Shinycroak

During a Mastodon conversation between Signal Foundation President Meredith Whittaker and data scientist and activist Emily Gorcenski it was pointed out that most of the techniques that are called “AI” date to the 1970s and 1980s. Some predate modern computing. Ms. Whittaker: Deep learning techniques date from the 1980s, & “AI” had been hot/cold for decades, not slow until 2012. There was no new “single idea” in 2012. What WAS new, & propelled the AI boom, was concentrated resources (data/compute) controlled by tech cos. – link Ms. Gorcenski: Backpropagation dates back to the 60s. Deep learning neural nets used to be called “group methods of data handling” and date back to 1978 or so, when the first 8-layer (polynomial) neural network was developed. Fuzzy approximation networks and radial basis function networks hail from a similar era. Weiner explored the polynomial chaos in the 40s, the Karhunen-Loeve transform predates that iirc. - link Everything that could be do...

Because of my limited knowledge, I have chosen to present these as disconnected notes rather than a more organized essay. However, I have not seen many of these thoughts before, so I hope this short note adds something new to the ongoing discourse. It’s not, really. Not intelligence, anyway. It doesn’t know truth from falsehood, or right from wrong. The technologies that are called artificial intelligence, ( diffusion models and large language models) , are basically very large grammars. They seem to replicate part of brain visual and speech centers, but no other neurological functions. In brain damaged people, there is a thing called confabulation . Confabulation is what happens when a damaged brain reaches for a memory and finds it’s not there. It just fills in the gaps. And I think that’s pretty much what an LLM does; it seems to be a replication of part of a brain but it has no real memory or logical capacity or ethics. A human author knows to fact check and not to plagiarize...

There is a tension between microblogging as social activity and reading a microblog site for news. One wants to know the official announcements of, say, the state of Texas or the Tory party. Yet if these things came from your friends or even casual contacts you would ignore or block them. This is the balance one negotiates on Twitter. To effectively replace Twitter a site or a service has to support this balance.

When FDR became president, one of his administration’s first acts was to stop a shipload of gold from leaving the USA. It was, literally, a denial of service attack on an already deflationary economy. At that time, the US economy was in such a poor state that the very wealthy thought the best thing to do was to protect their wealth by converting their banknotes to gold and removing the gold from the USA, thereby making any economic improvement impossible – a denial of service attack on the US economy. Metallic currencies have the failing of being inflexible in supply. In a financial system based on gold or silver – “specie” – the wealthy can simply cash in their chips and take them home, and the economy freezes because, literally, it is out of money. In that situation it is not that there is less labor, fewer farms, stores, or factories, or less demand – there is a shortage of money and barter becomes the only way to do business. Cryptocoins combine the problems of metallic and fiat ...

This is all very discouraging, but let me offer a few rays of hope. The objections I have raised are answerable. A centralized sign-up process, user-oriented focusing tools, social ownership, and an ethical governing organization could provide a better version of microblogging. We might even be able to preserve some of the best things about federated models. If one were to design focusing and filtering tools that worked for the users rather than the network owner, they would have both automatic and manual elements, and be subject to direct control by the user as well, which is something the commercial sites cannot allow, since users would block most advertising. But if this is going to come to pass, someone is going to have to take the lead and a great deal of resources would have to be put into this proposed system. It surprises me how short this section, and the section on ideological problems, are. Partly this is because they are a short distillation of years of experience but, a...

Your first problem, if you decide to get a Fediverse account, is which Mastodon server to connect to. I believed the Mastodon propaganda, and picked out a small site from the list at joinmastodon.org . That small site turned out to be run by fascists and does not allow one to cancel one’s account. I left and moved on to a small political site…which kicked my moderate liberal ass out for being too radical. I then decided that being one bird in a large flock was a good idea and signed up for an account at mastodon.social , the Mastodon mother site. Many people won’t get past this first barrier. If you want to try, as a general rule, avoid small Mastodon (and other Fediverse) sites unless you personally know and trust the management; some of them are run by abusers, and you sometimes can’t find this out except by joining and sustaining abuse. Others are run by various sorts of snobs. (By the way, why the devil are Mastodon messages called “toots,” a US ...

I've done my time and then some on Usenet. If learning to moderate online forums is like studying trolls and demons, then hanging out on Usenet is like living in Sunnydale: if you survive long enough, you'll eventually come up against one of every kind of monster – and after a while, your reaction will change to “Bored now.” – Teresa Nielsen Hayden The Fediverse is a decentralized network made up of a large number of semi-independent nodes. Any resemblance to the political order established by United States constitution is not at all a coincidence – it takes serious study and effort to create political ideas, and even then people have to be persuaded to adopt them. Much easier to fall back on things already known. And, it has exactly the problems of constitutional federations on the US model worldwide. In US politics, there has been a race to the bottom in local jurisdictions. Commercial corporations go to Delaware for a liberal regulatory environ...