Author believes we need to be more reasonable about child labour

More seriously, to save you the bother of reading it, he objects to comparisons between anti-slop sentiment and the actual Luddites, because slop haters are too… centralised? And then cites our friend SE Gyges in an update.

I clicked around the blog a bit and the guy’s definitely a slopfondler. But a reasonable sloperator, of course

Addendum: so this guy has apparently read all the literature on Luddites, yet still believes their concerns had anything to do with people being ‘displaced’ by ‘automation’. Fun reminder: ‘automation’ as a word literally did not exist until 1948.

I approve of their very helpful and comprehensive documentation for LLMs: https://jepsen.io/llm/index

There’s a ridiculously simple test you can use to figure out whether AI mandates at a given company are well-considered, or are being shoved out the door by out-of-touch buffoons: What happens when an engineer documents that AI made a task worse? Are they taken seriously, or are they marginalized and eventually managed out?

Even easier test: is it an AI mandate?

“imagine themselves” was the important bit

I think the poster ad thing is a bit big for that. The idea of this fantasy is that the sloperator should get zero value from their defacement of public space, so it would have to meaningfully obscure any pertinent details like address etc. while also very helpfully telling the sloperator what their oversight was.

So what’s with the phenomenon of people that are dismissive of the capabilities of chatbots and freely list their constant fuckups, maybe even habitually calling them ‘clankers’, and yet still constantly fucking using them, comparing harnesses, blah blah blah? It’s not our usual cocaine analogies because these people are hardly evangelists… maybe still covered by ‘gambling addiction’? It’s just baffling to me. You humbly suggest that maybe they shouldn’t be making so much use of a chatbot that constantly bullshits them, and you don’t get any actual objection to that… and yet they continue on.

I poked around the repo some more a while ago… it’s somewhat enlightening into why the story is Like That. I should probably write up a sneer on it, though it was already out of the stubsack by that point…

Just so long as the future involves gas turbines.

I saw a slop ad hanging on a fence today, and I’m in half a mind to buy some spray paint just so I can write “SLOP” over it

Never interrupt your enemy when they are making a mistake – you’ll lose the opportunity to take notes and copy them.

https://theluddite.org/post/spectacle-of-computation.html

The natural world does not come with a quantified representation of itself, but we are constantly awash in so much data that we forget that it must come from someone with their own interests, flaws, and ideologies, no matter what they claim, or how much computation they put it through.

What if you did productive and creative labour, that benefits your employer and not you, for free? Now that’s impact!

Mitchell Baker: I need to be paid $7 million because that’s what I could be paid elsewhere

Then go elsewhere?

Turns out slop prose isn’t any less galling after you put it in quotation marks.

Maybe the very first sentence of your story shouldn’t have me stopping to work out whether you meant January or August.

You’re fixated on charitably reading between the lines when far more pertinent – the entire point of this discussion here – is that the possibility is being raised at all. Is water conscious? Should we consider the ramifications of drinking fluids that react to potential gradients? Why would anyone be conjecturing the consciousness of computer software if they did not already think it were plausible, and why would they spend any time discussing it in preference to anything else?

“A recent paper showed birds change their behavior when they think that they’re being tested, they’re aware they are being tested.”

“Now, normally, when you say something’s aware of that, that means it’s conscious,” he continued. “Being conscious and being aware are pretty much the same thing.”

If that’s the case, he said, then it’s hypocritical of us to give intelligent beings like birds “fewer rights than us.” And for that, we must quickly atone.

“We should make them so they really care about us,” he said. “And if we don’t do that, we’re toast.”

Yes this definitely sounds like the logical conclusion you would reach from just wondering whether something is hypothetically conscious, pure thought experiment, no opinions revealed here

Relativity also has its origins in classical electromagnetism, which absolutely relied on so many dang experiments by countless people over decades.

I guess this is the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap… or something. (seen previously)

Once again, slop machines only work ‘well’ when you can externalise the pain and costs onto someone else (in this case, millions of stressed-out sysadmins and webmasters)