Kate Littlejohn

Sorry I'm not more open-minded about LLMs, it's just some fucking maniacs shoveled out a bunch of useless bloatware featuring that technology, did not give me any chance to opt out, reorganized the entire economy around it, zeroed out gains made by green energy, and made it impossible to buy RAM

Google pledges roughly three hours of its annual profit to fight climate change Google and others are committing $100 million to combat climate change.

The perfect headline doesn’t exi…

...nothing. Literally nothing. We already had this conversation when evopsych and data science tried to do "Big Data History" and we don't talk about it anymore for a reason. Guys. We're not idiots. Coding doesn't actually change every field every time it happens.

If you are having someone else do your lit review--and I mean LLM but also research assistants, honestly--you didn't review the lit, you don't know the field, you know someone else's view of the field. That seems like a problem, like a constructing a strawman problem. With LLMs, it's worse.

And 165 non-artificial schoolchildren were blown up by all this advanced and precise targeting. Congrats to everyone involved on achieving this brave new world.

I love using em dashes, and AI is ruining it for me. AI is also ruining the world. The world is also ruining itself. But, still. My em dashes.

Australians

This is a hella smart, and new (to me anyways) critique of AI. Read the whole thread!

Reading someone else's text is sometimes hard. But reading LLM-text is actively adversarial. It is imposing cognitive work on me. I have to impute meaning where it either never existed, or where it has been obscured by numerous layers of matrix multiplication.

Evergreen

Alright time for the ritual. Time to post our favorite part

I know there's a lot going on in the world, but I'm still not over the fact that hatred towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has surged so much that a man attempted to bomb an Indigenous march on Invasion Day and the country barely talked about it, let alone try to fight that racism.

Which is fine, collecting is what some people find joy and purpose in. But for me I also think there's something that gives specific ick when it is related to books and pens - perhaps because the 'doing' part of those hobbies feel almost anti-consumption in some way. For me anyway.

Absolutely. I think that's what plenty of people find joy in and that's great. But I feel that same ick and to me it's tied to the excessive consumption that seems to be becoming more the norm in everything. Booktok stuff gives me similar ick bc it's all about 'having' books, not so much reading.

Anyway clearly I think about hobbies and consumption because I had more to say than I realised and the more I ponder the more complicated my thoughts seem to get about it because I love hobbies and think they're essential to being human but I don't always love the way socials play into it

Fountain pens are interesting I think bc there's almost a third/hybrid category for collectors where the hobby isn't so much just about buying things for, but actively seeking out specific types to add to the collection and the research that comes with that.

Each to their own, but I do think there is something to the idea that 'doing' a hobby and 'buying things for' a hobby are two distinct ways of being in the hobby space. Sometimes people sit within both groups, but plenty are only in one of them.

Honestly I am with you, and I know myself well enough to know how easily I get lured into the consumption aspect of hobbies. I have more fountain pens than I need but I actively rotate and use all of them and I stopped buying new ones bc I have hit my 'any more and I'll be overwhelmed' point.

never, ever, ever, ever accept "how will you pay for it?" as an argument against social programs.

This is a basic and crucial point for any discussion of LLMs’ use in teaching research or writing. Whether it can ape us, fool us, or get facts right or wrong is, in the end, irrelevant. The LLM is not the thinker we are trying to encourage; the LLM is not the writer that we are trying to improve.

Saw a thoughtful thread about AI, don't want to QT or argue. But. The biggest rage factor with LLMs is the people who, because genAI is transformative for coding, think it's transformative for everything else, because they devalue every other form of work and labor and knowledge.

1 Me: He froze like a deer in the headlights. 2 Deer: Okay tough guy, what would you do? Me: It’s just an expression. 3 Deer: No, no, no. You’re standing there, suddenly all you see is a blinding light. What’s your plan? I want to hear it. 4 Me, frowning: I would freeze. Deer: I fucking thought so.

This is one of my favorite comics we've made.

Ah yes, cutting funding to Muslim groups because of a social media post by the far-right Australian Jewish Association. The textbook definition of social cohesion

I actually think I would be fine getting interviewed by Isaac Chotiner. If anything we’d probably become friends afterwards

Everybody gets hit with Body Stuff, but white women and the thinness thing is just diabolical. Like…they want y’all to look you’ve been surviving off cotton balls soaked in milk and roach carcasses.

I wish I could get a subscription just to Chotiner's interviews, I am not interested in anything else in the New Yorker currently but every single time he does an interview the screenshots alone make me want to sign up.

A lot of people think a modern Isaac Chotiner interview destroys the interviewee by exploding in contact with the hull. In fact it creates a region of very high pressure beneath the keel and cracks the interviewee in half

finally, in my forties, I feel I am developing the ability to see someone be wrong on the internet and not reply to them

Ooooh I feel like that has been happening too, I just thought I was tired and over everything 😂