Trying to get some sort of centralized management of users.. On the recommendation of some, I chose FreeIPA.. Nothing short of a pain in the ass 😜 getting it installed on my LXD cluster!! I'm sure it has something todo with me not knowing WTF i'm doing..
@taco I neither endorse nor refute your criticism of The Sun.
However, this attitude of looking down one's nose at anyone who "doesn't have any post-secondary education" is bullshit, elitist, exclusionary crap.
If someone is willfully ignorant, go ahead and call them out on it. But not having had an opportunity to go to post-secondary school does not make someone automatically a moron, unworthy of consideration as your fellow human.
"This is a country with net household wealth of $2.25 trillion, which is $450,200 per person. How is it that 90% think it’s OK for 10% of our people to be so poor they can’t afford a place to live or enough food to eat?"
I had a lot of people engaging about #Eurovision last night, and for those of you that follow me for security and tech wondering if my account had been hijacked. It hadn’t, and this will probably be my last post about Eurovision Song Contest this year.
But I’d like to go into some of the minutiae and nuance of the contest, and explain why not everything is as it seems from the outside.
@nattiegoogie Which reminds me, I really need to post the latest bullshit letter I got from Twitter in my ongoing right to erasure dispute with them through the Irish “DPC”.
HELLLLL NAAWWWWW this is some bullshit.... I caught my #ISP throttling the connection to the FRICKING #FREEBSD PKG SERVER!
For real, speeds were like 8.3kbps in a fiber connection. And then I confirmed the BS by adding a VPN on top and running pkg upgrade again. Boom, back to 1~2Mbps again. Caught 'em Red. fucking. handed.
Why even do this shit? For real. It's just fucking HTTP!
Reminds me of the time when The Next Web, an adtech company, asked me and some other folks to say “I told you so” about Facebook, another adtech company.¹
I said I‘d only do it if I could call them out at the same time. They agreed.
You know why?
Because the fuckers knew they’d still make money from the article… via adtech!
My core value is personal #freedom. I’m strongly for #FreeSoftware and dream of a world in which free software is the default basically everywhere. I’m for a free and open #Internet, against #censorship and intellectual monopolies. #Decentralization is better than centralization. I hate #hierarchies of #power. ✊
I have a low tolerance for #bullshit and zero tolerance for anti-intellectualism. Critical thinking is important to get things done. If you find bullshit in my posts, tell me. 💩
From #politics to #AI, one of the defining aspects of the time we live in is #bullshit.
Which is why I highly recommend this #book (essay, really) of #philosophy by Harry G Frankfurt. It really will help lead you to an understanding of where we find ourselves.
In Frankfurt's model, bullshit is not about lying, it is another axis of #morality entirely. Whereas a lie is constructed with knowledge of the truth, and is directly in opposition to it, bullshit has no concern with the truth. Bullshit can be true, or it can be false. The creator of bullshit does so without regard to these things.
When an LLM tells you that the human population of Mars is ten billion, it is not lying to you, it is bullshitting. Even if it correctly tells you that the population of Mars is zero, it is still bullshitting. Either way, its "concern" is with the text it is generating, and not with the truth or falsity of that text.
Here are a few quotes to whet your appetite, but you should go read the whole thing. https://www2.csudh.edu/ccauthen/576f12/frankfurt__harry_-_on_bullshit.pdf It's not very long, it'll take you 20 minutes. I like the hard copy, I re-read it frequently and the physical book helps me feel like I am Thinking Serious Thoughts.
"For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. "
"Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus. It is designed to insert a particular falsehood at a specific point in a set or system of beliefs, in order to avoid the consequences of having that point occupied by the truth. This requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true. And in order to invent an effective lie, he must design his falsehood under the guidance of that truth. On the other hand, a person who undertakes to bullshit his way through has much more freedom. His focus is panoramic rather than particular. He does not limit himself to inserting a certain falsehood at a specific point, and thus he is not constrained by the truths surrounding that point or intersecting it. He is prepared to fake the context as well, so far as need requires."
This was originally written, by the way, in 1984, but it sure reads like it could have been written in 2016. Or late 2022.
In our book Calling Bullshit, Jevin West and I provide the following definition.
#Bullshit involves language, statistical figures, data graphics, and other forms of presentation intended to persuade by impressing and overwhelming a reader or listener, with a blatant disregard for truth and logical coherence.
Notice that this is what #LargeLanguageModels are designed to do. They are designed with a blatant disregard for logical coherence in that they lack any underlying logic model whatsoever.