YourNetworkIsHaunted @ YourNetworkIsHaunted @awful.systems

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1 yr. ago

For as much as they like to talk about building things and solving problems the software industry doesn't seem to put a lot of effort into building things well or solving their own problems.

I once used that exact same image (watermark and all) in a university presentation, and it's still the canonical "hacker" pantomime in my family to this day. Holding up a Chromebook menacingly in one fingerless-gloved hand while typing furiously with the other.

That's how he suckers you in!

What if instead of making robots better we just made interacting with a real person indistinguishable by demanding they conform to arbitrary metrics that the brain-slugs that control our minds think look like genuine human warmth and kindness?

Quick, someone file the copyright for "Roko's Postmodern Life"

I'm pretty sure you're only allowed to have that discussion if you're a Metal Gear villain. Which despite his best efforts Roko does not have enough dramatic presence or raw drip for.

Right next to the illegally-retained classified documents!

Even if that's all true and not missing any context it's a pretty bold argument to blame the EU instead of the incompetent vendors themselves or the companies with sufficiently poor practices that this update was pushed to all users without proper testing and validation. Microsoft themselves isn't above pushing a bad update, and it's obviously not like crowdstrike are an unknown bunch of yahoos that everyone should have known not to trust. Instead, largely because of the anticompetitive practices of every company in the IT industry we find ourselves once again facing massive systemic disruptions from a small error in one component of the wider infrastructure.

Truly the weirdest consequence of crank magnetism and conspiracy syncretism is the kinds of bedfellows you find. UFO cults align with Christian dominionists because the aliens are actually demons (or vice versa - which direction isn't important).

It feels like modern fascism is less driven by orthodoxy (right belief) than they are by orthopraxy (right action) to the degree that as long as they aren't actually in power anyone who hates on the right people and rejects the right facts can join the same club regardless of what they actually think. The weirdo occultism of the Nazis was largely tied to the project of reifying their racial hierarchy in all aspects of society by establishing that the Aryan race had the best religion and the best history in addition to the best genes and the best country. The weirdo occultism of modern fascism doesn't have that kind of thread to it that I can see, and I don't know what that means for ongoing development. Does it turn into a source of internal strife as they get closer to having actual influence? Do they settle into a more specific doctrine and cull the ranks of those who don't adopt it? Or is accepting a consensus reality actually the optional part here as long as the group can broadly agree on what to do?

Catching up on SMBC and finding a quality sneer I'm a little bit surprised I didn't find here sooner.

Can I get an abot?

This can also be an area where ML is an appropriate and useful tool. You'll see it used to establish a statistical baseline for what traffic should look like and then it can flag when it detects something that doesn't match that as suspicious and worth further investigation. In this space there is actually a lot of value in some of the statistical modeling techniques, though generative AI is obviously a very different and less useful beast.

Or you identify which company is scraping you and feed their GET request into their own model to make the resulting training data as incestuous as possible.

I mean, it's inherently hard to quantify the impact of this kind of thing, but in terms of Putin's goals for it I think "substantial" is pretty reasonable. It's not effective in that Russia can't trigger a color revolution in America any more than America can trigger a color revolution in Ukraine, Serbia, Georgia, or any of the Arab Spring nations. But just because they aren't the source of the divisions in American society that form these fault lines doesnt mean they aren't actively trying to widen them. Especially when we're talking about the America First crowd and the Conspiracy Left I think it's entirely fair to point out loudly and often how the narrative they're advancing is backed by adversarial powers that actively want to weaken America specifically and democracy in general.

Or to refer back to the original meme, Jimmy Dore may think he's a lefty, but all his political actions and rhetoric work to the benefit of fascists rather than working people.

If the only options are supporting genocide or being a Russian asset

So about those Ukrainians. Or is genocide, like imperialism, only bad when America does it?

I dunno man. It's definitely getting repetitive, but when we know that there is a substantial Russian disinfo machine out there and support for the Russian invasion of Ukraine is such a consistent theme in these people AND Putin is one of the major beneficiaries of the general turn towards right-wing authoritarianism (because when our politicians say and do the same things it legitimizes those antidemocratic elements of his own regime), it's not an unfair connection to keep drawing.

The most compelling argument to not call them Russian troll farmers would be for them to simply stop saying all the things a Russian troll farmer would say.

I once helped one of my company's customers troubleshoot an issue that had seen the same ridiculous edge case error happen three times over the course of a few years. At one point the actual sustaining developer we worked with was able to narrow down a specific bit that was getting flipped somehow, and pitched that cosmic radiation was a plausible solution given how rarely this kind of thing impacted other customers.

It was at this point that we remembered that the customer was either a university with a nuclear physics lab or a hospital with a nuclear medicine program (can't remember now, ironically enough) that the server rack lived adjacent to.

As someone who is still confused why C++ is different from a B-, thank you for your sacrifice in wading through that nonsense.

That's actually a really good point re: Scott's audience and the role he fills. Especially when we're talking about the influential or high-profile folks in the Ratosphere it's ironically easy to take them at their word and act as though they're inhuman utility-maximizers with an abhorrent utility function, rather than as actual people with squishy human needs and feelings and all that.

I think a lot of the challenge in reaching these people is that they tend to meet those emotional needs largely by rejecting the parts of the world that don't comport to their self-image. That fits with the emphasis on race science, for example. Rather than acknowledge that they're beneficiaries of systemic injustice it's easier to model a world where those inequalities are an inevitable result of natural processes. I think we got introduced just yesterday to a sociologist interested in the topic who has done much more background reading on the kind of worldview a lot of the silicon valley/tech industry bubble has ended up in and how it got there. I think that despite their repetition of mantras about the relationship between maps and territories it's pretty clear that Scott and Co's version of Rationalism is still focused on making more abstracted maps. It's a flight from ambiguity and responsibility that honestly I can't describe without slipping into sounding dismissive and callous towards those who take it, even though (or maybe because) I definitely started down that same rabbit hole and if I hadn't hit a completely unrelated road block that stopped me from moving to San Francisco and joining the same rat race I very likely would have ended up in the same kind of ideology.

But I think you're spot on that a lot of the reason Scott connects with that audience is because he makes them feel good about doing the things they want to do anyways, which usually means enjoying structural advantages and disproportionate wealth compared to the people they presumably know are out there buy don't have to seriously engage with often.

I may have posted this on another thread of yours somewhere, but I think Elizabeth Sandifer wrote the best analysis of Scott's rhetoric and writing style. Her assessment is, basically, that he doesn't persuasively or effectively argue for his conclusions as much as he implies them through metaphor, negative space, and allegory. This lack of clarity serves to obscure how weak the underlying arguments actually are, particularly the degree to which he completely ignores any context (historical, statistical, philosophical, etc) of one of his reference points that would complicate the picture by making it actually accurate and complete.

This beigeness is the heart of how his despicable politics were able to float under the radar for so many people, myself included. I would add to El's analysis two things. The first is that Scott is a master of apophasis, the art of talking about something by explicitly not talking about it. He frequently draws to a repugnant conclusion regarding race science or gender relations and ends up spending the last paragraph quickly disavowing the obvious implication of the rest of his piece. He is also very skilled at performing intelligence. He builds his non-arguments from elements of multiple fields across history, science, philosophy (often using the jump to move from implying his conclusion to assuming it) and has a good vocabulary that lets him sound vaguely academic but without being as dry and detailed as actual academic work.

The combination there is very useful for telling Important People the things that they want to believe anyways or that flatter them, but not great for actually communicating. I don't know how well those techniques can be adapted to less bastardly ends.

Nah, that would only happen if they touched our boats.

Or if we thought they touched our boats.

Or if something wholly unrelated happened to one of our boats nearby and it was politically convenient to say they had touched our boats even if they didn't actually have much reason to at the time.

The Caves of Steel was basically named for it, with a major plot point revolving around the fact that everyone is too agoraphobic to have committed the murder because of generations spent living in giant domed cities kept isolated from the natural world.