Like its been years and years now, if all this is true, you'd think there would be more of a paradigm shift? I'm happy I guess waiting for Godot like everyone else, but the shadows are getting a little long now, people are starting to just repeat the same things over and over.
Like, I am so tired now, it's causing such messes everywhere. Can all the best things about AI be manifest soon? Is there a timeline?
Like what can I take so that I can see the brave new world just out of reach? Where can I go? If I could just even taste the mindset of the true believer for a moment, I feel like it would be a reprieve.
Off the internet. Maybe it's just time we all face the public internet is dead.
Maybe a trusted private internet, though that comes with it's own risks and tradeoffs.
Maybe we start doing PRs over mailed USB keys. Anyone with enough interest will do it, but it will cut out the bots. We're back to a 90's sneakernet. Any internet presence may become a read only site telling others how to reach you offline.
The information superhighway died a long time ago. 4chan enlightened me on the power of intelligent stupidity. The machinations of a few smart people could embolden countless stupid people to cause nearly unlimited damage. Social media gathering up the smart and dumb alike allowed bullshit asymmetry to explode onto the scene and burned out anyone with a modicum of intelligence.
Is that conceit somehow intrinsically absurd? Or is everyone just supposed to just know?
Like I wish it was simple as "if it wasn't viable, they wouldn't be in business," but alas that argument is kinda the more naive one in this world. Right?
Or is there some intuition about energy/cost here all the dump posters miss, that you could tell us about?
Lisp calls c in emacs. What would be a better language? The code-as-data, data-as-code paradigm fits nicely imo with everything-is-a-buffer. Things like global namespace, hooks, defadvice, would all feel very wrong in other interpreter, and yet seem to make sense in elisp.
There will always be cost though. Even if perfect code is getting one-shotted out, that is constantly maintained and adapted to changing conditions and technology, it simply can't stay at 0 forever because one day the power is surely going to go out!
More and more I am drawn to these kinds of ideas lately, perhaps as a kind of ethical sidestep, but still:
It's not going to solve any general issue here, but the one thing these freaks need that can't be generated by their models is energy, tons of it. So, the one thing I can do as an individual and in my (digital) community is work to be, in a word, self-sustainable. And depending on my company I guess, if I was a CEO I would hope I was wise enough to be thinking on the same lines.
Everyone is making beautiful mountains from paper and wire. I will just be happy to make a small dollhouse of stone, I think it will be worth it. How can we see not just at least some small-level of hubris otherwise?
It's a bummer because sometimes the headline seems cool, but its always generated blah blah recently. I don't think I've seen a non-AI readme on here in months..
Everyone has their own hueristic, but if it took someone 6 hours or whatever to make some whole big app, my confidence that they will continue to maintain or care about it even next week is pretty much zero... How could they? They've already made three other apps in that time!
I don't care if the code is perfect, all this stuff just has the feel of plastic cutlery, if that makes sense.
> The main Blacksky feed and platform are exclusively for Black people. Non-Black people cannot create accounts to post on Blacksky.
Fascinating
edit: before people take it the wrong way, I mean it's fascinating in that I've never seen these type of moderation policies before. I've seen plenty of communities about cultures (i.e. Ukrainian discord servers), but not around Race and not exclusionary to outsiders. I'm not making a moral judgement here.
Yeah it's worth noting that blacksky provides accounts to non-black users but their posts don't get included in the blacksky feed. And non-blacksky PDS users who are confirmed black still are allowed to be included in the blacksky feed.
So it's multiple components really.
- The blacksky feed which is a curated feed and community built around the US black community on atproto.
- The blacksky client, appview, moderation team, and relay which provide the necessary infrastructure for blacksky to operate independent of the rest of the ecosystem if they need to and for them to tailor their experience to their community.
- The blacksky PDS which serves as a source of truth for data storage and auth for blacksky users that choose to use it.
And of course non-black users can use all of this infrastructure but if you aren't black and you want to host your account on a blacksky PDS you have to pay a small subscription/donation.
It's all for their community but they are more than willing to let other people use their infra as long as those people pay their fair share.
Note that I'm not a blacksky member, just someone involved in the greater atproto space so my understanding of the process is likely not perfect.
But AFAIK the way blacksky operates is that they assume good faith when new users join. If it becomes obvious that you are not black then you will likely get reported or directly hit by moderation action and they will ask you to verify your identity at some level.
I think it's something along the lines of "send a photograph that would be non-trivial to fake". Not necessarily forcing you to dox yourself but requiring that you provide some level of evidence that's visibly resistant to AI/tampering. Now I have no idea the extent to which they do this to be entirely honest but I do know they don't mess around with people doing "digital blackface".
I'm not sure how well that moderation approach will scale at large but given they are a community that has carved out their own niche and not a corp just blindly driving to scale, I doubt they'll see the strain that the greater bluesky and atproto have experienced with moderation struggles at scale. And given all decisions around policy and moderation rules are decided by the Blacksky People's Assembly, as the community evolves participants can participate in governance and help craft the process if they are dissatisfied.
i.e. it becomes clear you are using it as a sockpuppet account (some users have been caught trying to do this), outright saying you aren't black, etc.
Like if you aren't being a niche internet celebrity and aren't trying to play main character on the internet it's unlikely you'd get caught unless you were particularly stupid but that's also kinda part of the point. It's a community and people in that community know each other both online and IRL. It'd be pretty hard to be involved in the community without leaving behind an evidence trail of you blatantly lying about who you are.
Go into the subreddit "blackpeopletwitter" and just open a bunch of threads and look for someone commenting "found the white guy", or something like that.
If you grew up writing (and reading) a lot, it's quite natural to have a "voice." It makes sense too: it's akin to having spent a lot of time with a certain person.
Although, I do not know if this is really that shining of an example of anything, although a fine blog post!
If you are surprised, I wholeheartedly recommend just reading more. Something clicks after 1000 pages of Swann's Way, or Infinite Jest, or even the Gnus manual where you simply must reckon with a certain kind natural voice that can be cultivated and exhibited without exertion, without even a "thought."
And I know the implication here is maybe underhanded, and that you feel its "entertaining" as a party trick is; where one compensates for content with flowery prose. That might be fair, but I see this charge more and more, and I just worry one day everyone is just going to deem reading and writing itself as a waste, as a compensation for some unnamed other thing we should all be doing (optimizing productivity). Which is why I must defend every labored, silly metaphor I read now to my death from all yall editors that popped up three years ago.
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