Notices by Phil Stevens :tinoflag: (phil_stevens@mastodon.nz)

RE: https://mastodon.nz/@ClareBear/116608881300602104

I would go much, much farther than this excellent start.

"AI" is such a tangled mess of unknowns. Unless a booster can honestly answer some tough questions, it is manifestly unsuitable for any mission-critical applications. Start with these:

What is the provenance of the information that is being used for inference? Sources and references not only help establish the data's reliability, but also provide vital context. LLMs are just matching word fragments and predicting what would most likely come next.

What is the cost to run the model? The big vendors' token pricing is changing rapidly (hint: it's not going down) and a lot of big software shops are suddenly finding out that their monthly spend will put them out of business really quickly. See Shopify and Stripe for real-world examples.

What is the effective yield per token? How much "work" do you get out of an LLM for a given spend? No one knows, because you can give an identical set of prompts and get completely different outputs each time. There is nothing deterministic or predictable about this and it sure as hell is no way to run either a business or a public sector agency (they're different, BTW, but some requirements are universal).

How stable (and by extension trustworthy) are the vendors? Do you expect them to still be around after the bubble pops? Check out Ed Zitron's excellent rants for a withering analysis of how shaky this whole house of cards really is...https://www.wheresyoured.at/ai-is-too-expensive/

Just like the companies who have reduced their dev headcount, orgs that lay off a bunch of backroom analysts will find out the hard way that they were doing Real Work and that many other functions relied on what they did. When the LLM goes dark, even if you do manage to hire some of those domain experts back, they will be appalled and hampered by the scale of the mess you're asking them to clean up. #AI

Zero surprises here. Southland's next.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/594164/amazon-takes-45m-hit-abandons-planned-west-auckland-data-centre

https://www.carbonbrief.org/traditional-models-still-outperform-ai-for-extreme-weather-forecasts/

RE: https://mastodon.nz/@cuddlyanarchist/116478712970307954

The problems with imputing "meaning" from atoms of text are deeply ingrained and potentially unsolvable, at least with LLMs as currently implemented.

Predictive inference is just a statistical exercise. And if your data set is dirty, skews in a particular direction, has gaps in it, or represents a rapidly changing knowledge domain, the conclusions you make from that cannot possibly be better than the source.

All of this was a problem in the beginning of the genAI boom a few years ago, but now it's becoming far worse as models train on the slop that they themselves spewed out. We've created a giant petri dish and now the culture is feeding on its own waste products. All those gaps, biases, and shaky prior assumptions are merrily spawning their own feedback loops.

Nicola Willis thinks everyone should get a pony.

All the other countries in our refined fuels supply chain are implementing conservation measures and even rationing, but Willis and her team are glued to some alternative fanfic that has everything coming right any day now.

I hope her plans include looking for work come November. Because she obviously doesn't have any for the country. #NZPol

https://archive.is/fqNWG

I've already reduced my personal footprint. Sold my ICE car in 2018. Ride my bike and the bus as much as possible. Grow lots of my own food. If I count all the biochar I make, I'm a net remover of CO2 and have been for quite some time.

I don't do business with billionaires. I deleted my accounts with all the social media sites, shut down my AWS instances, and moved my Kiwisaver out of all US equities.

How much impact has any of this had on CO2 levels in the atmosphere?

Sweet.

Fuck.

All.

The only possibility we have to turn this thing is to change the system, and the only way we do that is with radical accountability for everyone who profits from our collective misery.

Don't tell me to take individual action. I've been doing that most of my adult life and I can see the results. I'm taking names.

RE: https://mastodon.nz/@billbennett/116435737145419350

We're putting real, definitive advances in tech on hold so that some ketamine-addled billionaires can have a financial circle jerk.

Let's see if I've got this right:

0. In the beginning, the Strait of Hormuz was open and free to transit, and it was good.

1. Fascist superpower launches unprovoked and unlawful act on Iran.

2. Iran exerts control of the strait, blocking key shipping lanes.

3. Global economy, hyperdependent on cheap and readily available fossil fuels, goes into panic mode.

4. Fascist superpower realises it's made a boo-boo and badly wants the strait open again.

5. Ceasefire declared and Iran reopens the strait, albeit under conditions.

6. Fascist superpower doesn't like the conditions, so it blockades the strait.

7. Global economy says WTAF dude?

I cannot for the life of me see how any of this plays out in favour of the fascist superpower.

@tasket That's a hypothesis all right, but it ignores the pricing of oil as a fungible commodity and how the pain of rising fuel prices is torching Trump's support in flyover country.

Sure, there are lots of great insider trading opportunities at every juncture in this farce. But it's been pretty obvious that every momentous decision coming from the White House and Pentagon has been made without any future scenario assessment.

In other words, shooting off their mouths and making shit up on the fly is costing them dearly. Whether that extends to wiping out the dollar gains made by a small group of cronies might just depend on some zealous federal prosecutors in the next few years.

We just got a major downgrade in energy ministers (not that Watts was a shining lamp in his own right), with the worst possible timing to put in someone who denies basic physics. #NZPol

RE: https://mastodon.nz/@davemosk/116319281786567526

Hot tip: get off Github. Find an alternative, like spinning up your own Forgejo instance.

Good evening! What's your fave #AngineDePoitrine song today? Mine's ABABA HOTEL. It might be tomorrow as well. That is the most infectious 7/4 groove in fucking existence.

https://youtu.be/AHbdYT8U_r4?list=RDAHbdYT8U_r4&t=2675

We're at least a week past the point where a serious PM (one with actual leadership qualities) would have stood in front of the cameras, looked us all in the eye, and said that things could very likely get dicey quickly and we need to make some big adjustments.

Instead, we are hearing "la la la individual choice everything is fine five weeks of supply" and the gormless finance minister goes on a photo op to the tank farm at Marsden Point. And they still won't back down from the plan to waste billions building a stranded asset to import LNG from the bombed-out Qatari producers, nor will they condemn the illegal military strikes that precipitated the whole mess we're in.

What an absolute bunch of incompetent and corrupt idiots. They can't get any worse at this stage. #NZPol

@mattblaze @skinnylatte It's time to start smuggling bubble gum and set up cartels.

If I was in charge of energy security for this remote island country, I would be placing an order for some container ships stacked with solar panels, batteries, and the hardware required to hook them up. Today. Get those things on their way here before any more shenanigans ensue.

I'd also get some ships loaded with e-bikes and small, budget EVs. A bunch of electric semi tractors will be needed, too. Not to mention spinning up workshops to retrofit some of the existing fleet of fossil farm machinery with motors and batteries.

But as all that stuff made its way to our ports, I would be starting the work of electrifying rail lines and getting all the engineers with appropriate chops to build us trains and railcars by repurposing stuff that's been mothballed over the decades. It goes without saying that we'd need more buses in service everywhere, too.

Transportation is our biggest vulnerability as we go over the edge of the fossil cliff.

We could have spent the last thirty years planning and executing a transition on the basis of climate breakdown only to find that it also gave us energy independence. Instead, we've meekly allowed the fossil billionaires and their lackeys to keep the cycle of dependency in place, and we're about to find out what collapse might look like.

RE: https://mastodon.nz/@ThisCJ/116212423797818604

Even an economist could have figured this one out.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@jenniferplusplus/116206213357860863

This encapsulates why the whole #AI craze is so incredibly harmful to our relationship with technology...and expertise.

Developers of hardware and software spent three quarters of a century striving for a goal of determinism. They knew that if technology was to be accepted to handle important tasks, its outputs had to be beyond reproach.

Consistent. Repeatable. Verifiable.

We never would have seen adoption of computing in banking, finance, or insurance without a track record that satisfied the shareholders of those industries. Vibe coding would not have put humans on the moon and brought them home in one piece with under 100 KB of memory.

Now we have a generation of amoral techbros who are more than happy to piss all of that away just to make number go up. They're intentionally releasing dry rot all through the support beams underpinning the modern economy, and it will take years -- decades -- to find and replace all the damaged structures.

If it's even possible, or worth doing.

@coreyspowell The south cam is pretty good at the moment...double plume. Spectacular.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXKuUyKt8mc

RE: https://mastodon.nz/@gristc/116009021016084895

"Essentially all LLMs are built on scraping the Internet, badly, often completely trashing servers as they download the entire site without using any of the polite techniques developed by archivers and search engines over the past 30 years. They're all built on copyright infringement. Which is a felony, as anyone who has crossed Disney well knows."

Shackle Winston (and the coalition in general) to Trump. It's the best strategy we have for punching our homegrown nazis and eroding their electorate support. The worldwide revulsion at what ICE is doing can be an election-year wedge issue here, so let's make it one.

#NZPol