The representative of the fascist party in Germany says she's "lesbian but not queer". I think it's the same case.
I tend to like "Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff" more than "Behind the Bastards". Need some nugget of hope in these dark days. A lot of the cool people have been downright inspiring.
My daily podcast is "It Could Happen Here", but some other mainstays in the educational side include:
No need for xcancel, Gebru is on actually social media: https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/113160285088058319
Dunno but why not, after Nanowrimo claimed that opposing "AI" means you're classist and ableist. Why not also make objecting be sexist, racist etc. I'm going to be ahead of the curve by predicting that being against ChatGPT will also be a red flag that you're a narcissistic sociopath manipulator because uhh because abused women need ChatGPT to communicate with their toxic exes /s
I also fear that said collapse could be ruinous to big tech, deeply damaging to the startup ecosystem, and will further sour public support for the tech industry.
Yes... ha ha ha... YES!
Also John McCarthy and Ray fucking Blanchard
I find the polygraph to be a fascinating artifact. most on account of how it doesn't work. it's not that it kinda works, that it more or less works, or that if we just iron out a few kinks the next model will do what polygraphs claims to do. the assumptions behind the technology are wrong. lying is not physiological; a polygraph cannot and will never work. you might as well hire me to read the tarot of the suspects, my rate of success would be as high or higher.
yet the establishment pretends that it works, that it means something. because the State desperately wants to believe that there is a path to absolute surveillance, a way to make even one's deepest subjectivity legible to the State, amenable to central planning (cp. the inefficacy of torture). they want to believe it so much, they want this technology to exist so much, that they throw reality out of the window, ignore not just every researcher ever but the evidence of their own eyes and minds, and pretend very hard, pretend deliberately, willfully, desperately, that the technology does what it cannot do and will never do. just the other day some guy way condemned to use a polygraph in every statement for the rest of his life. again, this is no better than flipping a coin to decide if he's saying the truth, but here's the entire System, the courts the judge the State itself, solemnly condemning the man to the whims of imaginary oracles.
I think this is how "AI" works, but on a larger scale.
I don't have many good memories but I recall having a 486 or Pentium 1 in 2001 when it was already old, in my college dorm room, running NetBSD to serve my and my roommate's personal blog.
One problem we had is that periodically the ADSL modem would stop responding and nothing could fix it but a hard reset. If nobody was using the Internet (which used to be a thing back then!! not looking at the Internet 24/7!!) it could go hours without us noticing that the blog was down. I couldn't program or access the modem in anyway, it was a black box, so my workaround was as follows. NetBSD had a /dev/speaker device which could play notes on the buzzer like "echo 'ABC#' > /dev/speaker". I made a little script that output small, random 7-note melodies to /dev/speaker (in pentatonic so that they sound "musical", and in the lower octaves so it wasn't grating). A watchdog service periodically pinged the modem; if the modem was blanking out, the PC would bleep-bloop cute little computer songs until somebody turned the modem on and off.
in retrospect I found computing in this era significantly healthier and more rewarding than the current Internet.
how's the nix drama going these days? I need more spilled tea to sip, anywhere I can read a recap? did everyone just gave up on not being sponsored by border surveillance drones?
Meanwhile in Brazil, the first ChatGPT-powered city council candidate, advertising the Lawmaker of the Future AI as his governing assistant, and the power of blockchain against corruption.
The most black mirror part for me is where he's selling tickets to watch Lex (the aforementioned Lawmaker of the Future "AI", represented as a sci-fi girlbot) in the theatre. No really this isn't a parody, they're literally serving political spectacle, as in, on stage.
A note for the unawares that Nanowrimo also tried to cover up a scandal when one of their mods was found to be referring minors to an ABDL fetish site. To my knowledge Nanowrimo never tried to own up to it, never even admitted anything was wrong until the FBI got involved, and still blocks any discussion of the situation.
https://xcancel.com/Arumi_kai/status/1760770617073082629
https://speak-out.carrd.co/
Reportedly they're now shilling AI hard on their Facebook (I don't have Facebook to check). I consider it 100% likely that, from this year on, everyone who uploads their 50k words to the organisation to prove completion will have their work promptly fed to the hungry algorithms.
At least one writer in the board has already resigned over the AI blog post https://xcancel.com/djolder/status/1830464713110540326
translate technically fiddly instructions of the type where people have trouble spotting mistakes, with patterned noise generators. what could go wrong