Of course you’d hate LLMs, they know about you!

Headline: LLM slams known pervert

This is an article about a tweet with a screenshot of an LLM prompt and response. This is rock fucking bottom content generation. Look I can do this too:

Headline: ChatGPT criticizes OpenAI

Welcome aboard 🫡

I’ve tried it all: modals, banners, rewording it, … and, like, I get it. If I contributed a few bucks to every worthwhile thing, I’d run out of money quickly. There actually is one at the bottom of every post right now, though it’s quite small, because I’ve learned that it really doesn’t matter.

Also, to be clear, I didn’t mean to complain or anything. I just wanted to explain the reality of the ecosystem as it currently exists, to the best of my knowledge.

I just want to emphasize that to set up a truly independent and unpaywalled piece of media, you probably need to abandon hope of it being even a viable side hustle. Quasi-independent media on, say, YouTube or Substack can make some money, but you’re then stuck on those corporate platforms. If you want to do your own website or podcast or whatever, that’s more independent, but you’re still dependent on Google if you run ads, or on Patreon if you do that sort of thing. The lesson of Twitter should make pretty clear the danger inherent to that ecosystem. Even podcasts that seem independent can easily get into huge trouble if, say, Musk were to buy Patreon or iHeart.

I’ve been writing on my website for over two years now. My goal has always been to be completely independent of these kinds of platforms for the long term, no matter what, and the site’s popularity has frankly exceeded my wildest dreams. For example, I’m the #1 google result for “anticapitalist tech:”

But I make no money. If I wanted this to be anything but a hobby, I’d have to sacrifice something that I think makes it valuable: I’d have to paywall something, or run ads, or have a paid discord server, or restrict the RSS feed. As things stand now, I don’t know my exact conversion rate because I don’t do any analytics and delete all web logs after a week, but I did keep the web logs from the most recent time that I went viral (top of hackernews and several big subreddits). I made something like 100 USD in tips, even though the web logs have millions of unique IPs. That’s a conversion rate of something like 0.00002 USD per unique visitor.

Honestly, if I got paid even $15/hr, I would probably switch to doing it at least as a part time job, because I love it. Compare that to the right wing ecosystem, where there’s fracking money and Thiel money just sloshing around, and it’s very very obvious why Democrats are fucked, much less an actual, meaningful left. Even Thiel himself was a right wing weirdo before he was a tech investor, and a right wing think tank funded his anti-DEI book. He then went on to fund Vance. It’s really hard to fight that propaganda machine part time.

I’m probably going to get shit for this here, but you have to meet people where they are. If elections are where they are, that’s where you have to go. The best way to get people to work with you will always be working with them first. That’s going to involve doing shit that you don’t want to do. In the same way that a good teacher in school is in a two-way relationship with students, effective organizers don’t organize at people, but build meaningful and mutual relationships with them. People will open up to you when they feel you’re open to them.

So my advice is to join the DSA work, do their elections, but take it upon yourself to keep up the organizational momentum once the election is over and work on something else. Yes, you’re going to have to canvas for some shitty democrat, but, if you knock enough doors, you’ll really learn the situation on the ground where you live, and you can roll that over, hopefully with a few friends. If your personal philosophy doesn’t let you compromise enough to go that route, so be it, but that’s what I’d do.

Not directly to your question, but I dislike this NPR article very much.

Mwandjalulu dreamed of becoming a carpenter or electrician as a child. And now he’s fulfilling that dream. But that also makes him an exception to the rule. While Gen Z — often described as people born between 1997 and 2012 — is on track to become the most educated generation, fewer young folks are opting for traditionally hands-on jobs in the skilled trade and technical industries.

The entire article contains a buried classist assumption. Carpenters have just as much a reason to study theater, literature, or philosophy as, say, project managers at tech companies (those three examples are from PMs that I’ve worked with). Being educated and a carpenter are only in tension because of decisions that we’ve made, because having read Plato has as much in common with being a carpenter as it does with being a PM. Conversely, it would be fucking lit if our society had the most educated plumbers and carpenters in the world.

NPR here is treating school as job training, which is, in my opinion, the root problem. Job training is definitely a part of school, but school and society writ large have a much deeper relationship: An educated public is necessary for a functioning democracy. 1 in 5 Americans is illiterate. If we want a functioning democracy, then we need to invest in everyone’s education for its own sake, rather than treat it as a distinguishing feature between lower classes and upper ones, and we need to treat blue collar workers as people who also might wish to be intellectually fulfilled, rather than as a monolithic class of people who have some innate desire to work with their hands and avoid book learning (though those kinds of people need also be welcomed).

Occupations such as auto technician with aging workforces have the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warning of a “massive” shortage of skilled workers in 2023.

This is your regular reminder that the Chamber of Commerce is a private entity that represents capital. Everything that they say should be taken with a grain of salt. There’s a massive shortage of skilled workers for the rates that businesses are willing to pay, which has been stagnant for decades as corporate profits have gone up. If you open literally any business and offer candidates enough money, you’ll have a line out the door to apply.

Sounds very doable! My friend has an old claw foot tub that he lights a fire under. If you want something a little less country, you can buy on demand electric or propane water heaters and hook your hose up, though I’d expect the electric one wouldn’t be able to keep up at 120v. Hardest part of this project is probably moving the tub. I say go for it!

AI systems in the future, since it helps us understand how difficult they might be to deal with," lead author Evan Hubinger, an artificial general intelligence safety research scientist at Anthropic, an AI research company, told Live Science in an email.

The media needs to stop falling for this. This is a “pre-print,” aka a non-peer-reviewed paper, published by the AI company itself. These companies are quickly learning that, with the AI hype, they can get free marketing by pretending to do “research” on their own product. It doesn’t matter what the conclusion is, whether it’s very cool and going to save us or very scary and we should all be afraid, so long as its attention grabbing.

If the media wants to report on it, fine, but don’t legitimize it by pretending that it’s “researchers” when it’s the company itself. The point of journalism is to speak truth to power, not regurgitate what the powerful say.

Subscribed! I miss this whole genre of subreddits: onejob, notmyjob, crappydesign, dontdeadopeninside, etc.