YourNetworkIsHaunted @ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

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Today in finding statistical association in text data is not the same as reading

Your name appeared in a lot of articles about terrible crimes. You know who else's name appears in those articles?

Rick Astley is absolutely the Auron here, hanging on unsent for decades waiting for a chance to set things right.

I mean, does she actually write books anymore? Or is she a full time TERF now? Because that's a direct conflict between what's in her legal best interest and in her professional best interest.

In classic Rationalist fashion, she noticed something she didn't like, hypothesized a cause with no real evidence, and then proceeded to rant about the implications of that unproven hypothesis.

My suspicion, on the other hand, is that because Claude is just reproducing statistical patterns from its training data is simply reflecting the fact that she is referred to as a Nazi coder far more often than she is as some kind of open-source luminary. Unless her github metadata signs everything "Justine T the open-source developer" then that association isn't reflected in the patterns extrapolated from the training data.

It is an unfortunate fact thatsomeone is going to have the biggest stick. USA/NATO absolutely should be criticized for how our military has been used and what we've sacrificed domestically in order to have that, but I'm pretty sure a world where Russia or China have had the biggest stick over the last few decades is markedly less peaceful, less just, and less free than the current status quo.

Would you believe that there's a racist element to this as well?

Setting up the infrastructure for that manufacturing is expensive and complicated, requiring supply chains and skilled workers. Even ignoring the risks of disruption by hostile action that's a lot of infrastructure and industrial capacity to build up in an active war zone, and from the western perspective it's better long-term to have that extra manufacturing capacity locally, to say nothing of being easier to sell to politicians and voters.

I mean, hand grenades dropped from quadcopter were unironically effective against Russia's invasion of Ukraine in the early days, and arguably a lot of the current emphasis on FPV drones and loitering munitions represent an evolution of the same tactical concept.

See, I actually don't hate the idea of engineering and automating away parts of work. Work, almost by definition, sucks. If it didn't suck we wouldn't think of it as "work."

But the current model of AI is less trying to free humanity from work than it is freeing work from humanity. Take the important business of making the line go up away from the grubby hands of people who need things like "food" and "healthcare" as a necessary precondition for working, to say nothing of their desires for "dignity" or "respect". Even creative and artistic work that gets underpaid in exchange for being something people can be innately passionate about can be taken away from those people and fed a diet of raw electricity and compute.

I was trying to think of one that didn't end in a mass murder/suicide/conflagration-of-violence though.

I tried to think of a smaller cult that's still pretty well-known or influential but kept coming up with Heaven's Gate or the Branch Davidians.

I mean, "here's the video you asked for" is a pretty standard setup for a Rick roll, so it's definitely in the training data, and if it doesn't have an actual URL to link it's going to fill in something if it starts to spit out an affirmative response, which as we've seen is a really standard failure mode for these systems.

It's a little bit like a tiny version of the Mormons if Joseph Smith had read the collected works of Isaac Asimov instead of the Bible and also his name was Yud.

Or to go with less of a sneer, the Rationalist/TESCREAL/Californian Ideology is a loose grouping of fringe beliefs rooted in old-school science/tech fetishism with a lot of science fiction overlays and libertarian/reactionary politics that effectively define "let ultrawealthy tech capitalists do whatever they want" as the only reasonable choice and make it a moral imperative.

The good news is that the tools created were sufficiently useful that there's still a decent job market for tech workers (assuming we're not focused on the griftier side), it's just focused largely in non-tech companies.

David may have won the race, but I have the first sneer!

Parents weep because making good products is insufficiently profitable.

In reading about this I've seen some interesting concepts from scraping the edges of management cybernetics, focusing on organizations kind of like analogue information-processing systems. The one that really stuck in my mind is the accountability sink, am organizational function that takes the responsibility for some action or decision away from the people in the organization who actually do it and places it somewhere more abstract, like a process or a policy. This ties in to a lot of what we talk about here, since a lot of the tech industry these days seems to be about centralizing things around a few major platforms and giving the people who run those platforms as many accountability sinks as they can come up with, with AI being the newest.

Absolutely, and her record in those roles imo actually suggests at least some awareness of the kinds of problems that need to be solved there, though I'm sufficiently cynical about things that I would be surprised to see significant action on federal reforms. I'm cautiously optimistic about her, but my point is that even if you don't think she's any different from a rank-and-file Republican that would still make it irresponsible not to vote against Trump and the very specific plans he and the people around him have to make all of those problems even worse.

There is definitely room to push the Overton window farther left and (federal) electoral politics does not give an avenue to do that as long as the Republican party continues to drift further right. But the way to do that does not involve abandoning powerful federal offices like the goddamned presidency to right-wing loons.

I think there's definitely something to be said for the exhaustion of low-hanging fruit. Most of those big consumer innovations were either the application of novel physics or chemistry (refrigerants, synthetics, plastics, microwaves, etc) combined with automating very labor-intensive but relatively simple tasks (dish washing, laundry, manual screwdriving, etc). The digital age added some very powerful logic to that toolset, but still remains primarily limited to the kinds of activities and processes that can be defined algorithmically. The ingenuity of software developers along with the introduction of new tools and peripheral capabilities (printers, networks, sensors) have shown that the kind of problems that can be defined algorithmically is a much larger set than you would first think, but it's still limited.

Adding on to this, it's worth noting the degree to which defining problems algorithmically requires altering the parameters of that problem. For example, compare shopping at a store with using a vending machine. The vending machine dramatically changes the scope of the activity by limiting the variety of items you can get, only allowing one item per transaction, preventing you from examining the goods before purchasing, and so on. The high-level process is the same; I move from having no soda and some dollars to one soda and less dollars. But the changes that are made to ensure the procedure can be mechanized have some significant social tradeoffs. Each transaction has less friction, but also less potential. These consequences are even more pronounced if your point of comparison is an old-school sofa fountain where "hanging out waiting for the soda jerk and drinking together" is largely the whole point and while that activity requires more from you it also gives more opportunities to interact with and meet people and to see friends outside of work or school. Even if you don't want to spend the time or be social (or even like me get severe social anxiety sometimes!) this still leads to a world where there are more and larger blocks of time that you can't be expected to trade away to your job or other obligations. Your boss is likely to fire you for being late to work, unless that tardiness comes from the ferry you and your coworkers rely on being late. Because it's inevitable friction in a necessary part of working (can't work if you can't get to work) and because it can't be put entirely on the individual (even if you do want to blame the employee for taking the "wrong* boat so you really want to fire the whole team?) the system is basically forced to give you more grace than it otherwise would want to.

This is another way to frame the problems with more recent "innovations" - while social media and the gig economy both arguably empower individual consumers and producers of both cultural output and of services like taxis, they do so in ways that fundamentally change the relationship and individualize the connections between consumers, producers, and the system that they interact through. And because nobody has as direct a connection to the owners and operators of that system, they have more power to increase their profits at the expense of everyone who actually has to use the system to function.

It's also an accountability issue. If you create something in GIMP or whatever everyone agrees that you did that and are responsible for any copyright issues or defamation or whatever else arises from that work. That becomes fuzzier when people start saying "Grok made this!" Especially because Grok does operate according to a model that can and does go beyond whatever it's been instructed to do, so you might be able to plausibly argue that if you craft the prompt right.

And I can guarantee that the cesspool formerly known as Twitter will try to play whichever side of that is more advantageous to them. Copyright infringement? That's on the user. Unique IP? Well, Grok had a profound and independent creative role and so we deserve a piece.

What exactly do you think the alternative is here? Not voting just surrenders what little power the electoral process does give you. Even if electoral politics aren't a meaningful way to advance your vision of a better country, this is still an opportunity, however small, to reduce the harm that will be done under a Trump presidency. Like, even if you don't expect Harris to meaningfully improve things (and there are a lot of areas where a former cop probably shouldn't be expected to), the alternative is someone who continues to actively promise to make those same areas even worse.