@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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tess, to random
@tess@mastodon.social avatar

manic pixie torment nexus

https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/13/24155652/chatgpt-voice-mode-gpt4o-upgrades

trochee,
@trochee@dair-community.social avatar

@tess

I feel obligated to contribute this

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

May I never ever ever be the kind of guy who Ed Zitron gets a hate on for

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Just a devastating career-long rundown of the dude who drove Google search into the ground, and some of the people on whose necks he stepped along the way

Via @mhoye

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

I propose that 2024 be the year of no more "sprints".

organize your work into "strolls", and connect up those strolls into "rambles".

aw dammit now I want a book pitch for the "randonneur's guide to software development".

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

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

Holy cow, Ed Zitron can write about the careening rolling disaster that is the useful knowledge of the web being rendered useless by the glue-factories of modern search

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-great-looting-of-the-internet/

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

Louder again, for the people in the back. This is why Ned Ludd rose up!

> AI companies make money by selling models to companies hoping to fire their workers.
> for that to work, companies have to plan on making money by firing their workers and replacing them with AI.
> If no company was interested in this proposition, we wouldn't have to worry

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/112088883766763211

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

This thread of trains driving on grassy tracks is pure solarpunk competency porn in the vein of @annaleen 's THE TERRAFORMERS

(via @blogdiva ; thx!)
https://urbanists.social/@straphanger/112168979067387415

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

> Replacing a screenwriter with AI to “save money” is like cutting out your daily Starbucks but buying a $25,000 La Marzocco espresso machine, if the La Marzocco was also bad at making espresso, but could, with careful human assistance, produce beverages that resemble espresso.

The Computers Are Coming For The Wrong Jobs | Defector
https://defector.com/the-computers-are-coming-for-the-wrong-jobs

trochee, (edited ) to random
@trochee@dair-community.social avatar

The boom in LLMs is going to hollow out a number of knowledge-worker industries — for example, writing boilerplate code or technical documentation

Not because it does it well but because the flacks can sell upper management on the idea that it can do it at all, as @pluralistic recently pointed out

This sale is a pig-in-a-poke, and the winning move is to not be holding the bag when the actual code or documentation is found to be terrible

1/

trochee,
@trochee@dair-community.social avatar

What is our (data science, machine learning, UX, design) equivalent of solarpunk?

Can we even imagine a world of automation without the exploitation, fantasies of infinite growth, and the increasingly unsubtle justifications for "laundering toil away"?

What are compelling visions of the future of automation that aren't burying the exploitation behind an app or within a billion-parameter model?

6/fin (I think)

w7voa, to random
@w7voa@journa.host avatar

Trump campaign is asking for down-ballot candidates who use his name, image and likeness in fundraising appeals to give at least 5 percent of the proceeds to the campaign. https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/17/trump-campaign-fundraising-five-percent-00152830

trochee,
@trochee@dair-community.social avatar

@futurebird @jwcph @w7voa

it's like he heard he was "living in your head rent free" and just knee-jerk assumed he was the landlord in this metaphor

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

one of my co-workers confused Animal Crossing with Animal Farm before coffee, and made this brilliant thing

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

OMG this is so good

as someone who has been in a fairly exciting field (speech and language tech) for >25 years and at least a dozen technical self-reinventions, this 💯 rings true

The negotiation cycle. — Ethan Marcotte ( @beep ) via @grimalkina
https://ethanmarcotte.com/wrote/the-negotiation-cycle/

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

the current AI boom is 100% "put a bird on it"

but that bird is a stochastic parrot 🦜

with apologies to @emilymbender and @lzg

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

Musk is trying to turn his loss to the NLRB into a corporate headshot against any federal recognition of labor whatsoever

Gloves and mask are off; he really wants to be the manifestation of racialized Capital embodied in saggy middle-aged flesh

https://mas.to/@carnage4life/111701537379211149

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

Six forms of AI-driven dehumanization, and six forms of cognitive scientist resistance

thanks @emilymbender for sharing this preprint of https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214231217286

(preprint at https://faculty.washington.edu/ebender/papers/Bender-2024-preprint.pdf)

StefanThinks, to random
@StefanThinks@beige.party avatar

Inspired by Stephen Hawking, to test if time travel is possible, I threw a party for time travelers but sent out the invitations afterward to see if anyone came.

Nobody came, but I don't know if it’s because time travel doesn't exist or everyone hates me.

trochee,
@trochee@dair-community.social avatar

@Alice

When I was in college in the early 90s, I encountered flyers for a budding right-wing grievance paper that called itself "The Precept" (think "do you feel persecuted for being right wing on campus?")

So I used my editor-of-the-highschool-paper digital layout skills and made identically-formatted counter-flyers for "The Pre-crypt", a cannibalism-curious paper that asked "do you feel persecuted for exploring alternative protein sources?"

Proud to say they both disappeared thereafter

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

Y'all, I ain't kidding about LLMs being "word shoggoths"

especially if you read "Elder Things" as "Slow AI" LLCs

Look what it says on Wikipedia:

> Though able to "understand" the Elder Things' language, shoggoths had no real consciousness and were controlled through hypnotic suggestion.

> …exterminating the shoggoths was not an option as the Elder Things were dependent on them for labor and had long lost their capacity to create new life.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoggoth

https://dair-community.social/@trochee/112477267079709781

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

OH at work:

"giving out medals for firefighting quietly encourages arson"

this is a post about software engineering

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

This article is one enormous [citation needed]

> “I’m more optimistic because we have been using the tool a lot, and some of the insights we’re starting to get from a scientific standpoint are things that none of our scientists were aware of,” he added.

Moderna CEO says AI will help scientists understand ‘most diseases’ in 3 to 5 years | Semafor
https://www.semafor.com/article/04/18/2024/moderna-ceo-says-ai-will-help-understand-most-diseases-in-3-to-5-years

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

A mild-mannered (but deep) burn on a great many self-serving technosolutionists, from @PavelASamsonov

> If your goal is to "create value," solving the problems of the people with the fewest problems may not be the best place to start!

https://mastodon.social/@PavelASamsonov/110374060820177995

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

Oh man, Sinead and Pee-wee in the same week

A rough week for us gen-x weirdos

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

OH* at work:

> Nobody writes a manifesto that says "everything should remain exactly how it is", except maybe Marc Andreesen

  • okay, I overheard it because I said it
trochee,
@trochee@dair-community.social avatar

So my manifesto was about

> take dependencies only on components with longer planning horizons than you

Chasing trends can get you "tool-stranded" — the thing you're depending on goes away (probably because it's no longer the apple of some executive's eye).

Depending on a hot new toolset is asking for trouble (old man yells at clouds); you're better off using tools that were stable 15 years ago

This is not ONLY about "generative AI" but it is not NOT about generative AI.

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

How dare you, whoever stocked this snack drawer.

How. Dare. You.

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