Sven Slootweg @joepie91@pixie.town

“Ultimately, if you feel strongly about not using a product, that's up to you. But trying to impose your views on others is not cool. Instead, why not try politely letting them know about your concerns in case they weren't aware, and then leave them to make up their own mind.”
https://kevquirk.com/blog/on-virtue-signalling

It seems to me that when the powerful are terrible people and the weak are trying to articulate their anger, to organize, to get a mass movement going, asking them to politely make their case and letting other people make up their mind is reprehensible. By telling people not to fight for their rights but to just politely make their point and then shut up one aligns with the powerful, one dismisses the methods of resistance.

i don't think i've ever seen a wikipedia page cite itself before

Is this not a reasonable place to park?

Food banks and all variations on that theme should be seen as indictments of a failed state, not something to be encouraged or celebrated. They exist because we have collectively fucked up our economic system.

Sorry

your annual reminder that any brand recognition you have for AKG is now for naught because Samsung bought them, moved the manufacturing out of Germany, discontinued most of the classic AKG lines, and all the engineers left.

I just remembered that this happened and it made me sad.

most of the AKG folks are now at Austrian Audio.

Buitenlands gedoe inderdaad.

https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2025/01/03/buitenlandsgedoe-a4878486?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_term=share-modal

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 account of me not having massive data centres nor the moral calousness to spew that much carbon, but still)

(Never mind that if it *was* true, it'd open a gigantic ethical can of worms to effectively compel and imprison a system capable of agency behind a corporate chatbot. So I can only hope that said marketing teams don't believe their own claims.)

Anyway, it's something I'm trying to watch in my own language when I talk about Facebook's new chatbots today. They aren't "trying" to do anything, they aren't "claiming" things, or anything like that. It might seem like hairsplitting, but it does matter — so much of the marketing behind LLMs is geared towards getting us to believe that they are capable of acting with intent and purpose, but that's just not true.

I've said this before, but the bias in English towards agency makes it really hard to talk about LLMs in a reasonable and neutral manner. If an LLM-based chatbot outputs a question as its response, is it fair to say that the chatbot asked a question? There's a critical difference between returning text that contains a question and asking a question, yet it's very difficult to be consistently clear about that distinction.