@trochee@dair-community.social
@trochee@dair-community.social avatar

trochee

@trochee@dair-community.social

NLP (the nerdy kind). Wrong-half Jew. Privilege-traitor.
Linguist. Empiricist. Rager against machines. formerly #indymedia
Also, #comics, #SFF #scifi, languages, big data, algorithms, software design, and more, including #EthicalAI

#WestSeattle #Duwamish unceded land

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thomasfuchs, to random
@thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io avatar

Dressing up troops as humanitarian aid workers is a war crime and a direct violation of the Geneva convention, but who’s counting

foone, to random
@foone@digipres.club avatar

I could go down the long rabbithole of figuring out how to call g*mp's image manipulation tools from a commandline or API, or getting imagemagick installed on this PC and figuring out how to port it over there...

or I could be silly and take advantage of the fact that I'm applying gamma ramps to an 8-bit greyscale image. What's the difference between the "before" and "after" images? a different palette.

foone,
@foone@digipres.club avatar

two of the best feelings when programming are:

  1. figuring out a really clever way to solve a problem
  2. figuring out a really stupid way to solve a problem
evan, to random
@evan@cosocial.ca avatar

Is there a general-purpose ActivityPub implementation that runs on cheapo PHP+MySQL hosting?

kissane, (edited ) to random
@kissane@mas.to avatar

Welp.

https://www.businessinsider.com/jack-dorsey-fiatjaf-nostr-donation-2024-6

(https://archive.ph/uXdXN#selection-2141.0-2157.353)

ETA: Muting thread.

GossiTheDog, to random
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

I strongly believe we're within 5 years of the generative AI boom collapsing almost completely, and it will have a profound economic impact, as the use cases for the products being sold almost entirely suck arse.

GossiTheDog, (edited )
@GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social avatar

You'll know the organisations that restructured and laid off key staff in long standing profit making areas of businesses so they could concentrate all their Opex on ridiculously ill thought through AI schemes.

Remember their names, and the senior people in charge. They suck.

Miriamm, to random
@Miriamm@mastodon.social avatar

These are the type of statues we should be putting up. Danuta Danielsson hitting a neo Nazi (1985).

kbal, to random
@kbal@fedia.io avatar

"We kept companies small for the same reason that we limited the height of skyscrapers: not because we opposed height, or failed to appreciate the value of a really good penthouse view – rather, to keep the building from falling over and wrecking all the adjacent buildings and the lives of the people inside them." — @pluralistic

I'll just quote that so as to have a slightly better chance of remembering it. If Jagmeet Singh were on the fediverse I'd @ him too. How do we build a society where politicians have the basic common sense it takes to follow Cory Doctorow?

jacob, to random
@jacob@jacobian.org avatar

🎶 Music recommendation!

The Race For Space by Public Service Broadcasting is a mashup album but a very cool/strange one. It combines actual audio from the Apollo program with sorta indie-rock-ish instrumentals. The album opens with JFK's "we choose to go to the moon” and closes with audio from the actual moon landing.

It's one of my favorite albums: the music slaps, the concept totally works, and it never fails to give me chills.

Here's the best track, “Go”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHIo6qwJarI

emilymbender, to random
@emilymbender@dair-community.social avatar

Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, Ep 33 Much Ado About 'AI' 'Deception', in which guest co-host @mmitchell_ai and I find it's really the AI doomers deceiving themselves with motivated thinking.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/15180482-episode-33-much-ado-about-ai-deception-may-20-2024

With thanks, as always, to Christie Taylor for production!

Also available as video on PeerTube!
https://peertube.dair-institute.org/w/tYM69gHkQsoFiKyhQfWEVE

Find all episodes here: https://www.dair-institute.org/maiht3k/

And our newsletter here: https://buttondown.email/maiht3k

Audiogram with the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 logo, title "Episode 33: Much Ado About 'AI' 'Deception'" and subtitle "Why the handwringing over duplicitous algorithmis says more about us" Captions: MARGARET MITCHELL: It’s not fundamentally truthful. It’s literally a bullshit generator. This concept that somehow it’s already grounded in lying and truth and understands this as ‘a human good’ misunderstands how these systems work. EMILY M. BENDER: Yeah. IrateLump says in the chat, “It’s so hard to know how much of this is intentional misrepresentation and how much is just wishful thinking leading to motivated reasoning. MARGARET MITCHELL: I think that is so spot on. Yeah. Some of this is confirmation bias and some of this is experimenter’s bias. There’s kind of this fantasy, this kind of desire for this kind of thing to be true, even if it’s horrible. There’s this sci-fi part of us that gets really sort of stimulated and seduced into this mode of thinking. We’ll tend to see evidence of that even when there are other alternative reasonable explanations. We’ll tend to focus on that in particular when putting forward the results. And that’s how we end up in this sort of situation here, where it’s like seduction into fantasizing that has overwhelmed the more sort of rational explanations of what’s happening.

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

Some of y'all are still confused as to why it seems that Silicon Valley billionaires are "turning to Trump." That's because you don't listen to Black people, you disrespect poor white people, and you ignore obvious statistics that have been staring you in the face for decades.

Silicon. Valley. Billionaires. Have. Always. Supported. Trump.

Not because they like the tax breaks. Because they are more likely to be racist, and racism is the greatest predictor of Trump support.

1/N

mekkaokereke,
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

Most of the people in Silicon Valley, vote Dem.

But most of the money in Silicon Valley, votes GOP.

Some of these VCs sit around in online chat rooms with alt-right reactionaries and real life nazis. Some of them hold little public meetings, where they talk about ending democracy and great replacement theory. Some of them write books on why diversity is bad, and should be avoided. Most of them cheer on Elon's anti-woke, fashy push.

And y''all are surprised that they support Trump?

4/N

mekkaokereke,
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

When you hear "college educated white folk," picture:

  • A barista at a Starbucks in Portland
  • Pam and Jim from The Office
  • Military officers
  • Teachers

None of these people are making bank.🤷🏿‍♂️ They're slightly pro-Trump or pro-Biden, depending on the region.

When you hear "non college educated white folk," picture:

  • Tech startup founders that drop out of college
  • Trades business owners (plumber, electrician, etc)
  • 70% of real estate agents
  • 77% of sheriffs

Rich. Very Trumpy, everywhere.

paninid, to ai
@paninid@mastodon.world avatar

If “#AI is shorthand for shitty”, it turns out that management is realizing that “shitty is good enough”, quality is irrelevant, and the costs will be for their successor to bear: https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/understanding-the-real-threat-generative

kjhealy, to random
@kjhealy@mastodon.social avatar

This seems like both a personal cry for help and an indication that you work for a dangerously dysfunctional organization

kjhealy, to random
@kjhealy@mastodon.social avatar

It's fun that people come up with truly clever little hacks like the udm14 trick for Google search and find ways to integrate it into their setups, but I can't help but feel that it has the same vibe as those allegedly heart-warming news stories where a kid runs a lemonade stand to raise money to pay off their classmates' school lunch debt or their Mom's medical bills. Like, that's nice but why the hell are we even in this situation in the first place?

nora, to random
@nora@blob.love avatar

it is not useful to tell people who do not control what operating system they use at work to use a different operating system at work.

inquiline, to random
@inquiline@union.place avatar

People shaming others to vote and saying we mustn't say anything bad about Biden/DNC makes more sense when they reveal that they think the problem is the voters, not the very, very rigged system we are forced to submit to

LRRRonEarth, to random
@LRRRonEarth@beige.party avatar

THIS IS A PRETTY HARD TIME FOR YOUR REPUBLICAN FAMILY MEMBERS. KICK 'EM WHILE THEY'RE DOWN. CALL YOUR UNCLE A BABY. ASK HIM IF HE'S GONNA CRY.

LRRRonEarth,
@LRRRonEarth@beige.party avatar

@lulu

I AM ABSOLUTELY NOT A DEMOCRAT. NO NO. I AM A FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY SPACE COMMUNIST.

wordshaper, to random
@wordshaper@weatherishappening.network avatar

@trochee On the one hand I always think it's a good idea when people work on things that directly affect them, as the outcomes are generally better or at least more sensibly designed. On the other, when you look at what these people are targeting when they do work on things that directly affect them you end up being terribly depressed and also feeling a little sorry for how sad their lives are and how much of a mess they're making trying to deal with that.

trochee,
@trochee@dair-community.social avatar

@wordshaper

But it's — as in the case of the LLMs — not the engineers, scientists, researchers, or designers who choose the direction, it's the executives and venture capitalists who decide what problem they're gonna solve.

The "moon landing" great collective effort of the 2010s was to alienate both commerce (crypto, metaverse) and conversation (chatbots, LLMs) from the world of real interpersonal relationships

And then the COVID-19 lockdowns sewed the lid on

peter, to random
@peter@thepit.social avatar

what does it say about Silicon Valley that they think the most pressing problems facing the American worker and consumer right now are: 1) too many e-mails to read; 2) too many meetings to attend; 3) i wish i had an assistant to plan my travel.

MusiqueNow, to news
@MusiqueNow@todon.eu avatar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lMxdQU6xMz0

3 June 2024

MusiqueNow,
@MusiqueNow@todon.eu avatar

'Let's be clear. , is on a boil water advisory because local elected officials have chosen to prioritise the funding of violent police at the expense of local infrastructure, environmental safety and . '

QasimRashid, to random
@QasimRashid@mastodon.social avatar

HEADLINE 1: June 2023: Atlanta City Council approves $90M for Cop City

HEADLINe 2: June 2024: Atlanta residents are under boil water orders because of a failed water system

America’s out of control police spending is literally killing us, and police violence is just the tip of that iceberg. Smh.

image/png

jasongorman, to random
@jasongorman@mastodon.cloud avatar

They say a picture speaks a thousand words

trochee, to random
@trochee@dair-community.social avatar

A shockingly large proportion of SV technosolutions are band-aids for the "problems" of a techbro who

  • drives to work alone
  • in an expensive car
  • with a good mobile connection
  • through silicon valley traffic

For example:

  • autonomous driving (or gig drivers)
  • food delivery; task rabbit
  • agents to read and respond to your email
  • voice assistants providing emotional validation

https://mastodon.online/@danirabbit/112502816917988936

cstross,
@cstross@wandering.shop avatar

@trochee @kataclyst A machine to do the ironing! Domestic Service As A Service! An auction network to allow would-be maids and butlers to underbid one another to work for the most undemanding techbro (if they work >90 hours a week on death marches they won't be around to bug you about dusting on top of the wardrobe).

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