Kwakigra
I don’t care about fixing Reddit and I don’t care about teaching Reddit a lesson. I don’t care if the site buckles or continues to hold on and grow while they regulalry downgrade their service as they have been doing for the 10 years I’ve been an active user. No protest of anything Reddit has done has ever caused Reddit to reconsider what they’re doing. Reddit does not care about anything because it’s not a person. It’s a business entity which will attempt by any means to maximise profit. Having a functional website or having human users or moderation at all are not strictly necessary to secure investment or generate ad revenue. Doing what investors want them to do, regardless of the actual effect it may have long-term, is what will get them investment now. That is more important to Reddit than everything else put together. There’s no mastermind, no one’s at the wheel, no idiot is unilaterally making decisions like a king. There’s only the inevitable consequences of the collective decisions of businesspeople participating in corporate capitalism.
The main reason I don’t care is that I don’t have to care anymore. The Fediverse has been a breath of fresh air after a very long time.
That article was a wild ride. He said he wants to put the reddit changes to a vote. Just saying whatever I guess. If Reddit actually does that I’ll eat a hat and a crow.
This article strikes me in a way that I’m finding very difficult to put into words. Basically I can’t imagine this is any business of the average Guardian reader who is not going to be able to do anything about it other than to support another invasion or contra-like rebel group. Anyone speaking English as a first language has no credibility to exercise soft power to mitigate this in any way, and that is because for centuries the governments of people who primarily speak English have cemented the idea in the Afghan national identity (maybe the only nationally unifying idea) that Westerners are treacherous and not to be trusted meddling in Afghanistan’s internal affairs. This is especially given that this very meddling there and with other nearby countries is why the Taliban exists in the way it does. However this is addressed our involvement would not help and would likely lead to another exploitative apparatus. Maybe it might soften readers’ attitudes towards accepting refugees, but if they’re already reading The Guardian I’m not sure this is going to change anyone’s mind from one position to the other.
We have groups of people who are massively disproportionately ending their lives out of hopelessness in our nations and our spheres of influence. We may be able to do something about our own cultural flaws or those of our allies with whom we have some credibility.
I’m not bashing the Guardian, and out of widespread publications I would definitely say they are among the best. My criticism is based on their primary and secondary audiences residing in places whose governments’ actions have rendered them incapable of assisting Afghanistan or its people. As a side note my first exposure to The Daily Mail was when it was being distributed for free at the airport, and it made me so angry I threw it in the trash with much more force than I realized. Awful racist rag.
Edit: I’m suggesting in my previous comment that Guardian readers are already likely to support refugees or else they would be reading the Sun or the Daily Mail instead.
What frustrates me is that the crypto scene didn’t have to develop in this direction. While I’m not sure how to get around the electricity requirements necessary for any “coin” to exist on a large scale, the concept of a blockchain doesn’t seem to me like an inherently predatory idea. The idea that coins or NFTs were investment vehicles really provided the opportunity for those with the knowledge and resources to manipulate a poorly regulated market and literal con artists to move in and be the main influence as to how everything played out. Although it’s somewhat of a relief that it’s widely recognized by most people as being a racket, the missed opportunity of the concept of permanent and intangible “objects” to be used for some purpose other than scamming does bum me out a bit.
I wish people knew more about the way business works in general. Focusing on quality of product or service is a strategy only the smallest businesses can afford. In the big leagues it’s all about triggering purchasing behavior and minimizing price sensitivity by using well-proven psychological techniques to sell cheap minimally-viable and soon to be obsolete products to as many people as possible, and sell them the solutions to the problems left in the original product as “optional” add-ons. Developers all want to make good games, but the businesses they work for couldn’t care less since they make their money in other ways. Welcome to the 21t century, consumers!
A lot of these comments from developers read to me like “We really tried guys, but you don’t know what it was like.” Given this is usually without commenting that industry norms are toxic since that can get you blacklisted. Their marketing department doing damage control is of course way less sympathetic to me.
Context: During the Haitian Revolution, France hired Polish mercenaries to go to Haiti and help with putting the slave rebellion down. After arriving, the Polish mercenaries immediately recognized they had much more in common with the other people being oppressed by major European powers and joined the revolution on the Haitians’ side. After the revolution and because of some of the most severe international sanctions in world history (many of which are still in effect to this day), the Polish mercenaries were now completely Haitian and were legally declared “black” by the new Haitian government.
No, LLMs can’t write good novels and they won’t be able to in the future. Yes, LLM-produced text is going to show up in all kinds of places where it doesn’t belong. Having an LLM write an entire novel from a single prompt and then selling it for money through self-publishing is a kind of asset-flipping and it is a scam. I think this is the use people are the most upset about.
This is an interesting article because it’s not featuring a scammer, but featuring a professional writer who has decided to use LLMs to assist her in writing including using LLM-produced passages in the context of her original writing. This is much more of a gray zone to me and not actually something I’m necessarily opposed to.
One of the first things I did with an LLM was to have it convert my silly ideas into iambic pentameter and it was a lot of fun. I didn’t tell it, “write a poem in iambic pentameter about X” and then try to sell whatever it gave me. I had it convert each of my descriptions part by part one at a time and often I had to generate several different versions of the same passage before I even had something to clean up. Some of what ended up in the finished product was directly from the machine, but most of it I had to re-write. It was interesting to experiment with.
The difference between a scamming people and using an LLM as a tool is reflected in the finished product. A writer has to know what works and what doesn’t work because most of what the machine will give is not going to be usable as-is, and if it is usable it is by happenstance as it happened to conform with what the writer was trying to express at that moment. A human mind is still absolutely necessary to write something someone would want to read, especially if they are choosing whether to read it, and I don’t see that changing with what these models are capable of or possibly capable of. This being the case there are probably going to be some distinctive traits of LLM-produced stuff that people will probably pick up on and get tired of. I’m interested to see how all art develops in a direction to distinguish it from what LLMs can produce such as when painting diverged significantly after the invention of the camera.
