William Blackerby

@blackerby
27 Followers
237 Following
97 Posts
Apparently I'm a librarian. Retooting, mainly.
@ink wow this is great

"You do not have to use a language model to let it organise your attention or distort your thinking."

Ouch.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying

LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity

The Guardian

I think we can still build a future where the foundational principles of a software commons are focused on the betterment of people's lives and understanding the human consequences of reproducible automation, and not what you're allowed to copy and paste to where because you're not the boss of me.

I still think that's possible.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@_elena/116300255139664628

Trying it out now. I may be a convert.

o tempora, o morons

Boost plz!

Looking for critical scholarship on the use of "AI" by library/archive workers. University libraries in particular, but adjacent and tangentially-relevant-at-best stuff is welcome too. Any format is fine: books, papers, blogposts, whatever. If it's good, gimme all you've got!

Looks like we're gonna have a department-wide conversation about people using LLMs, and it's being framed as "we're all using it, but we're not talking about it, so let's make sure we're all on the same page about using it responsibly" ... I'll of course be pushing the "there's basically no way to use it responsibly" position, and I'd like to arm myself and others with some critical analyses of issues related to its use in library/archive spaces.

#llm #LLMs #ai #libraries #archives

@elilla "Signal-shaped noise" is an utterly brilliant characterization of what "gen AI" produces.

It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.

@hectorjcorrea Having just scratched the surface, I can say that I like the install process and the sensible defaults. It was pretty straightforward and quick to get it onto the machine and to get into a graphical environment. That said, there's going to be a learning curve. But that's part of the fun!
Hello from OpenBSD on an old ThinkCentre!