The potentially bitter pill to swallow here is that we all need to get better at critical thinking.
There's a lot of talk over whether LLMs make discourse 'better' or 'worse', with very little attention given to the crisis we were having with online discourse before they came around. Edelman was astroturfing long before GPT. Fox 'news' and the spectrum of BS between them and the NYT (arranged by how sophisticated they considered their respective pools of rubes to be) have always, always been propaganda machines and PR firms at heart wearing the skin of journalism like buffalo bill.
We have needed to learn to think critically for a very long time.
Consider this; if you are capable of reading between the lines, and dealing with what you read or hear on the merits of the thoughts contained therein, then how are you vulnerable to slop? If it was written by an AI (or a reporter, or some rando on the internet) but contains ideas that you can turn over and understand critically for yourself, is it still slop? If it's dumb and it works, it's not dumb.
I'm not even remotely suggesting that AI will usher in a flood of good ideas. No, it's going to be used to pump propaganda and disseminate bullshit at massive scale (and perhaps occasionally help develop good ideas).
We need to inoculate ourselves against bullshit, as a society and a culture. Be a skeptic. Ironnman arguments against your beliefs. Be ready to bench test ideas when you hear them and make it difficult for nonsense to flourish. It is (and has been) high time to get loud about critical thinking.
I'm all about using the rainbow of language to it's full breadth, but if you're going to go for shock jock you should maybe have something better to say than "hurdurr I smart and world bad 'cause dumb people". Makes you sound a little like you're trying too hard to be part of the 'literati', whatever that's supposed to mean.
If it was hoarded by anyone, then by definition not useless OR worthless. Also, you are currently on the internet if you're reading this, so the point kinda stands.
Likely progressive, but definitely not luddite [0]. Anti-capitalist for sure.
I struggle with this discourse deeply. With many posters like OP, I align almost completely - unions are good, large megacorps are bad, death to facists etc. It's when we get to the AI issue that I do a bit of a double take.
Right now, AI is almost completely in the hands of a few large corp entities, yes. But once upon a time, so was the internet, so were processing chips, so was software. This is the power of the byte - it shrinks progressively and multiplies infinitely - thus making it inherently diffuse and populist (at the end of the day). It's not the relationship to our cultural standards that causes this - it's baked right into the structure of the underlying system. Computing systems are like sand - you can melt them into a tower of glass, but those are fragile and will inevitably become sand once again. Sand is famously difficult to hold in a tight grasp.
I won't say that we should stop fighting against the entrenchment of powers like OpenAI - fine, that's potentially a worthy fight and if that's what you want to focus on go ahead. However, if you really want to hack the planet, democratize power and distribute control, what you have to be doing is working towards smaller local models, distributed training, and finding an alternative to backprop that can compete without the same functional costs.
We are this close to having a guide in our pocket that can help us understand the machine better. Forget having AI "do the work" for you, it can help you to grok the deeper parts of the system such that you can hack them better - and if we're to come out of this tectonic shift in tech with our heads above water, we absolutely need to create models that cannot be owned by the guy with the $5B datacenter.
Deepseek shows us the glimmer of a way forward. We have to take it. The megacorp AI is already here to stay, and the only panacea is an AI that they cannot control. It all comes down to whether or not you genuinely believe that the way of the hacker can overcome the monolith. I, for one, am a believer.
Not true for the Internet. It was the open system anyone could join and many people were shocked it succeeded over the proprietary networks being developed.
It started as ARPANET, which was not an open system (slightly sloppy use of the term i know, not technically the internet but I consider one the extension of the other).
How are unions any better than mega corps? My brother is part of a union and the leaders make millions.
He's pigenholed at the same low pay rate and can't ever get a raise, until everyone in the same role also gets a raise (which will never happen). It traps people, because many union jobs can't or won't innovate, and when they look elsewhere, are underskilled (and stuck).
You mention 'deepseek'. Are you joking? It's owned by the Chinese government..and you claim to hate fascism? Lol?
Big companies only have the power now, because the processing power to run LLMs is expensive. Once there are break throughs, anyone can have the same power in their house.
We have been in a tech slump for awhile now. Large companies will drive innovations for AI that will help everyone.
That's not a union - that's another corporate entity parading as a union. A union, operating as it should, is governed by the workers as a collective and enriches all of them at the same rate.
Deepseek is open source, which is why I mention it. It was made by the Chinese government but it shows a way to create these models at vastly reduced cost and was done with transparent methodology so we can learn from it. I am not saying "the future is Deepseek", I am saying "there are lessons to be learned from Deepseek".
I actually agree with you on the corporate bootstrap argument - I think we ought to be careful, because if they ever figure out how to control the output they will turn off outputs that help develop local models (gotta protect that moat!), but for now I use them myself to study and learn about building locally and I think everyone else ought to get on this train as well. For now, the robust academic discourse is a very very good thing.
I've been on both sides of it (in a union and working with union members when there was no other choice).
They all work the same way. I'm fundamentally against the idea of unions after seeing how they stifle innovation in nearly all industries they control.
At the surface, it's an antitrust issue (the scale of Meta doesn't have the capacity to behave better, so it doesn't). This, like so many other things, can be traced back to a broken system of governance on a root level.
Our system of incentives, operating within a system of governmental authority baked in an age where gunpowder was the new hotness, leads to a place where the movement of individual bits of law or policy don't matter. The forces at work will roll back whatever you do to make the social situation better, if they are antithetical to the interests of capital. Fix healthcare, and the insurance companies will find ways to twist it to their profit. Fix housing, and the banks and real estate developers will find ways to charge rent anyway.
The coupling between decision making and the vox populi is weak and must be strengthened. The coupling between decision making and capital is strong and must be broken. Unless we can accomplish either, any change we make is cosmetic.
I think what we need is a dissolution of representatives in favor of a more direct form of democracy, but most dismiss this as looney/impossible. I'm inclined to agree about the impossibility but that just kind of lands us back at 'what the hell do we do about it'.
Ranked choice is a good start, perhaps. Might not 'fix it' but maybe it's a foot in the door.
> I tried to correct the nonsense written on the appalling Wikipedia page 'Concrete Ship', only to find myself 'Indefinitely Blocked' from updating Wikipedia. Their grounds were that by citing referenceable facts from this website, I was 'self-promoting' apparently. Self promoting history ? History that has been meticulously researched and is completely free to access ? I then had the audacity to argue with one of the tinpot dictators that run Wikipedia such that I was banned from 'Talk' as well. Closed minds, fake history. This is only important because when you research anything, Wikipedia comes out top. The text then gets repeated ad nauseam. That's the problem...the nonsense on Wikipedia is extrapolated and propagated many times over. For everyone that reads this, a hundred will read Wikipedia and attach what is written to their photo or video. This fact alone means that there is a responsibility on Wikipedia - one that they take extremely lightly - to ensure that statements have adequate and reputable citations. Wikipedia is not a source, Wikipedia is never a source
Pretty strong sentiments - anyone else have this sort of experience? Bit of a bunker buster if the assertions within hold weight...
edit: found the talk page referenced [0]. It's popcorn-worthy at least.
I’m immediately reminded of John Siracusa’s rant about Wikipedia on his old Hypercritical podcast. This is a lengthy rebuttal from (presumably) a Wikipedia lover that includes a link and timestamp to the original podcast segment [0]
I agree, verifiability makes sense, and truth can’t really be claimed without verification, and so it’s a confusing argument to say: truth should be above verifiability; but I must admit: I find it very strange that some people have information about them on their Wikipedia pages that they’re not able to correct despite _being the person_ because one can only cite a source.
The problem of circular citations exists as well, where an article is cited which itself only cites another article, and it might loop back on itself.
People not being allowed to edit their own page (and by extension, anyone that comes without verifiable info because they could be agents of said person) is an unfortunate need. I refer you to the oft-sockpuppeted page of former airline exec Frank Lorenzo [0]
The "more to the secret sauce" is the structure of the company. Valve is flat. Employees have 100% control over their time. By not centralizing decision making, you create the conditions for good ideas to form and connect with the problems they are going to be best suited for.
The dynamics at work here are very well understood (see Ackoff / Sycara / Gharajedaghi, and yes I had to look the spelling up). Hierarchies and centralization cause fragility and maladaptive behavior, autonomous cellular networks are robust and highly adaptive.
For another look at similar principles in action, look up gore-tex and their corporate fragmenting. It's not flat like Valve but it's still kind of genius.
I wish there were more discussion about this stuff in general - society could benefit from having better systems literacy.
> The "more to the secret sauce" is the structure of the company. Valve is flat.
I'm too lazy to dig up references, but there have been semi-exposés over the years by ex-employees stating that Valve's flatness was anything but. Namely, in the absence of formal hierarchy an informal one will inevitably arise, and can be equally constraining and pathological, without the benefit of having known avenues for redress. To be sure, formal procedures can also be window-dressing: it's a balancing act, and not an easy one. I'm just skeptical of ascribing too much benefit to lack of structure.
My understanding is that the emergence of informal hierarchy can actualy be the feature; The problem being addressed being the rigdity of formal hierarchies in a changing environment. As long as informal hierarchies emerge and die according to circumstances, that can be a win.
The point being that the informality arises organically. People are capital-b Bad at risk assessment and planning; we are much, much better at responding to current stimuli.
Also, flat is a structure (albeit a simple one). To use an abstraction, think of a house. When you move in, the house is flat (organizationally speaking). There are floors, and that's it. This means you can place things anywhere they make sense to. Sure, it's inconvenient to have to add a dresser here or a shelf there when one doesn't already exist, but you can adapt the space to your current problems. Over time, you add things and change stuff to be less flat, which means that if you've been living there a long time there is more friction to implement things that you may not have known you were going to need at first. Your fridge is insufficient, but instead of getting one that works for what you need you now need to move all the things between the fridge and the door, move out the old fridge, and only then can you move the new one in.
With a 'flat' org - you start each project with this fresh slate. Each project can adapt it's policies and org chart to match what's important for that project. This way, you don't end up using an organization that is primarily suited for content distribution to make a game (a win that i think is obvious in Valve already) or using an org built around an advertising platform for a browser (a deficiency blatantly obvious in Google).
