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Dans cette vision, la démocratie entendue comme autogouvernement de citoyens égaux est déjà morte — et il ne reste plus que, dans l’obscurité d’un data center, la gestion clinique de son cadavre.
I’ll grant the Holy Inquisition guy something: he really knows how to turn a phrase. the English summaries of this article really don’t do it justice.
It’s true that these analogies can be stigmatizing, but they needn’t be. As someone with an autoimmune disorder, I am not bothered by people who describe ICE as an autoimmune disorder in which antibodies attack the host, threatening its very life.
This bothers me more than I can explain.
ICE as autoimmune disorder presupposes that it’s normally a good thing to have ICE around and it’s just malfunctioning as an exceptional state of things.
Systemd
Jesus.
I’ve been advocating for a hall of fame of projects that explicitly reject LLMs; ctrl+f “Gentoo” on this very comment thread for the few examples I heard about.
Take “Morgellons Disease,” a psychosomatic belief that you have wires growing in your body, which causes sufferers to pick at their skin to the point of creating suppurating wounds. Morgellons emerged in the 2000s, but the name refers to a 17th-century case-report of a patient who suffered from a similar delusion:
Nitpick but this is unusually sloppy for Doctorow. 1) People with Morgellon’s don’t believe they have wires growing out of sores, but fibres (which upon examination turn out to be cotton for clothes). 2) The original Morgellons is a putative children’s disease «wherein they critically break out with harsh Hairs on their Backs, which takes off the Unquiet Symptomes of the Disease, and delivers them from Coughs and Convulsions.» Which is quite different from the modern condition, whose sufferers have skin sores anywhere in the body with fibrous material looking like lint, dandelion fluff etc. And 3) The association between the two was made by Miriam Leitao, a mother who believes her son suffers from the disease, and has gone to countless doctors and media trying to prove it’s real. So it’s an attempt to legitimise the postulated disease by cherry-picking something “historical” that vaguely resembles it.
It doesn’t detract from Doctorow’s overall argument, it’s just an invalid example of the point he’s trying to make (that delusions can be spread farther or intensified individually by technology). But where’s the fact-checking? I learned this in five minutes from two Wikipedia pages, one of which was linked in the post. I have to wonder if Doctorow is posting through it in such emotional distress that he’s pressing publish too quickly, which is what I hope for, because the alternative is that he asked a chatbot about Morgellon’s Disease instead of reading Wikipedia.
they’re both worse
So oil prices are down again, and on nothing but a promise from Trump and a promise from the EU. The economy has proved remarkably resilient to me; the attack on Iran is like, wild nonsense number 17 that the USA regime did that I thought would trigger a major recession, and didn’t.
I mean don’t get me wrong, things are much worse now than 3 years ago, clearly. But they’re not like, Great Depression worse. They’re not even 2008 worse. It’s just a certain level of degradation (cost of living is higher, purchasing power is lower, concentration of wealth is higher etc.) that people got used to as the new normal. People can get used to lots of things.
To make the IT analogy, I think the global economy is like Twitter. Sure, it feels like a Jenga tower held up by thoughts and prayers, but it’s holding up. When Musk took over I really did think his catastrophic management philosophy would completely break Twitter, but no, it trudges on. Yes, moderation is now nonexistent, and I’m told it’s down more often, and often in “soft downtime” like notifications not working, or DMs, or some other feature, or it’s working but slow, and so on. But clearly the site is up most of the time and more or less functional. Users just get used to degraded quality as the new normal.
I predict AWS will 1) get slower and costlier thanks to “AI”, with higher downtime, at higher stress for the workers; 2) the leadership will refuse to see or admit or even consciously be aware of this; 3) the worsened services will be the new normal. I predict similar developments for the socioeconomic situation of the world, too; though I’m not ruling out a spiral into complete recession, either.
I feel like at this point I want to highlight the ones that took a clear stance against LLM code. On a chardet thread, people listed:
- Gentoo
- Servo
- Loupe
- Qemu
- postmarketOS
- GoTo Social
- Zig
Yeah recording oneself and comparing your pronunciation to a model is a good practice and I recommend it for everyone at beginner stages, that’s a good feature to have in an app like that. (Of course one can also just use the builtin android voice recorder or
sox(1) or anything.)
I haven’t used it but from reading a description my first impression is:
Better than Duolingo (low bar):
- Native speaker conversations
- A bit more context
- Phonetic spelling
Still bad:
- Gamified
- Extrinsic motivation rather than intrinsic
- Tries to replace human interaction with #engagement
- Artificial (“bite-sized”) content
I suspect your podcast and Peppa Pig routines (both good calls, as long as stuff like Coffee Break is interesting enough for you that it holds your attention without having to force yourself) were doing much more of the job than the app, and if you replaced Mango by anything that involves other human beings in the loop rather than streaks and achievements, you would both have progressed more and felt much less bored by it. (For a longer discussion as to why, see the blog posts I just edited into the OP.) If you’re ever going to try something like this routine again, try comparing the Mango app to a fully offline textbook+paper notebook practice, or even better, an online penpal or language coach. Do a couple weeks each and see how it feels.
Here’s a couple blog posts about methods I recommend:
