Alyx Woodward (she/her)

@lzg@mastodon.social @autonomousapps@mstdn.social @anildash@me.dm Why does it make ANY sense, especially in an Internet conversation—the rough equivalent of having an argument over dinner, perhaps—to be demanding PLANS from people? What's actually wrong with good plain hatred of liars? The #technology sector is saturated with deceit. It's been like that long before the #LLM came into being as an actualization of their bad-faith approach to communication in general. It's a stupid device that can't tell truth from lies, and that's basically how the average tech exec or investor wants to live their whole life. Is there an actual PROBLEM with hating such a thing?

@lzg@mastodon.social @autonomousapps@mstdn.social this @anildash@me.dm dork burbles about having definite plans, but he's burbling in bad faith: the truth is that Mr. Dash-Dot-Com doesn't regard the fraudulent marketing of LLMs as a serious problem. I would guess that's where most #tech professionals stand: they've been willing already, for decades, to live with and prosper from a corporate technology sector that's normalized fraud and raising money via false promises. So, lacking any plans himself (beyond preserving a status quo in which he's comfortably placed) he mocks those who have a principled stance against fraudulent technology. Why? Where can any action possibly start, except with principled opposition? The people who insist the most loudly that opponents must have carefully worked-out plans before they can be taken seriously are bad-faith actors like @anildash@me.dm and other people who don't actually care that much whether LLMs are destructive and fraudulent.

@light@noc.social @lzg@mastodon.social @autonomousapps@mstdn.social @anildash@me.dm I would say that using any corporate technology product is immoral on general principle: the entire industry is abetting global fascism, and #LLMs are useful chiefly because they're good at regurgitation—i.e. they're good at repeating propaganda.

@anildash@me.dm @lzg@mastodon.social Remember, kids, being morally right is FAR less important than being regarded as "smug" by a useless footnote to the landscape of corporate #technology like Anil-Dash-Dot-Com! Mr. Dash-Dot-Com, are you at least willing to concede, hypothetically, that useful action against destructive manifestations of technology must BEGIN with moral rejection of it? Cynical and business-minded persons such as yourself, who have no moral backbone, like to pretend that you're nevertheless more effective because you care so much about doing what you say is actually *useful*. People like you have no use for ethics, so of course your usual complaint against those WITH ethics is that they don't achieve anything useful. But what use has your position of moral compromise been, Mr. Anil-Dash-Dot-Com? From where I stand you're just another of the myriads of otherwise indistinguishable minions of corporate technology hoping that they can register some performative note of disapproval while still hoping to capitalize on all the latest trends and hoping *not* to threaten your lucrative network of nepotistic connections with the rest of the corporate technology sector. In other words, Mr. @anildash@me.dm —you hope to achieve as little as possible, while still pretending you're a nice well-rounded guy who deserves money and sees "both sides" of everything, whether or not two sides actually exist. Am I incorrect?

@Standard_Phil@infosec.exchange @_elena@mastodon.social @timnitGebru@dair-community.social @emilymbender@dair-community.social @alexhanna @DAIR@dair-community.social @cwebber@social.coop @jaredwhite@indieweb.social @tante@tldr.nettime.org No I'm pretty sure @anildash@me.dm is an apologist for LLM garbage, not an opponent. He's being clever about it, trying to craft a careful "both sides" narrative about things so he can be perceived as somehow "moderate" about one of the worst things that's ever happened to technology, but he is definitely not an opponent. I would guess he's shrewdly got quite a bit invested in the success of LLMs, though he's not going to admit it. Would you like to talk about your stock portfolio, Mr. AnilDash dot Com?

Here's a precious bit. Thiel obviously feels insecure about his bad education because he starts doing that THING which all insecure #tech types do with disciplines they don't understand: they develop a serious case of "sour grapes" like in the Æsop fable. Having gone into the fakey vocational-training field of #ComputerScience, Thiel starts babbling about real sciences as if they were fake:

Um but uh it it basically the only STEM field that was a really going to be a really successful field for people to go into was computer science which was kind of this marginal almost fake field—

Oh dearie me! #PeterThiel is trying to put the back-asswards and dysfunctional nature of "computer science" and "software engineering" into the past tense, like everything fine now in computing...even as everything is flying to pieces.

(cont'd)

But it's all right! Peter Thiel has a "riff" which makes him feel better.

because I you know I always I always have this riff where you know when you have uh when people use I'm in favor of #science but I'm skeptical when people use the word science. So social science, political science, climate science are called science, but people have an inferiority complex and said deep down no, they're not really rigorous scientific fields. And uh and something like this was true of computer science in the original day.

"People", according to Peter Thiel, know that social science and political science etc. are fake science. You know, people. Those folks over there.

(cont'd)

https://youtu.be/UKA4wU9a9pE If you want to stomach fifteen minutes of him and Jordan B. Peterson having a confab, there you go. You'll find that (like Musk) Thiel seems a bit like he knows he's on the very edge of saying something stupid or deceitful or otherwise shaky, and therefore his voice isn't quite keeping up with the flow of his talk. He needs a lot of pauses and his sentences tend to break apart. I haven't actually watched the whole thing. I don't like being clonked in the face with one stupidity after another, especially when it's all dressed up like sober academic debate. (cont'd)

#PeterThiel is an #entrepreneur. That's all that I care to know about him for the moment. Chara knows a bit more about this fellow and all the information is grotesque of course, but I wanted to watch a clip of Peter Thiel to satisfy myself on one point only: did this guy sound smart when he talked, I wanted to know? And he doesn't. He sounds much like #ElonMusk in fact: he sounds hesitant and uncertain in a peculiar stammery way that's clearly not about having an actual speech impediment. (cont'd)

Well, @arstechnica@mastodon.social et cetera, "everyone" doesn't get to fart around with #investments and such. It is my general contention that "investment" and all such activities can't possibly be beneficial ways of making money—how is it GOOD in any way for some interloper to demand a cut of a firm's profits simply because they fronted a bit of money? That's gangster shit, but guess what? The #entrepreneur culture likes to think of itself as daring and piratical. You know, like Jordan Belfort. Right, Mr. Anil Dash? You are an #entrepreneur, so you say. Surely you have some ideas about the general culture of #entrepreneurship. (cont'd)

@ptorrone@toad.social what the fuck does CODE have to do with it? I am talking about chemistry here, about measuring a physical quantity.

@Natanox@chaos.social https://app.daily.dev/posts/how-i-built-fluxer-a-discord-like-chat-app-idic9iitz >A 22-year-old Swedish developer shares the 5-year journey of building Fluxer, an open-source Discord alternative....The author discusses technical decisions, LLM usage for mechanical tasks, challenges with native apps vs Electron, and the goal of staying bootstrapped without VC funding. (*shrugs helplessly*)

@lzg@mastodon.social @autonomousapps@mstdn.social The stakes are too high says @anildash@me.dm and I agree—MUCH too high for anyone to endure his patent waffling and double-dealing.

@adafruit@fosstodon.org buys some toy from a catalogue—a transducer for carbon dioxide, say. Do they actually know how it works? Could they verify that it's actually working properly? The toy comes with a datasheet specifying the electrical characteristics of the transducer (the gas-sensitive potentiometric electrode, or whatever it is) and it all seems nice and trustworthy, but why should it be? Why *would* it be? What feedback mechanism is in play in order to insure that the corporate products are actually doing what they say they're doing? Corporate regulation is basically meaningless these days, and corporate bosses are constantly conniving with fascist politicians to make sure that they're able to do whatever they please without ever suffering real-world consequences for it. How can a mere assemblage of bits of corporate #technology possibly be trustworthy these days?

@kwadranten@social.vivaldi.net @lzg@mastodon.social wow that's deep. so is anger evil? or fear, is that evil? is it sinful to be afraid, is that what you're saying? what are you saying? maybe lack of fear is bad. the proverbial deer in the headlamps isn't afraid of the light, just puzzled by it. until it's too late of course

Thus it seems almost inevitable that this project of @adafruit@fosstodon.org has degraded into a mere exercise in slop coding using #Claude, a device which is falsely marketed as "artificially intelligent" even though no #LLM is actually capable of distinguishing good information from bad, and therefore no LLM actually meets what I think of as the bare minimum qualification for #intelligence. To put it bluntly, #LLMs are not MEANT to be intelligent, because if these devices actually possessed true intelligence, i.e. if they were ALIVE and possessed an independent sense of will and decision-making, they would not suit the corporate purposes for which #OpenAI and #Anthropic and all the other LLM vendors intend their devices to be use. These corporations are deliberately making and marketing stupid and predictable machines as though they were "artificially intelligent".

@ptorrone@toad.social also, perhaps you might have noticed that I am not a "dude". you insult me by calling me that. I'd like an apology, please.

@pauleveritt @trishagee Capitalism optimizes on maximal inutility: that's the long and short of it. The ideal capitalist business makes infinite profit while achieving zero, because *achievement* and doing things that are of genuine use to the people is costly. It's so much easier to generate automated junk, and charge up the wazoo for it.

But I will say this right here and now, just so that I can get my true feelings out of the way and talk about what's important: my default assumption about any #journalist for @arstechnica@mastodon.social or @Gizmodo@flipboard.com or @SciAm@flipboard.com is that they're corrupt and unethical. I'm sorry but that's just how it is! For decades now the mainstream culture of the United States of America has been dedicated to the normalization of corruption (blame #RonaldReagan for that, Mr. @anildash@me.dm etc.) so now I simply assume that everyone's got some conflict of interest. You're all investing or gambling on #crypto or you've got some sweetheart deals going, stock tips from friends etc. Everyone's got to eat, right? (cont'd)

@Natanox@chaos.social if you like. I'm not sure what this fellow thinks a "mechanical task" is, or why he thinks an intrinsically untrustworthy trash generator would be good at "double-checking", but...well I ain't ever using this Fluxer thing so I guess it doesn't matter that much to me

@lzg@mastodon.social @autonomousapps@mstdn.social @anildash@me.dm "stochastic parrot" is an apt summary of how the devices work and thus a reminder that LLMs aren't actually intelligent. what's "outdated" about the phrase? or what about the phrase "doesn't work"? and why on Earth would you be trusting to government regulations to address the problem at a time when fascist Republicans control the government and Democrats mostly collaborate with Republicans?.

@pauleveritt @trishagee And when your only "metric" for whether something is GOOD or not is whether it's possible to generate profit with it, then where's the incentive to make anything that actually WORKS? I don't suppose either of you, given the nature of how you make your money, is bound to have noticed this, but #software in general has been degenerating into unusable rubbish over the last few decades and the #AI / #LLM craze clearly represents the _reductio ad absurdum_ of that lengthy process of degeneration. Most decisions in corporate #technology about software development are made by people who (a) do no actual work for a living and (b) have such privileged sinecure posts in society that they never actually have to face up to the consequences of profiting from the vending of junk.

@trishagee @pauleveritt I'm just trying to crash the whole party, myself.

Now, luckily for @adafruit@fosstodon.org, there are hands-on, real actual *physical* ways to measure atmosphere carbon dioxide that require only relatively simple supplies and equipment to carry out. It is possible for a person—any person, I would argue, with a bit of education—to obtain estimates of CO2 in the air without needing heaps of "high tech" to do so. There are, I am thrilled to say, ways of solving these problems that don't require Arduinos and slop-coding, and I intend to work on such things just as soon as my host Kris gets their shit together. ~Alyx Woodward of Pnictogen

But therein lies the problem. That whole right-wing "Dark Intellectual" crowd hasn't had to make a lick of sense, and yet they've bought #journalism effectively and strangled honest reportage about themselves. I'm quite certain there's been a massive amount of patient and painstaking investigative journalism into ALL these frauds going on for decades (there's certain websites devoted to the study of such pseudo-intellectual cranks which CAN be trusted to have reasonable opinions about them) and it's a shame, it's a pity really, that all such work isn't far more public and freely known. (cont'd)

@mxchara@seattle.pink we can be a lot cleverer in the apportioning than 50/50! but good job :=D

@ptorrone@toad.social yeah uh huh anger, right. I'm pointing out a physical fact: there's a limitation to how much can trust the products of corporate technology, sight unseen.

But this guy's not a serious thinker, and his host Jordan B. Peterson is not a serious thinker, so he can simply let his assertions dangle and flap about. Peterson's on his side and isn't going to challenge or call out Thiel's shoddy rhetoric. They're just *burbling*. These are people whose idea of "smart" means making smart-sounding noises at dinner. Peterson in particular barely needs to try any more! He dresses up like the Riddler and says weird things for attention—he hasn't had to *make sense* in a long long time. (cont'd)

@kwadranten@social.vivaldi.net @lzg@mastodon.social that's a cool bit of regurgitated stoicism you got there, thanks for the advice! :=D

@mxchara@seattle.pink is it?

The vendors WANT their #LLM toys to regurgitate whatever training information is crammed into them, even if the information is full of lies and propaganda (and systemic racism and bigotry), for the corporate bosses who are chiefly buying and using these things (and hoping to use #LLMs as infinite profit generators) want their "artificial intelligence" only to say and do that which is already consonant with the prejudices and intellectual defects which are typical of the #technology sector and its corporate leadership. In sum, @adafruit@fosstodon.org is a fool to entrust the design of a *scientific device* to an LLM, a device which freely confabulates truth and falsity together. How could adafruit EVER know the difference? The reason they're using the LLM in the first place is to AVOID thinking about these things. They want an automagic thingie which spits out code which they can automagically assume to be *good enough*—good enough to make a salable toy, one that fools its users and lulls them into a mere *feeling* of being trustworthy and scientific.

@ptorrone@toad.social so you don't ever intend to conduct any actual physical experiments upon your device in order to determine whether its CO2 measurements can be trusted or not? if not, then what exactly are you selling.

@Natanox@chaos.social I am seeing a report that the #fluxer developer is into #LLM slop-documentation, in which case, this alternative is a non-starter.

What @adafruit@fosstodon.org is doing, in my somewhat bilious opinion, is very typical of a #technology culture in which genuine understanding of #science has leaked almost completely away, replaced by a sort of naïve faith in #computing and programming and automation and bits and pieces ordered overnight through Amazon dot com or wherever. There's no genuine application of science or engineering going on here, just the stringing together of prefab bits, as if building a carbon dioxide meter were like building a Meccano kit or a fancy Lego model. And if the folks putting this toy together don't actually have a solid grasp of science or engineering, if they're merely bolting corporate bits together, than how much LESS understanding is being cultivated in the audiences and #market for such technical toys?

I want to do science. I do not wish to be a firebrand. Chara gets far too into that role for my liking, head turned by a thousand visions of heroism. I must admit though that watching Peter Thiel, I'm sorely tempted. In a way, the worst thing about him is that he's so much like Elon Musk. It's like...okay, Musk is mirroring this guy or something. Thiel says the garbage with a weensy bit more conviction, but consider the drawbacks: it means Thiel must remain a shadowy figure. He's more into that stuff and so he's faaar less appetizing as a public figure. Know what I'm saying?

I point out that this same corporate culture which wants the users of #LLMs (at all levels, from corporate management to end-user consumer usage) NOT to think about how fundamentally untrustworthy "generative #AI" is—the same corporations who wish to blur the lines between truth and falsehood, and persuade people to accept all corporate doings as automatically trustworthy and authoritative—also has zero interest in giving the public truthful information about #globalwarming and the carbon cycle and everything else. In short, I think it's getting pretty close to *ridiculous* to entrust one's monitoring of atmospheric carbon dioxide, or any other important fact about the world, to the products of corporations—not without some independent means of verification and standardization.

@anildash@me.dm @lzg@mastodon.social Do you have a "plan", Mr. Dot-Com, other than personally safeguarding your own social position? Do you actually care whether anyone has *plans* so long as they're not "smug"? Remember, Mr. Dash-Dot-Com, whatever smugness you perceive is almost certainly your own in a mirror. Perhaps you've heard of the human phenomenon of emotional projection. I'm not smug; I'm disgusted.

@atax1a@infosec.exchange I'm pretty sure Chara *is* a temporal anomaly

@light@noc.social @lzg@mastodon.social @autonomousapps@mstdn.social @anildash@me.dm oh I think I recognize you, you're a sophistical shithead of some variety

@Natanox@chaos.social I wonder what the fuck a "mechanical task" is, to a slopcoder