Notices by tante (tante@tldr.nettime.org), page 11

I like ActivityPub and the decentralized social Web as much as the next person but we all know that scalability is a massive problem and I haven't seen too many convincing approaches to fix that. So let's not pretend this is just a magic silver bullet.

Blogs and the web didn't scale to actual web traffic (which admittedly many blogs never needed), centralized caches and services were necessary for this stuff to work. Which is exactly why we got so much centralization.

Solving that for decentralized social networks is the core issue.

A few days ago these two little maniacs moved in. They're the best.

There are spaces where LLMs, even those generating actual text can be used in meaningful ways. Personally I don't feel like those spaces are really explored much, instead we force these systems into contexts where their built-in problems just multiply and create bigger issues.

Man kann nicht "das Gendern" verbieten. Die Deutsche Sprache erzwingt es faktisch.

Was "Genderverbote" wirklich sind ist Zwang: Der Zwang, diskriminierende Sprache zu verwenden.

I get a lot of people calling out my #Bitcoin skepticism (as in: Bitcoin is a worthless piece of hot garbage trying to kill our planet) because number is again going up. This time it's real, now that the scamers have been caught and all.

But if you want to know why Bitcoin goes up you just need to look at one curve: Tether has printed 4 billion USD from thin air in the last week.

While it's great to see the crypto scam artists SBF and CZ been caught and punished (sadly without making their victims whole) the actual rock that whole scam economy is built on is Tether. Has been Tether for years.

And I really don't get why US regulators let some weird company print fake USD.

Es gab dazu ja schon mehr Berichte: Deutschland's liebestes und vom LIDL Gründer und der Bundesregierung hofiertes "KI"-Startup Aleph Alpha ist bei der Bekämpfung von Rassismus, Sexismus, Homophobie und diversen anderen Diskriminierungen immer noch im "alles scheißegal, unser Gründer war mal bei Apple" Modus.

Und für das Startup übt die Bundesregierung gerade viel Druck auf den AIAct aus, damit dieses System nicht reguliert wird.

"KI" nach "Europäischen Werten" ist nie eine inhaltliche Aussage, man will nur irgendein Startup in Europa, das am Ende noch schlimmer agiert als OpenAI.

https://interaktiv.tagesspiegel.de/lab/aleph-alpha-ki-aus-deutschland-biases-vorurteile/

Sam Altman is back as OpenAI CEO with a new board.

And of course the new board was hand picked to no longer restrict Altman so he can run OpenAI as a business as he sees fit (until he jumps to one of his own things he's been preparing for months now).

The interesting aspect of this: The new board no longer has any women, the only woman on the old board was replaced by Larry Summers who's known to think that women just have less "intrinsic aptitude" for "science and engineering". So Yeah. Says a lot about what OpenAI considers important.

Everyone that Microsoft has fired in the last few rounds to be more lean must feel super good about them basically hiring everyone who ever stumbled into an OpenAI job, a massively overstaffed company that has never made any money and no real medium-term pathway towards profitability.

If you want to understand the whole OpenAI thing, this article is super helpful because it explains that OpenAI is not a real research organization or tech company like the ones we know: It's a cult. It's basically Scientology 2.0.

Quote:
"The consequences are what you might expect when a crowd of bright but rather naive (and occasionally creepy) computer science and adjacent people try to re-invent theology from first principles, to model what human-created gods might do, and how they ought be constrained. They include the following, non-comprehensive list: all sorts of strange mental exercises, postulated superhuman entities benign and malign and how to think about them; the jumbling of parts from fan-fiction, computer science, home-brewed philosophy and ARGs to create grotesque and interesting intellectual chimeras; Nick Bostrom, and a crew of very well funded philosophers; Effective Altruism, whose fancier adherents often prefer not to acknowledge the approach’s somewhat disreputable origins."

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/look-at-scientology-to-understand

Quote from https://awful.systems/post/544588

"imagine meeting Sam Altman and thinking: this is my king. I will follow him into the breach. I will fall onto my sword for this doomsday-prepping weasel."

This really captures it.

@allison then they are not doing a great job

The most fascinating fact of the whole "500 employees threaten to quit OpenAI" is the amount of people they employ. Like what are these people even doing really?

Does every graphics card have its own dedicated tech-shaman or what?

It's very easy to say that "#AI" is a #productivity multiplier and for some people in their work it is.

But we don't really have any studies to see if that's structurally true or whether for example the quick wins you gain from using generated scaffolding are eaten up by extra costs for reengineering, bugfixing or general maintenance later.

And that's just the pure "productivity" (which itself is _very_ hard to measure). The effects on the demands with regards to output quantity, allotted time for task, expected quality haven't been studied yet either.

We. Just. Don't. Know. Yet.

So take these large promises with a shovel of salt.

Die Berliner CDU wird unterirdische Hyperloops zu bauen versuchen, statt Fahrradwege zu bauen oder den ÖPNV mit mehr Ressourcen auszustatten.

Weil man immer "Innovation" spielen muss.

Looking at the participation stats of another digital event in Germany I think it's important to repeat: Men, if you participate in all-male panels, you are part of the problem. Organizers, if you organize all-male panels, you are part of the problem.

I have a standard paragraph I send with my responses to panel invitations:
"I do not participate in all-male panels, at least one, ideally at least 50% of invited participants need to be non-cis-male. Also, I demand every participant to be paid the same."

If an event cannot cope with that, you shouldn't participate.

https://systemli.social/@anneroth/111425537935348646

I fully switched to Firefox a few months ago when Google kept on pushing their "Manifest V3" Chrome policy, now that they continue to push it and remove V2 (and with it meaningful adblockers) from Chrome in 2024 maybe you want to start migrating as well?

https://developer.chrome.com/en/blog/resuming-the-transition-to-mv3/

Don't go to Brave btw. It's a shit company that keeps doing shady stuff and is run by a homophobe. There are so many browsers, just pick one. (Whether other Chromium-based browsers will keep an interface for effective customization for users around is for you to research. Just use Firefox TBH).

@parismarx Either they were pissed off by his Elon-esque blurting out of crap ("We'll pay all your legal fees if ChatGPT gets you into trouble") or (and that's almost a pavlovian reaction to a powerful man being fired by now) allegations of sexualized violence coming

"The hegemony that algorithmic culture is in the process of achieving doesn’t depend on what algorithms “really” do, but on the ways we come to tolerate their deployment — what sorts of stories we come to tell ourselves about algorithms to domesticate them or disavow them, to make their threat to our autonomy seem manageable."

https://robhorning.substack.com/p/two-riders-were-approaching

"Here's an AI to write Alt-Text for your images" is exactly what @danmcquillan argues is the "management of austerity" at the core of current "AI" systems: Marginalized (in this case blind) people get a shitty version of the real thing because we can't be bothered ("can't afford") to give the real thing.

Writing alt text is not some annoyance that you should automate half-assedly. Write the fucking description of you post an image. It's just part of what you do when posting a fucking image.

I wonder if one of the reasons that people so willingly if not happily embrace forms of surveillance is that it shows at least someone caring.

In a way surveillance is therefore an emotional antidote to the alienated, nihilist experience of late stage capitalism in which nobody matters and is cared for.