When you read about Bans of Social Media for Teens and Age Verification, you must remember what it truly means:

• Official identification of every adult using social media.

• Deanonymization of every account, endangering groups that often rely on pseudonymity for safety, such as victims of domestic violence, victims of stalkers, people of color, and LGBTQ+ people.

• Putting every adult at great danger of exploitation, fraud, and identity theft by forcing them to share their official ID with a for-profit third-party company with no incentive to protect it. Breaches have already happened.

• Constructing a system of mass surveillance to attach every comment on social media to a legal identity. Effectively allowing authoritarian governments to silence their critics and opposition.

• Potential for dystopian censorship and cutting off means of organization for groups of resistance to oppressive regime and organizations.

• Endangering children online by putting a clear identification beacon over every child or family with children online.

• Endangering the data of children who will inevitably try to pass as adults, and have their information collected by the third-party for-profit company.

• Diminishing the value of official identification due to the inevitable data breaches, eventually pushing the system to require even more intrusive identification techniques, such as iris scans and fingerprints.

• Installing a system of mass surveillance capable of attaching even more information to everyone's legal identity. With a potential to built list of people in certain groups, and scale-up state censorship and discrimination in unprecedented ways.

• The list goes on and on.

This isn't about protecting the children.
It never was.

Do not be duped by this excuse used to convince you to let go of your human rights. They are only trying to manipulate people lacking information.

Stay informed on the issues related to Age Verification, and push back for your rights to privacy and democracy.

The future depends on us.

#AgeVerification #Privacy #HumanRights #MassSurveillance #Authoritarianism

My biggest problem with the concept of LLMs, even if they weren’t a giant plagiarism laundering machine and disaster for the environment, is that they introduce so much unpredictability into computing. I became a professional computer toucher because they do exactly what you tell them to. Not always what you wanted, but exactly what you asked for.

LLMs turn that upside down. They turn a very autistic do-what-you-say, say-what-you-mean commmunication style with the machine into a neurotypical conversation talking around the issue, but never directly addressing the substance of problem.

In any conversation I have with a person, I’m modeling their understanding of the topic at hand, trying to tailor my communication style to their needs. The same applies to programming languages and frameworks. If you work with a language the way its author intended it goes a lot easier.

But LLMs don’t have an understanding of the conversation. There is no intent. It’s just a mostly-likely-next-word generator on steroids. You’re trying to give directions to a lossily compressed copy of the entire works of human writing. There is no mind to model, and no predictability to the output.

If I wanted to spend my time communicating in a superficial, neurotypical style my autistic ass certainly wouldn’t have gone into computering. LLMs are the final act of the finance bros and capitalists wrestling modern technology away from the technically literate proletariat who built it.

All of these AI coding advocates talking about creating good docs and APIs, yes, please. Programming in natural language? OK, let my ADHD take you somewhere unexpected.

Larry Wall studied linguistics at Berkeley with the intent of discovering an unwritten language on a Christian mission to Africa and developing a written language for it. For health reasons, he couldn't make the trip and stayed in the US where he joined the JPL and created Perl. I worked with Larry at craigslist and attended many Perl conferences where he spoke. One of the guiding principles of the design of the language was natural language. I'm probably misquoting, but the phrase I remember was, he wanted "a language that mimicked the sloppiness and unpredictability of natural language so it could grow with you." I happen to love Perl because of this. Some of my earliest contributions to perlmonks.org were Perl Poetry [1](https://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=40275), [2](https://perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=37997).

What's it got to do with AI? Whenever I hear someone explain to me they want to use natural language to write code, I think of Larry and Perl. I posted this story and asked "Can someone explain to me how using AI generated code is better than Perl?" And now none of the AI people want to talk to me!

#fuck_ai #ai #fuck_with_ai #perl