Notices by Jeremy Kahn (trochee@dair-community.social)

Rudy, the LLMs are not minds and never will be

https://mastodon.social/@rudytheelder/113502207893139195

@dalias @xgranade

I'm actually seeing an analogy to the kind of work I do in software

neither firefighting bug-patching
nor grandiose compatibility-breaking rewrites

Instead, staged scaffolding and strangler fig patterns to get out of the bad place without breaking everything

> progressive politics generally demands that immediate fixes are paired with structural changes that will help prevent the same or similar problems from occurring in the future

I +1ed this so vigorously that I'm suddenly wondering if anybody claims a different politics and also demands the same pairing within their value system

(I recognize this is not the central point of your letter, @xgranade , but I wanted to throw that in as a side conversation)

https://www.xgranade.com/a-progressive-case-for-the-fediverse/

Y'all.

Can we get @kissane 's idea like, for real?

tech-co-op

- $25/month
- open-source projects:
- read-later
- obsidian-equivalent
- zotero
- simple blogging (blot-like)

I would pay at least this much if I could point a subdomain of a domain I control at this hosting, _especially_ if I have some confidence it won't swap itself into a VC-funded startup focusing on "AI"

https://mas.to/@kissane/113392528258484984

I'll see your "'software engineering' is not engineering"

and raise you one

"'prompt engineering' is not _even_ software engineering"

"we don't need regression tests for the regression testing framework"

https://researchbuzz.masto.host/@researchbuzz/113335766826230509

@eaton

*bows*

When I was at G--gle, well before the latest AI boom, I worked in an advanced research group experimenting with neural networks for all kinds of impractical but fun things.

(At one point, too close to getting laid off to try it, I proposed learning a joint embedding between SF book cover illustration & their back copy, & then running it through in either direction. Still wish we'd built it.)
This particular group also decided to start a "relevant SF" reading club.

1/3

This reading group was often pretty firmly on the nose (for example, David Brin's EXISTENCE, which has alien intelligences in slick black hand-sized glass pods, trying to convince humanity to dedicate all its resources into building more pods).

We really should have called it the Torment Nexus reading group, but even that glorious phrase hadn't been coined yet

2/3

The local VP was in the group, and contributed (I believe without irony) SUPERINTELLIGENCE by Nick Bostrom, and — though he wanted to brag about hobnobbing with Bostrom & dozens of other rich white men on a private island — he didn't really get that this was pretty _bad_ science fiction

but he DID stop coming to the reading group after I called Bostrom's memetic hazard book "exponential-function fanfic in service of the status quo"

3/3

Twenty years ago (exactly!) I had a hot semi-blind date (we'd been mutuals on Livejournal for eight days).

Today, I helped her hang her first art show.

Twenty more years, him!

@jonny @gsuberland

What.

🤡

I could not write farce that strong; even Chief Wiggum couldn't sell it

@seachanger

The latest attempts to silence resistance-to-evil/not-in-my-name opinions on Fedi

...have been a lot

I'm reminded of the (now-fallen) uneasy alliance between (mostly white & privileged) "free speech libertarians" and anti-oppression activists from the early days of the modern Internet (1998-2002?)

the FSLs were so obsessed with "getting the process right" and "never telling anyone they weren't allowed in the room"

1/2

> Mulaney then shared an anecdote about how he and his son, who is nearly 3, like to play baseball in their front yard.

> “We’re just two guys hitting Wiffle balls badly and yelling ‘Good job’ at each other,” he said. “It’s sort of the same energy here at Dreamforce.”

Some genius shit-stirrer inside Salesforce pitched this idea and then walked away from the explosion without looking back

Comedian John Mulaney roasts SF techies at Dreamforce
https://sfstandard.com/2024/09/19/comedian-john-mulaney-brutally-roasts-sf-techies-and-ai-at-dreamforce/

@inthehands need an "i dunno i'd probably try to work out whether my audience cared" option

@inthehands

I just stuck a catchy name on your fundamentally new-to-us-in-this-timeline idea

Almost all our "personal technology" — from phones to "smart" houses and cars — draws attention to itself.

But it seems important to consider that it's both "personal" and "technology" that is self-aggrandizing

1/2

@inthehands

The "impersonal" technology — "cloud" computing, for example — is carefully designed to direct attention elsewhere (& thereby hides its redistribution of externalities)

The personal tools that don't self-aggrandize don't get considered as "technology"

- the paper notebook
- the seatbelt
- the filling cabinet

@inthehands

💚 to the idea of "self-effacing personal technology"

@jonny

See, this is what the AI Bros took from us when they columbused "text generation" from the weird dada NLP nerds

@emma

Like so much else in the TESCREAL crowd, they cannot imagine that aliens/transcended minds would not be venal and petty and extractive like they are

Their projection and short-sighted view means they are firmly planted in the Defect corner of the Prisoner's Dilemma

…they don't know it's iterated
…they can't imagine anything smarter than themselves
…therefore any super-intelligence must be rapacious imperialists like they are