Mastodon Feed: Posts

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
benfry@information.garden ("Ben Fry") wrote:

RE: https://thepit.social/@peter/116376219055579156

I simply cannot get my head around why anyone would let AI anywhere near their data analysis work.

Why would you add something to your work that can drop its accuracy by half? by 10%? by 1%? What would be an acceptable amount? What is the possible upside that would make this worth it?

I'm floored by the number of people in this field who take themselves all too seriously but are out there starting their whatever *dot AI* companies to get in on the grift, or say things like “and of course, AI” like it's both obvious and inevitable. And how is this so shiny that even educators have taken leave of their senses?

What the f*k is the point of analyzing a dataset if you're ok with answers simply being incorrect? What are we even doing here?

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
emilymbender@dair-community.social ("Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)") wrote:

Almost a year ago, I was described in the FT as "a Cassandra with a wry grin and twinkling eye", and was entertained because Cassandra (famously) was right.

It's actually not fun, though, to watch the world do things you've been warning against:

https://www.newstatesman.com/technology/2026/04/the-silent-coup

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
uglyreykjavik.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Ugly Reykjavik") wrote:

They really do match. Hopefully, they'll be restored to their former quaint glory one day.#Iceland #photography #streetphotography #nature #landscape #naturephotography #landscapephotography #abandoned #decay #snow #rust

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

(I'm aware that some Hollywood A-listers have publicists/managers who make vetting questions a condition of interview access to their clients. I am not the right interviewer for that type of scenario. On the flip side, neither my publicists nor my manager ask for that from my interviewers, and also, I am not a Hollywood A-lister.)

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

Having been on both sides of the interview table: Veronica is correct, this is not it. As an interviewer I don't clear questions ahead of time and as a subject I don't ask for that. At most, as an interviewer, I'll entertain requests about subjects the interviewee doesn't want to talk about. When I'm asked that same question by an interviewer I tell them to ask whatever they want and if I don't want to answer I will charmingly deflect.

RE: https://www.threads.com/@veronicaroth/post/DW9OG6hEbH4

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

Charles Emerson Winchester the Third, on the other hand, handily defeats her, he's surprisingly wily

RE: https://www.threads.com/@comixgail/post/DW-8B2xFfyC

Boosted by jwz:
RadicalGraffiti@todon.eu ("Radical Graffiti") wrote:

"No Flock"
Poster spotted in Bloomington, Indiana denouncing Flock surveillance cameras.

Boosted by jwz:
RadicalGraffiti@todon.eu ("Radical Graffiti") wrote:

Anti-surveillance poster spotted in Sydney

Boosted by jwz:
digyoursoul@universeodon.com ("Voting is Your POWER") wrote:

Apple is closing down the first of its US stores to unionize.

Apple says that because of the collective bargaining agreement with these workers, they "couldn’t offer to transfer them to nearby locations.”

The union is outraged, and exploring options to hold Apple accountable.

https://bsky.app/profile/moreperfectunion.bsky.social/post/3mj5khm64fk2b

Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
toonie@meow.social ("🌿Toonie🍸") wrote:

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
mcc wrote:

@jplebreton y'know, i think i knew this, but i never actually bothered learning what any of the other colors *correspond* to. like what are the other color book standards for.

*checks*

hahahahahaa

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
jplebreton ("JP") wrote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow%5FBooks TIL "red book audio" was part of a larger set of CD standards books with different colors. feels like discovering new Ages of Myst.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

casual thinkpieces and lazy attempts at scicomm are what has set me off but the actual thing I'm mad about is that we are ruled by people with a child's understanding of the world and the economy and that's actually really bad

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

seriously just imagine the plot of one of the movies that doomers seem to think are documentaries, like Terminator 2. imagine the scene where the T-1000 is getting pelted with bullets. instead of seamlessly autonomously healing, imagine it has to lie down and wait for a human to place an order for $1,000,000 of NVIDIA GPUs to be delivered in a shipping container and then a construction crew to set up a methane generator to run for two weeks straight before it got up again. is that still scary?

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

like if anyone had halfway-plausible "grey goo" nanotech that could do anything that looked like computation, that might be worrying. a locally viable self-reproducing platform that can make another one of itself from a pile of dirt, even if it's like, special dirt, that might scare me a little bit. but an overlord hive-mind that requires an uninterrupted global high-purity helium supply chain just to make ONE more of itself is supposed to be a threat?

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

put ME on CNN and MSNBC, you cowards.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/115076275195904439

I've written about this before and I will probably do it again. but I don't know what else to do but repeat myself when allegedly serious, internationally-renowned academic experts and influential public intellectuals are just going out there and saying stuff that would get you laughed out of a late night freshman dorm room conversation about philosophy

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

doomers might look at my rant here and think, "but wait, once it's self-sustaining, even a little, it's TOO LATE, it's already out of control!!!" and to that I say: no. not even close. look the evolution of *any* business. managing resource flows is really hard. there is an off-ramp every single day

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

if, in order to achieve your out-of-control doomsday robot scenario, a trillion dollars worth of human effort must be expended annually, and if any of it stops for even a moment than the whole thing implodes and grinds to a halt, _you can stop worrying_ that it is "the machines" which dominate us

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

we are not even remotely close to a single LLM meaningfully constructing even a portion of the pipeline to train another LLM. you can sort of argue around the edges that maybe under certain synthetic conditions this is borderline possible now, but on the "singularity" progress bar, that is 0.5%

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

in order to be a singularity candidate, an AI would need to achieve vertical integration from silicon fabrication through logistics and integration, into operating systems and applications, with tight whole-system feedback from the robotics to the shipping to the power generation and back

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

it is so mind-meltingly frustrating to see people think that we are close to a "singularity" with current AI technology. here's a hint about when you could worry about a disruption so big that it might, even momentarily, *appear* to be a singularity:

a single corporation turning a profit even once

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

resources run out. processes hit bottlenecks. optimizations reach physical limits. perpetual motion machines are impossible for reasons that are pretty well understood

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Heading back to the US from two weeks in Korea, and I'm struck by how rational this policy response is. Western democracies are not showering themselves in glory by comparison:

https://www.korea.net/NewsFocus/policies/view?articleId=290296

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

I will be here!

RE: https://www.threads.com/@latimesfob/post/DW-UDLuFE5p

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

Dear the people trying to suggest this is somehow a MAGA conspiracy or otherwise trying to defend Swalwell in the comments here: Go be fucking trash somewhere else, thanks

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
mcc wrote:

I was using a GUI graphics editor today and thinking about all the ways it could be better. I can think of so many ways the software we use could be different, so many ways our software could be better. Instead of working on that I suspect I'll spend the rest of my autonomous life as a developer desperately bailing out water, trying to create a little pool of programs I can use without having fake "AI" in it

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

Well? IS the moon haunted?

Boosted by cstanhope@social.coop ("Your weary 'net denizen"):
ljwrites@writeout.ink ("Author-ized L.J.") wrote:

The existence of participants implies the existence of particiskirts