Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)

“Naomi Klein Interview: Trump, Musk, Pandemic Rage, and Climate Denial”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/naomi-klein-trump-musk-thiel-oligarchs-climate-science-1235330780/

> I don’t know if you’ve been following this, but Peter Thiel is now running Bible study groups in Silicon Valley. He said in a few interviews recently that he believes that the Antichrist is Greta Thunberg. It’s extraordinary.

This entire interview is great and is a must-read, but this quote in particular is all kinds of yikes

Time to revisit the “you are what you do” lineage of media theory

The point made by Dewey and McLuhan is that meaning comes from what you do, the actions you take, not from what you say, think, or believe. Ideas have no meaning, only the actions you take to execute them and the actions the audience take to receive. The prevailing “AI” orthodoxy is almost the diametric opposite, that meaning comes from your ideas and that all actions can be automated.

Being a long term fan of John Dewey and thus, practically by default, McLuhan and Postman, is particularly torturous in this era of “AI will do it for me”

From “Democracy and Education”:

> The self is not something ready-made, but something in continuous formation through choice of action.

“The AI jobs crisis is here, now - by Brian Merchant”

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-jobs-crisis-is-here-now

> The unemployment rate for recent college graduates is unusually high—and historically high in relation to the general unemployment rate

"AI" is killing entry-level jobs, which means that a few years down the line companies won't have senior labour to hire.

This also shows that talk about “AI literacy” and “AI skills” is a joke. You’re not gonna need any skills if employers aren’t employing in the first place

Code that does the job the end user wants it to do is already the exception and software is a product managed based on vibes throughout. Anybody who goes all huffy because the field OVERWHELMINGLY responds to "vibe coding is using AI to create code that you don't care about" with "ah, so all coding, gotcha!" has not been paying attention

Laughing at "AI" boosters worrying "vibe coding" is becoming synonymous with "AI coding". Tech is vibes througout. Vibe management. Vibe strategy. Vibe design. Coding has been a garbage fire for decades and, yeah it's a vibe-based pop culture from top to bottom and has only been getting worse

“Not everybody in software dev is like that! Some coders genuinely care and put in the work needed to make good software”

True, but I feel confident in saying that next to none of those are leaning hard into “AI coding”

The target market for “AI” is SPECIFICALLY people who don’t care

"Vibe coding is all AI coding" feels true to most. Not caring what happens after code is pushed to the final victim is already the norm. The only change from adopting "AI" is they now have the freedom to no longer care about what happens BEFORE as well.

In the absence of functioning regulation of the tech industry in the US, the only mechanism we have to mitigate the harms of generative models is mass action, which is a blunt instrument that doesn’t allow for nuance

Regulation is how risky products get into wide use. That’s what it’s for. Without regulation, mockery and boycotts are the only mechanism available to us that have any hope of working

It's impossible for me to tell over Gore's Internet whether you, Clever McSmartypants, are genuinely trying to have a nuanced discussion of the pros and cons of the tech or are just a hurt manbaby reacting defensively and since the whiny toddlers outnumber the nuanced thinkers by several orders of magnitude, most people online are going to treat both the same, with good reason

@ErikJonker Not “some”. It’s pretty much all of big tech. And given that only big tech cos have the resources to build and roll out LLM-based products at scale—every small outfit is using a model made by a big tech co under the hood—the distinction is pretty much moot. All of this is only getting funding because they think it can destroy jobs and industries and let them loot the remains.

“Why does everybody get angry at me whenever I defend a new tech that’s purpose-made to destroy industries, misinform, and pollute the environment?”

A mystery for the fucking ages. First help us stop the harm done by these tools (both the makers and what they make) then you can come back and talk all you want about your vague wishy-washy positive use cases that you use to justify your blatant neophilia

Of course, you will have lost interest by then because it won’t be new anymore

Most of the comments I've seen that call for moderation in the discussion of generative models have come from dudes reacting emotionally to hearing criticism of their new favourite toy. They are impossible to reason with because they don't want reason, they want to be flattered for their choices. I don’t have time to flatter somebody that shallow just to find out that they were never going to take the discussion seriously.

“We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at All - WSJ”

https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/how-ai-thinks-356969f8?st=JK4ruj&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

> All of this work suggests that under the hood, today’s AIs are overly complicated, patched-together Rube Goldberg machines full of ad-hoc solutions for answering our prompts.

There have been researchers who pointed this out from the very beginning and yet they're only getting airtime now.

@silverwizard @CppGuy Ah, crap. That sounds like a separate issue to the blocklist as well.

I've added the lemon squeezy sales pages including the discount to the original thread since PayHip doesn't seem to be working for everybody

https://toot.cafe/@baldur/114398515623014978

Sorry about all of this.

@CppGuy Well, that sucks.

“Flash Games Were the Internet’s Crayon Box”

https://innerspiral.lol/Blog/flash/flash

I miss seeing the kind of interactive work and experimentation a designer could do on their own with Flash. There isn't really anything like it any more.

"This is what a digital coup looks like"

https://www.ted.com/talks/carole_cadwalladr_this_is_what_a_digital_coup_looks_like

Finally got around to watching this and hoo boy is it timely, accurate, and terrifying

After seeing a few people on social media point it out, I can't unsee the parallels between the efforts of both the US and UK governments to dismantle education, media, research, and knowledge work in favour of "proper" jobs like factory and farm work and the beginning of Mao's cultural revolution