Mastodawn

When you post things on Instagram, Facebook, and X, this is what they look like to people who don’t use those platforms.

Cass Mar 10

Eugen Rochko Mar 10

Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs. It's worth pointing out two things: Machine translations existed decades before LLMs, and yes, machine translations are useful. However: I would never in my life read a machine translated book. Understanding what a social media post is talking about in rough terms? Sure. Literature? Absolutely not. Hell, have you ever seen machine translated subtitles? It's absolute garbage.

Cass Feb 17

Charlie Stross Feb 17

Oh boy, this year the UK is—surreally—entering Sam Battle, aka Look Mum No Computer, as their contestant in the Eurovision Song Contest. Yes, it's *that* Sam, who built the Furby Organ.

Cass Feb 16

Charlie Stross Feb 15

The UK isn't a country; it's four raccoons in a trench coat. Only one of them is a brown bear that outweighs the rest by 9:1 and keeps dragging them places they don't want to go (like: out of Europe), and the fourth raccoon has dissociative identity disorder and is self-medicating with cocaine because it's Northern Ireland.

Cass Feb 13

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Matt Wilcox Feb 12

I'll re-iterate what I said yesterday:

- Once you outsource your manufacturing to other countries, you no longer retain the skills and workforce to spin it back up.
- Once you're reliant on outsourced work, the people you outsourced to have the power and get to dictate terms.

AI is *exactly* the same thing.

Once it's been relied on long enough that there are not enough juniors with the fundamental knowledge, few to no seniors left... that's the end of your ability to not rely on AI providers.

Cass Feb 9

schrotthaufen Feb 9

Last boost: Age verification is never about child safety. It’s about restricting the free web, linking legal identities to everything you do, and harvesting data for profit.

Edit: typo

Cass Feb 2

MattiP 🤡🃏🧌🚩Feb 2

Great expression that should be used more.

Cass Feb 2

gemma lynn Feb 2

i tried to read excerpts of this essay from @Crell to my hubby and i got so choked up i couldn't get the words out. this is what i felt at the end of last year, when i decided it is what it is.

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Cass Jan 30

@ello I have never connected these dots but this makes perfect sense. I, a linguistics grad in software dev job, am more sceptical of LLMs than much more capable pure-CS developers that I work with.

(yet another example how the lack of humanities in engineering curriculum is a bad thing)

thing that always gets me is seeing the computer scientists - who i know understand how it all works and should know better - yap about the possibility that the text prediction models they talk to at could be sentient.

it's like an ee looking at a wall outlet and then going Holy Shit is that a little guy with hopes and dreams and a rich inner life????

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