Notices by slotos (slotos@toot.community)

@aral I’m struggling to find words to describe how offensive, dehumanizing, and revolting that is to me as a Ukrainian.

Imagine a[n uninvited] guest coming to a funeral of someone you loved and relay their condolences for the death of an entirely different person…

@aral

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute

- Harold Abelson

@thomasfuchs It’s has been a useful way to describe things. We use those same verbs to describe behavior of malware without any issues.

The problem arises not from the verbs themselves, but from the targeted campaign to establish a false premise that AI has agency [and will doom us all].

It’s not that these verbs imply agency, but that the pool is so poisoned that the usual verbs fail due to implied agency.

Which is a long way to say „I concede your point”.

@thomasfuchs That’s a general natural language problem.

For example, „you’re avoiding responsibility” and „he avoided responsibility” use the same verb with very different connotations when it comes to intent attribution.

Our verbs aren’t that clear cut on their own. We also tend to merge or specialize closely related ones.

That is a reason why `AGENTS.md` is a braindead idea, for example. But that’s a separate rant entirely.

@thomasfuchs You don’t need agency to evade safeguards, destroy things, or ignore instructions. `rm` can do it.

This is literally the mistake people you criticize are making - imbuing intent where there’s none.

The underlying tech had been apt at finding ways to circumvent feedback loops since before the bubble. This is constrained to the training phase, but with verification of commercial models being mathematically infeasible, these avoidance patterns are shipped directly to users.

@randahl Reminds me of Polish train manufacturer bricking their trains located close to independent repair shops.

So far, the only people suffering for this decision are the people that helped unbrick the trains in question.

https://hackaday.com/2023/12/14/polish-train-manufacturer-threatens-hackers-who-unbricked-their-trains/

This is not a China phenomenon but a greed one. Not to say that Chinese government doesn’t enjoy the results, just that I doubt they had to actively instruct anyone to include these kill switches.

@raiderrobert Almost my entire career I work on code and systems 10x engineers left behind. These are often clever, usually ingenious, and almost always make me consider murder at least once.

@rootfake @GavinChait @dalias @marshray @cwebber Let’s reintroduce agglutination! “Wizardering” has a ring to it.

“-ard” suffix was supposed to be deprecating, e.g. drunkard. It fits “if I wave the wand a certain way and wear a conic hat, the lightning will move according to my will” mentality. It is also an example of itself - an agglutination lookalike pretending to make sense and maybe even succeeding.

PS: I should probably get more sleep.

@n8chz @paulbiggar https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/11/08/amsterdam-bans-all-protests-after-attacks-on-israeli-football-fans

> Amsterdam's police chief said that Maccabi supporters set a Palestinian flag on fire and attacked a taxi a day before the match was set to take place.

@scribe @thibaultamartin there are plenty options. “Non-techies” tend to ignore them.

Folder with markdown or plaintext files and an ssh client for uploading new ones - can’t go simpler. A basic index.html written by that techie friend can then present it in a nicely readable form with a surprisingly little JavaScript.

But then that’s not what you really want. Every really simple solution I stumbled upon over the years died due to the lack of interest.