Notices by Scott, Drowning in Information (vortex_egg@ioc.exchange)

This is anecdotal but buying everyday stuff has become really… challenging? Many physical stores are out of business, the remainder carry the most basic low-end versions of things that used to have a selection, and online shopping is a locust swarm of knock-offs from made up drop-shipper brands.

@AnarchoNinaWrites I keep saying this and all of the responses are like the other comment to your post here: “He’s so dumb no one I know is going to vote for him.” But it’s going to be a problem.

My father is 75 and has Parkinson’s. He used to be a fine artist and computer graphic artist but can’t make art anymore because his hands shake too much. He was telling me that he’s been using generative AI to illustrate a movie he started making and this is the happiest I’ve seen him in a decade.

@cstross @goatsarah @lauren Given that there is an actual network of people today who take the Cthulhu mythos both literally and very seriously, and who have racial politics that are significantly worse than Lovecraft's, that seems like a good rule.

@eaton We really need to reframe the discourse around LLMs such that we stop saying that LLMs hallucinate and start saying that LLMs cause the people who use them to hallucinate.

@annaleen @charliejane @ouropinions I have a copy of Superintelligence that a former(?) friend gifted to me when he was tumbling down the EA/LW/rationalist/longtermist rabbit hole and trying to get me to come along for the ride. I never read it because I flipped through the book, saw this table and noped the f out.

@jonny One of the funny parts is that statistical generative language models are dynamically opposed to the production of knowledge at a logical and mathematical level.

Another funny part is what is even the point of knowledge if nobody actually enacts it by doing the work to know it in the first place? There’s some kind of weird conception of the nature of knowledge and science (as commodity?) going on here that is intensely anti-epistemic.

@aeva As a person who has done a lot of software archeology in past jobs, I can definitively tell you that "software pseudoarcheology" is also alive and well in organizations.

@clacke I put the messy snacks in a bowl and tip the bowl directly into my mouth.

Since I remembered while it is still #Caturday, here is a picture of Nimbus.

For all the concern about adversarial and malicious use of deepfakes to influence people, it turns out society is like, “Oh a computer made it up? Sold.”

@MattHodges My sense is that the ActivityPub protocol, the Mastodon app design, and the social culture of the Fediverse at large are all antithetical to the idea of “owning your own data” and have more of a collective or communalistic approach to data ownership—which is different than corporate ownership, but not the same thing as individuals being able to make personal-level decisions about who can do what with their data throughout the whole data lifecycle. It also doesn’t properly conceptualize how individual consent should be handled in data-fusion scenarios (i.e. when data from multiple people are mixed together, but some individuals in that mixture have different opinions from each other on who or what should happen to their data).