I used to think anti-consumerism was a lot more popular. It’s a significant disconnect from how I thought people are. Apparently I took more media related courses in high school and university than most people do.
One thing that continued to confuse me is how tech cultures are unrepentantly consumer capitalists. The earlier times of the world wide web was very counter-culture. So it’s been an unending source of befuddlement how tech nerds have been deep-throating the adtech boot.
I haven’t looked at Discord since December after getting into an argument. So perfect timing I guess.
The platform is ass anyways. Monetized features everywhere.
That doesn’t make sense. The tech bros have been saying for decades that all this data harvesting and surveillance will be used to improve lives.
Reddit is State Department agitprop. This leak is probably a tiny fraction of their operations on reddit.
It’s crazy how successful that platform is because nobody suspects it. Redditors all hate the other social media platforms. They cannot fathom that reddit is just as bad or worse.
But why is that. Is it the illusion of control. Because ostensibly its a user curated site. Because they think they have voting power. All of these things have proven to be completely false time and again. Yet the illusion of reddit persists.
There doesn’t need to be a replacement for everything. How much does the world need to revolve around a random person’s hot-take in 140 characters or as many seconds. These are artificial walls.
Before the tech industry set its sights on AI, “hallucination” was called error rate.
It’s the rate at which the model incorrectly labelled outputs. But of course the tech industry being what it is needs to come up with alternative words that spin doctor bad things into not bad things. So what the field of AI for decades had been calling error rate, everyone now calls “hallucinations”. Error has far worse optics than hallucination. Nobody would be buying this LLM garbage if every article posted about it included paragraphs about how its full of errors.
That’s the thing people need to learn.
Yeah, I’ve had this type of interview lately. Not for software though. You install what probably might as well be a rootkit on your machine. They monitor your eyes through webcam. The slightest detection of your eyes looking away is an instant fail. That’s the gist of the process now.
Unfortunately for most people, they aren’t technical enough to know what they’re getting themselves into. They just follow the instructions.
Nobody is going to read the mountains of terms and conditions of all the services required to jump through along the application process. People are just trying to get a job to they can eat tonight.
Do you want the cool shit from Star Trek’s imaginary future or not?
You lost me there. Conflating a fictional future utopia with the product your trying to sell is cheap trick.
Anyone who uses this bad faith tactic loses all credibility. Post read and disregarded.
People get offended whenever I’ve said that even random app developers are part of the problem. They can’t or won’t see that what we have arrived at is a Kafkesque world. It has been death by millions of papercuts. The collective rush to make an “app for everything” was in net effect building a global surveillance dragnet. It was inevitable the aggregate of data would turned into an authoritarian system of oppression.
All you wanted to do was make a 99 cents a sale for your basic phone app. You blindly stuffed it with copy-paste analytics APIs that voraciously collect data from users without transparency at all. You insisted that these random data brokers are 100% super honest. Just trust them, bro. You ridiculed anyone of trying to warn people how reckless this is. Good job, guys.
It would be one thing for a corporation to misuse the term open source as they’ve been doing lately. It’s pretty bad for one of the biggest and oldest tech news sites to be doing it.
But they have work tomorrow. /s
Not really anymore for me. A few times this past year they snuck in the return shipping cost at about $10-$15 USD. The page showed the cost refunded then added back. I don’t know but it fooled me.
With this hardware shortage insanity, I won’t be surprised if they get more aggressive with return shipping fees.
one of the most human spaces left on the internet
Journalism once again demonstrating they are about 10-15 years behind on the times. Did they forget reddit completely broke back in 2016 when the_donald left the place in a permanent troll state.
I’m not going to read the article on account of time right now but I’m guessing it’s written as if reddit was invented yesterday and the prior 20 years of reddit history is didn’t happen.
It hasn’t been human since the early 2010s. Reddit was botted to death long before LLMs.
Big tech propaganda. There has been zero push back. At least until the last few years.
The entire zeitgeist from film/TV, news, academia, politics, everything has been propagandizing the world on how tech companies and the people behind it are basically modern day gods.
In film/TV the nerds have been the stereotype of the benevolent good natured but awkward super genius. The news has made them out to be the superstar businesses that are infinite money printers. Tech in academia is seen as the most prestigious departments. Politicians are all afraid of being labelled as tech illiterate. That’s why nobody can ever make any sort of legislation on tech companies anymore. It’s why “disruptive” (aka destructive) tech companies are allowed to break every single legislation ever made. Because all any techbro has to do is threaten to accuse politician for being afraid of technology. Nothing makes a politician shut up faster.
It came as no surprise that all the big tech heads were at the front row of the inauguration. We live in the dystopian cyberpunk future. For most people it seems they don’t even know. They’re completely entranced by it all.
Bogeymen are imaginary. Political troll farms are real.
Has anyone else noticed the recent resurgence of mechanical turk jobs? It’s all AI training work. Before the work was doing tasks directly. Now they have people training tailored AI models.
In other words the tech bros have found get another way to shoehorn themselves in as a middle man. Instead of having workers do the work itself. Now the work is delegated to AI. Which is trained to do the task by humans.
At first it said the LLM era was the end of mechanical turk work. It’s going in a circle back to mechanical turks again.
Somewhere there’s a line in propaganda playbook that says to blame everything on the left. Has to be. At this point so there’s been many random comments attempting to “ackshually the left”. Probably the the cover of such a thing is titled Flooding the Zone or something.
There’s a world that exists outside of your bubble. It’s real. No matter how much you bury your head in the sand.
Did you read the article? This isn’t about a research paper that talks about theoretical lab experiments. Sodium batteries are in real world application right now. Mainly in China and South America.
You can buy sodium batteries from AliExpress. It’s been available for a while. I was thinking about ordering a few but I ended up spending my hobby budget elsewhere. There’s no economies of scale yet for sodium battery tech. You can get the battery but there is zero electronics available for it. Mainly you’d have to design your own charger and battery management modules. That’s out of my pay grade. I’ve been waiting for Chinese engineers to mass produce such things.
Pretty much what people already know by now. Algorithms find optimal ways to manipulate you.
The two ingredients are data and a way to measure the thing you’re trying to optimize. Machine learning is used to find optimal ways to keep people engaged in internet platforms. In other words they’re like designer drugs.
Worse than designer drugs. They’re continuously self optimizing because they keep measuring the results and making adjustments so the result stays optimal. As long as they have a continuous feed of recent data, the algorithm evolves to find the optimal solution.
That’s why recklessly giving away your personal data is dangerous. Let’s say the system notices you’ve been spending 1 microsecond less time engaged in screen time. The system will adjust to make sure they’ve reclaimed that 1 microsecond of your day.
It will show you things that tend to keep you engaged. How does it know that? Because you give it the data it needs to measure what keeps you online more. That data is based on every interaction with your phone or computer which is logged.
It’s worse than substance abuse because you never develop a tolerance. If you do then the algorithm has already adapted to find the next thing that keeps you engaged in the most optimal way.
It’s not just engagement. It’s whatever target you want to optimize for. As long as you have the two ingredients. Data and metrics.
That’s why data is called the new oil. Or was it gold rush? I can’t remember. It’s been called this since the early 2000s maybe.
LLM AI isn’t so scary when you know that they’ve been using AI against us for a very long time already. If more of the world understood all this better, we’d all have quit to study poetry already.