Notices by Reg Braithwaite 🍓 (raganwald@social.bau-ha.us)

Thoughts from Eric Forman's basement:

1. We'll know that generative AI is really here when the entire stack from LLM vendors all the way down is written by LLMs, and everyone who remembers the code that was originally written by humans is gone.

👇🏽

👆🏽

2. “The AI Stack” will not be an architectural chain, it will be a recursive pile of AI, where humans prompt AIs, which in turn do the programming by prompting other AIs, which in turn do the programming by prompting other AIs, which in turn...

Because prompting AI will itself become so large and complex that AI is needed to prompt AI. And no, we won't recognize any but the human-most “prompts.”

It’ll be AI all the way down.

👇🏽

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And finally:

3. When people speak of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” as prophetic, they’ll be speaking about Ken Thompson’s work, not George Orwell’s.

“To what extent should one trust a statement that a program is free of Trojan horses? Perhaps it is more important to trust the people who wrote the software.”

—Ken Thompson, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Turing Award lecture, 1984

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf

Eric Forman’s basement is a place where even the most banal observations provoke unstoppable giggles:

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"When nobody remembers how to read code, who will review the code written by AI?"

_More AI, of course._

"Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

_You can't fool me, young man. It’s AI all the way down._

@aral @Nick_Stevens_graphics I was about to say that's a major correction, but then I recognized your cunning:

The statement that he's not the engineer his mummy tells him he is... Is quite the slight.

This is a MessagePad 100, the device that Apple shipped too early, and revisited with iPhone a decade later.

It was widely ridiculed because you wrote on it with handwriting, but it didn't interpret what you wanted from what you wrote and how you wrote it, you had to teach yourself how to write what it wanted to interpret.

Looking at AI today... Ah, you can write the punchline for yourselves.

@randomgeek @mhoye

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

—Hannah Arendt, “The Origins of Totalitarianism” (1951)

“I fight for the Right to Repair. Which is why the system wants to torture me to death. It’s about control, kid, and if we can fix what they break, the whole system collapses.”

—Harry Tuttle, rogue heating engineer

@mhoye One of the many brilliant things about Brazil was the depiction of fascism was the wilful refusal to see that The State was rotten with incompetence.

By design.

”Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.“

—Frank Herbert, ”Dune“

@ronanmcd Ironically, a lot of them angrily denounce Big Pharma for making things like anti-depressants, which the conservative influencers say just keep people sick but paying out for medication month after month.

Followed by, "Click here to subscribe to my rants."

@jasongorman @corneil

I’m laughing at this because if I stop laughing, I’ll start sobbing. Not for my career, but for the people and the passion for programming that I love.

I'm skating on thin ice when I use words like "BRANDS" on LinkedIn:

“All too often, America has been a democracy of convenience. Rights are granted to those who align with power. For the poor, for people of color, for those who resist injustice, rights are but words written on water.”

Mahmoud Khalil has written this century‘s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”

https://social.bau-ha.us/@avillavecesn@col.social/114360788620196043

@HistoPol And to juxtapose it with ”Letter from Birmingham Jail:“ Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

https://www.learningforjustice.org/sites/default/files/general/Letter%20from%20Birmingham%20Jail%20MLK.pdf

Under late-stage capitalism, fixing things without permission is a revolutionary act.

“We're all in this together, kid.”

@david_megginson I got started with “The Mac is Not a Typewriter.” There's an entire generation of people who followed its suggestions like a modern-day Strunk & White.

Another LinkedIn influencer explaining that if you write using em-dashes, he'll ignore you because you obviously used AI.

MF, I was writing blog posts directly in HTML twenty years ago with — and also ranges with  –  twenty years ago, don't tell me I write like AI.

I don't write like AI, AI writes like it reads my web site, you dunderheaded thunder-chicken.

Fascism optimizes for incompetence, because there is nobody so loyal as someone whose only claim to their job is the King's patronage.