Perhaps folks misunderstand my stance on "AI" as it now exists. I have absolutely no problem whatsoever with big data or using extremely large data sets to do specific types of work. This is, after all, how weather forecasting is done. It's how genomes are decoded. It's how a lot of scientific research is organized.

What I have a problem with is these absolute knobs at FAANG, Palantir, etc. Stealing data from public resources, scrambling it until it's absolutely FUBAR, then trying to sell their vomit back to us as "innovation".

Fuck ALL the way off.

There's a character in Galápagos, the 1985 novel by Kurt Vonnegut, who has created a computer called the Mandarax that can understand natural language, translate languages, and answer questions on many topics -- it's basically an LLM. His wife does ikebana (Japanese flower arrangements) and she discovers that his machine can do it as well as her because he's tape recorded her classes and fed the data into the computer. She says to him,

"You, Doctor Hiroguchi, think that everybody but yourself is just taking up space on this planet, and we make too much noise and waste valuable natural resources and have too many children and leave garbage around. So it would be a much nicer place if the few stupid services we are able to perform for the the likes of you were taken over by machinery. That wonderful Mandarax you're scratching your ear with now: what is that but an excuse for a mean-spirited egomaniac never to pay or even thank any human being with a knowledge of languages or mathematics or history or medicine or literature or ikebana or anything?"

I read that on the bus this afternoon.

#Books #Tech #AI

If you open a pull request that adds 1,009,257 lines across 6,755 commits, the *lenient* consequence should be that you are permanently banned from GitHub and all of your computers are fed into an industrial shredder.

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/pull/30412

Remember the early days of Uber and Lyft, when rides were dirt cheap because the companies were operating at a loss in order to capture the minds/wallets of the masses?

The rug pull in the AI/LLM world when the companies adjust pricing to actually make a profit is going to be spectacular. Especially when you consider the numbers of people / orgs that are addicted to or dependent on such technology.

Woah - this link is gold!

If you have access to Libby through your public library, you can type in your local library system and this will tell you all other Libby systems you’re eligible for!

Edit: I thought this app was available in Canada, but it appears that it currently operates only in the US, with plans to expand to Canada and the UK. Apologies!

https://reciprocard.com

#Libby #libraries #books #bookstodon