Anthony

I'm Anthony and I'm an organic computer scientist and a Luddite. I believe that unsound research lends itself to social harms.

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nprofile1qqsddjydafyfajyqv0utzszepdr73jyh30eqjsrjrgqswr8h7m9dclcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43qh6stat

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npub16mygm6jgnmygqclck9q9jz68aryf0zljp9q8yxspqux00ak2m3ls2u7w9x

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Last Notes

2026-01-27 20:29:01 UTC

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@nprofile…n8q3 I don't have the foggiest idea what you are saying nor why you chose to say it.

2026-01-27 20:02:52 UTC

Perhaps the most (in)famous and illustrious American computer scientist and acknowledged principal pioneer of the discipline now known as artificial intelligence (AI), Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT, once pronounced—a belief he still holds—that ‘‘the brain is merely a meat machine.’’ It is significant that the English language distinguishes between ‘‘flesh’’ on the one hand, and ‘‘meat’’ on the other. The latter is dead and may be eaten, thrown in the garbage, fed to pigs, and so on. Flesh, on the other hand, is living matter and, as such, deserves the respect and dignity for life of which, among others, Albert Schweitzer spoke eloquently. The word ‘‘merely’’ in Minsky’s sentence means essentially ‘‘nothing but,’’ that is, also not deserving unusual respect. His statement is a clear reflection of a profound contempt for life that, as I see it, is shared explicitly by important sectors of the AI community, the artificial intelligentsia, as well as many scientists, engineers, and ordinary people. Daniel C. Dennett, an important American philosopher, once said that we must give up our awe of life if we are to make further progress in AI.
From Weizenbaum, Joseph (2007). Social and Political Impact of the Long-term History of Computing
#AI #ComputerScience #life #brain #mind

2026-01-23 17:42:58 UTC

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@nprofile…5k9x This is not quite an answer, but to the extent that corporations are the main purchasers of image generators, the promise seems to be similar to what LLMs promise. Confine human endeavor to a small, controllable world that seems "creative", but is incapable of generating a true challenge to the powerful. Here I am using Leonard Savage's small vs. large world distinction. The former is like living in a chess game according to the rules of chess; the latter is like living in the real world, where you can knock over the board, refuse to play, draw a smiley face on the Queen, etc etc etc. If chess grandmasters convince people that all of society's concerns should be decided over a chess board according to the rules of the game then they've locked in their power because there is no rule of chess that allows you to suspend the rules of chess. That's how I've been seeing the value of AI (to the powerful) lately.

2025-11-07 21:10:02 UTC

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@nprofile…vc9q You should know that I am actively migrating away from KeePassXC, and have been telling everyone I know to do the same, because of your acceptance of LLM use in the software. Speeding up software development of a password manager is trust-eroding; speeding it up with AI is trust-destroying.
@nprofile…nduk

2025-09-09 14:28:32 UTC

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@nprofile…rhsn Right down to actually holding the bad view while pretending to rise above it all!

2025-09-09 14:24:02 UTC

US tariffs boil down to a regressive sales tax that largely affects non-wealthy people after the removal of the de minimis exclusion. Combined with the bill that reduced the tax burden of the wealthy and corporations, the net result is to accelerate the movement of wealth to the wealthy. That's been happening for decades, but at this point it's now eroding ordinary peoples' hobbies to the point that they might have to give them up.
https://mastodon.social/users/jasonkoebler/statuses/115174753970647636
#USPol #economics #tariffs

2025-09-09 12:56:20 UTC

I like to poke LinkedIn once in awhile with an "AI" critique to see what I can stir up. One reason I do this is to keep an eye on the changing form of the booster rhetoric. Nowadays a lot of folks respond to critique with some form of "today's LLMs are bad but tomorrow's will be amazing", the true believer/quasi-religious response with a touch of false humility for flavor. Yesterday I got a "AI critics are just as bad as AI boosters" false dichotomy, which by my read was a variant of the "AI critics are hysterical and irrational" with the twist that the speaker was suggesting that boosters are too. That felt new-ish to me. Granted, the hubristic "we're the smart guys in the room, you should do what we say" framing is ancient in the tech industry. Suggesting the boosters are also not the smart guys in the room is an interesting move because it's an attempt to go meta. Neither the boosters nor the critics are the smart guys in the room; the smart guys in the room are actually the ones who can see that (and so you should do what they say, which is more LLMs always).
#LinkedIn #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #LLM

2025-09-08 15:16:08 UTC

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@nprofile…eyct Thank you!

2025-09-08 13:29:47 UTC

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@nprofile…97lc Thank you! I hope you're settling in well in your new place!

2025-09-08 12:43:58 UTC

Entering my 53rd year. 53 is the 16th prime, and is also the number of bits used for the significand in IEEE 754 double-precision (binary64) numbers.
#birthday #math #ComputerScience

2025-08-28 15:44:58 UTC

Oversimplification is not a form of elegance.

2025-08-25 00:02:46 UTC

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@nprofile…qvst I have six wisdom teeth as well as an extra tooth embedded in the gums above and between my two front teeth. My grandmother had three kidneys and it's possible I do too, but I've never had a scan or x-ray there so I don't know.

2025-08-24 19:58:17 UTC

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@nprofile…dqzf This is good to know. If he makes that we'll have to get some. I like the kind of rye bread we have in the US, but I have no idea how it compares to Danish rye bread.

2025-08-24 19:28:47 UTC

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@nprofile…dqzf Unrelated to the song, I thought you might be interested to know that my small rural town has a clan of Danes visiting it and I see them walking down my road every day. One of our neighbors was a successful chef in Denmark who eventually worked as a chef in Paris before retiring to rural Maine with his wife. We've gotten to know them over the years and they're both very nice. He makes and sells bread but so far we have not bought any from him (to our discredit, almost surely). They have family visiting and they all like to take walks.

2025-08-18 17:39:15 UTC

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@nprofile…dqzf The baobab might outlive you and your entire family line!

2025-08-18 15:39:35 UTC

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@nprofile…dqzf "You can search for your own name, if you know it."

2025-08-15 20:31:52 UTC

Part of route 302 in Windham closed and shelter in place order issued because of a shooting in North Windham. Just got an emergency alert about this.
https://www.newscentermaine.com/article/news/local/public-safety/part-of-route-302-in-windham-closed-due-to-police-incident/97-40212da0-d8f9-4fb5-a9cd-5e805e0d00a1
WINDHAM, Maine — The Windham Police Department and Cumberland County Sheriff's Office issued a shelter-in-place order at around 4 p.m. Friday to people in and along the Windham and Raymond town line.
This comes after police closed part of Route 302 in Windham was closed Friday afternoon as police searched for a person connected to a shooting in North Windham.
#maine #shooting #GunViolence #EmergencyAlert

2025-08-09 13:44:14 UTC

LinkedIn changed how they code their landing page and I needed to adjust my uBlock Origin rules to hide the cluttered up "news" (really, ads) feed they put down the side of the page. If like me you want an uncluttered experience and use uBlock Origin, here's a rule that hides that feed:
www.linkedin.com##div[componentkey="newsAndGamesCard"]
Make sure to put two hashes (#) between "www.linkedin.com" and "div"; for some reason my fediverse server smashes two hashes into one, so what's displayed is not exactly right.
#uBlockOrigin #LinkedIn #cruft #clutter #ads
This post is not an invitation to scold me for using LinkedIn or Microsoft products, nor to suggestion I leave it or find alternatives.

2025-08-02 17:36:18 UTC

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@nprofile…xzgc You clearly do not appreciate the desire not to be scolded, because you just did it too. Scolding people does not reduce the spread of misinformation.
If it really does matter to you, you'll note that I edited my post to correct the matter, and I've made sure to note my mistake.
@nprofile…dfdx

2025-08-02 17:10:26 UTC

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@nprofile…tv9a @nprofile…l20m If that's what they're up to I'm embarrassed it worked on me. I can and should definitely be more careful about what I share and why.

2025-08-02 16:36:55 UTC

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@nprofile…dfdx I don't need to be scolded online, thanks very much. Take that elsewhere.
I read the entire post. The wording was not clear, in my opinion; at time of writing Phoronix nowhere stated it was a third-party project in their post. It took clicking through to the Github and project web page to fully determine it was not officially affiliated with GNOME (at the urging of someone else who responded).

2025-08-02 16:30:52 UTC

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@nprofile…l20m Thanks for this. I looked into it more and now I think I was tripped up by the wording Phoronix used in this post. They could have made it clearer that this was a third-party project.

2025-08-02 16:20:13 UTC

I guess I won't be using GNOME ever again
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-AI-Assistant-1.0
#tech #dev #FOSS #OpenSource #linux #software #GNOME #NoAI #AI

2025-07-31 15:32:13 UTC

I have a feeling the commercialization of space is going to end very badly.

2025-07-31 15:08:54 UTC

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@nprofile…dqzf “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” @nprofile…64t5

2025-07-31 14:18:34 UTC

If you created a text corpus consisting only of true, declarative statements in English and trained a large language model on it, a generative AI system built with this trained LLM would still output false statements sometimes.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM

2025-07-29 15:47:39 UTC

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Maybe I missed the memo, but I find it surprising that Ars Technica is publishing OpenAI ad copy as if it's an article.

2025-07-28 15:53:10 UTC

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@nprofile…97lc I haven't been to a beach since she wrote this, but given my affinity for a gothy death-adjacent mindset I fully intend to try inhabiting this view next time I'm on one!
I'll let her know you liked it!

2025-07-28 14:21:25 UTC

Beach vacations only became popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries as part of the lifestyle of the wealthy in Western countries. Early Europeans, and especially the ancient Greeks, thought the beach was a place of hardship and death. As a seafaring people, they mostly lived on the coastline, yet they feared the sea and thought that an agricultural lifestyle was safer and more respectable.
From The beach wasn’t always a vacation destination - for the ancient Greeks, it was a scary place: https://theconversation.com/the-beach-wasnt-always-a-vacation-destination-for-the-ancient-greeks-it-was-a-scary-place-259356
A post in The Conversation by my favorite classicist (my wife!)
#summer #beach #AncientGreece #myth #classics

2025-07-26 12:54:45 UTC

AQI is 155 (unhealthy) where I am, the result of wildfire smoke blown south from Canada.
Inside, the AQI is 8 (good), because we run air filters continuously and actively manage the air inside the house. We picked up this habit because of the COVID pandemic. The latter is ongoing, and wildfire smoke looks like it'll be a problem every summer for the foreseeable future, so here we are.
#maine #Canada #wildfires #AirQuality #COVID #COVIDIsAirborne

2025-07-26 12:11:26 UTC

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@nprofile…gu3y Hi Dan--I thought this was a very interesting interview and appreciate your thoughts on AI. I had a couple reactions to your application of Juenger's notion of total mobilization to what's going on with AI I thought I'd share, for whatever it's worth:
- I noticed awhile ago that media and tech companies started reporting data center capacity in terms of megawatts and gigawatts. I didn't take note of when this started becoming common, but by now it's typical. I found it puzzling at first, because of course we usually care about latency, throughput, storage capacity, and other such measures when talking about computing. But, and especially in light of your interview, all this really is about the power. Maybe rating data centers with a unit of physical power is a kind of confession about what they're really for;
- I'm not familiar with Juenger's writing but the total mobilization you mentioned reminds me of Lotka's maximum power principle interpreted as a principle of evolution. This H. T. Odum quote (lifted from Wikipedia) really captures it:
Lotka provided the theory of natural selection as a maximum power organizer; under competitive conditions systems are selected which use their energies in various structural-developing actions so as to maximize their use of available energies. By this theory systems of cycles which drain less energy lose out in comparative development.
Lotka and Juenger were writing at around the same time and it seems likely Juenger knew of Lotka's work. Generative AI is a great way to burn through a whole lot of power while believing you're "organizing" something. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if there are a bunch of politicos who think that in this newly competitive geopolitical context, we have no choice but to burn as hot as possible; otherwise, we'll be outcompeted by other nations, and die off (nature red in tooth and claw etc etc etc).
Anyway thanks again!

2025-07-25 16:20:51 UTC

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@nprofile…22h8 If it helps in your debugging, I saw this item posted twice in a row about 20 minutes ago.

2025-07-25 12:38:02 UTC

New uBlock Origin rule to clobber the intrusive "Copilot" button that recently appeared in Outlook web mail:
! Jul 25, 2025 https://outlook.office.com
outlook.office.com###CopilotCommandCenterButton
#uBlock #AISpam #AI #GenerativeAI #Copilot #Microsoft #Outlook #DarkPattern
This post is not an invitation to criticize me for using a Microsoft product or to suggest an alternative.

2025-07-24 15:02:01 UTC

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@nprofile…dqzf Oh wow that's cool. Do you get to see the butterflies up on the ceiling inside the building during the winter?
We've been carefully cultivating our milkweed here, since that's the only plant monarch butterfly caterpillars eat. I carefully mow around it and if I see any when clearing brush I leave it alone. We've tried to transplant it and grow more, but only with mixed success. Anyway, it's nice to see them every summer and I hope we see more over time. Their migration from one small area in Mexico all the way up here, something like 3,000 miles away, and back again every year awes me.

2025-07-24 14:40:18 UTC

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@nprofile…dqzf Nice!

2025-07-24 14:36:18 UTC

Saw a monarch butterfly in the yard a couple days ago. Hadn't had a chance to see any up close yet this year.
#maine #monarch #butterflies

2025-07-19 16:15:46 UTC

Big turkey family in our yard today. 3 adults, maybe 10 little ones.
#maine #turkeys #summer #wildlife

2025-07-10 20:18:51 UTC

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@nprofile…d6p8 I have spent more time than I'm willing to admit thinking about this and doing web searches, and now I'm desperate to know a solid example of four.
I did come across the "widow skimmer dragonfly", which works if you're willing to stretch: you have to grant that widows and dragons are legitimately animals and take "skimmer" to be the type of bird. It's not entirely satisfying.

2025-07-09 17:20:12 UTC

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@nprofile…wpfr We benchmark GPUs and CPUs in a multitude of ways, including FLOPS, number of transistors (per unit space), etc. In fact performance-per-unit-of-power. Ignoring all the other ones in favor of a single metric that's removed from what you actually do with the device is bizarre.

2025-07-09 15:45:04 UTC

It's odd to me that people talk about data centers in terms of megawatts, a measure of electric power. For one example among many, a Bloomberg article from March about Microsoft cancelling data center plans began:
Microsoft Corp. has walked away from new data center projects in the US and Europe that would have amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity, according to TD Cowen analysts, who attributed the pullback to an oversupply of the clusters of computers that power artificial intelligence.
"Data center projects that...amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity" is a nonsensical statement. The (technical) capacities of a data center have to do with storage, compute, transmission, and latency. I understand there's probably some Fermi calculation along the lines of converting electric power to compute capacity using the TDP of NVIDIA's latest GPUs or something like that. Nevertheless, it's misleading to speak this way, not to mention lazy. It is oversimplifying in a bad way, treating data centers as utilities that supply a commodity when that is just not the case (at least not with AI, where prices for services still fluctuate fairly wildly).
#dev #tech #AI #energy #power #DataCenters

2025-07-08 14:07:23 UTC

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@nprofile…23gf I don't have great resources on hand but these look OK to me:
- https://www.visual-paradigm.com/guide/uml-unified-modeling-language/what-is-sequence-diagram/
- https://agilemodeling.com/artifacts/sequenceDiagram.htm
- https://sequencediagram.org (for playing around)

2025-07-08 13:54:22 UTC

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@nprofile…23gf I wouldn't be able to teach you how to read source code on Mastodon any more than I could teach you how to read Greek. It's a skill that takes sustained effort and practice.
From what you've said it sounds like it'd help to diagram the code. Sequence diagrams can be helpful in understanding the logic; I like to start with those. Start with some simple flow and build up from there. I don't know how long you've been working with that codebase but I wouldn't rely on memory alone till you're quite familiar with it.

2025-07-08 13:12:06 UTC

It seems to me that the ability to read source code will become more and more important over time. This skill is rarely taught, as far as I can tell. The learning situation resembles that for natural language: knowing how to produce/generate text does not immediately translate into the ability to read it, let alone read it well.
#tech #dev #code #CodeLiteracy

2025-07-08 12:38:12 UTC

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@nprofile…dqzf One 3-d rendered game that stands out for me is The Long Dark. Its art style borders on cartoony: it's 3-d, but highly stylized and not hyperrealistic. This video gives a sense of it. It's one of the few games I've played as an adult where I felt like I had an experience. I remember and still think about it from time to time.
Hyperrealistic 3-d game art tends to trigger unpleasant feelings in me. Usually either it's the uncanny valley, where everything feels creepy, or it's one I can't easily describe where I feel like I'm smelling cellophane the whole time (everything's too shiny) and just want to leave before I'm sick from it. It's disorienting, almost dizzying, and I can't suspend disbelief enough to enjoy the game a lot of the time (while also acknowledging some of these games are visually very impressive). I've had this reaction to modern digital television shows too. I'll admit that maybe I'm unusual, but anyway I have a kind of "alienated" response to this kind of game art too.

2025-07-08 12:26:51 UTC

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@nprofile…hmjf I do tech consulting, and more than once since 2022 I've advised small-to-medium-sized businesses about LLMs. It's extremely valuable to have analysis like this in hand and be able to link to it. Throwing an analysis into the wind may not change minds, but those of us in the trenches can make excellent use of it.

2025-07-07 15:53:35 UTC

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@nprofile…frcv You are now the second person who has 'splained at me how banking and credit works, without knowing a single thing about my circumstances or the nature of the account I'm using. You didn't ask any clarifying questions, nor inquire into whether I was seeking advice (which I'm not), before writing all that--including a suggestion to switch banks, which is absurd. What is going on out there that people think this is a good thing to do at someone on the internet?
I was commenting on the lousy nature of their fraud detection algorithm and how it fails to respond appropriately to clear feedback. Regardless of the level of risk involved, a vendor that the customer has stated is safe over a dozen times should not be flagged as potentially fraudulent. Doing so is wasting everyone's time, attention, and resources, and detracts from the purpose of a fraud alert. Alerts don't tend to function when there are too many false positives. If you work at a bank and have insights into why this algorithm might exhibit such poor behavior, I'm all ears. If you want to vent along with me, great. Otherwise what are you doing?

2025-07-07 13:49:04 UTC

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@nprofile…4zct Why do you think you're entitled to dictate to me how I live my life? You know nothing about me nor how I make my choices. This is an astonishingly inapt thing to post.

2025-07-07 12:48:19 UTC

My debit card's "fraud protection":
1. Regularly flags payments to subscription services as potential fraud even though I've used them for years, paying with the same debit card, and in spite of the fact that I've indicated many times that I trust these services; and
2. Has never identified a real instance of fraud
Whatever they're doing to detect potential fraud, it has a large false positive rate and does not seem adaptive (at least in my case). It's especially odd to me that this bank asks if I've authorized transactions it flagged as potentially fraudulent, I indicate no, this is not fraud, and yet the system continues to flag transactions with the same vendor as potentially fraudulent. I'm giving it a reinforcement signal that couldn't be more clear!
#DebitCard #banking #fraud #FraudProtection #FraudDetection #cybersecurity #InfoSec

2025-07-05 14:14:33 UTC

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@nprofile…3dym Taking actions that undermine the value that your actions are intended to obtain is not clever in any interpretation of that word that makes sense to me. I'd use "shrewd". There's a cunningness about it--many con artists and cheats surely have that--but it's self-serving, destructive, and ultimately self-defeating. There's certainly nothing intellectual about cheating the scientific publishing system.
I feel like I've commented like this before on previous posts of yours, and I think it's because we probably differ in our interpretations of these words. Here's where I'm coming from: I draw a distinction, along the lines of Max Horkheimer, between "instrumental rationality" and what's sometimes called "value rationality". To be simplistic about it, the former is about being good with tools while the latter takes a broader scope encompassing what's good, or right, or desirable. I think there's a strong argument to be made that overfocus on instrumental rationality at the expense of all else is incredibly destructive, and therefore, ironically, not instrumental in a wider analysis. If in the pursuit of whatever ends you're after you erode the foundation upon which those ends attracted you in the first place, you certainly have not done something clever, in my view, since I class that word "clever" on the "value rationality" side of things.
All that aside, the fact that you wouldn't have thought to do a thing is not really a reliable yardstick for judging the cleverness of another's actions! That's a moving target that could even vary throughout the day.
Anyhow, that's how I read this situation. Sure, there's something shrewd or cunning about font cheats (though this style of cheating has been around awhile e.g. Unicode domain phishing attacks). But it erodes the value of scientific publications, which is what the cheats are after.
Sorry for the tome. I figured it was worth spelling out my thinking.

2025-07-05 13:29:46 UTC

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@nprofile…3dym It's really not clever at all.

2025-07-03 23:58:07 UTC

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@nprofile…a3zp Defactualization is death don't go gentle into that particular goodnight.

2025-07-03 19:25:13 UTC

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At the moment it's sunny again. Looking at the radar map it's possible we may not get much of a storm here after all.

2025-07-03 16:58:44 UTC

Rain just started where I am in York county #maine It's windy but nothing unusual yet.
https://cunnin.me/users/technodad/statuses/114789996771597151

2025-07-03 13:01:54 UTC

It suddenly struck me the other day that generative AI used in government and media has a very Memoirs Found in a Bathtub quality about it. One of the premises of Lem's (amazing) novel is that paper disintegrates for unknown reasons, leaving very few hard records of anything. The book is a mock diary of a person who lived through the disorienting chaos that ensued.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #tech #dev #StanislawLem #fiction

2025-06-25 16:41:40 UTC

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@nprofile…gqxr Resources to help with immediate critical needs such as:
- Where to get water
- Where to get food
- Where to get warm clothing if in a cold climate / where to cool down if in a warm climate
- Where to obtain medical supplies
- Where to get medical attention
- Where to find shelter

2025-06-24 12:42:24 UTC

My outdoor thermometer read 90℉ (~32℃) by 7:30 am.
On the bright side we saw a turkey hen with 10 poults following along after her.
#maine #heatwave #GlobalWarming #ClimateChange

2025-06-23 19:34:48 UTC

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@nprofile…kcuf I like this post for many reasons, and especially as an impugnment of so-called "data science". Here are a few initial reactions, for whatever they're worth:
The neoliberal world order was made through "government intervention."
It's literally called the "Washington Consensus" ffs, as in Washington D.C.! I facepalm every time I encounter a well-meaning person who does not understand this.
a computationally-legible account of cultural hegemony masquerading as neutrality.
This is a nice quote. You know, I've been digging into rational choice theory and its offshoots for about a year now, and recently came across Sonja Amadae's writings. Her latest book Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice Liberalism looks to me like a must-read on all this (waving hands at the world). It currently sits under Horkheimer in my reading pile. Your friend Dave is functioning as the rationalizer, basically. "Rational choice liberalism", which overlaps heavily with neoliberalism, cannot admit squishy feelings, intuitions, or collective thought, as you say. It needs cold hard facts, even if a guy named Dave in North Carolina conjures those facts from the air. Something you might find interesting about this Amadae book is that she's making the argument that one of the reasons the US went this way as part of Cold War strategy was to devalue collectivism in Americans' eyes. Arrow's "impossibility" theorem is the most celebrated result: "it's impossible for a group of people to collectively make a rational choice" is how you're meant to read it. She brings receipts, apparently.
It occurs to me that one of the functions of data science is to supply the rationalizations the neoliberal mind needs for it to accept whatever is being argued. "Rationalization" has a specific, even technical meaning--Amartya Sen wrote an often-cited 1971 paper laying out and comparing different ways of formalizing it--although the more colloquial meaning is related in my opinion. It roughly means "non-cyclical preference relations", which von Neumann and Morgenstern helpfully told us can sometimes be represented by numerical metrics (nevermind the assumptions that must hold for those to mean anything). "a" lies above "b" in some scale; "a" is 2.5 and "b" is 1.79 (according to some metric/attribute/characteristic/feature/objective/variable/data column/what have you). Data! Even the theoretical underpinnings of all this is deeply questionable.
It's the theory behind the code that gives it meaning, not its output.
You're channeling Peter Naur (Programming as Theory Building)!
uninterpretable if not outright meaningless results
I get why you didn't, but I'll go out on a limb and say yes they are outright meaningless, at least as they're presented. They must be, because there is no meaning to be found in rationalizations. But everybody's been trained to think there is, I guess.

2025-06-23 13:25:59 UTC

Energy and AI Observatory
The IEA’s Energy and AI Observatory provides up-to-date data and analysis on the growing links between the energy sector and artificial intelligence (AI). The new and fast-moving field of AI requires a new approach to gathering data and information, and the Observatory aims to provide regularly updated data and a comprehensive view of the implications of AI on energy demand (energy for AI) and of AI applications for efficiency, innovation, resilience and competitiveness in the energy sector (AI for energy). This first-of-a-kind platform is developed and maintained by the IEA, with valuable contributions of data and insights from the IEA’s energy industry and tech sector partners, and complements the IEA's Special Report on Energy and AI.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #power #PowerGrid #electricity #climate

2025-06-22 13:19:58 UTC

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@nprofile…q4lf Speaking of maps, I've noticed several articles now, especially in the AP, with maps of the area where Iran is partly cut off so that it looks significantly smaller than it actually is. Granted it must be challenging to create a squarish map of that area that includes both Israel and Iran, but I can't help thinking this is an editorial choice. Iran is a large country, much larger than Iraq and almost the size of Saudi Arabia. Obviously there's much more to the situation than geographic area but I do think the choices in visuals can be telling.

2025-06-20 23:02:27 UTC

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@nprofile…a3zp https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/13668

2025-06-19 18:30:01 UTC

We caught 4 more states sharing personal health data with Big Tech
Healthcare exchanges in Nevada, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island shared users’ sensitive health data with companies like Google and LinkedIn
Maine’s exchange, CoverME.gov, sent information on drug prescriptions and dosages to Google through an analytics tool. It also sent the names of doctors and hospitals that people had previously visited.
Google is an illegal monopoly, losing three different antitrust cases in the US over the last few years. None of us should be sending them data anymore, let alone state-run services.
https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2025/06/17/we-caught-4-more-states-sharing-personal-health-data-with-big-tech
#maine #surveillance #healthcare #HealthData #BigTech #IllegalMonopoly

2025-06-19 13:17:38 UTC

Just a reminder that Google is an illegal monopolist, having lost three distinct antitrust cases.
It looks likely that Google will be treated the way Microsoft was in their famous antitrust loss in the late 1990s, and not be broken up in any significant way. Google absolutely should be broken up, just like AT&T and Standard Oil (and countless other large US monopolists) were before it. Google's wealth and power derives from illegal behavior; this is not in question anymore. Why should they be permitted to keep what courts have decided they stole? 100 years of antitrust law and precedent says that it should not be permitted to keep the spoils of its illegal behavior.
It sounds to me like the hesitation to break up Google is largely ideological on the part of the judges and lawyers involved. The failure to break up Microsoft after its antitrust loss is arguably one of the main reasons the US economy is such a monopolized, consolidated mess today, and why so many things are "enshittifying". Breaking up Google and changing that pattern would obviously not cure all ills, but it'd almost surely make a number of things in the economy better for a whole lot of people.
In any case, one thing we can all do is look at Google as a bad actor, a law-breaking entity whose power is illegitimate.
https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-is-google-still-in-one-piece
#Google #Microsoft #antitrust #monopoly #USEconomy #neoliberalism

2025-06-18 13:10:37 UTC

I don't know what was going on with me yesterday, but so far this morning I have found cd .. in three different text files I'd left open.
#tech #dev #linux #terminal

2025-06-17 13:56:57 UTC

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@nprofile…tyrg @nprofile…4fvz I'll throw in a "same" as someone who does computer science R&D and has been in and around the tech sector for 30 years too. I don't think it's just software; it's the entire field.

2025-06-16 14:56:40 UTC

One definition of the word "artifice" is: crafty device; an artful, ingenious, or elaborate trick. One would be fully justified interpreting the phrase "artificial intelligence" as an elaborate trick resembling intelligence.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM

2025-06-16 13:26:36 UTC

Regarding the last couple boosts: among other downsides, LLMs encourage people to take long-term risks for perceived, but not always actual, short-term gains.
In that respect they're very much like gambling. The messianic fantasies some ChatGPT users have been experiencing fits this picture as well.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #tech #dev #ChatGPT #GPT #Gemini #GamblingAddiction #nihilism

2025-06-09 20:26:31 UTC

Simulated food does not nourish you any more than simulated thought educates you.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

2025-06-04 14:40:06 UTC

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This scam of pretending a computer system can do much more than it actually can by hiding the labor of lots of smart people has been going on since at least the 1980s.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #crypto #scam #grift #dev #tech #con #AICon

2025-06-04 14:38:38 UTC

As with crypto, so with AI:
A $1.5 billion AI company backed by Microsoft has shuttered after its ‘neural network’ was discovered to actually be hundreds of computer engineers based in India.
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/ai-company-files-for-bankruptcy-after-being-exposed-as-700-human-engineers-3208136/
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #crypto #scam #grift #dev #tech #con #AICon

2025-06-03 12:54:19 UTC

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I think the interest in Deleuze and Guattari might be because A Thousand Plateaus argued that capitalism was "axiomatic" in the same way that Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory is axiomatic (haven't read this one either; I'm basing that on a critical paper by Jon Roffe I did read).
Incidentally I have you to thank/blame for this:
https://buc.ci/abucci/s/post-c4a70549f3bb041f4a5f3382f361d720.jpg

2025-05-30 14:23:56 UTC

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@nprofile…kcuf One of the references that made me mad and I forgot, but that I just now looked up again, is The Exploit: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816650446/the-exploit/ . I haven't read it, but I've read reviews and critiques. It's been cited over 1,000 times and was pretty popular when it came out. It has a quasi-philosophical tone--they reference Foucault and Deleuze and Guattarri! I think it helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the "I spy a network therefore something magical must be happening" genre.
One of the reviews I read of it noted the absence of any kind of race analysis. A phrase from that review has been ringing in my ears ever since: "by default, the network is white and male". Middle/upper class too, I'd assume. It just seems like a word for unanalyzed power dynamics, in the end.

2025-05-30 13:02:37 UTC

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@nprofile…kcuf So, farce then. Ugh.
I liked The Tyranny of Structurelessness that you mentioned in your post. I am sad I'd never come across that before. Holy hell did it nail the dynamics I saw unfold in Occupy. I remember at the time it was fashionable to talk about things in network terms, as if there's something magical about calling something a network that militates against how we know human beings in groups behave (look at this for instance, or actor-network theory. I keep stumbling on these things, getting mad, and not keeping references).

2025-05-21 16:18:15 UTC

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@nprofile…dqzf I guess I'm naive but I still believe that what's right in these texts will ultimately prevail in spite of the mass action in the opposite direction. Though, I think a decent proportion of people who have worked on computer programs agree with the spirit of what Naur argues in this article (that's been my own experience at least).

2025-05-21 15:54:23 UTC

Programming properly should be regarded as an activity by which the programmers form or achieve a certain kind of insight, a theory, of the matters at hand. This suggestion is in contrast to what appears to be a more common notion, that programming should be regarded as a production of a program and certain other texts.
Peter Naur in Programming As Theory Building, 1985.
A computer program is not source code. It is the combination of source code, related documents, and the mental understanding developed by the people who work with it regularly. In other words a computer program is a relational structure that necessarily includes human beings.
The output of a generative AI model alone cannot be a computer program in this sense no matter how closely that output resembles the source code part of some future possible computer program. That the output could be developed into a computer program over time, given the appropriate resources to do so.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #Copilot #AgenticCoding

2025-04-26 17:50:47 UTC

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@nprofile…dzrl I think it's a bit reductive to suggest the US's rise was a historical accident. Phillips O'Brien for instance has written about what makes a "great power", and has a very similar list of features. Luck and raw military power matter, but political structure, industrial capacity, and a strong educated middle class, among other things, factor very strongly. A nation that has a strong military and good fortune, but lacks those other aspects, is unlikely to become a global power (in my read of O'Brien). The US developed many of these characteristics over its history, not only as a function of its role in WWIII.
The person I quoted previously was economist Fadhel Kaboub. He's arguing that under Trump, the US looks to be abandoning all of those advantages aside from its raw military power. Like O'Brien, Kaboub suggests the US cannot maintain its status as a global power on the basis of raw military power alone.

2025-04-26 12:47:38 UTC

"When you are a dominant empire like the US...and you make bets that are exclusively based on power rather than technology, innovation, research and development, education, a growing prosperous middle class, history tells us that you will eventually fail, and that is the ugly reality."
#USPol #US #hegemony

2025-04-24 16:43:31 UTC

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@nprofile…q4lf Looks like it's not just you: https://mastodon.ar.al/@aral/114391204097999787

2025-04-24 16:13:17 UTC

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@nprofile…q4lf Wasn't #codeberg being effectively DDoSed by AI bots recently too?

2025-04-14 13:09:29 UTC

Atlassian decided to vomit AI all over Jira so I decided to mop it up with uBlock Origin. So far so good. One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to get it out of the context menus (right-click menus).
I also noticed a new Copilot button in GitHub so I zapped that one too.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AISlop #Jira #Atlassian #NoAI #GitHub

2025-04-08 15:50:06 UTC

It's not a dire wolf. That's obvious and requires no further deliberation. The priests of the church of techno-optimism are loud and platformed but you don't have to take their sermons at face value.

2025-04-08 11:30:10 UTC

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@nprofile…7tf8 It seems the message they are trying to get people to accept is "don't worry about species going extinct. We have technology that can bring them back." Fairly typical incantation of the technooptimist religion if you look at it that way.

2025-04-07 14:01:53 UTC

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@nprofile…q4lf Besides the tariffs, reduction in government spending almost invariably leads to recessions. These fools are doing that too. It's almost as if their goal is to cause one on purpose (which I half believe).

2025-04-06 23:10:52 UTC

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@nprofile…q4lf A Trump recession is looking more and more likely. If the DJIA is really down this much tomorrow that's a big three-day loss.

2025-04-06 16:57:42 UTC

Spent about two hours working in the woods today. This property had been neglected for years and it shows. We've been removing briars, brush, and vines that are choking trees, clearing paths, and taking down sick or dead trees for a couple years now but there's so much left to do. Eventually we'll have the ancient rusted car that's back there removed (!). Anyway today we cut another path from the yard back into the woods to a clearing we made last summer. It's already a nice place to sit and relax.

2025-04-04 21:11:38 UTC

I was using git in the terminal just now and copy-pasted what I thought was a filename. I ended up issuing
git diff Taco Carne Asada
and was told
fatal: ambiguous argument 'Taco'
😢

2025-04-03 15:45:00 UTC

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@nprofile…q4lf I'm sure there are plenty of folks with venal or parochial aims, but there's also ideology at play and I don't think it's fascism.

2025-04-03 14:24:12 UTC

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@nprofile…q4lf Yeah, I've heard this suggested but this admin's economic analysis seems to be incoherent so I don't trust that they know what they're doing at that level. Making it more difficult to obtain US dollars, which being a net exporter would do, pushes the price of the USD up relative to other currencies. Minimizing USD use as a reserve currency is meant to drive that price down. It's also likely to lead to the use of more military force. They say the USD is the first set of boots on the ground, after all, but that's only because it's the word's reserve currency.

2025-04-03 13:25:02 UTC

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@nprofile…q4lf Trump's admin is purposely trying to drive down the value of the dollar relative to other currencies. It seems to be working for now, but it's going to cause a lot of pain within the US. The purported reason is to encourage re-shoring and turn the US into a net exporter, but that can't work and there are probably other reasons we're not fully aware of yet.

2025-04-03 10:55:13 UTC

We got a bit of snow last night, just enough to make everything soggy. The dehumidifier is working overtime.
#Maine #weather

2025-04-01 14:23:40 UTC

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@nprofile…dqzf It also makes me feel bad about their life choices, because for some of us they're the main source of the harm they purport to be decrying.

2025-03-19 02:04:31 UTC

Listening to Gordon Lightfoot and feeling transported back in time. I don't think it's nostalgia as much as his music being so much of the time you can't help feeling it.

2025-03-14 15:10:16 UTC

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@nprofile…q4lf I realize this is reductive, but I always come around again and again to the fact that Chuck Schumer goes way back with Trump and his mentor Roy Cohn: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/04/frank-rich-roy-cohn-the-original-donald-trump.html
The party itself is intellectually bankrupt--roll over and play dead is the "daring" strategy Carville suggests in that article--nakedly corrupt, and decadent. I think there is not enough cohesion within it to mount a response with enough oomph to overcome the petty aims of individuals like Schumer. It seems like the courts--the last and definitely not best line of defense--are the main hope right now.

2025-03-04 21:48:33 UTC

I used to be into punk music in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was president. Lately I've been gravitating to punk music again (looking at you The Gubs #maine #punk). Funny how that works.

2025-02-26 18:15:17 UTC

The governor of my state is being targeted because she insisted that she intended to follow state and federal law in governing Maine. It would appear the people targeting her don't have much respect for state and federal law, nor for state's rights, even as they hide under the cover of these. That's where we are now, apparently.
#maine #USPol

2025-02-24 15:54:23 UTC

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@nprofile…kcuf I thought you might be interested in this given the Nature connection

2025-02-24 15:53:53 UTC

Speaking of widespread low-quality scientific publication and the need to take care with words: https://retractionwatch.com/2025/02/10/vegetative-electron-microscopy-fingerprint-paper-mill/
The phrase was so strange it would have stood out even to a non-scientist. Yet “vegetative electron microscopy” had already made it past reviewers and editors at several journals when a Russian chemist and scientific sleuth noticed the odd wording in a now-retracted paper in Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research.
Today, a Google Scholar search turns up nearly two dozen articles that refer to “vegetative electron microscopy” or “vegetative electron microscope,” including a paper from 2024 whose senior author is an editor at Elsevier, Retraction Watch has learned. The publisher told us it was “content” with the wording.
Note the presence of Nature publishing group, notorious lately for their low-quality AI slop or AI-boosterism, and Elsevier, who is generally terrible.
#AI #GenerativeAI #LLM #AISlop #InformationOilSpill #AcademicPublishing #ScientificPublishing #PaperMill #PeerReview

2025-02-20 15:26:20 UTC

The other day I had another conversation in which someone said that #GenerativeAI made them more productive, and after I asked a few questions they admitted maybe 80% of the output was OK and they have to check and double check everything. Then when I asked the obvious followup, "wouldn't it have been easier just to do it yourself from the beginning instead of having to put in all these safeguards and worry about whether you missed errors?" they had no real answer.
I feel like people have been sold the idea that #GenerativeAI must provide productivity gains, and many don't bother to examine whether it really does.
#AI #GenAI #hype

2025-02-18 15:13:41 UTC

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@nprofile…q4lf I'm looking forward to a break from the shoveling. It's been a bit much recently.
It's possible we had gusts that high. I don't have a way of measuring it. I'm thinking I might invest in a portable weather station thingy at some point.

2025-02-18 13:40:32 UTC

We had a bit of snow over the weekend (roughly a foot? on top of what was already down), and then two days of winds gusting as high as 25 mph (guess). The snow pack is blue-ish and topped with waves. It's reached the point where we'll need to use snow shoes to walk in it.
#maine #winter #snowstorm #snow
https://buc.ci/abucci/s/d2b5ca33bd970f64a6301fa75ae2eb22.png

2025-02-12 20:25:07 UTC

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@nprofile…q4lf They will not. That political party is broken and the sooner we hospice it and mourn its passing the better off we'll all be.