Related Recs

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tech literacy

there is lowkey an unbelievable crisis in tech literacy atm, and working on the projects that i have over the last year has driven that home for me like nothing else. once upon a time, understanding how a computer worked was a precondition for using one. it isn’t anymore, and that is so unimaginably dangerous. the total helplessness i’ve seen (some) people express in response to tech’s recent rightward turn has been deeply unmooring. i see people all the time who genuinely do not understand how the platforms and devices that *govern their entire lives* operate on a basic level. “the kids” didn’t become computer wizards - instead, the devices got good enough that they could abstract all of their actual functionality away from you. the amount of power and control knowing even a little bit about digital technology can give you is immense. learn about http. learn about rss. learn about how servers operate. learn the absolute basics of programming. far dumber people than you are doing it every day in silicon valley, and they (and their bosses) are using those skills against you.

@dotmatrices

Jan 28, 2025

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Thinking about The purpose of AI

Apologies if this is strongly worded, but I'm pretty passionate about this. In addition to the functions public-facing AI tools have, we have to consider what the goal of AI is for corporations. This is an old cliché, but it's a useful one: follow the money. When we see some of the biggest tech companies in the world going all-in on this stuff, alarm bells should be going off. We're seeing a complete buy in by Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and even Meta suddenly pivoted to AI and seems to be quietly abandoning their beloved Metaverse. For decades, the goal of all these companies has always been infinite growth, taking a bigger share of the market, and making a bigger profit. When these are the main motivators, the workforce that carries out the labor supporting an industry is what inevitably suffers. People are told to do more with less, and cuts are made where C-suite executives see fit at the detriment of everyone down the hierarchy. Where AI is unique to other tangible products is that it is an efficiency beast in so many different ways. I have personally seen it affect my job as part of a larger cost-cutting measure. Microsoft's latest IT solutions are designed to automate as much as possible in favor of having actual people carry out typically client-facing tasks. Copy writers/editors inevitably won't be hired if people could instead type a prompt into ChatGPT to spit out a product description. Already, there are so many publications and Substacks that use AI image generators to create attention-grabbing header and link images - before this, an artist could have been paid to create something that might afford them food for the week. All this is to say that we will see a widening discrepancy between the ultra-wealthy and the working class, and the socio-economic structure we're in actively encourages consolidation of power. There are other moral implications with it that I could go on about, but they're kind of subjective. In relation to art, dedicating oneself to a craft often lends itself to fostering a community for support in one's journey, and if we collectively lean on AI more instead of other people, we risk isolating ourselves further in an environment that is already designed to do that. In my opinion, we shouldn't try to co-exist with something that is made to make our physical and emotional work obsolete.

@theclack

Mar 24, 2024

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Mourning how capitalist frameworks limit the applications of revolutionary technology

i think that large language models like chatgpt are effectively a neat trick we’ve taught computers to do that just so happen to be *really* helpful as a replacement for search engines; instead of indexing sources with the knowledge you’re interested in finding, it just indexes the knowledge itself. i think that there are a lot of conversations around how we can make information more “accessible” (both in terms of accessing paywalled knowledge and that knowledge’s presentation being intentionally obtuse and only easily parseable by other academics), but there are very little actual conversations about how llms could be implemented to easily address both kinds of accessibility. because there isn’t a profit incentive to do so. llms (and before them, blockchains - but that’s a separate convo) are just tools; but in the current economic landscape a tool isn’t useful if it can’t make money, so there’s this inverse law of the instrument happening where the owning class’s insistence that we only have nails in turn means we only build hammers. any new, hot, technological framework has to either slash costs for businesses by replacing human labor (like automating who sees what ads when and where), or drive a massive consumer adoption craze (like buying crypto or an oculus or an iphone.) with llms, it’s an arms race to build tools for businesses to reduce headcount by training base models on hyperspecific knowledge. it also excuses the ethical transgression of training these models on stolen knowledge / stolen art, because when has ethics ever stood in the way of making money? the other big piece is tech literacy; there’s an incentive for founders and vcs to obscure (or just lie) about what a technology is actually capable of to increase the value of the product. the metaverse could “supplant the physical world.” crypto could “supplant our economic systems.” now llms are going to “supplant human labor and intelligence.” these are enticing stories for the owning class, because it gives them a New Thing that will enable them to own even more. but none of this tech can actually do that shit, which is why the booms around them bust in 6-18 months like clockwork. llms are a perfect implementation of [searle’s chinese room](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/) but sam altman et al *insist* that artificial general intelligence is possible and the upper crust of silicon valley are doing moral panic at each other about how “ai” is either paramount to or catastrophic for human flourishing, *when all it can do is echo back the information that humans have already amassed over the course of the last ~600 years.* but most people (including the people funding the technology and ceo types attempting to adopt it en masse) don’t know how it works under the hood, so it’s easy to pilot the ship in whatever direction fulfills a profit incentive because we can’t meaningfully imagine how to use something we don’t effectively understand.

@alaiyo

Mar 24, 2024

Top Recs from @darice

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rejection

it means u tried

@darice

Feb 26, 2025

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purses as a gender neutral concept

so many of my guy friends never have a bag on them and consequently i am frequently the one doling out hand sanitizer/gum and carrying little things for them. luv them and truly happy 2 #provide but it Would be nice if we all carried some things now and then to cover each others’ bases….nowadays i do think more people regardless of gender are bringing bags around for fashion/functionality which is a great trend keep it up ✊(also it doesn’t have to be a big bag!! i don’t like carrying around too much stuff either🙂‍↕️)

@darice

Feb 26, 2025

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inefficiency

moving slowly, dilly dallying, lingering, taking the scenic route, etc

@darice

Feb 28, 2025