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Looking at which organizations and 'communities' are currently happily jumping on the "AI" train while handwaving about vague benefits of it, is going to tell you a lot about who is happy to throw their community under the bus to look cool or investable

It still boggles my mind how companies like Medium and Substack have managed to create hype about their 'revolutionary platforms' which are... literally just blog hosters

- Edit:
Here it is, thanks to
@molly0xfff : incidentdatabase.ai/

- Original question:
Do we have something like "Web3 is going just great" but for A.I.?

If you don't know the project:
@web3isgreat
web3isgoinggreat.com/

#AskFedi #ai #techbros

@requiem It's vastly disappointing how many people (including here) misunderstand both the problems associated with AI and the capabilities of AI in of itself.

* The current capabilities of AI are over-hyped and over estimated. It's fancy pattern recognition. It is by no means intelligent.

* Corporations are abusing it to steal code, art, and thus get rid of jobs.

* AI output is error prone, and always worse than what a skilled human would produce, but bad quality has never stopped a corporation from cheaping out in order to profit.

It is a multiplier in the race to the bottom. Artists, writers, etc,... are all getting massively screwed by having derivatives of their work stolen while at the same time job offers for the more simpler tasks vanish. As if creative people needed another kick while down. And their customers are being screwed by getting worse products in the end.

We're not "scared" of AI because we think it might go skynet on us. It ain't that clever. It's problematic because it gives corporations another way to exploit us. On a massive scale.

And sorry, but "Should have reviewed the code" is a lame excuse. We all know it's harder and slower to properly and thoroughly review code than to write it from scratch, especially for the trivial stuff AI would be used for at this time.

By using AI you're feeding more data to the companies running them which they can assimilate into their models. By using the tools you are accelerating the problem and actively making the world worse.

There is just no reason and no excuse to use AI. Just don't.

This from @mmasnick is so spot on:

“your reputation when you refuse to moderate is not ‘the grand enabler of free speech.’ Because it’s the internet itself that is the grand enabler of free speech. When you’re a private centralized company and you don’t deal with hateful content on your site, you’re the Nazi bar.”

techdirt.com/2023/04/14/substa

I sort of want to shake people who are excited for LLMs because they might be able to synthesize information one day and be like "the reason that it's so hard to synthesize information now is because the exact same companies profit from the strategic disorganization of information by selling it back to us as search, analytics, dashboards, and platforms, and LLMs are the logical conclusion of that exact pattern."

i'm an unfluencer. i erase details of products you were interested in from your brain.

Since one of my friends was shocked to learn that library memberships cost money here: Do you have to pay for using public libraries where you live?

I think this may be the best explanation of how Mastodon works that I've seen in my 5 months of being here.
mattbrown.dev/mastodon/

How terribly sad it is when someone on one of the bigger instances *cough mastodon.social cough* is the target of trolling and bigoted harassment and that's their take-away experience of the fediverse :(

Fuck 'official mastodon', making it harder for actual genuine safe space communities to convey that actually fedi can be lovely and you don't need to be on an instance that doesn't take care of its community.

covid and events 

I don't want you to have a Covid policy. I want you to have an infectious diseases policy. I want you to take seriously the risk of spreading norovirus, mono, flu and measles at your event. The timeline is not split into "before Covid, when things were safe" and "with Covid, when things are deadly". You just weren't aware of the disease risk of large gatherings before now. None of the diseases are going away. Account for more than Covid.

chatgpt complaining 

Growing extremely tired of having to explain to people almost literally every day why ChatGPT is bad, actually, and seemingly being the only person in my circles doing that job

Reminder: unionization is the "meeting the employer at the middle" between workers not getting what they want and beheading the employer.

Union busting only tells me that they want their heads removed.

I was asked to review continuing education for a summit on autism and I was ready to be so angry but they're platforming and highlighting neurodiversity-affirming conceptualizations and supports and I feel so happy right now that this is becoming mainstream in my field 💜

@JessTheUnstill: I have a strong feeling about this point. It seems to me that as a society, we've been too willing to allow a hierarchy between "developers" and "end users" to creep into the "software products" that we use, and I believe that technical means encouraging people to see, and treat, software not as black boxes but as systems of rules that can be modified on the fly would help neutralise the worst abuses of this unpleasant development.

I'm not entirely sure how to get there yet, though. In the context of web browsers, adding simple and powerful tools to enforce the notion the user has power over what happens in the browser, by means of easy-to-use archival and scraping and "content" re-formatting tools would probably be a good start.

@ariadne

covid and cons 

Been looking at the feedback on mask policies from two separate conferences. People seem to fall into three groups:

1) I'll go with the policy, whatever it is

2) The risk of attending an event without masks is too high, so I will not attend without a strong mask policy

3) You cannot force me to wear a mask, so I will not attend if you require them.

You can always get group 1 at your con. Choose between groups 2 and 3.

My random sampling says that group 2 is nicer than group 3. Group 2 is both easier to hang around with, and safer.

Easy choice.

You can tell a lot about a person by how they react to being told that a thing they thought was benign is actually racist/sexist/anti-queer

anyway the venn diagram of white trans people who used to be alt righters and white trans people who think their transness makes them immune to racism is a perfect fucking circle.

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