Mastodawn

🔮 oracle of dylphi :crumb_dancing: 🇬🇾

icymi, local net person Cory Doctorow has decided to give up his unofficial role as the fediverse's Emotional Support Celebrity in bombastic style by coming to the defence of "open source" LLM's https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/ (not tagging him to avoid a pile on)

Tante has a good write up about the strangeness of his argument here https://tante.cc/2026/02/20/acting-ethical-in-an-imperfect-world/ (again, don't want to pile on).

I also wanted to add that Cory deploy's all this rhetorical barrage in service of... having a robot proofreader. His use case is not restoring justice and dignity to the underpaid, traumatised transnational workers who built the models he uses (https://www.noemamag.com/the-exploited-labor-behind-artificial-intelligence/), it is not helping the people of Southern Memphis escape smog and pollution, it is not protecting the mostly female victims of NCII generation (indeed, millions of private unmanaged generative machines might make that problem even harder to fight against). It is not a meaningful argument about leaving space for "good" or ethical generation - it is sophistry in service of avoiding the inconvenience of actually assessing if he's acting ethically. Tante is right to expect more from him.

Pluralistic: Six Years of Pluralistic (19 Feb 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

🔮 oracle of dylphi :crumb_dancing: 🇬🇾Feb 20

all I'm saying is if he'd sat down and gone "who am I helping with this?" the answer makes it clear that this isn't a useful thing to do with LLM's

because the answer is "Cory Doctorow" and no one else

mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)Feb 20

@kalviter @Sharksonaplane we have long since been baffled as to why people treat that guy as anything other than a capitalist hack writer trying to sell you his books and speeches, but maybe this will break people's illusions finally

🔮 oracle of dylphi :crumb_dancing: 🇬🇾Feb 20

@atax1a @Sharksonaplane it is probably very silly for me, a hack sci-fi writer who does it for no money, to get too high and mighty about another person's writing

but I will say that this excerpt of Unauthorized Bread, the thing I've seen quite a few people on here talk about as "brilliant", is quite... boring? indulgent? Idk, it's not my thing

idk I feel the same way about all this as I do whenever Taylor Swift's private jet use get's brought up. Why are so many emotions pegged to the sainthood of some random person? Hopefully you're right and people manage to maintain a bit more skepticism in the future

edit: forgot to attach the excerpt

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Unauthorized Bread: Real rebellions involve jailbreaking IoT toasters

Cory Doctorow's book, Radicalized, is up for a CBC award. To celebrate, here's an excerpt.

Ars Technica

mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)Feb 20

@kalviter @Sharksonaplane everything he writes is smug, superficial, and self-congratulatorily wanky. so of course the leftoid part of the tech industry, made up of people who haven't done any critical self-examination of the libertarian beliefs of the field, love it and take any criticism thereof extremely personally.

Shar(yna)Tran/Shark(aeopteryx)Feb 20

@kalviter This is just an EXCERPT??? oh my god it's so fucking long and annoying

And like, all it does is validate everything we've been saying about him

THIS is the writing that person I blocked said was "anti-capitalist"?? lmaoooooo

🔮 oracle of dylphi :crumb_dancing: 🇬🇾Feb 20

@Sharksonaplane "twelve year old child asks asinine questions" is certainly one of the narrative devices of all time

the revolution is simply the freedom to do compute, you understand. The more computering, the freer the people /s

Dźwiedziu Feb 20

@atax1a
Maybe because of the body of his generally anti-captslist work?

@kalviter @Sharksonaplane

mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)Feb 20

@dzwiedziu he is a slop purveyor and a kept pet of the tech industry. you are a rube if you believe him to be anticapitalist

Dźwiedziu Feb 20

@atax1a
Using ad hominems instead of proofs doesn't help your case, but the opposite.

mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)Feb 20

@dzwiedziu not really a huge fan of debatebro tactics from randos, take a hike

David Fleetwood - RG Admin Feb 20

@atax1a @dzwiedziu I've never once seen him promote alternatives to capitalism. He exposes very specific problems with capitalism, but he has never to the best of my knowledge challenged the edifice directly or even entertained the thought.

Milo Trujillo Feb 20

@reflex @atax1a @dzwiedziu He's written a whole book on the subject - Walkaway. You can critique the book in a variety of ways, but it most certainly promotes an alternative to capitalism.

David Fleetwood - RG Admin Feb 20

@illegaldaydream @atax1a @dzwiedziu I have not read it so I'm not going to say you are wrong, but the summary on wikipedia seems to imply it's a fiction story set in a near future world where people can quit working because tech made it all possible.

That world does not exist, is not likely to exist, is not a solution to society and is what people like Elon and Sam promote constantly to distract from harm.

Maybe it's better than the summary, I don't know.

Milo Trujillo Feb 20

@reflex Yes, most of Doctorow's work explores social issues through fiction, including his post-scarcity anarchist utopia. As I said, we can critique that vision, but to suggest that Doctorow has never entertained the thought of alternatives to capitalism is demonstrably false.

David Fleetwood - RG Admin Feb 20

@illegaldaydream I do not consider that to be a serious work of anticapitalism, but I don't challenge your right to do so since you've read it.

David Fleetwood - RG Admin Feb 20

@kalviter I'm just blown away that his use case is a spelling and grammar checker, something word processing apps have been very good at for 25 years and which requires basically no measurable power.

🔮 oracle of dylphi :crumb_dancing: 🇬🇾Feb 20

@reflex one wonders if the problem of "I consistently make the kinds of writing mistakes that elude spellcheck" is a sign that you should take more time to write your stuff

I make mistakes like that too. My workflow involves multiple re-reads so I can catch them. Voila, pressing need for an LLM has been vanquished.

David Fleetwood - RG Admin Feb 20

@kalviter Literally. It certainly is not "so lets burn more energy by using a plagiarism machine built by fascists" situation.

Also, love that he'd rather run a LLM than pay a professional editor despite being a relatively wealthy man. Totally in solidarity, that one!

Evelyn 🐉Feb 20

@kalviter always rubbed me up the wrong way a bit the personality cult this guy seems to have around him. If you talk about certain subjects and enough people see it, eventually someone will bring him up as if it's impossible to independently arrive at useful conclusions about DRM.

@kalviter I usually don't even get to the ethical aspects of why I won't use llms in my thought process. They are just shitty and inefficient tools. "Typo catching" was a solved problem like 40 years ago on machines that were less powerful than your car's keyfob. Such a bizarre argument in favor of using that shit.

Alex Excrement-getter 😷 🍉Feb 20

@kalviter That's because he is a computer fucker, he fucks the computer, EFF has never been anything but anti-control of computers from those who have some money and time to spend to control them themselves, its not about justice they don't understand that they just want computer. $ = freedom.

@kalviter @tante's response is excellent, although someone commented on there claiming that somehow torrenting is just like LLMs. 😂

'Probably half of the "errors" it points out are false positives, which is better than the false positive rate for Google Docs' grammar-checker. As someone who uses a lot of jargon, made up words, etc in his prose, I'm used to overriding my text-editor.' - aren't these systems trainable? 50% false positives seems rather high