Jeremy Kahn

NLP (the nerdy kind). Wrong-half Jew. Privilege-traitor.
Linguist. Empiricist. Rager against machines. formerly #indymedia
Also, #comics, #SFF #scifi, languages, big data, algorithms, software design, and more.

#LLMSkeptic. farm-to-table organic free-range prose only. Don't send me generated text.

#WestSeattle #Duwamish unceded land

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twitter (obsolete): https://twitter.com/trochee
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Last Notes

2025-09-04 14:16:17 UTC

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I've started thinking of him as the horseman of pestilence

2025-07-04 17:50:49 UTC

Preparing a Western hemisphere indigenous vegetable for a holiday that is problematic today.
Distress flag seems right.
https://cdn.masto.host/daircommunitysocial/media_attachments/files/114/796/214/014/336/806/original/88af09b5d7e92f16.jpg
https://cdn.masto.host/daircommunitysocial/media_attachments/files/114/796/214/135/668/272/original/0c123e26b90a1b7d.jpg

2025-07-03 13:59:04 UTC

So glad MS invested in the efficient strategies of AI, or they might have had to do socially harmful things to stay afloat
like, add a paywall to MS Paint while laying off 9000 people

2025-06-30 17:53:40 UTC

I read Bostrom's book SUPERINTELLIGENCE back when I worked at Google —
Blaise A— insisted that it go on the "AI" SF book club reading list
(as an aside: I started the book club; we were mostly reading, uh, cautionary stories)
SUPERINTELLIGENCE is garbage, & I said so: throw around big numbers until your moral calculus has a floating-point overflow & you can be convinced of obviously crazy things
(phrasing wasn't so clean at the time)
... nine months later I was no longer working for Google

2025-05-04 17:27:06 UTC

LLMs lower the immediate cost of "fucking around"
and push "finding out" beyond management's forecasting horizon
which is Yet Another reason that everyone with actual expertise should Avoid At All Costs
#NedLuddWasRight

2025-01-23 18:51:42 UTC

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this is parallel to the attempts to rehabilitate the "good Imperials" in star wars
there ARE NO GOOD IMPERIAL OFFICERS
"clone trooper" was an attempt by Lucas to let you feel less bad about killing stormtroopers and even _that_ got turned on its head

2024-07-27 21:03:32 UTC

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I love the idea of a Building Towards Infomocracy reading group.
Sort of a polisci solarpunk radical approach
@npub1g8l…vwtm @npub18x7…p6e7 @npub1sac…kcpe @npub1ev3…sk2l

2024-07-27 20:56:16 UTC

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I'm overdue for rereading M. Older's Infomocracy, but I can read backwards from that timeline into some of the things we would need to start building today, to get to the (still imperfect) place those books start from
One thing we would need is something like Information: collectively-accountable, socially-maintained, socially-connective information infrastructure that we can use to make local, organized, informed collective decisions