Skip Navigation

theluddite

@ theluddite @lemmy.ml

Posts
19
Comments
349
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Idaho bans ‘Everyone Is Welcome Here’ classroom signs, calling them ideological

    Jump

  • Great comment. Taking it further, making "politics" inherently negative has a lot of propaganda value to power. The people in charge generally want to defend the status quo, so they'd rather depoliticize the populace. This is why you get such strange contradictions as the people in charge constantly attacking "political elites" or "the swamp" or whatever. They're trying to discredit politics itself to consolidate their power. Similarly, when they do want to change something, they say "it's not politics; it's common sense." They want a population that feels like politics is something inherently dubious, or at least just not worth their time and effort.

    Inclusion has always been and will always be a political project, because there are people who want power and who will use it to exclude people for whatever reason.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • I get your point and it's funny but it's different in important ways that are directly relevant to the OP article. The parent uses the instrumental theory of technology to dismiss the article, which is roughly saying that antidemocracy is a property of AI. I'm saying that not only is that a valid argument, but that these kinds of properties are important, cumulative, and can fundamentally reshape our society.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • I don’t like this way of thinking about technology, which philosophers of tech call the "instrumental" theory. Instead, I think that technology and society make each other together. Obviously, technology choices like mass transit vs cars shape our lives in ways that simpler tools, like a hammer or or whatever, don't help us explain. Similarly, society shapes the way that we make technology.

    In making technology, engineers and designers are constrained by the rules of the physical world, but that is an underconstraint. There are lots of ways to solve the same problem, each of which is equally valid, but those decisions still have to get made. How those decisions get made is the process through which we embed social values into the technology, which are cumulative in time. To return to the example of mass transit vs cars, these obviously have different embedded values within them, which then go on to shape the world that we make around them. We wouldn't even be fighting about self-driving cars had we made different technological choices a while back.

    That said, on the other side, just because technology is more than just a tool, and does have values embedded within it, doesn't mean that the use of a technology is deterministic. People find subversive ways to use technologies in ways that go against the values that are built into it.

    If this topic interests you, Andrew Feenberg's book Transforming Technology argues this at great length. His work is generally great and mostly on this topic or related ones.

  • After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers

    Jump

  • Honestly I should just get that slide tattooed to my forehead next to a QR code to Weizenbaum's book. It'd save me a lot of talking!

  • After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers

    Jump

  • I agree with you so strongly that I went ahead and updated my comment. The problem is general and out of control. Orwell said it best: "Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations."

  • After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers

    Jump

  • These articles frustrate the shit out of me. They accept both the company's own framing and its selectively-released data at face value. If you get to pick your own framing and selectively release the data that suits you, you can justify anything.

  • After 50 million miles, Waymos crash a lot less than human drivers

    Jump

  • I am once again begging journalists to be more critical of tech companies.

    But as this happens, it’s crucial to keep the denominator in mind. Since 2020, Waymo has reported roughly 60 crashes serious enough to trigger an airbag or cause an injury. But those crashes occurred over more than 50 million miles of driverless operations. If you randomly selected 50 million miles of human driving—that’s roughly 70 lifetimes behind the wheel—you would likely see far more serious crashes than Waymo has experienced to date.

    [...] Waymo knows exactly how many times its vehicles have crashed. What’s tricky is figuring out the appropriate human baseline, since human drivers don’t necessarily report every crash. Waymo has tried to address this by estimating human crash rates in its two biggest markets—Phoenix and San Francisco. Waymo’s analysis focused on the 44 million miles Waymo had driven in these cities through December, ignoring its smaller operations in Los Angeles and Austin.

    This is the wrong comparison. These are taxis, which means they're driving taxi miles. They should be compared to taxis, not normal people who drive almost exclusively during their commutes (which is probably the most dangerous time to drive since it's precisely when they're all driving).

    We also need to know how often Waymo intervenes in the supposedly autonomous operations. The latest we have from this, which was leaked a while back, is that Cruise (different company) cars are actually less autonomous than taxis, and require >1 employee per car.

    edit: The leaked data on human interventions was from Cruise, not Waymo. I'm open to self-driving cars being safer than humans, but I don't believe a fucking word from tech companies until there's been an independent audit with full access to their facilities and data. So long as we rely on Waymo's own publishing without knowing how the sausage is made, they can spin their data however they want.

    edit2: Updated to say that ournalists should be more critical in general, not just about tech companies.

  • Are there any good books which are both accurate and engaging which talk about human world history?

    Jump

  • David Graeber's Debt: The First 5000 Years. We all take debt for granted. It's fascinating to learn how differently we've thought about it over the millenia and how much of our modern world makes more sense when understood through its lens.

  • The Anti-Intellectualism of Social Media Design

    Jump

  • No need to apologize for length with me basically ever!

    I was thinking how you did it in the second paragraph, but even more stripped down. The algorithm has N content buckets to choose from, then, once it chooses, the success is how much of the video the user watched. Users have the choice to only keep watching or log off for simplicity. For small N, I think that @kersplomp@programming.dev is right on that it's the multi-armed bandit problem if we assume that user preferences are static. If we introduce the complexity that users prefer familiar things, which I think is pretty fair, so users are more likely to keep watching from a bucket if it's a familiar bucket, I assume that exploration gets heavily disincentivized and exhibits some pretty weird behavior, while exploitation becomes much more favorable. What I like about this is that, with only a small deviation from a classic problem, it would help explain what you also explain, which is getting stuck in corners.

    Once you allow user choice beyond consume/log off, I think your way of thinking about it, as a turn based game, is exactly right, and your point about bin refinement is great and I hadn't thought of that.

  • The Anti-Intellectualism of Social Media Design

    Jump

  • Yeah I really couldn't agree more. I really harped on the importance of other properties of the medium, like brevity, when I reviewed the book #HashtagActivism, and how those too are structurally right wing. There's a lot of scholars doing these kinds of network studies and imo they way too often emphasize user-user dynamics and de-emphasize, if not totally omit, the fact that all these interactions are heavily mediated. Just this week I watched a talk that I thought had many of these same problems.

  • The Anti-Intellectualism of Social Media Design

    Jump

  • I knew you were the person to call :)

  • The Anti-Intellectualism of Social Media Design

    Jump

  • Thanks!

    I feel enlightened now that you called out the self-reinforcing nature of the algorithms. It makes sense that an RL agent solving the bandits problem would create its own bubbles out of laziness.

    You're totally right that it's like a multi-armed bandit problem, but maybe with so many possibilities that searching is prohibitively expensive, since the space of options to search is much bigger than the rate that humans can consume content. In other ways, though, there's a dissimilarity because the agent's reward depends on its past choices (people watch more of what they're recommended). It would be really interesting to know if anyone has modeled a multi-armed bandit problem with this kind of self-dependency. I bet that, in that case, the exploration behavior is pretty chaotic. @abucci@buc.ci this seems like something you might just know off the top of your head!

    Maybe we can take advantage of that laziness to incept critical thinking back into social media, or at least have it eat itself.

    If you have any ideas for how to turn social media against itself, I'd love to hear them. I worked on this post unusually long for a lot of reasons, but one of them was trying to think of a counter strategy. I came up with nothing though!

  • Technology @lemmy.world
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    The Anti-Intellectualism of Social Media Design

    theluddite.org /post/intellect.html
  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • Yup. Silicon-washing genocidal intention is almost certainly the most profitable use of AI we've come up with so far.

  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

    Jump

  • taps the sign

  • I'm Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better

    Jump

  • I'd say that's mostly right, but it's less about opportunities, and more about design. To return to the example of the factory: Let's say that there was a communist revolution and the workers now own the factory. The machines still have them facing away from each other. If they want to face each other, they'll have to rebuild the machine. The values of the old system are literally physically present in the machine.

    So it's not that you can do different things with a technology based on your values, but that different values produce technology differently. This actually limits future possibilities. Those workers physically cannot face each other on that machine, even if they want to use it that way. The past's values are frozen in that machine.

  • I'm Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better

    Jump

  • No problem!

    Technology is constrained by the rules of the physical world, but that is an underconstraint.

    Example: Let's say that there's a factory, and the factory has a machine that makes whatever. The machine takes 2 people to operate. The thing needs to get made, so that limits the number of possible designs, but there are still many open questions like, for example, should the workers face each other or face away from each other? The boss might make them face away from each other, that way they don't chat and get distracted. If the workers get to choose, they'd prefer to face each other to make the work more pleasant. In this way, the values of society are embedded in the design of the machine itself.

    I struggle with the idea that a tool (like a computer) is bad because is too general purpose. Society hence the people and their values define how the tool is used. Would you elaborate on that? I’d like to understand the idea.

    I love computers! It's not that they're bad, but that, because they're so general purpose, more cultural values get embedded. Like in the example above, there are decisions that aren't determined by the goals of what you're trying to accomplish, but because computers are so much more open ended than physical robots, there are more decisions like that, and you have even more leeway in how they're decided.

    I agree with you that good/evil is not a productive way to think about it, just like I don't think neutrality is right either. Instead, I think that our technology contains within it a reflection of who got to make those many design decisions, like which direction should the workers sit. These decisions accumulate. I personally think that capitalism sucks, so technology under capitalism, after a few hundred years, also sucks, since that technology contains within it hundreds of years of capitalist decision-making.

  • I'm Tired of Pretending Tech is Making the World Better

    Jump

  • I didn't find the article particularly insightful but I don't like your way of thinking about tech. Technology and society make each other together. Obviously, technology choices like mass transit vs cars shape our lives in ways that the pens example doesn't help us explain. Similarly, society shapes the way that we make technology. Technology is constrained by the rules of the physical world, but that is an underconstraint. The leftover space (i.e. the vast majority) is the process through which we embed social values into the technology. To return to the example of mass transit vs cars, these obviously have different embedded values within them, which then go on to shape the world that we make around them.

    This way of thinking helps explain why computer technology specifically is so awful: Computers are shockingly general purpose in a way that has no parallel in physical products. This means that the underconstraining is more pronounced, so social values have an even more outsized say in how they get made. This is why every other software product is just the pure manifestation of capitalism in a way that a robotic arm could never be.

    edit to add that this argument is adapted from Andrew Feenberg's "Transforming Technology"

  • In Vermont, an ultralocal social network is as popular as Facebook

    Jump

  • I live in Vermont. These rosy articles about Front Porch Forum come out every so often, and, as someone who writes about the intersection of tech and capitalism, they frustrate me.

    First things first, it's a moderated mailing list with some ads. I don't know if it even makes sense to call it a social network, honestly. It's a great service because moderated mailing lists are great. Here's the problem:

    To maintain this level of moderation, the founder does not want to expand Front Porch Forum beyond Vermont's borders. He highlighted Nextdoor, another locally-focused social media platform that has expanded internationally, which has often been accused of inflaming tensions within communities due to its more relaxed moderation policy. However, Sabathier believes that local social media similar to Front Porch Forum could work elsewhere in the US, including in less progressive states – Vermont, the home of socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, was the state that cast the fewest votes for Trump in the November 2024 election. "It's not so much a political platform as a tool for communities to organize themselves and be more cohesive," said the researcher. "And that would be beneficial everywhere."

    Capitalism makes this world impossible. Front Porch Forum is a private business owned by a guy (technically, it's a public benefit corporation, but those are toothless designations). Like so many beloved services, it'll be great until it's not. Eventually, cofounders, as lovely and well meaning as they might be, leave, move, die, whatever, and someone shitty will end up in control. Without a corporate restructuring into, say, a user cooperative, it is just as doomed as every other internet thing that we've all loved. These puff pieces always act like Vermont is a magical place and, frankly, it is, but not like this. We live under capitalism too. Sometimes, due to being a rural, freezing, mountainous backwater, we get short reprieves from the worst of it, but the problem with social media is systemic.

    AMA I guess.

  • What is your personal perception of people that like to listen to metal? Does that change based upon age?

    Jump

  • There's the old joke that metalheads are nice people pretending to be mean, while hippies are mean people pretending to be nice.

  • Study claims that "AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably." WaPo, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and others picked it up. Here's my response.

    Jump

  • He's really interesting!!! It seems like this awakening was maybe too intense for him, because he basically disappeared entirely and no one has heard from him since. Kind of a bummer of an ending.

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    Study claims that "AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably." WaPo, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and others picked it up. Here's my response.

    theluddite.org /post/ai-poetry.html
  • Technology @lemmy.ml
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    Did Twitter Make Us Better? A Critical Review of the Book "#HashtagActivism"

    theluddite.org /post/hashtag-activism.html
  • Software Gore @lemmy.world
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    i type ~150wpm. this is how fast the characters show up in facebook chat

    imgur.com /a/AnwmdOg
  • Fuck Cars @lemmy.ml
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    Why are cars getting bigger? A theory.

    theluddite.org
  • A Boring Dystopia @lemmy.world
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    Our antidepressant medications have merch

    archive.md /oUwtG
  • Antiwork @lemmy.ml
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    The Researchers Studying AI That Are Actually Producing Anti-Labor Propaganda

    theluddite.org
  • Technology @lemmy.ml
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    The Researchers Studying AI That Are Actually Producing Propaganda

    theluddite.org
  • Late Stage Capitalism @lemmygrad.ml
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    These Researchers Studying AI Are Actually Producing Capitalist Propaganda

    theluddite.org
  • Technology @lemmy.ml
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    Google Made Me Ruin A Perfectly Good Website: A Case Study On The AI-Generated Internet

    theluddite.org
  • Technology @lemmy.ml
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    Cyberspatial Feudalism: Understanding Twitter's Rebrand, Worldcoin, and the Rest of Tech

    theluddite.org
  • New Communities @lemmy.world
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    Luddite - Technology should be helpful and fun. Any tech that is not should be smashed.

    lemmy.ml /c/luddite
  • A Series of Tubes @sullen.social
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    Barbenheimer and our Malleable Reality

    theluddite.org
  • Solar Punk @lemmy.ml
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    Colonizing Space Is Store Bought Tomatoes but More and for Everything

    theluddite.org
  • Philosophy @lemmy.ml
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    Barbenheimer and our Malleable Reality

    theluddite.org
  • Are The Straights OK? @lemmy.blahaj.zone
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    Spotted in the wild!

  • Technology @lemmy.ml
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    The Crucible of Mediocrity: Lessons from the Physical World for the AI-Generated Internet

    theluddite.org
  • Late Stage Capitalism @lemmygrad.ml
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    The Crucible of Mediocrity: Lessons from the Physical World for the Ugly, AI-Generated Internet

    theluddite.org
  • Fuck Cars @lemmy.ml
    theluddite @lemmy.ml

    Technological Antisolutions: The Difference Between Public Transit and Self-Driving Cars

    theluddite.org