RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/115827646863388901

@glyph i love it when i come across some line of reasoning where i do learn something new, and i feel like this thread qualifies as that.

some stray thoughts:
- the thread asks us to take a very good-faith angle on investors here, and i think i does so in a good way that can explain some parts of how this investment dynamic works. still, i also think greed, and many (big) investors being super out of touch with the general population is still a major part of how the AI hype bubble grew so big, and is going on for this long, alongside the more systemic pressures the thread highlights.
- i wonder if and how much this also plays into how easily DHH can secure large amounts of funding; afterall, he's (aside from a fascist) also long-time programming microcelebrity with good business connections. but it also kind of raises the question, what the *fuck* did this guy tell these CEOs he has direct access to what omarchy is? (not that it negates or changes the fact that these companies *are* massively funding a fascist who just happens to have the privilege of being on their contact list)

i feel like a big takeaway is that systemic issues play just as much a role in this stuff as personal failures, and in fact, the two can easily amplify each other. hm.

Description:
'lyssanetic' rhymes with 'cybernetic', and describes the property/tendency of LLMs to induce (metaphorical) madness in their users. effects range from things like mild addiction, anxiety, to decreased self-worth, social withdrawal, depression up to falling into conspiracy theories and complete disconnect from reality. broadly, any kind of psychological change that is directly due to LLM usage counts here.

this sometimes also gets talked about under the name "AI psychosis", but that term overly emphasizes only the upper end of what lyssanetic effects can look like, and it can give the inappropriate impression that they are an individual moral failure rather than something LLMs are capable of doing to you.

not everyone appears to be equally susceptible to it, but especially milder lyssanetic effects are incredibly common. people *do not* become mindless drones when under lyssanetic influence, but it can cause subtle shifts perception and judgement, like having something in the back of your mind that puts a finger on the scales of your decision-making. lyssanetic effects may uncover or amplify personal flaws and biases.

Questions:
are you a former or current LLM user? i would like to hear from you if you have experienced or are experciencing lyssanetic effects, and if yes, which; if you have recovered from more severe lyssanetic effects, what helped you recover?

(to anyone else: please withold any judgement you may have; this aspect of LLMs doesn't really receive enough attention, and we need to hear from those affected if we want to learn more about it, and what we might be able to do to help people out of it)

btw, to anyone interested, you can find both @csstricks and @geoff (the guy who runs (ran?) css tricks) here on mastodon, if you want to keep tabs on the situation, maybe support any other community projects this guy goes on to do.

keep in mind that css tricks is much more of an actual community resource than omarchy ever was, and has an AI statement that is, in short, "we don't use it".

even if we entirely set DHH's fascism aside for a moment, then omarchy is the kind of distro more or less anybody could run on a low budget: heavily piggy-backing off of another distro (in this case arch), with some super special customizations to set it apart. the fact that someone can easily get multi-million funding for this with relatively short negotiations while something like css tricks gets defunded (and other FOSS projects going largely un- or underfunded) leaves a bad taste in my mouth. not because this kind of piggy-back distro doesn't have value, but because it's such a crass and bizarre misallocation of resources.

DHH is throwing other projects under the bus here; he could also use his good connections to convince CEOs that other projects are worth funding as well, and he isn't doing that. DHH is the epitomy of "got mine, fuck you".

hm. hmm-hm. in case anybody is wondering how big of an asshole the digital ocean people really are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_upvxCAUzM

one thing this era of #genAI keeps showing us, is that often, the thing we care about isn't *just* the literal end product, but also in the process of how we get there.

with art, turns out we do care about things like context, and what it has to say, and not just about the physical presence of something nice to look at or listen to. and while the creation of individual pieces of art can, to a degree, successfully be imitated (often with some artifacts, but it isn't always easy to tell), the larger cultural conversation that takes place through art can't.

with coding, even if LLMs produced flawless code, having humans write code (aside from personal satisfaction etc) produces humans understanding the codebase, institutional knowledge becomes an incredibly important resource when things break, or the software needs to be adapted to changing requirements. and because code produced by LLMs is not any more flawless than organic human code, things *will* break, and we *will* need that institutional knowledge.

with mathematics, a significant part of the value in solving major problems has often not just been the solution itself, but also the techniques and insights gained from trying. group theory mainly exists as a byproduct from the effort of proving that the quintic is unsolvable. lie theory came from an attempt to solve differential equations, but is now largely applied elsewhere. even failed or incomplete attempts can go on to have a second life with a different purpose.

and while AI companies advocate for us to simply consume more end product, they are also deliberately insulating us from how incredibly resource-hungry LLMs are, as if that *didn't* drive the scale of the hype entirely ad absurdum.