@speakertomanagers.bsky.social
Retired software engineer, hard lefty (trending anarchosyndicalist), interested in (inter alia) art, visual mathematics esp. geometry, photography, theoretical biology, complex adaptive systems, SFF. Physically disabled, mildly neurodivergent (ADD + OCD)
Language modeling is a useful component of many technologies that can be built without extractive, exploitative means. Take the automatic transcription built by and for the te reo Māori people -- there's te reo Māori language model that's part of that.
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I also want to point out (again) the ways in which lumping together all uses of LMs (like the lumping of technologies into "AI") obscures the issues at hand.
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In this context, I feel like reminding people (again) that the stochastic parrots paper was not primarily a response to synthetic text extruding machines (not at all popular in late 2020), but an exploration of the range harms that had already been documented in the pursuit of LM scale.
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It was particularly disappointing to see Doctorow misconstrue (and thus, if he is believed) undermine the work that many of us are doing to shine a light on the ways in which the ideology of "AI" and the specific ways in which LLMs and other "AI" products are created do real harm.
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I was disappointed to read Cory Doctorow's post where he got weirdly defensive about his LLM use and started arguing with an imaginary foe.
@tante.cc has a very thoughtful reply here:
tante.cc/2026/02/20/a...
A few further comments, 🧵>>
This makes no sense militarily, logistically, or economically. Space Force inherited a huge infrastructure of systems to track objects in LEO from Air Force and NORAD bases. I doubt moving them makes much sense; replicating them in Alabama would cost tens or hundreds of billions of dollars.
A request by an Indigenous leader and lawyer that we all send messages to our governors and state attorneys general that concentration camps like “Alligator Alcatraz” are not acceptable normalize in our states.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GM8...
#History
#ColdWar
#ApolloMoonLanding
A grand day out
open.substack.com/pub/malmesbu...
“Dear Mom, I left my favorite purple bathrobe at home. Please bring it when you come visit. Sincerely, Lorenzo de Medici.”
#Renaisance
#Florence
#GreatPersonTheory
#AbstractForcesTheory
open.substack.com/pub/paulkrug...
#AI
#Bots
#Noodles
#SFF
Bots should be free to open noodle shops in San Francisco. Here’s a website for such a shop, from a novella by Annalee Newitz (spoiler: you should preorder this book if you support the civil rights of all persons, human or otherwise).
www.automaticnoodle.website
Customer support AI of coding AI company hallucinates and pisses off customers.
#AI
#AIRisks
#AINotReadyForPrimeTime
www.theverge.com/news/651651/...
A possible replacement for energy-intensive and polluting fertilizers.
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Damn, but this is great. I watched it several times. then looked at a few sections frame by frame. I am in awe!
substack.com/@animationob...
Hmmm… Could this be a big part of why govts aren’t doing anything to mitigate Covid? 🤔
It’s assholes all the way down.
On Kobo, not Amazon.
Congratulations!
My name is Neralis. Im a freelancer from Austria who creates stained glass styled illustrations.
