The Pnictogen Wing

it looks like Sam Altman and OpenAI are desperate to inflate their public image as opposition to the LLM fraud ramps up. my new browser tabs have been full of puff pieces about Altman and ChatGPT—isn't great how merely launching a web browser gets you hit in the face with ads now? oh sorry I meant "legitimate technology journalism". 🙄

I have tried to talk to these people and their fans on Twitter and it's hopeless. no argument gets anywhere and I can only assume that any sentences of mine that cast doubt upon the world-shattering AGI supergenius which OpenAI et alii are about to give the world (any second now! for real this time!) read as "hater" talk to them and they tune me right out. my talk doesn't have ZERO effect, though, because sometimes afterwards these people start getting real defensive, apt to spout things like "all expertise is fake anyway" or whatnot.

And occasionally a weird note of doublethinkful humility creeps into the techbros' talk. It's like, "Yeah I know I'm really an idiot who's faking it but isn't everyone?" It's like in their heart of hearts they have decided that humanity really has shot its bolt and is now retrogressing, so the only possible hope to solving multiple insoluble problems is the Machine God. They at least feel like they've got an edge on the folks (like Mono and me) who are totally out of the loop and critiquing this stuff from an outsider's perspective. Mono's erudition at least seems to faze them a bit, but surely they must feel like he's a goofy old relic to still be trusting in books and higher education. Isn't all that stuff going away?

If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. What's the least expensive way to get into this LLM crap? Can one host one that's wholly self contained?

~Chara

we would all like to get back into being better friends with computers. learning programming seems like a necessity if we're to survive the next several years because I have a feeling the landscape of personal computing is about to shatter.

we've been trying to help in the shattering process, I admit. Mono the Unicorn has been kicking away at the credibility of the "large language model", which seems like a cosmic joke of a technology, the world's most expensive Burroughs Machine. but people really do believe in it, and that's kind of terrifying actually. I'm quite prepared to believe that a lot of computer jockeys who feel like the Machine God is about to burst forth from their gibberish generator are shocked and amazed for the simple reason that they're seeing scraps of text they would never otherwise read. they're such limited people with limited intellects and a practically subliterate degree of language use because they're speaking a kind of street poetry or patois so liberally festooned with memes that you practically don't NEED to talk. it's actually sort of cool, but it's also rather obvious these people don't know how their machines work. so many layers of abstraction have been heaped atop the personal computer that these techie people plainly regard "the computer" more like a force of nature than a physical object. memory? electricity? data? surely these things merely flow like water or nitrogen.

in a way, that's delightful! fiction has met fact, in a way. where do you find such highly abstracted and stylized depictions of how computers work? in movies and games and comic books and fiction! this is how people talk about computers in stuff like Tron or Hellblazer, as if data and memory were substances, stuff. they certainly can be (in broad approximation) treated that way. but the real world is a place of infinite subtleties and these have all escaped the notice of the high-tech crowd. if they're bad at programming it's because at some level they don't even really know what a computer program is any more.

that's charming. they might even be as bad with computers as I am, despite all their bluster.

they're certainly not good with math. it's quite obvious in a hundred little ways that these programmer dudes have a mystical, innumerate sort of approach to numbers. they're numerologists though not honest ones. large numbers quite escape their grasp, but they're dazzled and impressed by them; small numbers tend to fall completely out of their sight. they love percentages so they have a habit of pretending that any fractions smaller than 0.05 or even 0.1 must not mean anything. Pfft, 5%, that's NOTHING!

anyway it would be pleasant to get that old feeling of facility back. I may have come to feel like my faith in the personal computer (it's sad to think that I did in fact HAVE one but I did) was betrayed, and thus conceive the sort of festering vengeful sense of offended justice that Emiya Kiritsugu once held for heroism. It's curious that our paths should have crossed as they did, and that we should have had so much in common, including a child's faith in a just Universe.

Apple Computer, most of all, has been like some Evil Empire in my mind, which is a bit silly I grant you, and yet...I can't let go of the feeling that they did in fact poison their tempting apple. they held out the promise of something that eventually they grew tired of trying to offer, so they settled for being COOL. but it's more than that.

think of what they did to George Orwell's 1984...they pretended it had a happy ending.

~Chara of Pnictogen

I was reading an editorial about the current state of the LLM "artificial intelligence" tech fad (i.e. "same as always!" "that bad, huh?") and something snapped in our psyche when we saw the Nth mention of LLM "hallucinations". Tech weenies seem to have picked up the entrepreneurial habit of appropriating words from legitimate disciplines and slapping them onto their own shit, whether or not the words make sense in their new context. "Hallucinations", though, particularly exasperates me but, well, my older sibling experienced those. So the subject isn't so damn funny, even if AI programmers think it's cute.

The AI boosters refuse to acknowledge the obvious implication of their devices' "hallucinations": surely one of the hallmarks of intelligence is being able to tell apart correct and incorrect information, and yet their machines can't do that and nobody seems to care. Yet they promise "superintelligence" any day now! Maybe next year, and only if Trump gets elected President. (You know what sort of politics those AI guys pretend not to believe in.)

Night in the Woods contains a fun little scene between Mae Borowski and Lori M. where they talk about putting metal figurines on the railroad tracks to be run over and squished, which feels like a fundamental unit of creativity: turn one kind of object (a tin soldier) into another kind of object (a weird squished metal thing.) "This is important art," says Lori, and if I remember correctly, Lori and Mae squish two metal figurines together. Another unit of creativity! Combine two things into a third thing. Small achievements like that mean a lot when you're trying to rescue yourself from oblivion and the Void, so I find the scene heartwarming.

Something I haven't found heartwarming is the way that high-pressure business culture, which now thoroughly afflicts the world of technology, has idolized creativity. To hear them talk, they were the sole possessors of the stuff. Nobody wants to be a plain business executive any more, or even a CTO or CEO, although these titles still have weight. The real game now is to brand yourself as a builder, a founder, a creator, even if all you do is gamble on cryptocurrency or sell accessories to TSLA fans. It might simply be noise intended to drown out the voices of those who are truly dedicated to creativity and constructive activities. Yet as with all things in the world of business and technology, one senses an undercurrent of sincerity: they're not just lying or hyping, but really do believe, sometimes anyway, that they're building great things. Elon Musk surely still believes, even after all his humiliations, that he's assembling a paradise for himself and his followers. (Followers may be optional.)

It's not as though building a TSLA requires no creativity, no innovation, even if the feat doesn't seem nearly as impressive as the fanboys say it is. I must confess that I'm not wowed by cars in general and I detest how tricked-out cars are sold with a Top-Gear-ish technological fanaticism, as if a fancy car (and not, say, universally available insulin) was the peak of human technological achievement, aside from rockets of course. All the same, Musk's workers have been compelled to push at technological limitations. The fanboys aren't completely wrong to be excited at TSLA's novelties. All the same, I feel as though the TSLA approach to "innovation" is very much a matter of diminishing returns and trumpeting incremental changes as technological revolutions. We've had many decades now of technological marketing in which every single tiny alteration to a product is sold as revolutionary. And that's bad, because even thermal noise causes changes. If one can market anything as a novelty, then hasn't innovation become irrelevant?

Nevertheless, there's a speck of creativity in what these people do, akin to the fundamental creativity of Lori M. and Mae Borowski squishing figures together on railroad tracks. The techbros are mashing up everything they know into something they consider to be brand-new—and it is! The LLM approach to artificial intelligence seems stale, mostly different by virtue of scale rather than technological novelty, but one can't deny that there is some thing new here, even if it's just a new monstrosity. And then the techbros want to mash their new thing together with old things to make them into something different. Yes, it's like trying to gin up a new market for home decorations by outfitting them with cheap clocks or bimetallic thermometers, but it is new. It's creativity. Kind of. Isn't it?

~Chara of Pnictogen