So yes, there are things called AI that I think are fine, because they help me do a mechanical thing faster (transcription, rotoscoping) and can be run on my local machine, and mostly aren't powered by stolen creative labor.

But these things are fundamentally different from what (in my experience, most) people mean when they say AI.

What (in my experience, most) people are railing against is Automated Slop Generation trained on the output of real people.

Image generators, music generators, text generators.

"Tools" designed to mimic human creativity and produce something that is designed to trick people.

Generative AI is a machine for producing something that seems plausible for a given input. That's all it can do, and that's what makes it dangerous.

When Generative AI hit the scene, it took me a really long time to make up my mind about it. Some people around me were (rightly) immediately against it, but I didn't fully understand why.

I played with early image generators because I found the results amusing. I was running stable diffusion locally, because I had a machine that could do that. I tried to convince myself that there were places that this tech could be used ethically. I tried to justify it.

I tinkered with early LLMs, partially because I found the results amusing and partially because (like many other people in the tech world) I saw in them the promise of a thing that I had long dreamed about and couldn't really articulate. (I was wrong! That promise is not there. These are machines built to look useful while doing nothing.)

And, in the meantime, I learned a lot about how these things work.

I've seen inside the sausage, I've eaten the sausage. I can say without question, that the sausage is made of people and sewage, and we're just hurting one another and ourselves when we eat it.

But there's nuance here, and I want to get into that for a second.

A 12 year old child in the United States or Canada and arguably in many other countries can get the highest level of a ham radio license and theoretically build or service a 1500 watt tube amplifier. This exposes them to lethal voltages. They are however forbidden from participating in “social media”.

The problem isn’t the children, it’s the tech bro billionaires and their non stop harvesting of your data.

I mean let's sum up right? The neoliberal "centrist" coalition in the Democratic Party has lost not one, but two elections to a reality TV show, billionaire, child rapist nazi whose catch-phrase is "you're fired." That happened. They have no future, they have no ideas, and they have no answers. What they do have however is a BURNING desire to stop "socialism" (moderate soc dem policies) from... OTHER Democrats.

Folks, these people are not your friends.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBdq-9RQyfU

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, but not on a quarterly basis, so you can always cut that expense to goose the numbers and then bounce before anything happens that might have negative consequences for you personally.

well that's rockstar, uber and nvidia on the fuck no list

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67663128

Screen reader users using a free and open-source calendar app on Linux, what do you use? I'd like to use one as a reference to make GNOME Calendar more screen reader friendly.

(Boost appreciated)

#a11y #accessibility #accessible #GNOME #GNOMECalendar #Linux

There's a few pictures currently going around of a group of Patriot Front fascist paramilitaries on Washington DC public transport.

A lot of people are worried by this. Some have talked at length about their worries.

As someone who spends a certain amount of time in black bloc, let me talk you through some things I haven't seen said about these pictures but that I think are very relevant.

(EDIT: people who know much more about PF as a group have commented below, please read what they have to say.)

(This is an invitation to show me oddbody furbies or other monstrosities, should anyone have any to spare)

Much like today, in December 2021, neo-Nazi Patriot Front members marched through DC with uniforms and masks. Later that night, they would encounter antifascist sabotage, leaving numerous vehicles damaged or inoperative.

Here's some PF members unmasked via police video obtained by Unicorn Riot: https://unicornriot.ninja/2022/patriot-front-members-exposed-in-parking-lot-clusterfck/

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116857003682719839

I'm not a sceptic who just walked away from Omelas and is criticizing it from the outside. I actually live there right in the centre, and am a valued member of its society that is worried!

#solarpunk #noai

Sometimes I jailbreak LLM support bots on websites and lead them around a bit to see how many tokens I can waste before they cut me off, just to punish the companies using them. Not sure or not if this is a significant enough form of resistance, especially if I'm the only one doing it.

Does anyone else do this?

Amazing photo by Cheney Orr from today. Black woman sitting alone on the DC Metro with a crowd of masked white supremacists on their way to the capital to march with confederate flags.

There is also a deeper analogy for what I keep hearing over and over from Black people: finding themselves surrounded by white people who either do not know, or do not care, about how America looks from the Black person's perspective.

#Photography #PoliticalPhotography #July4th

and, as a final insult, that when probability theory is mentioned, it can be swiftly derailed with the thermonuclear engagement bait device known as "pascal's wager",

• in which pascal's brother-in-law
  • (whom historians agree was in deep with a jesuit christian cult),
• posthumously published a lot of confusing and largely unremarkable theological rants, under blaise's name, as the Pensées
• which the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy tries very hard to link to blaise's authorship, fails,
• then tries to describe as vaguely math-flavored, and again fails,
• and then spends another 18 paragraphs on the philosophical exposition of the wager
  • as if that historical context is immaterial to the philosophical implications
  • which, again, are only distinguished from the ravings of a very troubled and traumatized individual,
• by virtue of the hoax that it was a mathematical study of the infinite

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/pascal-wager/

I managed an e-commerce server for about ten years. It grew from a small local shop into a major national business, even handling international orders. They expanded to the point where they reduced their local brick-and-mortar store hours because the bulk of their revenue was coming from online sales.

Then one seller came along and convinced them that switching to Shopify would be the key to growing even further. Apparently, their €130/month bare-metal redundant setup - which boasted a calculated uptime of 99.995% over 10 years - just wasn't cutting it anymore.

They’ve been on Shopify for about six months now, and every now and then, I still get the alerts. I left the monitoring active via Uptime Kuma and ran the numbers. Over the last six months, their uptime dropped below 98%.
In other words, in just six months, they’ve been down for almost as many hours as they were during the entire previous decade.

I contacted the client - not because I want to take over the hosting again, but just to understand what on earth happened (we're on excellent terms). Their response was: "We don't know, but if it happened on Shopify, it means it was bound to happen anyway."

As long as we keep swallowing the lie that "the cloud" and "tech giants" are always the right solution for us, we completely deserve the cloud and the tech giants.

#IT #SysAdmin #OwnYourData

they're adding LLMs to Scratch what the fuck is wrong with you

My mind seems to return repeatedly to the creation of standing armies in feudal Japan, begun under Nobunaga (an interesting character on his own, from what bits I know) and completed by his successor, Hideyoshi. I don't yet know much of this bit of history, but this dynamic seems like something I've really got to understand and spend a lot of time considering in order to further cohere my political tendencies. Feels like an especially treacherous turn of the broader "division of labor" dynamic.

I will never understand why so many activists still use generative images for their content, and rely on big tech for communications and organizations when there are now so many practical, more secure, and much more ethical alternatives.

Your principles aren't just to be stated, they must also be embodied and integrated in your work.

We must show by example what can be done with ethical tech and ethical practices.

#Activism #NoAI #NoBigTech

ya know how there's pseudoscience, where people take ideas & words from actual science & whip them up into a grand, fantastical misconception that is not scientific at all anymore?

we should similarly call out pseudotechnology. since the same blend of misrepresentation and magical thinking is all over the tech world right now

It didn't even start with AI hype. blockchain hype was another imo. even the idea of the 'Computer Whiz', a myth Silicon Valley is practically built on

Learning Idris 2, with an eye toward formal verification. Very much out of my depth, I think, but I'm gonna figure it out...