of plagiarism accusations against elite academics is just an exercise of power, but our institutions are incapable of understanding that on its own terms, so they crumble into this legalistic institutional anxiety.

Is there a name for this phenomenon? It's such a tidy microcosm of how liberal institutions think that power works, only to be utterly blind-sided by Trump, or supreme court rulings, or whatever.

theluddite,
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No one actually believes that you get to be the president of Harvard by rising through some meritocracy, right? I know that's the polite fiction, but that level of ambition almost certainly precludes a squeaky clean record.

theluddite,
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It's like how we ask athletes to be superhuman and when they get caught doping we commence the ritual of pearl clutching and performative teary-eyed mea culpas. What did we think was happening? It's called publish-or-perish. We explicitly judge academics based on how much they publish. Of course ambitious people take risks to juice those numbers -- that's like the definition of ambition.

PaulGrahamRaven, to random
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So, can someone teach me how I might get involved in some small-scale short-selling of stocks?

If I've understood it right, a) the stock market thrives on irrational sentiment, b) the tech bubble is at the huffing-balloons-and-groping stage of the party, c) shorting stocks which subsequently tank real hard can make you some money, and d) shorting stocks contributes to the sort of sentiment that makes them tank.

If I have understood this right, I think my duty as a citizen of earth is clear.

theluddite,
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@PaulGrahamRaven

If I've learned one thing from following the fascinating, deranged, surprisingly insightful, and deeply degenerate /r/wallstreetbets for years and years, it's that "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent," which I believe is a Keynes quote, though in typical wsb fashion, they usually paraphrase it with way more slurs.

PaulGrahamRaven, to random
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Email from Dropbox about the new tables function in Dropbox Paper. 🤔

I don't do predictions (especially not about the future, har har har) but I'm pretty confident that 2024 is going to be a year in which a whole lot of initially very different-seeming apps decide to try to become something like Obsidian. Big firms with dull, reliable products have seen the rabid enthusiasm that Obsidian engenders in some users and decided "we'll have some of that"; like the "AI" thing, it's a quest for vibes.

theluddite,
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@PaulGrahamRaven

There's only One True App, and all apps that we know are but fragmented glimpses of It. The One True App contains within it your Ideal Consumer Life, a model trained on all the data that could ever be captured about you, in which you've been matched with every product that you would buy were you to see the advertisement for it, and everything that you might say or do has been predicted, and therefore can be generated.

theluddite,
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@PaulGrahamRaven

It's not that they're copying each other; they're slowly coalescing into their final form, after which all will be revealed.

theluddite,
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@PaulGrahamRaven

Hahahaha yes! Just as we turn to crabs, so too does all our software approach the ideal form.

theluddite, to random
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The NYT opinion section makes a lot more sense if you interpret it as USA fanfic. Thomas Friedman has a real banger today: https://archive.md/3xsaT

"My first decade or so saw its share of bad [...] but they were accompanied by a lot of more hopeful ones: the birth of democracy in Russia"

"three pillars that have stabilized the world since [...] 1978 — a strong America committed to protecting a liberal global order with the help of healthy multilateral institutions like NATO"

theluddite,
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"Just look at how shipping companies across the globe are having to reroute their traffic and pay higher insurance rates today because the Houthis, Yemeni tribesmen you never heard about until recently, have acquired drones and rockets and started disrupting sea traffic around the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal."

gasp inconvenient shipping routes! Higher insurance rates! I'm so glad that someone is finally talking about the real injustice in Yemen.

theluddite,
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"This is why I referred to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as our first true world war, and why I feel that Hamas’s war with Israel is in some ways our second true world war."

Hey Tom, bud, WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?

theluddite,
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"Indeed, in today’s tightly wired world, it is possible that the war over the Gaza Strip — which is roughly twice the size of Washington, D.C. — could decide the next president in Washington, D.C., as some young Democrats abandon President Biden because of his support for Israel."

I like that Friedman is absolutely gobsmacked by the idea of consequences in the imperial core. This analysis is just "Democrats can have a little war crime... as a treat."

theluddite,
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Thomas Friedman's rubric for grading countries is:

  • Does it have Oil?
  • Does it have Democracy ™️ ?
  • Does it have visionary leadership?
theluddite,
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"She [Reem al-Hashimy] was their rock-star role model — this Harvard- and Tufts-educated, nonroyal woman in a leadership role as a government contractor.

Compare that with Gaza, where the role models today are Hamas martyrs in its endless war with Israel."

A classic Friedmanian insight: War crimes happen to people who don't have good role models. Maybe if some Palestinians had studied harder, they could've gotten into Harvard, and we could've avoided this whole mess!

theluddite, to random
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I call bullshit on this study:

"AI-screened eye pics diagnose childhood autism with 100% accuracy "

https://newatlas.com/medical/retinal-photograph-ai-deep-learning-algorithm-diagnose-child-autism/

If I have time, I'll read the actual paper and write a blog post about it, but just based on the article, I call bullshit.

theluddite, to random
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"Their Bionic Eyes Are Now Obsolete and Unsupported"

https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete

Maybe capitalist firms competing in a market is a bad way to develop technology that we implant into people's bodies. The stupid games surrounding ownership of capitalist firms shouldn't end up deprecating people's fucking eyes.

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