Yeah I think the thing that bothers me is that advocates of Bender's view keep trying to pass off an axiom as a conclusion.
I don't even think the axiom itself is that bad! A lot of really interesting conversations follow from it. I just wish Bender's camp was interested in those conversations.
Like, that might be true! But it's a premise that implies some pretty radical things downstream of it. The existence of a meaningful but non-encodable signal... opens some doors. I don't think the philosophical groundwork she's standing on provides the type of stability she seems to think it does.
Her whole premise seems to rest on the assumption that there exist signals that cannot be encoded into the form of language. That a grounded and an ungrounded version of a language are meaningfully different, but not in a way that could ever be determined by comparing their respective forms.
That makes sense. I've always just taken the word to mean "builds or operates data centers but big"
"We love our [blank], don't we folks?" and "that's OK, I'll still keep drinking that garbage" have reached Borat-voice My Wife levels of being burned into my neural circuitry and I hate it.
Wait, why wouldn't AWS & Azure count as hyperscalers? Aren't they like, the #1 and #2 biggest hyperscalers? What's the definition of hyperscaler that leaves them out?
It's 1977 and I'm the lone soldier on small south Pacific Island. A lone boat beaches itself on shore. The men step out and, confused by my presence, tell me "the war ended 30 years ago!"
But me? I'm ready for this moment.
"Sure buddy"
They're left speechless by my unassailable retort.
there are two ways for a neuron to say "idk." one of them is by making noise. the loss function hits you for making noise. the other one is to send your signal to a place where it has no causal power.
It's not just individuals ignoring Everything as a personal matter, institutions like markets are doing it too. We entered a hot war with Iran with no exit plan a week ago and gas is only now up just 11%? That would not have been the markets reaction circa 2023.
Dear future historians reading bsky to study what it was like to live through Everything:
We're all pretty fucking shell shocked tbh.
That's the sort of direct engagement with ideas that would, in itself, be productive!
Like... when Bouie criticizes you, he directly cites passages from your book. When you criticize Bouie, you criticize his tone and the conversation around him. These are not equivalent types of criticisms. An inability to distinguish structural differences between arguments defines so many pundits.
By and large, Jamelle Bouie is good because he directly engages with the arguments of critics. Bouie's critics are bad because they think engaging with the meta-commentary around Bouie is the equivalent of directly engaging with the arguments he makes.
🫡
How would the state identify code written by a local LLM as opposed to a person? How would it identify an image created by a local diffusion model vs something created in photoshop?
How is the state supposed to determine whether a certain type of computation has taken place in order to intervene?
I know you don't care what the people who work with the tech think it can do. That's the whole problem! This is not a case where "how the tech works and what it can do" can be handwaved away if you actually want to implement meaningful policy interventions.
I would maybe take some time to think about what makes regulating stabbing feasible, and how those attributes don't map onto regulating what types of computation can occur.
I'd be more on board with the "ban linear algebra" people if they stopped framing it as a policy preference and instead framed it as a direct assault on God's mathematical fortress.
This is the type of take you come up with if you refuse to actually engage with what the technology is.
It's also abundantly clear that whoever made this video has never ridden the Dubai metro. I have never seen able bodied adults shove people out of the way to claim a seat on any other metro system I've ridden.
Goddammit I made it 2.5 hours into my day without finding out we were at war. It was such an optimistic morning.
it's also notable that historians, scientists, non-fiction authors have thrived here while journalists often *haven't*. I think there are many reasons for that that are not journalists' fault, and some that are.
Sometimes something awful from Online breaks containment into IRL, and sometimes it's important to let an IRL nightmare loose on the TL
A gas station pump ad for chewing tobacco in Montana said to me "it lasts longer than your mom's boyfriend".
Virtue signaling is good because it's a way to signal what your virtues are
Why does the architecture in Spokane go so gd hard?
If you could take some sort of software, let it map the most important statistical connections between everything written on a social media platform, then tried to predict words based on those statistical connections, I bet you could decipher some pretty interesting things.
On the rare occasions I descend into facebook, it's almost like its algorithm is mocking me in the way it chooses to show me exclusively the worst things on earth.
It's sadder because I'm almost kind of sympathetic to facebook's core appeal. I would love a centralized place to stay up-to-date with friends and family. But facebook clearly made a conscious decision to stop caring whether it was even a bare minimum pleasant place to spend time.
