Notices by Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)

Between AI and collaboration with fascism, a lot of companies and nonprofits are learning about trust thermoclines the hard way right now.

Lying to someone then laughing when they believe you isn't a joke, it's just being mean.

Anyway, before you push that April Fool's post live, some questions to consider:

- Is it a joke?
- Is it a funny joke?
- Is it a funny joke that punches up instead of down?
- Is the joke still funny going into year six of a global pandemic and during the staggeringly cruel rise of global fascism?

I can't help but think of visibility as a kind of social contract.

If you want to see us, then you need to be able to be there for us when the people who want us to die also see us.

We get to be visible for our own sake, of course, but if you encourage visibility, much less demand it, please be prepared to offer the support that comes along with your side of that contract.

It is deeply confusing to me that conventional tech media keeps lavishing praise on Bluesky while making transphobic sneers about the fediverse.

Wait, no, I think I just answered my own question.

https://m.ai6yr.org/@ai6yr/114224015746470294

Hot take: if I have to choose which war criminal to be my adversary, I would generally choose an incompetent one who leaks directly to the media than one who is competent and runs a tight ship.

LLM shilling really strikes me as a form of Gish gallop. If you point out that they don't work as advertised, suddenly the conversation is about how they could work one day. If you point out that there's no theoretical or empirical basis for that expectation, suddenly the conversation is about "democratizing" coding skills. If you point out that there's no evidence LLMs actually accomplish that goal, suddenly the conversation is about AGI or something.

The thing that gets me about this political moment is how many, many chances those of us in the US had to stop this.

Even just in recent memory:

We could have not elected Reagan.
We could have done something when GWB stole the election.
We could have done something about the DHS, ICE, the TSA, and every other horrific organization GWB created.
We could have done something after Sandy Hook.
We could have stopped COVID.
We could have defunded police.

Apparently my one book and most of my academic papers are in the libgen database, all under my deadname.

So, yeah. Seems like a lot of what LLMs regurgitate about quantum computers will be trained on misgendering me.

Fucking wonderful.

I'm old enough to remember when journals hounded Aaron Swartz to his death over daring to archive papers, and here it is Zuckerberg et al can just... do that and so much more with zero compensation to authors, as long as they promise to only use it to undermine labor rights and synthesize misinformation at scale.

I know it's far from an original thought, but what's the point of copyright, anyway?

"God is my copilot" bumper stickers read pretty differently now.

I forget where I first saw this analogy, but describing LLMs as a broken clock just makes so much sense. You cannot scale up or improve LLMs to address fundamental limitations with the technology any more than you can make a hyperscale broken-clock data center to more accurately tell time.

What the hell is even the point of voting for Democrats? I've argued for years against both-sides-are-bad firing, but I feel like I have egg on my face as Senate Dems and governors like Newsom are almost giddy about adopting fascist, eliminationist narratives about us. Like, how does voting blue help me survive right about now?

I'll at least partially blame that for a *long* time, F/OSS has been ideologically captured into effectively being a kind of free labor for giant corporations... the disconnect from labor politics is a major weakness of many F/OSS communities, IMHO.

Reading project READMEs is so weird now. The examples for OSS projects seem to always be a mix of a few genuinely nice but somewhat niche applications, mixed in with examples showing how to better use climate-destroying labor-betraying plagiarism machines that lie and that you can only use by giving money to eugenicist fascists who spend way, *way* too much time on LessWrong and SSC.

The ideological capture of F/OSS communities by proprietary services and binaries* that are directly designed to work against their users' interests is at once fascinating and horrifying.

(*I strongly disagree with the idea that a serialized model is "open source," unless a debug-stripped P/E file is also "open source.")

I would have a lot more sympathy for where Mozilla is coming from if they could just be transparent about it. Like, put out a PR saying "hey, we're strapped for cash and would like to keep making Firefox, here's what we're trying, why we don't like it, and why it's still what we think is the best option."

But that's precisely what they're *not* doing.

ACAB, but especially the ones who just stole over a hundred dollars from me by putting a decreased speed zone at the bottom of a hill, and sending photo tickets for decelerating at a safe and reasonable rate through the change in speed limit. Seriously, I don't know how you issue this big a ticket when I was so very slightly past the speed limit and actively slowing down.

I just hate that police are incentivized to create sudden and unsafe changes in speed limits in order to make money off spurious tickets. I'm privileged enough I can pay it, but this is just theft, pure and simple.

(BTW, the tell is that this doesn't go on my driving record. If this was an actual safety issue and not theft, it fucking *should* go on my record. But it's not. This is in complete bad faith, and the police just get away with stealing money.)