Is this an archetype of guy that is concious of the harms of LLMs, but cannot trust his own gut enough to see they are fundamentally wrong? So they try to come up with their own super-ethical spin on the beast and try to change the rotting carcass from within.
I submit to you: slop liberals
yay one of us! if you want to, feel free to follow my mastodon if you want to see me hyperfocusing on crochet details!
recently I got into crocheting and I was immediately thrown into the hobby drama about all the havoc that generative “AI” is wreacking into the community. fake slop patterns that don’t work, fake photos of impossible amigurumi, that kinda stuff.
then I learned that, a few months ago, Hobbii, an once-beloved crafts supplier currently in a death spiral after being purchased by private equity, had the brilliant idea of alienating their entire client base by talking about how they love “AI” and use it all the time at the company. while firing a ton of people no less, including all the familiar faces that interacted with people online.
in damage control during the entirely predictable backlash, the new CTO Tomas Antvorksov Krag posted this:
While we take our responsibility very serious we have to explore new technologies as they enter the market or risk being left behind.
My brother in Christ Tomas Antvorksov Krag CTO of Hobbii, you are the CTO of a textile crafts company. Every client of yours does crochet or knitting or fucking macramé by hand, for fun. What technology do you figure we would be afraid of being left behind by? The spinning jenny??
before LLMs, auto-captions on Youtube used to be particularly terrible for Japanese. but thanks to the power of Gemini and very energy-intensive, biosphere-destroying giant datacenters, the captions now have become worse than ever.
like I was watching a jidaigeki and the captions kept rephrasing stuff—in addition to the previous class of sound-based error, e.g. saying 行きます when a character is dramatically telling the other to stay alive (生きます), so it sounds like they’re fucking off and running away—which continues to happen like before, Youtube now has brand new and exciting types of error, like, bizarrely, captioning 誇り as プライド, or 冗談じゃないぞ as ゲームじゃないよ. In a jidaigeki. Presumably when the shōgun Tokugawa Iemitsu is taking a break from playing Mario no Super Picross in his Edo-period Super Famicom
Just heard about tic-80 falling to slop.
After reading the obligatory forum thread where climate justice and concentration of wealth continue to not even factor into consideration, this how the world of open source feels to me these days:
Aw dang I was really hoping they’d all start using Supreme Intelligence just because of MAGAs signalling via Kree speech would be funny.
writing a story that looks like it’s about everyone having their own LLMs but it’s actually about the predicted state of clime catastrophe by 2040 and the consequences of the fascist turn in world politics, and the GPUs don’t make the slightest difference to anything and don’t really matter for the plot
Annie Altman, Sam Altman’s sister who has accused him of abuse has recently posted:
If any harm ever comes to me “mysteriously” - you know who it was.
I love my life.
https://xcancel.com/anniealtman108/status/2089964553207775529
She also added " I am not suicidal, nor on any kind of drug I could overdose on".
A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.
That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.
I hope investors hop in the bandwagon and start “shorting” the whole thing soon (finger guns)
Is it just me or LLM slop lately has developed this one weird quirk? I mean they always have some, right, but I don’t want to be like those people who think anyone using em-dashes or Nigerian English vocabulary must be a stochastic generator.
Still I keep seeing this one writing quirk and it keeps nagging at me.
I’m talking about odd use of paragraphs. Like, I’m also known to introduce a gratuitous paragraph break here and there for forced emphasis.
But not like this. It’s like paragraphs don’t even make sense anymore.
Couple that with the short sentences. All ending in a period. It’s annoying. It’s giving reply guy. It’s giving mansplaining.
I guess hacky tools also mirror the hand of their creators.
For a while now I’m being randomly login-walled on reddit.com on varying subreddits, in ways that seem nondeterministic. I hope they login-wall the entire thing, I’ll finally ditch my addiction then
I am in fact moving back to NetBSD, but the ambiguity of their LLM policy makes me wary/tired.
My only hope is that NetBSD moves so slowly anyway that the devs’ traditional preference towards clean, minimalistic readable code above all else holds off any “slop commits verified by maintainers” long enough that the bubble pops before slop gets any of its clawdes in core code at least.
Just been a week in Berlin where I had an absolutely torrid summer affair with this cool girl in Neukölln that culminated in going together to the F4g Dolls party where our already elevated levels of lesbian depravity could blossom a thousandfold. Gosh that was what I call travel ^___^ Last week will be displayed with a golden frame in my memories hall of fame for the rest of my life. I’m still swooning madly over her and will probably U-haul within the week (not really tho there’s stuff going on (but I yeaarnnn)))
As intelligence becomes abundant, the most important question will be how we direct it. Some argue that superintelligence itself, or a small set of experts who control it, should decide what is best for humanity. I disagree. The history of democracy and economics has shown that there is no single objective answer to how people define the best life, and therefore the best approach is letting people decide what matters to them. Rather than centralizing this power, we believe that delivering personal superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question.
Healthy societies also recognize that safety requires checks and balances. If only a handful of institutions have superintelligence, they will inevitably exercise a controlling influence over economics, science and politics. Even with the best intentions, that concentration would limit people’s ability to choose their own future.
Famous enemy of software monopolies and tech oligarchies that have an outsized influence over politics, champion of distributed ownership of the means of computation Mark Zuckerberg
“Up to 7 billion” over a period of 10 years can hardly dig Oracle out of the hole it has dug itself into, though…
It’s as if, practically overnight, everyone went from, “we need to do everything we can to reduce our demands on the environment or we’re cooked” to “oooh, shiny new toy, and it only ruins everything around it, cool!”
Definitely this one for me. I can only describe it as some fucked up denial psychology, the way people are pretending the environment isn’t collapsing, and the LLM boom on top of that is like a bad joke. Even in discussions critical of the tech sector this is treated as almost an afterthought—the very real, very violent damage done to all of us from poor countries by people in rich countries to prop up their toy fantasy schemes. Even if LLMs did everything they claim to do, it would still be a moral imperative to form insurgent guerillas to blow up these datacentres, on the environmental damage they do alone which is not a minor detail Karen it’s kind of a big deal
“AI bet goes awry: Oracle fires 21,000 employees, then hit a $7 billion power hurdle”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/ai-spending-spree-hits-600b-as-oracle-fires-21000-employees-to-fund-boom/ar-AA28vWuD
“Oracle’s Worst Stock Crash in 25 Years” “Has Cost Larry Ellison $213 Billion in 10 Months”
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/oracle-worst-stock-crash-25-113002772.html
It’s going to be Oracle to collapse the house of cards, isn’t it. Come on Oracle, die and take down the USA economy with you. Make the people happy, Oracle.
“In short, Oracle’s 65% decline is historic, but the stock’s future depends less on its past and more on whether its AI investments produce durable cash flow”
well good luck with that, Oracle! :D
Taking thread opportunity to highlight the existence of ethical software licenses, including the anti-capitalist software license. It’s past time to evolve beyond Freedom 0.