Notices by Rich Puchalsky ⩜⃝ (richpuchalsky@mastodon.social), page 2

Storage of digitally native texts is not the largest problem at the moment -- disk drives are cheap. Categorization and search is. When someone wants a text they don't want a near copy of a text, even if the text is someone's social medium post.

What are some other things that librarians do? They answer questions. An LLM is like a reference librarian if the librarian is blackout drunk and will not remember anything or really give coherent answers but still somehow sounds sober.

4/n

Librarians want to categorize and store texts so that they can be retrieved by people who are interested in them. The problem of people trying to drown out truth with propaganda, or art with bad copies, is an old one and librarians have various methods to deal with it.

When LLMs drown out human produced texts through a multitude of variants and partial copies, one can look for signs that it is an LLM produced text. But this takes time and LLMs will presumably get better at concealment.

3/n

Periodic self-repetition: As a data librarian I can say that "AI" is not a matter of personal preference -- whether you like it or not, or whether you have found some use that you think is useful. It actively destroys organized knowledge, and therefore it actively destroys civilization.

Whenever someone looks for a human written text and can't find it because statistical near variants have been created and indexed, whenever "AI" "hallucinates" a reference, knowledge has been destroyed.

@bruces

Why do they all have bluechecks? Did Bluesky start giving them to people, or are people imitating old Twitter in some kind of self-degradation ritual?

Why are the fascists calling all the military brass to a single in-person meeting? People who have never heard of fascism before are puzzled

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/09/25/hegseth-generals-quantico-meeting/

Ah yes, here we go. A message from the retired US general who once served as the commanding general for US forces in Europe.

Do not un-boycott Disney.

@bruces

only if they are humanoid killer robots

I've seen a number of posts attempting to minimize Kirk's position as "just a podcaster" and have tried to point out he ran a $40 million/year organization in 2020 (just counting revenues, who knows what kind of donations) doing agitprop and was apparently some kind of servitor to Trump Jr. But that's not really the important thing.

The important thing is that everyone in the US political class immediately recognized him as one of them.

Since someone reminded me of how it was 20 years ago, I might as well write about the continued failure of people to understand why they shouldn't stay on places like Twitter or Substack -- with reference to a place called "Tech Central Station" (I think, my memory may have failed) which existed from 2000-2005.

TCS paid bloggers and indie writers for stories. About very varied informative subjects. Why did they do this?

1/n

@mhoye

No one in tech learned anything from _IBM and the Holocaust_, no one in tech is ever going to learn anything about anything. It's just a category error to expect them to.

The people living in Phoenix, Arizona are people that I just don't understand. Ok so more than 400 people are suspected to have died there (so far) from the heat this summer. That I understand, most Americans want most other people to die. The place is becoming uninhabitable. OK, fine, people have no real future-looking ability. But come on, it's a place where you can't walk your dog because their paws will burn.

What kind of people live in a place where you can't walk your dog?

@hakan_geijer

Now you are just being an asshole. You were throughout the thread, really.

@hakan_geijer

OK. I'm willing to be annoying. I'm far too old to police myself on social media in case someone gets offended by (looks at recent examples) my reply from experience about to mop an unvarnished wooden floor.

Is this not the same as FOSS boosterism? I said at the top of the thread I didn't like FOSS boosterism. But once again: our likes and dislikes don't make rules for other people.

@hakan_geijer

People can get pissy about whatever they want to get pissy about. I said that giving advice is not some kind of anarchist infraction, and further that it's something that a whole group of people kind of characteristically do, not in a culture invariant way but certainly in most of our cultures.

" I try to avoid that unless it's medical or security misinfo which implies and immanent and significant risk of injury or imprisonment"

"your advice is copypasta, mine is righteous"

@hakan_geijer

If someone tells me once "don't bother me" I block them, so I don't do it again.

Look, I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think you're actually reading what I wrote. It's not even consistent with how much advice you give and how much of an authority your texts set you up as.

@hakan_geijer

OK, but as anarchists I think that it's important to distinguish between behaviors that other people don't like and behaviors that actually harm people or get power over them in some way.

If a criterion for being an anarchist is "don't be an asshole, as anyone else defines that" there will be very few of us. I for one am not willing to let other people define my advice-giving behavior as something I should stop. I'm fine with them blocking or muting of course.

@hakan_geijer

It's not that I don't get it, it's that we have an actual difference of opinion about whether giving advice to people, sometimes in an unwanted way, is somehow equivalent to racism or misogyny.

@hakan_geijer

If the person started out "I have a disability" and someone gave advice that depends on not having a disability, then sure. Otherwise my point is that this is an annoying person in the bar offense. There's a number of stereotypes about how people do this from the post office guy in _Cheers_ to Grandpa Simpson and the onion in his belt, and it's kind of part of the human condition.

People love this kind of post because a) FOSS is objectively bad, and only survives as the lesser evil to enshittified stuff, b) people hate being given advice on any topic.

I'm an old guy, we give advice. It's one of the very common temptations of age. It doesn't matter whether it's about gardening or whatever, people will be like "how dare you respond to my social media post as if I wanted advice on the problem I posted about."

https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/115015765968617946