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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
  • 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

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 15 September 2024
  • 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.

  • Random Positivity Thread: Happy Computer Memories
  • 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.

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 15 September 2024
  • 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.

    https://www.lex.tec.br/

    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.

  • Disapproving of automated plagiarism is classist ableism, actually: Nanowrimo
  • 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

  • Disapproving of automated plagiarism is classist ableism, actually: Nanowrimo

    > We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."

    > * Classism. Not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing. For some writers, the decision to use AI is a practical, not an ideological, one. The financial ability to engage a human for feedback and review assumes a level of privilege that not all community members possess. > * Ableism. Not all brains have same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing. Some brains and ability levels require outside help or accommodations to achieve certain goals. The notion that all writers “should“ be able to perform certain functions independently or is a position that we disagree with wholeheartedly. There is a wealth of reasons why individuals can't "see" the issues in their writing without help. > * General Access Issues. All of these considerations exist within a larger system in which writers don't always have equal access to resources along the chain. For example, underrepresented minorities are less likely to be offered traditional publishing contracts, which places some, by default, into the indie author space, which inequitably creates upfront cost burdens that authors who do not suffer from systemic discrimination may have to incur.

    Presented without comment.

    28
    80% of corporate AI projects fail — twice the rate of other IT projects
  • I really hate it that I already see in my mind the linkedin types going like "80% of AI projects fail—how you need to sleep in the office 7 days of a week to reach the 20%". I mean Y Combinator used to take pride on the fact that over 90% of startups fail, do you have what it takes to be a ten percenter??

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 1 September 2024
  • I was going to say they were cowards about this because it's powered by wind-up mechanics rather than burning droplets of black ship oil you feed into the tiny oil barrel. But then I realised that would probably waste most of the energy on heat, right on the delicate mechanisms and your wrist, and who wants to use an energy source that damages everything around it with excessive warming

  • Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 1 September 2024
  • I wanted to torture myself so I looked into that person's posting history. They have made the exact same point that "Monty Python in fact used to mock the gays, how ironic huh?!?" three times in a row in different threads, really showing it to them wokes

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)MI
    mirrorwitch @awful.systems
    Posts 1
    Comments 12