Jons Mostovojs @jonn@social.doma.dev

The Real Confederate Flag

#usa #civilwar #confederacy #traitors #failure

https://www.transspotting.com/episodes

Hey folks I'm starting a podcast with my friends. I'd really appreciate honest feedback about the episode we've made so far. Three non-binary trans women talk about navigating life, family, and finding joy. How can we improve? Is there something you'd like to see from us? Thanks 💞

Wrote down my notes on a #paper titled "On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales" by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing: https://asletaiwan.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/On-nonscalability.pdf

The text contrasts the concept of scalability, as used mostly in industrial and economic systems, with something she coins called non-scalability, focusing on relationships between system elements, and then explains why she believes this framing can prove useful.

Notes at https://cohost.org/mononcqc/post/1194272-paper-on-nonscalabi

Just rolled out an update for Substitoot, my #Firefox addon that transparently fetches up to date replies from remote Mastodon servers.

It's still missing a few major features (and a Chrome port) but I certainly makes the experience better for me. Perhaps you should check it out too:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/substitoot/

bless Scotland

I've lost about 10% of my income from the whole GitHub dropping paypal thing, and it's still trending down, so if you'd like to sponsor me that would be awesome 💜

#opensource #sponsor #github

https://github.com/sponsors/lpil

Last day in uni - life drawing in a library

Testimony to the United Nations Security Council on #russian hate speech.

#StandWithUkraine #NAFO #CancelRussia #StopRussia #genocide #imperialism

https://snyder.substack.com/p/playing-the-victim

Welp here we fuckin go. GPT-4 is launched.

Back in the run-up to this release, four whole days ago, a bunch of people were talking over on the birdsite about their reactions to the pronouncements of those who'd gotten beta access, and MSFT's own discussions of what they believed it was going to be like.

Everybody in the gpt-4 trend was talking about how much faster it's reported to be, how many more things it can supposedly be applied to, all while blithely glossing over the fact that MSFT itself said that it is *Still Very Often Wrong* (https://www.rockingrobots.com/gpt-4-to-be-released-this-week/).

And that? That is the problem with our technoculture, in a nutshell.

And today, as seen in the image below, we have have these just… incredible scenes, live from OpenAI's GPT-4, where, when Chris Nicholson asked GPT-4 to give him a syllabus and mnemonics for learning Spanish pronunciation, not only did GPT-4 *Get Most Of The Pronunciations Wrong*, but— and I genuinely do not know which of these is worse— *the New York Times Reprinted The Exchange Without Calling This Out*.

I just… Holy shit y'all.

And then add to ALL of that the fact that MSFT just laid off their entire "Ethical A.I." team, in favour of their increasing the workload and making increasingly nebulous the remit of their "Office of Responsible A.I." And they did this right before this the GPT-4 release announcement went wide, specifically citing the pace of development as the reason they were laying their ethicists off (https://gizmodo.com/microsoft-ai-ethical-ai-bing-chatgpt-layoffs-1850223358).

Let me say that again:

Microsoft is laying off their whole "ethical A.I." team specifically BECAUSE they are increasing the range of integrations of their "A.I." tool throughout their *Widely-Used-By-The-U.S.-Government* product ecosystem.

…Which tells me they woefully misunderstand both "Ethics" and "A.I."

I mean this is damn near beyond parody at this point. If I were going to craft a list of shit to absolutely NOT DO in a time like this, it would look pretty much exactly like what OpenAI and MSFT are doing, right now.

Things are about to get real bad, real fast, and you can feel free to quote me on that.