@clarity as it turns out, "do one thing, and do it well (and screw anyone who finds it hard to use)" is very susceptible to the particular form of EEE that involves building an ease of use layer around the open thing.
The question of whether LLMs "work" (in the whitepaper sense) serves as an obfuscating abstraction over the questions of whether they are fit for a given purpose - policing, medical diagnosis, education, etc. That they frequently work for producing passable code becomes a way of insisting, by the people sitting at the top of the pyramid of labor most valued by capital, that they work just as well for the many other purposes they have been deployed, that we can clearly see they are unfit for.
standard "star trek bridge crew taking a torpedo hit, camera tilts and shakes, sparks fly from consoles, everyone is knocked off balance and one or two crew fall down" shot, but a stage hand tosses a flapping chicken into the shot just to add extra chaos
you look at Jabba the Hutt and notice Salacious Crumb, the weird little laughing goblin-muppet sitting on his shoulder, and then you look closer and notice a tiny, even weirder guy sitting on Crumb's shoulder, and you imagine it going on like that forever with progressively tinier weirder guys
Exploring more of the Dynamicland website eg https://dynamicland.org/publications and this document is particularly full of bangers: https://dynamicland.org/2022/Radical_Decentralization.pdf "Many modern technologies are too complex to be learned and practiced by communities, and are instead bound to industrial modes of production, creating a class divide between “developers” and “consumers”. These complex technologies will never be decentralizable, and any attempts to decentralize them will fail."
I'd like to make a static HTML page with a gallery of pixel art images that can be viewed in a javascript-powered "lightbox". Tons of existing libraries for that, but none of them seem to have a couple niche features I need: aspect correction from non-square (4:2.5) pixel source resolution, nearest-neighbor upscaling small (320x200) images to fill screen / a larger area. Am I in "code your own custom lightbox" territory here, or is there a smarter path?
@tante it's yet another case of tech insisting they be judged on their potential not on their actual accomplishments; their lack of further progress becomes the regulators' fault. very convenient device for them. and of course the openly reactionary tech guys insist "we'd have AGI computer god by now if you just let us make 'not-woke' AI, ie letting it say all the slurs and conspiracy drivel in its training data"
There's a real Rube Goldberg quality to many of the attempts to find real use cases for LLMs: take regular desktop screenshots, OCR them, "find meaningful patterns" 🤔 so the system can answer queries... the amount of compute being chucked on a fire speculatively is absurd - so much of it already rolled out to users! The carbon cost of that is immediately alarming but there's also just something repellent about it from a systems design perspective. The desperation of these companies is palpable.
Ursula K Le Guin, on tech workers: "Real power goes to waste. Every wizard uses his art against the others, serving the men of greed. What good can any art be used that way? It's wasted. It goes wrong, or it's thrown away. Like slaves' lives. Nobody can be free alone. Not even a mage. All of them working their magic in prison cells, to gain nothing. There's no way to use power for good." - "The Finder", from "Tales from Earthsea"
@violetmadder@mcc i think the courts as an instrument are contested ground. they *should* be able do what they were created to do, and sometimes they do, and that is often down to the specific people involved. we should not concede the courts, categorically - specific courts, though, probably, yes.
"We guarantee that [our community's] livelihoods will not be part of a corporate buyout." - from @mirlo 's kickstarter campaign, this is what we need to expect from any project that is trying to replace the old world of for-profit platforms. At this point I don't care how virtuous or competent a project's leaders are, if its structure is such that it could all go away in an instant if some capitalist shrugs or swipes at it we can't entrust it with our future as creative people.
@tante can't think of a single thing altman has said where my response was "hm you know that's actually a really interesting and insightful point". 100% of everything he says is some combination of fundraising and stockpiling clout. despicable human being
One of my earliest DOS gaming memories, Populous (1989), is apparently now on Steam. But I can't tell if it includes the "Promised Lands" expansion disk, which added several new maps and graphics sets, including one that turns the Good vs Evil factions into Amiga vs Atari ST, respectively - a rivalry I had no idea about, as an american kid.
new normalized signed floating point game review scale (-1.0 to 1.0) where 1.0 is "adds tremendous value to capitalist economies, prolonging their dominance" and -1.0 is "removes value from capitalist economies, hastening their demise". Fortnite is a 0.98785, Doom (1993) is a -0.26525. what's the closest to -1.0 we've gotten
there's something uniquely offensive and inhumane about stuff that is written to superficially make sense even though in substance it is complete gobbledegook: if you don't know that's what you're getting into you start reading in good faith, using your limited energy and time on this planet to untangle the writer's meaning, only to stumble - this doesn't make sense, am i just not getting it? - before finally realizing that some shitty human made an active choice to waste your time with garbage.
@parismarx "we'll survive on an island / mountain bunker even if 99% of earth's population dies" is such a common rich guy fantasy and it's always been so infantile - where the fuck are you going to get food and medicine from once your stores run out? a child thought-experimenting it could see how unworkable it is. we are a deeply interdependent civilization and only people who have amassed horrifically alienating wealth have the luxury of fully forgetting that.