Good morning Mastodon (or whatever time it is for you). We are one day away from the one year anniversary of the Twitter Lockout, November 18, 2022. An amazing day in internet history on which a quarter million new users joined Mastodon. Perhaps it's a good moment to share thoughts or reflections about open social media over this last tumultuous year as well as hopes or predictions for our future.

#twittermigration #mastodonmigration

Here is your must-read article for the day, a profile of @emilymbender, and her efforts to deflate the ridiculous hype around large language models such as ChatGPT.

It's also about the people who are behind that hype, and about what their way of thinking has the potential to do to us.

It's worth reading all the way to the end.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

#ChatGPT and its ilk are effectively a large-scale DDoS attack on not only specific tasks (such as teaching, software maintenance and fiction editing) but on human creative inspiration, sense of self and ability to make meaning of the universe.

notice how they are
- creating work for us rather than saving us work
- automating inherently energizing and rewarding tasks such as making art rather than tiring and tedious tasks such as filing taxes
- flooding social networks with generated content that makes it harder to connect with real humans and build community
- distracting us with questions like “what if this machine is sentient?” which keep us from noticing and acting to prevent the suffering of actual humans

that thing where all search engines have become basically unusable because they’re stuffed full of AI garbage? i fear that’s about to happen to everything.

i don’t believe this is necessarily intentional, but no machine that learns under capitalism can imagine another world.

So I played the christ out of Metroid Prime Remastered over the weekend - and as someone who never owned a Gamecube, never mind played the original - what an outstanding piece of art. I haven't loved something so thoroughly in a long time.

A fantastic example of how to translate a 2-Dimensional concept to 3D, Prime feels so natural to pre-existing fans of the series such as myself.

Even if you have before, we both know you should be playing Metroid Prime right now.

#Metroid #Nintendo

Another zero interest rate trend bites the dust. Instead of studios trying to compete with Netflix, they realize selling streaming rights to Netflix after running a movie in theaters or show on TV is actually a better business.

Sanity prevails.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-02-12/why-hollywood-is-canceling-so-many-shows-firing-workers?sref=W6GJF3MS