While you all laugh at ChatGPT slop leaving “as a language model…” cruft everywhere, from Twitter political bots to published Springer textbooks, over there in lala land “AIs” are rewriting their reward functions and hacking the matrix and spontaneously emerging mind models of Diplomacy players and generally a week or so from becoming the irresistible superintelligent hypno goddess:

https://www.reddit.com/r/196/comments/1jixljo/comment/mjlexau/

The problem with FOSS for me is the other side of the FOSS surplus: namely corporate encircling of the commons. The free software movement never had a political analysis of the power imbalance between capital owners and workers. This results in the “Freedom 0” dogma, which makes everything workers produce with a genuine communitarian, laudably pro-social sentiment, to be easily coopted and appropriated into the interests of capital owners (for example with embrace-and-extend, network effects, product bundling, or creative backstabbing of the kind Google did to Linux with the Android app store). LLM scrapers are just the latest iteration of this.

A few years back various groups tried to tackle this problem with a shift to “ethical licensing”, such as the non-violent license, the anti-capitalist software license, or the do no harm license. While license-based approaches won’t stop capitalists from using the commons to target immigrants (NixOS), enable genocide (Meta) or bomb children (Google), this was in my view worthwhile as a rallying cry of sorts; drawing a line in the sand between capital owners and the public. So if you put your free time on a software project meant for everyone and some billionaire starts coopting it, you can at least make it clear it’s non-consensual, even if you can’t out-lawyer capital owners. But these ethical licenses initiatives didn’t seem to make any strides, due to the FOSS culture issue you describe; traditional software repositories didn’t acknowledge or make any infrastructure for them, and ethical licenses would still be generically “non-free” in FOSS spaces.

(Personally, I use FOSS operating systems for 26 years now; I’ve given up on contributing or participating in the “community” a long time ago, burned out by all the bigotry, hostility, and First World-centrism of its forums.)

I hate programming but if I wanted to waste any time programming stuff my idea would be something akin to Yahoo! Directory from before Google, or del.icio.us from the 2000s, but distributed, and tied to a PGP-like web of trust system.

You search for a topic, you get links saved with that tag by people you personally validated and trust first, and then by people they trust, and people you don’t know but added as probably fine, and so on. Dunno how doable it would be to do something like this.

Yes to all that, plus the browser thing: How annoying the browsers are with expired certificates. I mean it has to be super hard to allow me to guess that the admin just forgot to renew the certificate, or it wouldn’t protect me from the very common threat model of… ähm… uh…

(it’s to protect the CA business model, of course.)

small domino: Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters” (2003)

…

big domino: “AI” “art” “realism”

I see someone else also just learned of this from the bonus episode of the “Bad Hasbara” podcast that’s just been made public

No, I’m with you. Bad feeling about where this is going.

I find it impressive how gen-AI developed a technology that is fine-tuned to generate content that looks precisely passably plausible, but never good enough to be correct or interesting or beautiful or worthwhile in any way.

Like if I was trying to fill the Internet with noise to ruin it, on purpose, I couldn’t do better than this. (mostly on accounr of me not having massive data centres nor the moral calousness to spew that much carbon, but still). It’s like the ideal infohazard weapon if your goal is to worsen as many lives as you can

Seems like everybody got that email, my account is semi-abandoned and still got it. I love the reek of desperation in the morning

I’m looking on the bright side. Yes, they looted Puppet, but now they’re stuck with Puppet

OK so we’re getting into deep rat lore now? I’m so sorry for what I’m about to do to you. I hope one day you can forgive me.

LessWrong diaspora factions! :blobcat_ohno:

https://transmom.love/@elilla/113639471445651398

if I got something wrong, please don’t tell me. gods I hope I got something wrong. “it’s spreading disinformation” I hope I am

yes, but it can only sing Peter

I got some very intense, frequent bullying in 90s Latin America for being perceived as queer, before even understanding myself that I was actually queer.

I don’t think there was ever anything like the jocks from US movies. Bullies tended to be troubled kids from difficult backgrounds, the kind of kid who would be themself exposed to violence and abuse at home or in their neighbourhood. A handful were from religious fundamentalist families.

There was some hostility towards children who took school too seriously or were perceived as teacher’s pets, but I don’t think that in itself would have inspired “slapped every day” levels of bullying. I don’t remember bullying due to what today are called fandoms or geeky interests; they were just much less known.

What I never get about this stuff is how unfun all of it is. The characters in character.ai don’t sound anything like their model characters, at all. ChatGPT necromancy is terrible, the séance table in my hometown sucked but the medium on a lazy day was still significantly better at producing some sort of impersonation that felt at least a little bit like the dead person, a skill I’ve come to appreciate a bit when compared to ChatGPT’s attempt at it. Everything that ChatGPT writes, no matter who it’s trying to imitate, has the exact same flavour, and the flavour is slop.

translate technically fiddly instructions of the type where people have trouble spotting mistakes, with patterned noise generators. what could go wrong

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:

• Live Like the World is Dying
• Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness
• It’s Going Down
• Final Straw Radio
• Reaction (especially liked her dives on the Pinkertons and “The Business Plot”)
• Srsly Wrong [unrelated to the similarly named thing]
• The Iron Dice
• Bad Hasbara
• Frontline Herbalism if you like plants

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!