Today in common claims that are almost always lies: "I hate to say I told you so, but..."
With LLMs integrated into search, instead of diving into quirky, sometimes conflicting sources that distinct, disagreeing, often disagreeable humans may have written, we'll get professionally digested executive summaries.
And we'll all be as stupid as executives.
@edaross yeah, something like that!
@edaross (thanks!)
in my dream i was trying to get the politics to typecheck.
this period will be precious to you just like all the other periods that were distracting and exasperating when they were your present but now you see the photographs and pine.
life is lived in reverse chronological order, but we experience it backwards.
@wikicliff I don’t think we’re disagreeing very much. I don’t claim they will “bring the receipts” in a useful form. On the contrary. I think the authors of these devices will design side processes that search for elements of their vast training sets that in some sense seem related to the output, and have the outputs bibliographize that. It will be retrospective, rationalization, but they might train this second thing to do a pretty good job of selecting things mostly consistent with the 1/
@wikicliff output of the first thing. They won’t be “real” receipts, in the sense of “here is the evidence that persuaded me that should (normatively) persuade you.” The objective will be to persuade you that whatever the LLM spouted was right, not because the LLM learned from these sources and believes them to be solid, but because the LLM doesn’t know or believe anything at all and this other thing just trains on some measure that it has convinced people. /fin
@ml8_ml8 It's bound for great success in its career then.
@DetroitDan But it takes great care to make sense of what we do not actually experience, but are informed of by motivated actors. Sophistry can consist both of sewing false doubt and creating unwarranted certainties. Withdrawing into apathy or helplessness from doubt is bad, but so is acting with great certainty when, if you are wrong, your actions will do harm. Probability is one way of thinking about it. Another is that no form of rigor that can substitute for wise judgment. We're on our own.
This account (by an alum, of course) of New College and what DeSantis is thoughtlessly destroying is better than most of the culture-war stereotyped journalism on the subject. https://www.them.us/story/new-college-florida-desantis-okker-alum
a much requested and i think soon-to-be feature for LLMs will be to “bring the receipts” in the form of citations to the material on which its bloviation is based.
a useful side effect of that will be to make obvious that with a sufficiently large corpus to draw from, you can “bring the receipts” for just about any claim. 1/
artificial sophistry’s virtue is to remind us how persuasive pure sophistry can be, that in a world of motivated persuasion masquerading as analysis, mostly you should be humble about how certainly you think you know things. /fin
@djc do people have their e-mail newsletters sent to services that rss-ify it for them? (i think e-mail newsletters are not a great form, i follow hundreds of feeds, the substacks elbow their way where they shouldn’t. i’ll soon turn off mailing and follow them by RSS.)
@chrisp I'm of two minds about that.
Despite plenty of hard drive space, #Dropbox pops up this notification to me almost daily. I've gone around with their customer support. There's no way to turn it off (except by denying notifications at the OS level, which breaks their offline hard-drive backup feature).
They say it's technical, but with ~140GB free I perceive it as an upsell. Am I the only one really annoyed by this?
I'm very open to #enshittification resistant alternatives to #Dropbox.
Dropbox Notfication: Your hard drive is almost full / Free up hard drive space without deleting files by making them online-only.
is it a meaningful security risk if a server publicly exposes its pid?
“There are plenty of things that cannot go on forever but can, and should, go on for a while. Rapid wage gains might be one of them.” @jwmason https://jwmason.org/slackwire/at-barrons-how-the-feds-view-of-the-economy-matters-for-more-than-monetary-policy/
// great piece on how the Fed almost reflexively tilts against labor bargaining power and so income share
@jef You can always click through to the original site from the full content, but you can't read the content in the feed from just a summary! But of course, everyone's entitled to their own taste. If yours is widely shared, sites can offer both! They aren't a big project to add or maintain.