@laprice (thank you! i don't know whether there will or won't be a more final result. i've made a "drafts" blog because i became constipated about just sitting down and writing and hitting publish on things on the main blog, i've not decided, will i "promote" some of them or how to proceed. it has been liberating to not have to pretend to be a temporarily unemployed Atlantic writer, which is what blogging had become and why i was doing so little of it.)
[new draft post] Higher education is shockingly right-wing https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/03/01/higher-education-is-shockingly-right-wing/index.html
most claims about current affairs are insufficiently well defined to be either true or false. they are by their nature bullshit. if they cannot be true or false they can be designed to create an impression in recipients supportive of one side of a controversy.
@johnmcquaid it’s tabloid culture war content that generates clicks, but left blowback is much less threatening than right blowback. it’s a sweet-spot.
if this is the content you don’t want to see more of, link illicit copies or paywall circumventions, rather than right into the maw of their analytics engine.
@phillmv no exit, github edition. in the afterlife we continue to maintain the long-forgotten software that in life so preoccupied us.
was it a black lab or a golden one that’s supposed to have marked China as its territory?
with large language models, we can directly psychoanalyze the collective unconscious.
@poetryforsupper thank you.
[new draft post] New College https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/02/27/new-college/index.html
it’s ridiculous that trade-secret law prevents industrial buyers from even knowing what hazardous materials their employees are being exposed to. it’s hard to design a safe workplace if you don’t even know what’s in it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-06-15/american-chipmakers-had-a-toxic-problem-so-they-outsourced-it // an older piece, via @ashleygjovik
A good piece on YIMBYism by #FreddieDeBoer https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-yimby-movement-demonstrates-social
the AI hypesters tend to be anti-cancel-culture types, but when people start requiring evidence that their interlocutors are human watch how fast they’ll pick up “woke” language to insist on inclusion of and nondiscrimination against their products.
if they can’t get away with calling the LLMs themselves a vulnerable class, watch them promote uses by more conventional protected classes so they can claim resistance is whateverist.
@bobwyman @timbray @ben we got much better (though surveillant) browsers and amazing CSS, and a completely predatory, sterile internet dominated by a few sites that bring out the worst of us. i don’t know what open source browsers and standards would have looked like in a less commercial counterfactual. there are definitely some goods to counterbalance the bads on the path we’ve taken, but overall better counterfactuals if wr’d never made the internet friendly to scale seem plausible to me.
@ben @OliverC @maria @timbray profit maximization is a competitive game. the whole point of the so-called market for corporate control is that insufficient maximizers get eaten by “more efficient” firms. fundamentally, good and evil is the wrong way to look at the issue. it’s an alignment problem, and an intractable one. 1/
@ben @OliverC @maria @timbray there is no way to consistently align financial incentives with much more contingent and subtle excellences. the only hope is to reduce the role and strength of financial and career incentives (regardless of sector), because most humans when not deflected by those actually do seek to genuinely to advance good ends as best they can. /fin
definitely the cookies for me.
photograph of cookies in packaging, called “torticas de moron, shortbread cookies”
@jbminn @timbray @ben i hope not! but as @xurble reminds us, remember mail? remember, deja news was convenient, usenet in a web page! then Google buys it and look, Google groups. Microsoft bought GitHub. Venture-like returns for them? There's a business there, but not some next big thing from what it was when they bought it. They gained influence, tremendous access to data, whatever options come from creating and owning a single point of failure for the FOSS ecosystem.
@silvermoon82 @OliverC @timbray @ben how to we coordinate to all just say no? capital will tempt us each alone, is willing at first to pay us through various subsidies to use their thing. yeah, the people in this conversation have grown hard-bitten and calloused, maybe we’ll stay away. but we are weird.