theluddite

The purpose of a system is what it does

According to the cybernetician, the purpose of a system is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for bald fact, which makes a better starting point in seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intention, prejudices about expectations, moral judgment, or sheer ignorance of circumstances.

The AI is "supposed" to identify targets, but in reality, the system's purpose is to justify indiscriminate murder.

Vermont has several towns with as little as a thousand people that have fiber internet thanks to municipal cooperatives like ECFiber. Much of the state is a connectivity wasteland but it's really cool to see some towns working together to sort it out.

I'm suspicious of this concept of editorial independence. I think it's a smoke screen that lets companies have their cake and eat it too. As far as I'm concerned, whoever cashes the checks also gets the blame, because either ownership means something, in which case the concept exists to obfuscate that, or it doesn't, in which case why is nature buying up other journals?

Yeah, it's grotesque. Doubly so when you consider that it's often public money that funds the research that they get to paywall. I've been really ragging on them lately for their role in the AI hype, too, which you can read about here and here if that sort of thing interests you.

I cannot handle the fucking irony of that article being on nature, one of the organizations most responsible for fucking it up in the first place. Nature is a peer-reviewed journal that charges people thousands upon thousands of dollars to publish (that's right, charges, not pays), asks peer reviewers to volunteer their time, and then charges the very institutions that produced the knowledge exorbitant rents to access it. It's all upside. Because they're the most prestigious journal (or maybe one of two or three), they can charge rent on that prestige, then leverage it to buy and start other subsidiary journals. Now they have this beast of an academic publishing empire that is a complete fucking mess.

I just wanted to point out why I think that people are reacting to it the way that they are, not necessarily because I want anything else from Google (other than their dissolution as an illegal monopoly). Personally, I think the entire AI hype is absurd and tedious.

My two cents, but the problem here isn't that the images are too woke. It's that the images are a perfect metaphor for corporate DEI initiatives in general. Corporations like Google are literally unjust power structures, and when they do DEI, they update the aesthetics of the corporation such that they can get credit for being inclusive but without addressing the problem itself. Why would they when, in a very real way, they themselves are the problem?

These models are trained on past data and will therefore replicate its injustices. This is a core structural problem. Google is trying to profit off generative AI while not getting blamed for these baked-in problems by updating the aesthetics. The results are predictably fucking stupid.

I've had similar experiences to what troyunrau@lemmy.ca describes. The problem comes more from the expectations that users have as consumers, which they bring with them to open source projects from general culture, not necessarily the existence of the users themselves. Some of those users for big open source projects are often corporations, to boot.

I've posted this here before, but this phenomenon isn't unique to dating apps, though dating apps are a particularly good example. The problem is that capitalism uses computers backwards.

Maybe this is a hot take, but it's really unfortunate that only the unhinged conservative lunatics are willing to have this discussion. I actually think that it'd be really healthy in a democracy to come together and exercise some agency in how we allow tech companies to access our children, if at all, but American liberals seem committed to some very broken notions of technocratic progress paired with free speech, while American conservatives are happy to throw all that away in order to have total control over their children, arriving closer to the right place for very dangerous reasons.

I'm deeply concerned that as a society we're becoming unable to distinguish between science, aka the search for knowledge, and corporate product development. More concerning still is the distinction between a scientific paper, which exists to communicate experimental finding such that it can be reproduced, and what is functionally advertising of proprietary products masquerading as such. No one can reproduce that "paper" cited there, because it's being done in-house at a company. That's antithetical to science.

When you’re creating something new, production is research. We can’t expect Dr. Frankenstein to be unbiased, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have insights worth knowing.

Yes and no. It's the same word, but it's a different thing. I do R&D for a living. When you're doing R&D, and you want to communicate your results, you write something like a whitepaper or a report, but not a journal article. It's not a perfect distinction, and there's some real places where there's bleed through, but this thing where companies have decided that their employees are just regular scientists publishing their internal research in arxiv is an abuse of that service./

LLM are pretty new, how many experts even exist outside of the industry?

... a lot, actually? I happen to be married to one. Her lab is at a university, where there are many other people who are also experts.