Tim Gadanidis

Seems like most of their other lyrics don't touch explicitly on political themes at all though

I was typing this up before you deleted, but if still concerned, based on the first track of their 2023 release "second souffle", "l'union fait la force", their politics don't seem too bad (eg "unity makes strength / hate in our society / violence toward communities / racism is not tolerated")

In a UN speech today, President Trump said that "all of these [climate] predictions were wrong".

Back in 2019 I led a research effort to digitize old climate model projections and assess how well they did. Turns out they got future warming pretty spot on!

Sure, but particular ways of using any linguistic form, new or old, index particular social meanings and I don't see what's out of bounds about negotiating/contesting those.

another odd piece to all this is that many people are remembering a wave of "cancel culture" firings over insufficient wokeness that never happened.

Every time I think about someone saying "it's inevitable" when it comes to some tech thing, I think about Toronto stopping Google from creating a 'smart neighborhood' with their Sidewalk Labs project. A bunch of people worked very hard in their community to say absolutely not, not here.

Mark Carney continues to use the phrase “decarbonized oil” to try to greenwash a new oil pipeline for Alberta. It’s so shameless and I would argue it even shows contempt for the public to be so dishonest.

Why we need to (re)nationalize Air Canada It would be tempting to base an argument in favour of nationalizing Air Canada solely off its poor performance over the course of the last few weeks, but in truth the problems experienced by air trave...

Canadians built Air Canada and our airports with decades of public investment. Now we have a privatized airline cutting service, abandoning workers, and pocketing bailouts. If we’re footing the bill anyway, shouldn’t they serve the public—not shareholders?

Caterpillar waking up halfway through metamorphosis: I'm goo. Shit. Shit. Calm down. Go back to sleep. I'm really straight-up goo right now. Fuck

I am genuinely terrified everyone will forget, or has already forgotten, how different people were 15-20 years ago. Since then, all technological innovation has worked toward the goal of sapping human attention as a commodity and society is far worse for it.

Between a "No Other Land" crew mate filming himself being killed by a settler, to a journalist being killed by airstrikes he was covering minutes earlier, I'm not sure how much more televised Israel's genocide can be

Yes! Vaccines are your body making its own medicine. No refill, no follow up, no “lifetime customer.” The simplistic “pharma keeps us sick to keep us hooked” MAHA narrative collapses when you actually look at political economy of vaccines. Vaccines literally end their own market except for kids.

My least popular (and most correct) view is that cars should be automatically limited to the local speed limit. Put the pedal to the floor and you still can't go over 25mph in a residential area.

(15 in Manhattan btw)

I wouldn't say that success of the transformer architecture generally makes good evidence about the utility of LLMs specifically but I see where you are coming from now.

Transformer (deep learning architecture) - Wikipedia

Oh ok! Yeah that's a transformer model. (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transfo... I would define an LLM as an application of the transformer architecture to text specifically. Your coworker was maybe trying to simplify or draw an analogy or something.

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to debate them, just curious about what might make an LLM useful for this task. It could be a multimodal model or something. It sounds like we are all on the same page regarding the ethics of large-scale LLM deployment so I don't think we need to attack them over it.

Large language models are trained on text. They are called "large" because they are trained on vast amounts of text, which in practice usually means internet data. In any case it seems a stretch to call a model only trained on images a "language" model. Do you just mean it's a transformer model?

Can you say more about what the LLM is doing here? I'm not understanding the added benefit of a model trained on massive amounts of text from the Internet for tumour diagnosis (as opposed to a model trained just on tumour data), but I may be misunderstanding what you mean.

The more we make humans machine-readable, the closer capitalism comes to its end goal of fully treating humans like machines

I've been mentally referring to this as the "servile little creep" voice (after bsky.app/profile/laur...). Troubling to imagine the inner life of someone who responds well to it

We don't know what a real AI company looks like yet. We haven't seen one yet. We won't until the day one flips on the ads, and then they all will. Then we'll know what we're in for.

So far, recognition of Palestinian sovereignty has largely been limited to countries in Africa, South America and Asia that have historically been critical of Israel.

This is an amazing way of writing “most of the world”

C'est l'instrumentalisation de la douleur de refuser de parler de comment assurer que personne est plus jamais blessé ou tué au bord de nos routes.

you know, maybe qualitative work wouldn't be accused of being anecdotal if word count restrictions were permissive enough to permit us to... actually show the data

just went to immigration court in Lower Manhattan to see with my own eyes how masked and armed federal agents are apprehending people in the hallways as they walk out of their scheduled hearings.

Is 'Sweatshop Data' Really Over? A new essay argues that low-paid digital labor is becoming a thing of the past. Not so fast, TIME's tech correspondent writes.

AI bros think that "sweatshop" conditions of data labor are over, that we need "clever engineers" to train new LLMs.

But @milamiceli.bsky.social says: "it’s the same workers. If you talk to people, they will tell you: I have done content moderation. I have done data labeling. Now I am doing this."

YouTube video by Angela Collier vibe physics

I watched this (youtu.be/TMoz3gSXBcY?...) on the abuse of LLMs & 'vibe physics' by @acollierastro.bsky.social - well worth a watch! - and I was struck by how the back 15 minutes (the 'thought train') also summed up neatly what it has been like to be a public-facing historian, even before LLMs.1/