keefer
TaggartHoly crap this story knocked me over. It is everything I'm feeling about the machines right now.
https://sightlessscribbles.com/the-colonization-of-confidence/
The Orange Theme@mttaggart I read this a few weeks ago. It's fabulous writing, isn't it?
Fritz Adalis@mttaggart
This is Fight Club, but with art and love instead of testosterone and violence.
This is Fight Club, but with art and love instead of testosterone and violence.
The Witch of Crow Briar
Brian Bender@mttaggart I love that most of the best non-security-related stuff I see comes from the infosec people I watch.
This is a great example of that. Thanks.
3Jane Tessier Ashpool@mttaggart it’s a good one
MissConstrue@mttaggart I literally burst into tears, multiple times. The emotional arc was astonishing.
Chris@mttaggart That was one of the more moving things I've read in a bit. Seems that whole 'making community' theme that's been going around for a little while can actually be pretty damn good.
I definitely wish I had a friend that would offer "book or body buried?" When i needed something.
Thanks for sharing.
I definitely wish I had a friend that would offer "book or body buried?" When i needed something.
Thanks for sharing.
Christoffer S.@mttaggart It's... so sad.
@mttaggart The article inspired me of to allow for imperfection. I got this feeling of wanting to spend more time writing again.
Creating, thinking, learning. All those things entirely absent from LLM use.
@nopatience Love this. The power of human stories!
Barberousse@mttaggart You should also read this one then :)
https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/the-bookstore-hope/
https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/the-bookstore-hope/
Steve Roy@mttaggart Thank you so much for sharing that.
mike805@mttaggart There needs to be a no-AI writers' group. Producing spammy how-to content to sell on Amazon is one thing, and creative writing is another. "Chad" has no business in that group.
Someone should also point out to "Chad" that the spammy how-to content market is not going to last: the customer can ask the bot directly.
When AI use is clearly causing pain, "Chad" is being sadistic by continuing to do that. He sounds like the normal sociopath marketing guy who has taken over the Internet.
ArneBab@mttaggart @WeirdWriter I laughed and cried -- not only in that order.
And am still crying now, even while I smile.
Thank you so much.
And I’m recording that filk song I promised a friend this week. And maybe next week again. Fuck all else.
Robert Kingett@ArneBab @mttaggart I hope more do this! Continue to make things organnically. Thank you again! There is another story about me verbally bashing a Tech Bro that invaded an indie bookstore and my offline life. More to come so thank you! Click the Narrative tag
@WeirdWriter I found The Bookstore of Hope. Part one feels so much of the drab and harsh and exhaustion I know too well that I feared it would continue hardening and draining, but part two made it wonderful. Strengthened life, as if it formed a root that flowered into a new reality.
Aside: for anyone else reading, this is the link to the story: https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/the-bookstore-hope/
Sue is Writing Solarpunk 🌞🌱@ArneBab I have read this, it's brilliant! @WeirdWriter is a wonderful writer. I shared this with my daughter, an aspiring writer as well as ecologist, a while back and she loved it too <3
writer@[email protected]
Thanks! I also just published https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/loading-cartridge-thepurrparadoxexe/ @susankayequinn @ArneBab
@susankayequinn I should have guessed that you know it ☺
But it is just so good.
tante@mttaggart it is fucking fantastic. The author is also on fedi @WeirdWriter
@tante @mttaggart This means a lot coming from you! For others reading this thread, here is my follow page at https://sightlessscribbles.com/follow but if you don’t like reading, my podcast is https://weirdwritings.pinecast.co/ where you can find narrations of my blog posts, and all of my audiobooks, serialized
Softwarewolf@mttaggart @WeirdWriter "I fucking hate the Tech Bros. I hate the hype. I hate the Bros wrongly claiming LLM's will turn us all into toast. I hate their never-ending quest to make their investments have a return. I hate the venture capitalists in their Patagonia vests who talk about "disruption" while they burn down the library of human experience and fuck over workers. I hate them with the specific, intricate hatred of a survivor who knows exactly how the grift works."
🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Joe Vinegar@faoluin @mttaggart @WeirdWriter #LLM https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/the-colonization-of-confidence/ "The unraveling doesn't happen all at once. It is a slow rot, a decomposition of confidence that the Germans call Zersetzung[1]. Psychological decomposition. It was the method the Stasi used to break dissidents not with torture, but with gaslighting, with subtle alterations of reality until the subject lost faith in their own mind."
[1].https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zersetzung
[...] to undermine their self-confidence and self-esteem. [...] designed to intimidate and destabilise them by subjecting them to repeated disappointment, and to socially alienate them by interfering with and disrupting their relationships with others [...] to induce personal crises in victims, leaving them too unnerved and psychologically distressed to have the time and energy for anti-government activism.
✨メッツォ✨ 
@WeirdWriter I am at a loss for words after reading this, but I loved every bit of it. Thank you for sharing your work 
@mezzodrinker Yay! I’m so glaad you liked it! I penned similar long form stuff so I hope my feed makes it to your reader but https://sightlessscribbles.com/posts/tags/narrative/
@WeirdWriter I'm at work right now, but I'll bookmark the post so that if I don't remember to add the feed after work I can at least find your post again easily.
@mezzodrinker A better page to bookmark is my follow page at https://sightlessscribbles.com/follow And my podcast is https://weirdwritings.pinecast.co/ where you can find narrations of my blog posts, and all of my audiobooks, serialized
@WeirdWriter Oh, I meant the Fediverse post, sorry 
luna the doggie 
@mttaggart learning some chilling historical facts
The unraveling doesn't happen all at once. It is a slow rot, a decomposition of confidence that the Germans call Zersetzung. Psychological decomposition. It was the method the Stasi used to break dissidents not with torture, but with gaslighting, with subtle alterations of reality until the subject lost faith in their own mind.and from wikipediaZersetzung […] is a psychological warfare technique first used by the Ministry for State Security (Stasi) to repress political opponents in East Germany during the 1970s and 1980s. […] The Stasi used operational psychology and its extensive network of between 170,000 and over 500,000 informal collaborators (inoffizielle Mitarbeiter) to launch personalized psychological attacks against targets to damage their mental health and lower chances of a "hostile action" against the state. Among the collaborators were youths as young as 14 years of age.
@mttaggart you ever just wonder if this happens in an automated fashion nowadays
0x4d6165 (Julie)@mttaggart this is heartbreaking and beautiful
noodle@mttaggart
I read it before checking tags. I doubt I will ever again have such a positive emotive response to a 'nonfiction' tag.
I read it before checking tags. I doubt I will ever again have such a positive emotive response to a 'nonfiction' tag.
Bj�rn@mttaggart @WeirdWriter Thanks for sharing. I am still reading but
> "Great! Alright, creators," Brad announces. The word 'creators' sounds slippery in his mouth, like he's selling a subscription service. "Let's synergize the workflow tonight. Go on, Leo."
made me clench my fist involuntarily.
魔法☆少女☆アン@mttaggart I hate the "democratizing knowledge" and "democratizing creativity" argument so much. these things are already democratized. there are endless resources online and in libraries that can help people develop their skills, expand their sensibilities and learn things for free. all AI does is let you pretend you've put in the work; it lets you roleplay someone who actually has drive. it's an empty aesthetic sold in fancy packaging en masse, like a tshirt that says "be excellent to each other" made in a sweatshop on the other side of the world.
shellsharks@mttaggart Just read it. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t well up a bit. It definitely makes me feel better about my own mediocre prose 😅. At least it’s human! ( I scream at no one in particular).
It also reminds me to add a point about “keeping the web human” in my “why should you blog” post. 🤔
daria-andrea@mttaggart thought: imagine that for example, because of the LLMs and their consequences... there'll be no second umberto Eco and the Prague Cemetery ❤️
thanks @WeirdWriter
InsiderTreat@mttaggart finally set aside time to read this and thank you so much for sharing. Incredibly moving, generating such a varied range of emotions. Best thing I've read in a long while.
@mttaggart this is just soul-saving at hope-preserving at this moment in time 😭
Erik Johnson@mttaggart "Hallucination of competence" is an incredible term
Zordrak Shadowfang@mttaggart This is pretty awesome. Definitely tugged at my emotions.
erin@mttaggart This whole piece feels intensely Christian to me. This is most overt in the final scene, which is essentially an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting (the "addiction recovery" language is even used) where everyone gets together to repent the sin of denying their own sinful humanity. This ties to the piece's fetishization of "[human] imperfection" which is I think pretty illuminating of the author's internal thought process. Why use the word "imperfect" to describe what makes "human art" special, rather than any other descriptor, such as "interesting" (rather, why does "interesting" follow from "imperfect")?
I think the author really accepts more of the Tech Bro's premises than they think. The "resistance" they prescribe wields no financial leverage, coddles its subjects even as it defines them by their flaws ('we are all perfect in God's eyes'), and rests on an invented image of "humanity" that will necessarily not include all humans. What happens when someone talks about something horrible that happened to them, and is shut down because they're "disrupting the vibe"/"making people uncomfortable" (challenging this image of humanity)? What happens when a struggling person would be materially helped by LLM use, but this makes them unethical or dirty in the minds of the community around them? They become just another lost soul, drowning, drifting, no one to look at them.
But it sure is great to pretend that capital doesn't exist for a little while, isn't it? It feels so wonderfully guilty and suffocating to have a ChatGPT cheat day, doesn't it? It sure is great to have somewhere to call back your childhood and your parents, because you don't fucking have anything else, isn't it? That's the real contradiction. That's the real poison. If you make $50k/year and you're imperfect enough in the right ways, at least you can imagine that you're getting into heaven as the sun sinks below the horizon.
I think the author really accepts more of the Tech Bro's premises than they think. The "resistance" they prescribe wields no financial leverage, coddles its subjects even as it defines them by their flaws ('we are all perfect in God's eyes'), and rests on an invented image of "humanity" that will necessarily not include all humans. What happens when someone talks about something horrible that happened to them, and is shut down because they're "disrupting the vibe"/"making people uncomfortable" (challenging this image of humanity)? What happens when a struggling person would be materially helped by LLM use, but this makes them unethical or dirty in the minds of the community around them? They become just another lost soul, drowning, drifting, no one to look at them.
But it sure is great to pretend that capital doesn't exist for a little while, isn't it? It feels so wonderfully guilty and suffocating to have a ChatGPT cheat day, doesn't it? It sure is great to have somewhere to call back your childhood and your parents, because you don't fucking have anything else, isn't it? That's the real contradiction. That's the real poison. If you make $50k/year and you're imperfect enough in the right ways, at least you can imagine that you're getting into heaven as the sun sinks below the horizon.
mao tse tung tung sahur@erin @mttaggart the tokenization is disgusting too like the first things the author tells you about this trans woman, just about the only things really, are that she *is* a trans woman and that she's a good source of emotional/reproductive labor and a good conduit for The Struggle™
"Sarah sounds like she looks" what the fuck is that supposed to mean you are LITERALLY BLIND
"Sarah sounds like she looks" what the fuck is that supposed to mean you are LITERALLY BLIND
@erin @mttaggart also it's tagged as nonfiction but i find that extremely hard to believe when most of it reads as heavy-handedly as the average dhar mann video
maive@ochotona_princeps @erin @mttaggart i might be insane or something but so much of the sentence structure there feels like LLM writing itself, perhaps they are doing that knowingly though?
@winterklaus @erin @mttaggart i would give them the benefit of the doubt since they're blind and so their sensory descriptions of the world are probably inevitably going to read as long-winded to people who aren't blind, but yeah the dialogue reads soooo hard as fiction, if not LLM output
@ochotona_princeps @erin @mttaggart oh i didn't think it was under any doubt as "and then the whole class applauded"-tier fiction
Capitã Janeway@mttaggart it's completely moving. Couldn't stop reading it. Thanks for sharing!
Claudius Link