theluddite

Of course you'd hate LLMs, they know about you!

Headline: LLM slams known pervert

A few days later, DFCS presented Patterson with a "safety plan" for her to sign. It would require her to delegate a "safety person" to be a "knowing participant and guardian" and watch over the children whenever she leaves home. The plan would also require Patterson to download an app onto her son's phone allowing for his location to be monitored. (The day when it will be illegal not to track one's kids is rapidly approaching.)

Of course there's a grift train. I'd be very curious to know more about that company, its owners, and its financials.

Also tagging @abucci@buc.ci (can someone tell me how to do that right?). Seems like something that might interest you, re: our recent conversation.

This is an article about a tweet with a screenshot of an LLM prompt and response. This is rock fucking bottom content generation. Look I can do this too:

Headline: ChatGPT criticizes OpenAI

Welcome aboard 🫡

I've tried it all: modals, banners, rewording it, .... and, like, I get it. If I contributed a few bucks to every worthwhile thing, I'd run out of money quickly. There actually is one at the bottom of every post right now, though it's quite small, because I've learned that it really doesn't matter.

Also, to be clear, I didn't mean to complain or anything. I just wanted to explain the reality of the ecosystem as it currently exists, to the best of my knowledge.

I just want to emphasize that to set up a truly independent and unpaywalled piece of media, you probably need to abandon hope of it being even a viable side hustle. Quasi-independent media on, say, YouTube or Substack can make some money, but you're then stuck on those corporate platforms. If you want to do your own website or podcast or whatever, that's more independent, but you're still dependent on Google if you run ads, or on Patreon if you do that sort of thing. The lesson of Twitter should make pretty clear the danger inherent to that ecosystem. Even podcasts that seem independent can easily get into huge trouble if, say, Musk were to buy Patreon or iHeart.

I've been writing on my website for over two years now. My goal has always been to be completely independent of these kinds of platforms for the long term, no matter what, and the site's popularity has frankly exceeded my wildest dreams. For example, I'm the #1 google result for "anticapitalist tech:"

But I make no money. If I wanted this to be anything but a hobby, I'd have to sacrifice something that I think makes it valuable: I'd have to paywall something, or run ads, or have a paid discord server, or restrict the RSS feed. As things stand now, I don't know my exact conversion rate because I don't do any analytics and delete all web logs after a week, but I did keep the web logs from the most recent time that I went viral (top of hackernews and several big subreddits). I made something like 100 USD in tips, even though the web logs have millions of unique IPs. That's a conversion rate of something like 0.00002 USD per unique visitor.

Honestly, if I got paid even $15/hr, I would probably switch to doing it at least as a part time job, because I love it. Compare that to the right wing ecosystem, where there's fracking money and Thiel money just sloshing around, and it's very very obvious why Democrats are fucked, much less an actual, meaningful left. Even Thiel himself was a right wing weirdo before he was a tech investor, and a right wing think tank funded his anti-DEI book. He then went on to fund Vance. It's really hard to fight that propaganda machine part time.

I'm probably going to get shit for this here, but you have to meet people where they are. If elections are where they are, that's where you have to go. The best way to get people to work with you will always be working with them first. That's going to involve doing shit that you don't want to do. In the same way that a good teacher in school is in a two-way relationship with students, effective organizers don't organize at people, but build meaningful and mutual relationships with them. People will open up to you when they feel you're open to them.

So my advice is to join the DSA work, do their elections, but take it upon yourself to keep up the organizational momentum once the election is over and work on something else. Yes, you're going to have to canvas for some shitty democrat, but, if you knock enough doors, you'll really learn the situation on the ground where you live, and you can roll that over, hopefully with a few friends. If your personal philosophy doesn't let you compromise enough to go that route, so be it, but that's what I'd do.

Glad to hear it!

Totally agreed. I didn't mean to say that it's a failure if it doesn't properly encapsulate all complexity, but that the inability to do so has implications for design. In this specific case (as in many cases), the error they're making is that they don't realize the root of the problem that they're trying to solve lies in that tension.

The platform and environment are something you can shape even without an established or physical community.

Again, couldn't agree more! The platform is actually extremely powerful and can easily change behavior in undesirable ways for users, which is actually the core thesis of that longer write up that I linked. That's a big part of where ghosting comes from in the first place. My concern is that thinking you can just bolt a new thing onto the existing model is to repeat the original error.

This app fundamentally misunderstands the problem. Your friend sets you up on a date. Are you going to treat that person horribly. Of course not. Why? First and foremost, because you're not a dick. Your date is a human being who, like you, is worthy and deserving of basic respect and decency. Second, because your mutual friendship holds you accountable. Relationships in communities have an overlapping structure that mutually impact each other. Accountability is an emergent property of that structure, not something that can be implemented by an app. When you meet people via an app, you strip both the humanity and the community, and with it goes the individual and community accountability.

I've written about this tension before: As we use computers more and more to mediate human relationships, we'll increasingly find that being human and doing human things is actually too complicated to be legible to computers, which need everything spelled out in mathematically precise detail. Human relationships, like dating, are particularly complicated, so to make them legible to computers, you necessarily lose some of the humanity.

Companies that try to whack-a-mole patch the problems with that will find that their patches are going to suffer from the same problem: Their accountability structure is a flat shallow version of genuine human accountability, and will itself result in pathological behavior. The problem is recursive.

That would be a really fun project! It almost reads like the setup for a homework problem for a class on chaos and nonlinear dynamics. I bet that as the model increasingly takes into account other people's (supposed?) preferences, you get qualitative breaks in behavior.

Stuff like this is why I come back to postmodernists like Baudrillard and Debord time and time again. These kinds of second- (or Nth-) order "news" are an artifact of the media's constant and ever-accelerating commodification of reality. They just pile on more and more and more until we struggle to find reality through the sheer weight of its representations.

Really liked this articulation that someone shared with me recently:

here's something you need to know about polls and the media: we pay for polls so we can can write stories about polls. We're paying for a drumbeat to dance to. This isn't to say polls are unscientific, or false, or misleading: they're generally accurate, even if the content written around marginal noise tends to misrepresent them. It's to remind you that when you're reading about polls, you're watching us hula hoop the ourobouros. Keep an eye out for poll guys boasting about their influence as much as their accuracy. That's when you'll know the rot has reached the root, not that there's anything you can do about it.