@fkinoshita "Computer science is the study of self-inflicted problems."
-- my old theoretical CS prof.
@fkinoshita "Computer science is the study of self-inflicted problems."
-- my old theoretical CS prof.
@aral In fairness, I picked that phrase because it's a direct quote from Marc Andreessen - a uniquely reliable source of psychopathic language.
@aral I had a conversation today about how horrible it must be to be a person with a conscience across pretty much every industry. You work in advertising? You're manipulating people for profit. You work in garments? You're creating mountains of pollution heaped onto the Global South. You work in journalism? You're writing manipulative clickbait.
And you're probably a good person, anyway. Your work got turned evil by economic forces outside your control.
@aral Perhaps it's just because software is my own trade, but I think the software industry has been uniquely disgusting in this process. *Why* does that poor journalist have to produce shitty clickbait? *Why* is advertising now synonymous with surveillance? Because of the software industry.
Software did eat the world - and in the process, it unsurprisingly made the world into shit, half-digested by software.
@airshipper @malcircuit @spiegelmama The very short version is that back in the late 50s, John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky wanted to hold an academic conference about computing, but the field of cybernetics (founded and headed by Norbert Wiener) pretty much dominated the area. McCarthy and Minsky couldn't stand Wiener, so they came up with the term "artificial intelligence" instead of "cybernetics" so they could get away with not inviting him.
@Wolven I doubt they're going to walk this one back. I remember Wave and Google+ too, but I don't think they've ever gone as absolutely all-in on anything in their graveyard as they now have on generative AI.
@mattly I used to have "Therefore we must destroy the present politico-economic system" as my personal "ceterum censeo...". ;-P
But I have begun to think that we are probably overdue for a *correction*, or whatever to call it, about computers. If there was one thing being holed up all alone with nothing but digital technologies in 2020-2021 taught me, it is that the fully-digitized utopia fucking sucks.
@mattly I mean, at this point I'm just about ready to get a hammer and hoist the banner of General Ludd.
In seriousness, I think computers are at their best when they do things humans can't do at all. This is why I love old-school genart, but hate AI imagery. Why have computers spew out shoddy imitations of human art, when they could be used to make mathematical art that broadens the scope of what "art" even is?
@mattly I can't remember who wrote it, but someone recently remarked that the 80s-00s was an era where computers were mostly used to empower people. The 00s-10s was one where they were mostly used to surveil and manipulate people. And now we're transitioning into an era where they will be used to replace people.
@mattly Satya Nadella *bragged* that with AI, Microsoft was moving from the bicycle paradigm to steam engines. He bragged about this in a world that is presently dying of fossil fuels.
@mattly There's one part of font design where I'd *love* for some ML to take over: Kerning tables. There is nothing in the world more tedious and uninspiring than kerning a font. I've tried to automate it myself in various ways (including neural nets), without success.
And here is the font design version of the dream of current AI trends: Make an AI take over all the fun parts of designing glyphs and making creative decisions, leaving only tedious soul-crushing kerning to humans.
I make fonts as a hobby. I've been using this one as my terminal daily driver for a while, and it's pretty much come to be just "what the terminal looks like" for me now.
Should I put it up in public somewhere?
(It will, of course, be scraped so someone can use it to make an AI font generator and extinguish a little bit more joy from life.)
@mattly @technomancy I don't really care about making money off them. My terminal font and book face I made just to have something nice to look at when using my terminal and setting various things in LaTeX, back when I was a teacher. And also to keep me sane during lockdown. My sans was a gift for my mother, for her 64th birthday. Economic value was never part of it.
I do care about not donating free labour to the AI barons.
@mattly @technomancy No - none of my fonts are publicly available. I keep meaning to do it, but there's always something I have to do before I'm satisfied.
I'm thinking about putting this up somewhere though. :)
(This is 2024, so it will be scraped and then some asshole will make an AI font generator to extinguish just a little bit more joy from life.)
@technomancy Mine is 4 years old and I made it myself. There's too much sunk cost in it now to ever change it, I think. :-)
Quick screenshot with a sample. My terminal apparently has janky rendering of the italics.
@mcc Short-term: I am personally lucky that I live in a country that has some fairly restrictive regulations on workplace surveillance. I'm sure that this will spawn even worse spyware, but there are upper limits to how much of it I can legally be forced to use.
Longer-term: The end-goal of all the AI training is of course to build the Mass Layoff Machine, and that's going to fuck people here over too, if they can just get enough data from people in countries without a history of strong unions.
@mcc I hate it so much. I don't even use Windows, but I know that the things they'll be building using this will be deployed against me nonetheless.
@mcc Remember when people were saying "you're not the customer, you're the product"?
You're not even that. You're the raw material for the product.
@mcc *Of course* it won't be kept local. Same with the "we'll listen in on your phone calls to check for scammers!" features Google is hawking.
"We're running out of high quality language data!" ... "It's a total coincidence that we've made this decision right now, but we've decided to listen in on every phone call / watch every software interaction anybody ever makes ever again".
They're after more training data.
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.