baltakatei

I recall a joke thought experiment me and some friends in high school had when discussing how answer keys for final exams were created. Multiple choice answer keys are easy to imagine: just lists of letters A through E. However, when we considered the essay portion of final exams, we joked that perhaps we could just be presented with five entire completed essays and be tasked with identifying, A through E, the essay that best answered the prompt. All without having to write a single word of prose.

It seems that that joke situation is upon us.

Even if it is in jest, that’s a block.

POV: ESL programmers

Fast lane to parasite town.

It’s like useful information grows as fruit from trees in a digital forest we call the Internet. However, the fruit spoils over time (becomes less relevant) and requires fertile soil (educated people being online) that can be eroded away (not investing in education or infrastructure) or paved over (intellectual property law). LLMs are like processed food created in factories that lack key characteristics of more nutritious fresh ingredients you can find at a farmer’s market. Sure, you can feed more people (provide faster answers to questions) by growing a monocrop (training your LLM on a handful of generous people who publish under Creative Commons licenses like CC BY-SA on Stack Overflow), but you also risk a plague destroying your industry like how the Panama disease fungus destroyed nearly all Gros Michel banana farming (companies firing those generous software developers who “waste time” by volunteering to communities like Stack Overflow and replacing them with LLMs).

There’s some solar punk ethical fusion of LLMs and sustainable cultivation of high quality information, but we’re definitely not there yet.

Session, an Australian fork of Signal with onion routing and no phone number requirement, seems promising.

For an academic text on this subject with footnotes, I recommend Chokepoint Capitalism (2022) by Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow. It calls what you describe “moat buulding” and an “anti-competitive flywheel”.

The US didn’t even get the excuse of being forced to pay obscenely high war reparations to justify their fascism. Instead, it’s dissatisfaction with inflation which, in turn, is the predictable combination of the exponential depletion of scarce resources (real estate, water) and the consolidation of property into the hands of an ultra wealthy minority. If one must frame the emergence of fascism in a “war” context, then the cause is plutocrat beligerantes strategically fighting a social class war while most of everyone else think it’s a culture war.

(Via Masto)

Every story needs an Arthur Dent to ask dumb questions for the audience. It gives the author an excuse to worldbuild without pontificating. So, on the bright side, maybe our crumbling civilization has a lot of authors collaborating with mind-bogglingly panoply audiences, each of which needs their own lovable idiot hero to be a character in our world.

Fixed: Matt Gaetz, former Trump AG pick, had sex with raped an underage girl while in Congress, House Ethics report says

A minor cannot consent.

“ ‘Private property is the smallest unit of warfare’ - The Environmental Rescue Team Handbook”

— Annalee Newitz, The Terraformers (2023), chapter 15

quee><marquee>cool cool cool</mar

Amazon Prime is meant to invoke the sunk cost fallacy in your mind. Why shop around when you’ve already sunk over 100 USD per year into “free” shipping? This mental bias towards shopping with Amazon is the cost and is part of an overall anti-competitive strategy. See “The making of Amazon Prime, the internet’s most successful and devastating membership program”. Jeff Bezos has been explicitly anti-competitive on this point:

“I want to draw a moat around our best customers.”

You don’t leave a moated walled garden unless the Lord who maintains the moat permits you. And even then, they’ll strip you of your DRM’d digital goods (TV shows, movies, audiobooks, ebooks) as soon as you cross the drawbridge. The strongest supporters of Amazon are the ones who have thousands of USD of such digital goods locked up with them since they can’t leave without being stripped of things they bought.

Amazon replacements:

• Audiobooks: Libro.fm (no DRM)
• eBooks: eBooks.com (specifically, their DRM-free section)
• Shopping: basically any major online retailer’s website
• Electronics: System76 (for gaming machines), ThinkPenguin (for FOSS machines)
• Groceries: your local grocer, lol.

As for video streaming, it’s going to take a breakup of the Big Tech monopolies via revival of anti-trust laws to fix that. Hear the first chapter of The Internet Con (skip to 2m5s) by Cory Doctorow for more on that.

Can we have space settlement without the war and genocide? It’s not like killing Indians and robbing trains is a fundamental requirement.

I’m pretty sure fanfics have that territory covered. 🐍🐍🧶

Keyboards were so nice when you wanted to accurately input characters without putting your faith in auto-correct. God help you if you need to input something not in its dictionary like someone’s name.

Also, ISO 8601 has some handy rules for expressing time lengths and periodicities.

Week numbers are convenient for projects in which key delivery dates are often expressed in his many weeks out they are.