700 karma · joined July 2, 2019
LLM could commit plagiarism if authorship of generated media was claimed for either the LLM or its creators.
Sadly these things are often decided by rhetoric in society, but then again, there's no actual debate if it's just throwing slogans.
Now some of the same rhetoric is used in the AI battle. The only question worth asking here is what's the social benefit, as human culture is by nature all commons and derivation. But in this case, the AI companies are also accumulating power, and LLMs are removing attribution which could be argued to discourage publishing new works more than piracy. A "pirate" may learn about you and later buy from you in different ways, a LLM user won't even know that you exist.
[1] Not even discussing how exaggerated these privileges are from what would be reasonable.
I'm not a fan of bundling everything under the sun personally. But it could work if people had more discipline of adding a minimal number of dependencies that would be themselves lightweight. OR be big, common and maintain backwards compatibility so they can be deduplicated. So sort of the opposite of the culture of putting everything through HTTP APIs, deprecating stuff left and right every month, Electron (which puts the browser complexity into anything), and pulling whole trees of dependencies in dynamic languages.
This is probably one of the biggest pitfalls of Linux, saying this as someone to whom it's the sanest available OS despite this. But the root of the problem is wider, it's just the fact that we tend to dump the reduction of development costs onto all users in more resources usage. Unless some big corp cares to make stuff more economical, or the project is right for some mad hobbyist. As someone else said, corps don't really care about Linux desktop.
On the other hand, people tend to be happy with a history that ignores 90+% of what happened, instead focusing on a "central" narrative, which traditionally focussed on maybe 5 Euro-Atlantic great powers, and nowadays somewhat pretends not to.
That being said, I don't like the subjectivist take on historical truth advanced by the article. Maybe it's hard to positively establish facts, but it doesn't mean one cannot negatively establish falsehoods and this matters more in practice, in the end. This feels salient when touching on opinions of Carr's as a Soviet-friendly historian.
The internet is like media (press) or communication by letters. Both extremely established in terms of guaranteeing freedom of speech and in the latter case, also secrecy. And the ID identification (that you then make your argument about) is only loosely related to free speech strictly. It's about being constantly searched and surveilled with a presumption of crime.
The problem is there is no money and fame in using it that way, or at least so people think in the current moment. But we could return to enforcing some sort of clear, pro-reader writing and bury the 2010s-2020s SEO garbage on page 30.
Not the mention that the LLMs randomly lie to you with less secondary hints at trustworthiness (author, website, other articles, design etc.) than you get in any other medium. And the sustainability side of incentivizing people to publish anything. I really see the devil of convenience as the only argument for the LLM summaries here.
Not to pick on you, but I find it quicker to open new tab and do "!w robots.txt" (for search engines supporting the bang notation) or "wiki robots.txt"<click> (for Google I guess). The answer is right there, no need to explain to LLM what I want or verify [1].
[1] Ok, Wikipedia can be wrong, but at least it is a commonly accessible source of wrong I can point people to if they call me out. Plus my predictive model of Wikipedia wrongness gives me pretty low likelihood for something like this, while for ChatGPT it is more random.
That being said I do find the tone of this guide somewhat annoying and condescending at times. It could use some editing to make it more impersonal and to the point. Justifications and explanations could be attached separately and most people won't read them anyway. When people ask poor questions, it's often precisely because they don't read longform text for some reason.
I guess there is still something left here from there from the concept of programming language as a tool for top-down shaping and guiding the thinking of its users. Pascal being the classic example. Golang tries to be like that. I get how annoying it can be. I don't know how JS/TypeScript constructs evolve, but I suspect this is more Fortran-style committee planning than trying to "enlighten" people into doing the "right" things. Happy to be corrected on this.
Maybe the hardest to interpret in hindsight is the point that in the sixties programming has been an overpaid profession, the hardware costs will be dropping and software costs cannot stay the same (You cannot expect society to accept this, and therefore we must learn to program an order of magnitude more effectively). Yeah, in some sense, what paying for software even is anymore.
But interestingly, the situation now is kind of similar to the very old days: bunch of mainframe ("cloud") owners paying programmers to program and manage their machines. And maybe the effectiveness really has gone up dramatically. There's relatively little software running in comparison to the crazy volume of metal machines, even though the programmers for that scale are still paid a lot. It's not like you get a team of 10 guys for programming each individual server.
Myself, I can appreciate corporate stuff presenting corporate. More truthful, feels a little less manipulative.
I can see the intellectual appeal and even the argument for formalism in some high-risk areas. I guess I am most burnt by the advent of hyperlinted, theatrically "typechecked" enterprise Python. I don't think people pushing this stuff would have the balls to introduce an actually formal environment, since even Java is there, not to mention ML-style languages, Rust etc. Maybe there's fear about the staffing and scary appearance, which the article also mentions. (I still sincerely wait for a bigger niche for functional and lispy shops, maybe when the industry transforms with de-monopolization.)
But there is a common thread in the bad kind of arguing for formalisms, where the Scotsmen are never true and your lazy human mind isn't Godlike enough to reason about the program correctly from the start. I actually like how TFA moves toward communicating better so maybe conversations could be more productive in these aspects.
There's no inherent metaphysical worth in being on any particular level of strength, height etc., so we can spread whatever is the most convenient. I think arguments against (that I see being made) ultimately devolve into some magical thinking and a priori thing bad. (I am glad to be shown otherwise.) In fact we are already messing with human fertility in possibly unsustainable ways, so maybe more tools are needed as a part of the way out.
Of course there is political execution, corruption etc., but I don't see it any different from other technological challenges that civilization has dealt with. I.e. we need better politics but the tech is not at fault. Gene editing is isolated interventions, so it's in that detail more manageable than for example mass surveillance which is hidden and continuous.
One more esoteric argument is that we cannot socially agree on what traits are desirable. The ‘The Twenty-first Voyage of Ijon Tichy’ scenario. So opposite to "monoculture" in a way. But I don't see people expanding on that.
Not saying these are universal masterpieces. To every reader slightly different books will be the most enriching. It's true that at a certain age, there is often a transformation from the young adult interest in self to interest in the wider world. But the self is still what humans have, so it's not like it ever ceases to be relevant for one's experience.
While there is something romantic in finding a subculture, even one just slightly adjacent to the mainstream, [being] more chancy, on reflection I'm glad we no longer have it like that. (In fact, we probably regressed a little bit because of the decline of open internet and Google, and the move to group chats.) But today's youth can find and pirate whatever they want. The establishment is founded more on pure concentration of money and financing for legacy institutions, not actual technological hurdles like it used to be.
For a model example, you are a peasant in old Christian Europe, you don't know any learned humanism or anything like that, so you turn to witchcraft--as it is described by the preachers to you. Also it is common among young people who can be raised in a very controlled environment where the authority figures shut out any opposing views: so either you submit, or your only alternative is the (often objectively) horrible things they describe as the enemy. Of course they won't tell you there are other options besides that, and you are very unlikely to come up with them by yourself.
I would also say this plays a role in the society's spiral of internet radicalization. People rarely know basic boring political theory and ideologies, non-ragebait history post WW2 etc. If you are fully jacked into twitter-likes like that, your worldview is gonna largely consist of someone's Satans adopted out of ignorance and spite.
Usability decline and brain rot of the mainstream internet would only push toward this kind of stratification. My main "accelerationist" wish would be that Discord somehow becomes unusable shit for this demographic. At least so all semi-capable people want to avoid it.
Besides, I think depending on your definition some Zoomers can be already 30+.
If I'm gonna subscribe to your magazine, the main things I want to know is quality of reporting and if I can cancel without hassle (due to tactics sadly employed by some titles). I will not just believe you have good stories if I can't see them. This is not the level of trust we give nowadays. And magazine and newspaper subscriptions are not some pressing need that I can't forgo.
For some of these I could just buy one paper issue to try out (technically even for foreign titles), but otherwise how would I know. And no, with a book I would buy, I know I can expect some level of quality because of the publisher, and I can read what it is about in the backcover. Worst case scenario, I get 250 pages of poor entertainment to read when very bored in a train. It's not the same with getting access to someone's sorry content farm.
I would focus on staying sane psychologically and socially, and not feeling I'm wasting my years as much as possible. Though if you can participate in some movement of your colleagues with potential for a positive change, do that. Just don't overburden yourself alone.
I kind of think academia needs to be reformed and unwound from the outside. But I am more and more convinced by the news that the 'outside' might be unable to do it in ways that aren't appalingly dumb. So my faint hope would be that the much maligned "gen Z work ethic" will eventually force some change, and the old academia barons just die out.
Graeco-Roman world also created more patterns of radical political engagement than people tend to give it credit for (regardless of what you think of its legitimacy). Plato with his speculatively constructed vision of ideal republic. Ideologically motivated coups, like one of the Spartan king Cleomenes. Generations of social radicalism had looked at Gracchi. We are just too far removed from classical education to see and appreciate it.
The idea that you somehow have to pursue universal salvation as a part of and precondition of your personal happiness, I think this is extremely wrong-headed. Maybe not OP, but many people think you are morally obliged to be permanently depressed and want to ideologically control your every waking thought. In actuality, I'd say it is better to have internal calm and contentment to be able to achieve whatever you are able to achieve for the world.
As for popularity of ancient philosophy, I think some of this is it having more practical outlook and being less complicated, in a way, than most modern (meaning post-medieval) thought. Note that wide popularity of Enlightenment in 1700s also stemmed from it being more accessible to the masses in many ways. While also ancient stuff has enough of a "base lore" to be somewhat insulated from completely freewheeling "philosophical" crankery. That being said, I would encourage anyone to also look into Epicurean, skeptic etc. thought alongside stoicism. Cicero was somewhat right in trying to peruse and combine all this stuff.
As a second-order effect, I think there's a decline in expected docs quality (of course depends on the area). Libraries and such don't expect people to read through them, so they are spotty and haphazard, with only some random things mentioned. No wider overviews and explanations, and somewhat rightly so, why try to write it if (nearly) no one will read it. So only tutorials and Q&A sites remain besides of API dumps.
If we're looking for bright sides, there are parts of education/public debate which have been merely about stringing words together and mastering a discourse. This can be made more irrelevant by being indistinguishable from ravings of a generative model. Remember that even something like literary studies is supposed to be about themes, ideas and parts of human experience reflected in art, history of intellectual formations and stylistic techniques etc.
I was gonna say, knowing educated people I doubt any of this makes you wiser by itself. This would disprove the 'prepare for life' bit of the OP. But thinking about it, the most ridiculous scams and traps in life aren't generally targeted at people who've read Milton, Moliere etc. So maybe there's something about exercising your mind about human condition, and thought and experience accumulated by mankind, that I'm not appreciating enough. It does allow you to have a wider language to speak and listen, more dimensions to understand things in, and experience life.
An interesting thing is that they likely cannot, outside of some exceptional circumstances--which might include the current clownish situation. Lots of countries would like to be among leading economies. But they don't have enough capital, cannot get it on really favorable terms, don't have the know-how, cannot have effective protectionism to start up (blocked by international rules and retaliations).
You can attract foreign capital and corporations, but it's much harder to tie their people and wealth to you permanently. There is a term 'middle income trap' for example. The impressive thing about PRC is how they've had enough power leverage and ability to play into turn-of-Millennium Western establishment's mentality to really push ahead. But there are many countries that couldn't.
What I am talking here about is this. Most historians are aware of ground level facts like: decline of urbanism, trade, loss of a bunch of literature, political chaos, and Eastern Roman and Arabic world overtaking the former Latin part of the Empire that used to be at least nominally dominating. That's why I precisely indicated my geographic scope by the way. 'Western Europe' does not equal 'humans' by any means.
And on top of that you can have some kind of correction and nuance, where you say well, actually it wasn't completely catastrophic, some institutions survived, there were complex social factors and transitions, there used to be oversimplified narratives by Humanists and Enlightenment and so on. Then you have people who only get the correction and nuance part, because this is more recent and in some ways more interesting, and you get to "destroy" some people on the internet with your fresh facts and logic.
But really all that correction part does not erase the basic fact of the matter that this was a decline by most metrics that we can check. Less sources doesn't mean something like 'dog ate them', it was just a society less capable of creating sources, which says something by itself. And as I mentioned, we still have archeology.
This is a problem where historians look at what they're saying more as being a part of a continuing debate, where they can say revisionist stuff to sound more original in their field, with an understanding that their interlocutors will know the basics. There are many ridiculous views in public which form when historians effectively say "for a long time we have been thinking A <the basic thing about the subject>, but on the second/third order, if you look at it sideways, in some cases B". The whole part besides B gets cut off, because people stopped actively writing A 50-70 years ago. Now A is completely boring and passee and even suspicious to younger audience. But B can serve as fodder for video essays, tik toks, blog posts for us ancient peoples etc.
I think this might also explain much of WW2 revisionism. Of course knowing that especially for this period it can be ideologically motivated in some cases, and in the extreme can lead to someone like David Irving. This also isn't new.
Also, in general if a field of scholarship advertises consensus more than sound dispassionate methodology, then of course various randoms will think of having their own "consensus" because why not.
I expect there would be more of a glut of this stuff where there were lots of server farms and web tech businesses. If the scale was much smaller in your area compared to the US, then of course less servers are discarded.
But Stalin's Soviets were comparable to N. Korea, than, say, modern Russia, in terms of regime and its complete grip on everything. So I'd say the result would be more chaotic, might be actually comparable to Libya.
Both are dependent on good will, even if I think that a not-antisocial person should be open to this in a functioning culture. Demanding both at the same time is assuming some crazy level of authority that you might associate with some figures in your life sometimes. Not some randoms on the internet. Docility is not maturity.
There is no particular sympathy towards programmers in society, I don't think. Based on what I observe calling the mood neutral would be fair, and this is mostly because the group expanded, and way more people have someone benefiting from IT in their family. I don't see why there would be a big intervention for programmers. Artists maybe, but these are proverbially poor anyway, and the ones with popular clout tended to somehow get rich despite the business models of culture changing.
I am all for copyright reform etc., but I don't see making culture public good, in a way that directly leads to more artisanal creators, as anything straightforward. This would have to entail some heavier and non-obvious (even if desirable) changes to the economic system. It's debatable if code is culture anyway, though I could see an argument for software, like Linux and other tools.
> I fear that 90% of the worlds' data
Don't wanna go into a tangent in this already long post, but I'd dispute if these data really reflect the whole knowledge we accumulated in books (particularly non-English) and otherwise not put into reachable and digestible formats. Meaning, sure, they have these data, they can target individual people with private stuff they have on them, but this isn't full accumulation of human knowledge that is objectively useful.
Of course seeing Enlightenment as anti-Judeochristian in principle is a misunderstanding: Kant was one of the last great philosophers to sort-of rescue monotheism in his system. Most of 'philosophes' were Deists, Rousseau trolled them by being a Calvinist. What counts for Enlightenment is justification, not genealogical provenance of the idea. Later German post-Enlightenment philosophers were much happier to be godless.
I think the main problem with Enlightenment is how it has been abandoned, and the main reason is that it is easier to organize and dominate people with a faith-based doctrine (be it a traditional religion, or mass ideology).[1] The main thing that Enlightenment has going for it is that eases the access to material truth and fruits of free inquiry and inventiveness.
Can't say what will win, in the long term. It's an interesting question about human society folding into itself vis-a-vis physical world. I think you can be forgiven for thinking that Enlightenment is now in a path to being extinguished, but on the other hand, people are still aware of it. Seeing abuses of fundamentalists in power, they have where to turn to. I myself went through that transformation from oh-so clever "seeing the limits of reason wow" youth in the neoliberal era.
[1] Auguste Comte's positivism was an... amusing? attempt at creating an rational-scientific religion. There were of course others.