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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2024

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  • I expect we’re gonna hear more about the cherry-picked data points that aren’t atrocious for AI. Like specifically the “help me learn” usage stat (the only one where some AI users are on par or better), and the even more specific “help me learn” usage with AI/media literacy discussed in class stat.

    There’s probably all kinds of interesting factors involved that had to be ignored because they needed an AI fluff statistic. Like the one fact they mention, that high AI-use and partly non-AI use correllate with curiousity. Kids who want information will use the tools given to them, and those are often LLMs. If your teachers are into AI and discuss it in class, even more so. I expect the “once or twice a year”-users (who bottom out every chart) to include a big bulk of kids that just do not care about education (often coming from unpriviliged households), so they use it to cheat on their assignments and call it a day.

    Pretty undeniable though, that the daily users are always worse than the sometimes users. That’s probably the habitual delegation of thought kicking in. I could accept that a subgroup of the AI users learns on par or sliiiightly better than non-users on average, but they might be building up a reliance on tooling that will serve them worse and worse once they get past well-trodden school problems. In the same vein they’re probably all getting fucked, because noone gives a fuck about good text books & reference materials anymore.




  • Oof, the brain poison is real.

    Tap for spoiler

    Mod: Nothing says revolutionary politics like voluntarily abandoning productive terrain to capital and then yelling at everyone who wants to contest it.

    Organize workers? Fight over ownership? Build public and cooperative alternatives? Open source the tools? Democratize control?

    No thanks. I have selected performative outrage and yelling at strangers online.

    Rando: Not only that - they don’t even build art coops as pushback, instead celebrate petty-burgeoise of lone commission artist. And those types have that slimy “bootstrap” mentality.

    I’ll do you a favor and not link it.








  • This guy clearly has some deep thoughts to air out…

    The middle class individual, the petty bourgeois, yearns for the righteousness of the proletariat, and avoids coming to terms with their own privileged status. That status frequently precludes them from making moral, ethical decisions, because their fleeting privileges and narrow expertise makes it difficult and dangerous for them to fall out of line […].

    Once you accept that you can begin to think about how to overcome that.

    Or you may choose to ignore that and pretend they’re just blue collar workers and the very obvious tendencies they display are just because they’re temporarily deceived or lack class consciousness. No, they understand who they are, and yearning for proletariat righteousness is part of that understanding. It’s one component of a discourse of merit and authenticity, of rationalising their distinct social status.

    https://sunny.garden/@librarysquirrel/117185341657385932

    Honestly, it reads like a massive self-report, as it’s coming from a straight-from-uni second-year history PhD. Oh, you’ve noticed people tend to talk more about things that make them sound righteous rather than complicit? Probably also from people in your field. But it surely doesn’t affect you, as you’re so aware of the problem and working on being one of the good ones.




  • I just don’t think they’re smart enough to make a dent in an actually competitive industry, no matter how much espionage they got.

    They may throw some cash around and buy their way into a niche field that actually has a business model, but I don’t see how the espionage potential would help them much. To break into a difficult domain based on that, you would need the smart humans who can tell you what you are looking at.

    Maybe it would be possible if you assume competent shady management, that is willing to invest heavily in human capital and systematically violate every privacy policy in the world. I think that’s just not how they operate.


  • I think we have already seen what direct replacement by AI companies looks like, and it’s not pretty. Want an image for an ad but you’re too cheap for a designer? There’s a chatbot for that. Want to represent yourself in court? There’s a chatbot for that. Slopplications of that sort did capture some demand for services, hardest felt by writers/graphic designers because you can more easily get away with a steep drop in quality there (for a little while).

    I don’t believe a takeover of that sort can happen in more sophisticated cases. Critical knowledge in SW (speaking from my wheelhouse) isn’t some guarded secret-burger-sauce-recipe kind of knowledge. It’s vast amounts of knowledge, organized and made actionable through effort and built-up skills. It’s not knowledge they would have to replicate, it’s labour. And I don’t think they can privacy-violation their way to replicate a domain-specific knowledge worker from a chat history.