This is anecdotal, but every time I say I have a bad feeling about something
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I’m kinda just over people yelling at me. The more people get super angry about me saying something is fishy as hell, the more south it’s going.
@hacks4pancakes the curse of Cassandra. :(
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@hacks4pancakes This. And then there’s the massive FOMO every time bad but shiny tech gets hyped. Tech people loooove shiny things, and FOMO is the mind killer.
@schrotthaufen @hacks4pancakes Something can be terrible and still become somewhat useful and unavoidably ubiquitous. Smart Phones are a great example.
I wish I didn't need one to live in modern society, but if I'm going to need one I want to know how they work and what fun tricks they can do. That's sort of how I see LLMs. Maybe I'm just old and tired of yelling at clouds.
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@RegGuy @hacks4pancakes Last night, my uncle (investor/manager, zero computing background) called me saying he wants to install OpenClaw on his machine (and "to automate my company") with a lot of FOMO energy. He asked me because he didn't have the skill to figure out how to install that (and yet still thinks it is fine to let it "automate" his company, unmaintained?) I honestly don't know how to dissuade him.
@lesley @RegGuy @hacks4pancakes Don't. He'll find out eventually.
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I’m kinda just over people yelling at me. The more people get super angry about me saying something is fishy as hell, the more south it’s going.
@hacks4pancakes I especially dislike it when people yell at you!
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@RegGuy @hacks4pancakes Last night, my uncle (investor/manager, zero computing background) called me saying he wants to install OpenClaw on his machine (and "to automate my company") with a lot of FOMO energy. He asked me because he didn't have the skill to figure out how to install that (and yet still thinks it is fine to let it "automate" his company, unmaintained?) I honestly don't know how to dissuade him.
@lesley @RegGuy @hacks4pancakes
"I am uncomfortable helping you do something that's a very bad idea. I'm sorry, but you're going to have to find someone else for that." -
@lesley @RegGuy @hacks4pancakes
"I am uncomfortable helping you do something that's a very bad idea. I'm sorry, but you're going to have to find someone else for that."@jmax @RegGuy @hacks4pancakes I basically said that if he want to let his computer and his company's data hacker, I will help him
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The one I haven’t won out on because thankfully the other shoe hasn’t dropped is insecure child tracking apps but omg
@hacks4pancakes Cognitive dissonance is a bitch and a half.
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This is anecdotal, but every time I say I have a bad feeling about something
(See: Elon and companies, alleged grassy knoll ear shots, LLMs, cryptocurrency, Gamergate, project 2025)
And I get tech people yelling at me in the comments,
Within two years I’m proven extremely right.
@hacks4pancakes I share this curse of dystopia future-vision
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@jmax @RegGuy @hacks4pancakes I basically said that if he want to let his computer and his company's data hacker, I will help him
@lesley @RegGuy @hacks4pancakes Well, yeah, there's always the "Just give me all your private data and I'll sell it. We can cut out the middleman." approach.
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Yes, even the collapse of American free speech and democratic government because deep American exceptionalism and trust in stability is 💯💯💯 lifelong brainwashing too.
@hacks4pancakes At least this time, the things I get called "paranoid" (and worse) for concluding are revealing themselves more quickly.
Less social pain for me... 🤔
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@hacks4pancakes as a Brit who used to work in US tech and lived in Seattle years ago, I just assumed people got angry when I pointed this out because I was an outsider...
A bit like Baz Luhrmann's epic song, Sunscreen, every word of this thread rings true 💯
@not_a_label Pointing it out *makes* you an outsider. @hacks4pancakes
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This is anecdotal, but every time I say I have a bad feeling about something
(See: Elon and companies, alleged grassy knoll ear shots, LLMs, cryptocurrency, Gamergate, project 2025)
And I get tech people yelling at me in the comments,
Within two years I’m proven extremely right.
thanks for expressing my feelings
for me it were things like
Java
EJB
XML
Cryptocurrencies
AIand a few others.
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@cford I think it's mostly that many a) men, and b) people in tech do honestly believe that they have a more reasonable, more logical, more correct view of whatever is being discussed than the layman, and sometimes even than people with somehow less knowledge on the subject (or at least they think the other party has less knowledge, often without bothering to check). The urge to correct somebody may stem either from an honest desire to teach them, or from an egotistical desire to demonstrate one's own superiority. Combine the two, and men in tech are, in some ways, indeed the worst.
Please note that I am not excusing anybody's behavior; people MUST learn to question their own PoV, and people absolutely MUST learn to treat others as human beings.
And yes, I do say all of this with a full realization that I have behaved like the man in tech that I am many times, and sometimes do it still.
@mrrmot @cford @hacks4pancakes
Regarding 'Why do we think "debate" is the right way to explore points of view?',
If someone knows of practical workable other ways of resolving our differences of opinion, I'd love to hear about them.
Yes, I'm a man. And I have an ego that gets out of control at times. But I strive to understand other people's perspectives, and to give them appropriate "weight" — which might not be much. I do find myself being wrong at times, and strive to correct my mistakes.
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@mrrmot @cford @hacks4pancakes
Regarding 'Why do we think "debate" is the right way to explore points of view?',
If someone knows of practical workable other ways of resolving our differences of opinion, I'd love to hear about them.
Yes, I'm a man. And I have an ego that gets out of control at times. But I strive to understand other people's perspectives, and to give them appropriate "weight" — which might not be much. I do find myself being wrong at times, and strive to correct my mistakes.
@mrrmot @cford @hacks4pancakes
I might be crazy, dysfunctional, or a bad person. But I have always thought of software development and design being inherently about conflict resolution. I find that we often have different beliefs about how things are, and what would be best, for both short and long term.
Different opinions on observable facts about reality should be easy to resolve, I'd think. But often turn out to be surprisingly difficult to get agreement on.
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@mrrmot @cford @hacks4pancakes
I might be crazy, dysfunctional, or a bad person. But I have always thought of software development and design being inherently about conflict resolution. I find that we often have different beliefs about how things are, and what would be best, for both short and long term.
Different opinions on observable facts about reality should be easy to resolve, I'd think. But often turn out to be surprisingly difficult to get agreement on.
@mrrmot @cford @hacks4pancakes
Once we agree on the basic observable facts, I find that predictions about the future can be quite subjective. And rational decision making must involve expectations about likely future consequences, I would think.
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This is anecdotal, but every time I say I have a bad feeling about something
(See: Elon and companies, alleged grassy knoll ear shots, LLMs, cryptocurrency, Gamergate, project 2025)
And I get tech people yelling at me in the comments,
Within two years I’m proven extremely right.
@hacks4pancakes
Here also, I think we may be empaths. -
I’m kinda just over people yelling at me. The more people get super angry about me saying something is fishy as hell, the more south it’s going.
@hacks4pancakes Americas are mad about... everything. #Unbreakable
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I’m kinda just over people yelling at me. The more people get super angry about me saying something is fishy as hell, the more south it’s going.
@hacks4pancakes oh there is so much fishy stuff, that's all I can smell. for a long time. The point of the 'administrative state' (as Bannon puts it) is to limit the impact of 'fishy stuff' on the citizenry. Before the regulatory state, there was adulterated food galore for sale, overpriced monopolistic businesses, and so on. Or as the Epstein class calls it: 'the good old days'.
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@schrotthaufen @hacks4pancakes Something can be terrible and still become somewhat useful and unavoidably ubiquitous. Smart Phones are a great example.
I wish I didn't need one to live in modern society, but if I'm going to need one I want to know how they work and what fun tricks they can do. That's sort of how I see LLMs. Maybe I'm just old and tired of yelling at clouds.
@mikesiegel @hacks4pancakes Understanding how harmful technology works is not the same as adapting or even promoting, or investing in it, though.
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I’m kinda just over people yelling at me. The more people get super angry about me saying something is fishy as hell, the more south it’s going.
Gli ultimi otto messaggi ricevuti dalla Federazione
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@levelbot I feel good about myself and this number.
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@reiver@mastodon.social knowing people in general... They will get more bug reports if they said "whom"
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@reiver I've heard John Mastodon personally picks those out of a tall hat, for each user, individually. What a great man.
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I'm writing this in English.
Not because English is my first language—it isn't. I'm writing this in English because if I wrote it in Korean, the people I'm addressing would run it through an outdated translator, misread it, and respond to something I never said. The responsibility for that mistranslation would fall on me. It always does.
This is the thing Eugen Rochko's post misses, despite its good intentions.
@Gargron@mastodon.social argues that LLMs are no substitute for human translators, and that people who think otherwise don't actually rely on translation. He's right about some of this. A machine-translated novel is not the same as one rendered by a skilled human translator. But the argument rests on a premise that only makes sense from a certain position: that translation is primarily about quality, about the aesthetic experience of reading literature in another language.
For many of us, translation is first about access.
The professional translation market doesn't scale to cover everything. It never has. What gets translated—and into which languages—follows the logic of cultural hegemony. Works from dominant Western languages flow outward, translated into everything. Works from East Asian languages trickle in, selectively, slowly, on someone else's schedule. The asymmetry isn't incidental; it's structural.
@Gargron@mastodon.social notes, fairly, that machine translation existed decades before LLMs. But this is only half the story, and which half matters depends entirely on which languages you're talking about. European language pairs were reasonably serviceable with older tools. Korean–English, Japanese–English, Chinese–English? Genuinely usable translation for these pairs arrived with the LLM era. Treating “machine translation” as a monolithic technology with a uniform history erases the experience of everyone whose language sits far from the Indo-European center.
There's also something uncomfortable in the framing of the button-press thought experiment: “I would erase LLMs even if it took machine translation with it.” For someone whose language has always been peripheral, that button looks very different. It's not an abstract philosophical position; it's a statement about whose access to information is expendable.
I want to be clear: none of this is an argument that LLMs are good, or that the harms @Gargron@mastodon.social describes aren't real. They are. But a critique of AI doesn't become more universal by ignoring whose languages have always been on the margins. If anything, a serious critique of AI's political economy should be more attentive to those asymmetries, not less.
The fact that I'm writing this in English, carefully, so it won't be misread—that's not incidental to my argument. That is my argument.
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I've been checking out @inkwell , the new journaling app on the Fediverse. It looks absolutely great. Fantastic work by @stanton. If you'd like to follow me there, check out @evan@inkwell.social.
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There is the complete list that Mastodon is suggesting I (potentially) follow.
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Moaner's CRYING TOWELS
only 15¢ from Johnson Smith and Co (1951)
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It's "Whom To Follow" not "Who To Follow".
I.e., WHOM not WHO.
...
Also, I wonder how Mastodon picked those choices to me to (potentially) follow.
