right now, i just need to say what i think.

i don't think i can scream in public, so i'm just going to post my unfiltered thoughts about ai here. i'll also post my random thoughts about marketing bs that are a little too rude for linkedin. i'll look at ideas people are proposing for making the internet and other things better. and i'll probably comment on plenty of posts that aren't related to any of this at all, because i'm a human with other interests and i like seeing other, more positive things on social media too.

ai is a fucking religion. it seems you cannot say anything too negative about it on linkedin or in work-related spaces. if you criticize it at all, you'd better immediately qualify your complaint with some bootlicking statement about how you're "still like ai for x purpose" or "use ai every day" or whatever. sometimes i really wonder how many people buy into roko's basilisk.

maybe i'm just a chicken for not speaking up about llms under my own name, but also i need to earn a living. i admire the journalists and other people on mastodon who are doing what i'm afraid to do. maybe one day i'll have the courage to join them. but i'm not that financially secure, and ubi doesn't seem to be coming for me anytime soon. i need work. i don't feel like i can afford to say anything too controversial about the tools that virtually every company is using now unless i'm anonymous.

i'd like an llm-free job, but those are rare-to-nonexistent in the lines of work i'm qualified for, especially those that pay at least subsistence wages. i'm working toward changing careers, but there will be at least small doses of llms even in my new career. i'm told that even plumbers sometimes use llms these days. (yikes, wtf is an llm going to tell them to do to my pipes?)

part of the reason i'm here anonymously is that i don't know if i can post about my disgust for today's llms under my own name. not without scaring away potential employers who have bought into the hype, as it seems 99.99% of them have. i'd be willing to bet there are a lot of other people who hate llms but are holding back from saying so online for the same reason.

i know that it's a relief when i find out that someone else thinks the things i think about llms. i know it's really nice to read words by other real people talking about things i think need to be talked about. maybe this account will be that for some other anonymous person browsing mastodon

does posting on social media anonymously mean you unconsciously want to be seen? or does it mean you really don't? i don't know. i'm not sure i care if my posts mostly go unnoticed. i do know that i want to see communities that share my values, or at least to know that they exist. i know that i feel a sense of release expressing what i really think here, a bit more than what i get when i journal about things. some part of me wants my thoughts out in the world, apparently.