connor sheri shaw

as spurred on by the ceo of posting, let's ask a pretty obvious question in twitter's extended wake

do we fix it?

set aside finding another platform for a second- as only time will tell their staying power, remember hive?

is twitter, as it is now, worth fixing anymore?

so, in case you didn't hear, uh. elon musk bought twitter late last year despite clearly realizing before the sale was finalized it'd be a bad idea. since then it's gotten much worse, but this isn't a post about the specifics, just broad strokes here

let's say a third party intervened and like, confiscated twitter? for the public good or something? who knows, point being: let's say twitter was suddenly under new management that at least has a passing understanding of how to run a social media platform...

...let alone an account.

here's the thing- a lot of the damage is honestly already done. twitter's staff has been carved out, and many understandably have no interest in returning- i doubt new leadership would sway all of them

but losing 80% of your workforce and millions more dollars in the process is just a couple workers' rights violations off of potentially committing an actual crime

this is still a developing story and i'm no legal expert, however

that paid twitter blue checkmark on celebs' pages, claiming to be via their subscription to the service, despite those celebrities actively not wanting the checkmark, or being deceased?

i mean. this is a crime, no? someone who knows 'bout laws and ISN'T a cop please weigh in

all of this is to say, the platform itself, the website? the company that is Twitter? that cannot be completely fixed, and even if it could, it would still suffer aftershocks of elon's brute force bullshit via unpaid debts, lost staff, and destroyed infrastructure

no. even if we could fix twitter, it's too late.

you don't need me to sit here and tell you why, despite twitter being a cesspool, i would have preferred elon not do this to it. many artists, creators, and friends of mine rely on it for outreach, myself included, and when DMs aren't down and notifications are working i'm still pretty active there. for now.

it's many people's livelihood. and not unlike twitter's employees, elon has ruined it for us, too.

if nothing else, i like co-host, not just tolerate it like so many other proposed alternatives. so once twitter fully gives way or becomes too choked by techbros to be livable, i'll be putting my weight here, far as i can see.

when i read about how much debt elon musk has taken on or massive fines for corporations undermining democracy, something just fundamentally refuses to take hold in my silly little brain

$13 billion? $787 million?

today i spent $4 on pasta and a 2 litre of RC cola

money just... ceases to have a foothold in reality beyond a certain point. smart british youtube man did a very lovely demonstration of the differences between the M and B in the illion

these numbers are just hit points of monsters battling in the world of invented purpose

fines, as shown above, only really matter to people who are near to, or already struggling to pay for X or Y. there are legitimate expensive things to consider in these regards, schooling for your kids, healthcare

(you know those things america decided to charge you for )

but there's also, like, the $34 fine i get for being $2 in the hole in my bank. guess i got some bad rolls on my starting wealth

unrelated: look at these emerald dice! this is not a metaphor

so doing 1 million hit points of damage to elon musk is a good, solid hit, maybe he's even bloodied! now roll a dexterity saving throw for being dogpiled by weird internet fascists

when you have enough money to stop thinking of it as anything other than a statistic to increase, a number to raise, minmaxing to get the best build with the MOST money; you can do anything you want, any damage you take shrugged off because of your deep HP pool

this is why, perhaps, maybe for balancing the capitalist hellscape game that is America*, we should consider some debuffs for monostatting so hard

*(but since this metaphor is mostly about 5th edition it'll probably continue to be just as unbalanced lol)

there's a very famous series of cards in the game yu-gi-oh! that are the five pieces of the forbidden one. if you have all five cards in your hand, you just win cuz

he's real big and shows up and eats ya or somethin

i never got to play yu-gi-oh! as a kid cuz i was too busy doing minecraft redstone projects and dustoff, but it's a fascinating concept to me. each of these cards is worthless on its own, only once all five are in play do they all instantly work together to serve one function, one entity

this is not how AI works!

in my piece about machine recycled content i outline that we, to be clear, do not have general AI yet.

but there is an even stupider idea being thrown around then claiming general AI already exists:

and it's that general AI doesn't exist yet, but it will exist once we master enough narrow AI tasks and put them all together!

this is from a paper which is much more concerned with robots taking over humanity than in providing any credible sources for these claims about how to reach "AGI"

actually, sorry, there is ONE source:

lol. lmao.

so, how feasible is this approach? creating several narrow AIs which handle tasks like language, image processing, movement, and eventually get to a walking, talking, seeing robot from that? how is that any different from AI?

well, let me ask you this. if i put an amazon echo inside a roomba, have i now given that roomba a voice?

no. i've given it an alexa. it doesn't care; it does not have a function to care

okay, so let's just... you know. connect them. the way you can do with tech, bluetooth or whatever

now, and get this, you have a roomba, and an alexa. congratulations. all the powers of a vacuum and a bluetooth speaker and always on listening device, all in one

but the alexa doesn't now understand itself any different; it does not and can not understand itself. it's a phone without a screen, an alternate version of a terminal. with a narrow AI language learning model that records input, again just, all the time, and tries to print relevant data. giving it wheels and a job has, if anything, honestly just made me feel bad for the roomba

but that's interesting, isn't it? my whole point here is these narrow AI don't think and yet i get bummed out for the vacuum cleaner.

well, you know, humans do like to give personality to just about anything, and i think that's beautiful. but in this particular case it's kinda a problem. people are very fast to jump to calling any human-esque robot an 'ai', and thus will understand self-determining AI to behave like that

so let me ask you this! if you put the roombalexa into a realistic-looking humanoid robot, connect all of them together, have you made AI?

no. you haven't. but you can skip the roomba murder if you just put a guy in a suit and tell everyone it's AI

elon musk would lose to the mechanical turk and claim chess is simply beneath him

oh

the point being, how many more narrow-application robots do you have to pile into this monstrosity before realizing that the real world is not a children's card game, and you can't just connect random pieces of tech to create intelligent artificial life

but it might still explode and kill kaiba anyways, if elon made it