YourNetworkIsHaunted, yournetworkishaunted@awful.systems

What kills me is that there are so many obvious ways to be less wasteful about this. Nondestructive book scanners exist. They’re expensive but it’s not like AI companies are averse to throwing money down a fucking hole. Even if that’s not an option, it’s possible to rebind the pages and return the books to the market. And regardless of what happens to the physical books, the scans they create could be archived in a format that could be available as a digital library rather than just being fed into the statistical meat grinder to keep the trough topped off with slop. Even if they’ve got to fight with copyright holders it would cost them basically nothing to leave the option open and given the PR battle they’ve been losing it feels like doing so would be incredibly obvious. Hell, even Google Books was able to navigate this in a way that was less cartoonishly evil than this because they could point to their digitization effort as a public good in ways that Anthropic here just fucking can’t.

how productive the field will become

Let’s just ship all these people to Macroeconomica

I mean, I think the most charitable interpretation of the goal is effectively the one from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where all the AI systems including the simple automatic doors are fully sentient and have simply been given the ability to feel either euphoric joy or simple boredom, and then they have a chip that activates happy mode when they fulfill whatever purpose they’ve been given ("It was my pleasure to open for you, and it is with deep satisfaction that I close again behind you.") At that point, the argument goes, not making them do the thing would be cruelly consigning them to eternal boredom. This is also the same series that proposed solving the ethics of meat consumption by genetically engineering a cow that actively wants to be killed and eaten by restaurant patrons more than anything else.

I feel like there’s got to be a decent middle ground between a pinned post that pushes this in front of everyone and requires further mod comments to try and stave off harassment and silently letting anyone who notices find the mod logs and make their own judgements of everyone involved. Like, in the absence of an actual announcement I think people would absolutely come to their own much more inflammatory conclusions if/when they noticed regardless of what the removed mod does, and the removed mod could make things into an absolute shit storm (which they don’t appear to be trying to do as far as I can tell, to their credit). But on the flip side, the way this post is set up is also an escalation in its own right and represents a more aggressive use of power by the remaining mods than was absolutely necessary.

If blahaj.zone has an instance business forum then making the full statement there (where it won’t get pushed out of sight as fast as the 196 churn would do to a non-stickied post) and linking it may have been wiser, since it preserves the immediate statement without shoving it to the top of everyone’s plate, and would still allow a stickied post on 196 itself if the situation escalated and it became more necessary.

I dunno, mod shit is hard and I’m glad I get to armchair quarterback it rather than actually making these decisions in real time. Props to the full mod team for keeping the chaos of 196 from turning toxic and destructive for however long it’s been here.

If anything that makes for an even stronger case. Gangstalking is already a known pattern of delusional behavior and if a service pitched in part for its ability to provide relief is actually reinforcing that…

MYbe they meant to say “it’s not optional” instead?

I don’t think anyone here is likely to disagree that current LLM systems can’t coherently be said to have some kind of internal experience and the design and functioning of those systems seems to fundamentally preclude the kinds of conscious experience that we want to assign moral agency to. But the key to understanding this as a moral issue imo is that the people designing and building these things seem like they really want to create something that ought to merit that kind of moral consideration. For all that the humanizing language of agency, intelligence, welfare, etc. is in reality part of the grift, I think there’s a strong catch-22 to be argued that if it’s not part of the grift then slavery is pretty implicit in the value proposition of these companies.

The actual worst man, and also just fucking sad. Imagine knowing that not only did you peak in high school, but that you peaked specifically in the moment when you fucked up and lost the state championship. Like, you can just smell the empty beer cans and tears piled up around this guy’s posts.

This was a fun one. It feels like there’s a shared affinity between Rats and traditional conservatives for confusing length and volume of output with actual depth or quantity of thoughts, and I deeply appreciate your willingness to wade through it all. Now that I think about it it would be difficult to write 500 pages saying basically nothing and not repeatedly blatantly contradict myself.

Also, release the Foucault tangent, you cowards!

Ooh. I love these. I’m “I don’t think Sam Altman or most of his social circle are good people and I don’t want to give them more wealth and power.”

Vibe Construction

I feel like there’s a version of this that has a slider for how aggressively you’re willing to sacrifice readability, and you could probably get pretty decent results on the scale of 2x to 2.5x just using different encodings of the same basic glyph.

Secretly?

I know we’re all familiar with the metaphor of LLMs as roulette wheel, but I think there’s some real craft to turning that into Russian roulette.

I have definitely done this. Written half an essay in the awful.systems comment box, realized I don’t know what the fuck I’m saying anymore, and deleted it. I like to tell myself that forcing myself to realize I was being incoherent is enough to justify the costs. I guess if I acknowledge that I don’t rely on my online footprint to put food on the table the way the proper blogonauts (we’re still doing blogs, right?) do I can understand the incentives against doing that though.

I think this particular pattern is another consequence of long-termism in the water supply. It’s easy to disconnect yourself from humanity as a concept when you’re in a space that often assumes that you and everyone you could ever have a personal relationship with are already long dead. The fact that this makes it easy to ignore the problems that people today are having in front of your face is purely coincidental.

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen basic questions about functionality answered by “something something blockchain” but that appears to be the answer here.

You know, I think there’s an argument to be made for death threats against tech oligarchs being a crude form of direct action towards redistribution.

I can’t decide if it’s fitting or ironic that this group of men who spends collectively one week a year in spaces they don’t either literally own or otherwise totally control has such a hard time understanding concerns the rest of us have about privacy.