William Pietri

Chicago-area writer, software developer, runner, and nerd wrangler. Very interested in online community and reducing the harm of tech. Creator of The Flip, Chicago's Playable Pinball Museum. https://theflip.museum/

Public Key

npub10lej4dcu5eqhc3aj8rehye9x0p49v3f5xxzytefyhfhj2e73q0esfwn9yq

NIP-05 Address

[email protected]

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs8lue2kuw2vstug7er3umjvjn8s6jkg56rrpz9u5jt5me9vlgs8ucpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0ds72w7ez

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub10lej4dcu5eqhc3aj8rehye9x0p49v3f5xxzytefyhfhj2e73q0esfwn9yq

Show more details

Last Notes

2026-05-06 17:41:24 GMT

https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/116/528/854/710/456/008/original/3fbe2dc0a4cb73d3.jpg

2026-04-15 15:12:02 GMT

It's wild to me how much software is flaky. The kind of stuff that would get immediate attention in any physical business can be super flaky for weeks or months in the online versions. If software is going to eat the world, we're going to have to figure out how managers get the same level of awareness any corner store clerk has.

2026-01-17 13:15:18 GMT

- reply

Ooh, followed!

2026-01-16 20:31:27 GMT

- reply

I'd put the peak of this era in 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta, because a VR universe, the metaverse, was the future of both play and work. 9/
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/654/754/349/913/original/7f71fb61328af4d4.png
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/666/034/126/098/original/b505bbbcc74eb601.png
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/669/994/396/537/original/f9434267d1eb5182.png
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/673/035/476/077/original/06fe367afa4e0333.png

2026-01-16 20:24:52 GMT

- reply

But the big new future that came out of 3D movies was virtual reality, round 2. Starting in 2010 or so there were many stabs at this, all funded by rafts of ZIRP investor money. 8/
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/642/434/661/344/original/78e42fb56a42b52b.png
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/643/804/658/003/original/ea3d2b582169fc63.png

2026-01-16 20:21:25 GMT

- reply

With 3D movies back in fashion, electronics manufacturers wasted no time taking the obvious next step: 3D TV. One CES these were everywhere, and the next one they weren't. 7/
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/631/430/761/111/original/d091ae3b093c2b87.png

2026-01-16 20:15:58 GMT

- reply

We then needed 20 years to forget about that before the next 3D future arrived: Movies! Again! This one ran circa 2009-2013. As we know it ultimately didn't pan out, but it was enough to touch off two more fads involving stereoscopic 3D. 6/
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/601/193/895/169/original/fed2a59c459c08d9.png
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/601/971/078/351/original/12f19af359b53839.png

2026-01-16 20:10:23 GMT

- reply

The crash of that was enough to get people to forget about stereoscopic 3D for a generation. But in the 1990s as personal computers became ubiquitous and the early Internet created excitement, computers became powerful enough to render 3D graphics in real time. Rendering 3D worlds on 2D monitors was wildly popular, but interactive stereoscopic 3D was seen as the future of fun. And also of work! 5/
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/578/803/784/080/original/13412f56d81131d4.png
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/584/490/990/049/original/46f8a08b31183a20.png
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/586/448/594/614/original/b303bd63614ccdaf.png

2026-01-16 20:02:51 GMT

- reply

Then in 1952-1954 came the future of movies: anaglyph (aka red/blue) 3D. 4/
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/548/469/059/193/original/0b5ffe5e2be79fb3.png
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/551/110/731/481/original/0b2aaa28cb94054f.png
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/552/542/048/165/original/405a337e32682ed0.png

2026-01-16 19:57:06 GMT

- reply

By the 1940s, thanks to amazing technical advances, the future arrived not just for postcards but for education. The US military bought 100,000 viewers and 6 million reels to educate soldiers and sailors. 3/
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/524/926/804/117/original/ea0f04fefff59d38.png

2026-01-16 19:51:08 GMT

- reply

There was another wave of 3D during the rise of coin-operated machinery. Here, a device from 1905. 2/
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/511/440/061/917/original/fb4b0cbb488c5c10.png

2026-01-16 19:48:21 GMT

In honor of Meta's latest announcement, a thread on 175 years of 3D failure.
Let's first go all the way back to 1851 with the Brewster Stereoscope. No less a person than Queen Victoria was impressed, kicking off a fad that quickly sold over 250,000 units. Turns out it was not the future of photography.
1/
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/906/391/396/862/997/original/084e2282587d097e.png

2025-12-06 14:39:46 GMT

I'm unreasonably excited to get these!
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/673/107/149/478/105/original/494767cf5c5af183.jpg
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/673/107/396/596/410/original/7483de070208edb6.jpg

2025-11-07 02:04:54 GMT

- reply

There's a concept I like, Acquired Situational Narcissism. In short, if you spend enough time in a context where it's all about you, you start to think everything is about you. All of these insanely rich people have to be at high risk. How many people's effective job is to tell Thiel that he's right no matter what he says?
@npub1trg…v6kh

2025-10-21 22:34:25 GMT

https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/414/530/254/428/420/original/430403d5f4fcf35b.png

2025-10-09 02:28:49 GMT

- reply

That's wonderful!

2025-10-08 19:14:08 GMT

I can't fix the big things, but I can do something about the small ones.
A few days ago I went to the post office to ship something. I put it in one of the flat rate boxes and went to address it. Of the 6 pen-on-chain doodads they had, only one was left, and that one had no ink. Gah!
So I ordered some of those tethered pens, which are not expensive, and today I went back to quietly install them. I felt vaguely criminal, but I got all 6 installed and nobody noticed.
Making a few thousand people's life slightly better is a small thing with all the chaos in the world today. But it's the thing I could do, and I'm glad of it.
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/340/112/681/618/479/original/6b2fd0a8a6192e7b.jpg
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/115/340/134/612/012/754/original/427d8b2eb0bee846.jpg

2025-09-18 13:00:36 GMT

Every time I heard Charlie Kirk's schtick called "debate", it bothered me, because no Kirk clip I ever saw was anything like debate. Happily, Mike Masnick has saved us all from watching enough Kirk to properly describe what he was actually doing.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/17/the-debate-me-bro-grift-how-trolls-weaponized-the-marketplace-of-ideas/

2025-09-05 15:43:43 GMT

Weirdly, all the federal chaos has finally gotten me to agree with the (now nearly extinct) actual conservatives who thought the federal government was too big.
The amount of damage MAGA is able to do is enormous. At this point, I think things like public health should be inter-state collaborations, not federal. Probably a bunch of other things, too. The US right just can't be trusted to care about citizens, and the Senate and the electoral college will keep giving them disproportionate power until long after I'm in the ground. But blue states can still make good things happen.

2025-08-13 15:08:21 GMT

- reply

Years and years! That got me to go looking for the old Institute of Psychoceramics, which collected crackpots. I think there's more to find, but here's an old article: https://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~toby/writing/Guardian/ceramics.htm
And here's what I found on a quick rummage on the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/19980507162621/http://dev.null.org/psychoceramics/collection/

2025-07-21 22:01:49 GMT

- reply

https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/114/893/472/666/613/402/original/8419ae243806f54c.mp4

2025-07-19 11:49:34 GMT

- reply

Yes, and that's part of my point. But the word "just" in that indicates I'm going beyond that. It's literally available to anything that can create an HTTP connection, plus anything handling ActivityPub.
I get why people may want a different level of privacy, but my point is that they don't have it now and shouldn't expect it without major technical changes.
[@Uraael](https://kitty.social/@Uraael )

2025-07-18 13:42:47 GMT

- reply

I don't think of my Mastodon profile as just being available to anybody with a browser. That's certainly not what's going on technically. And it's certainly not my intent in setting up the account. I explicitly meant it to be machine readable to many other Mastodon and Fediverse servers, as well as search engines more generally.
If other people have different desires, I don't think that's unreasonable. But I think that's something we need to bake into the protocols and tools. Some of that's definitely already there, but apparently some people need more. I'm in favor of adding whatever they need.
I also don't think you have correctly applied my thinking to "places like Facebook". If you'd like my take, I'd rather you asked me for it than jumping to incorrect conclusions.

2025-07-18 13:23:01 GMT

- reply

I appreciate the explanation, and I see what you're saying about their theory of operation and local culture.
But just as a matter of actual implementation, the Fediverse is not closed to non-Fediverse software. Public things like profiles are public to the world. Intentionally, and as far as I know, right from the beginning.
If people want it to mean something different for them, I think that's a fine reason to have a new feature or a new kind of software on the Fediverse. But I think people expecting their local culture to dominate Fediverse-wide on this in spite of both the implementation and other cultures is, well, practically untenable to say the least.

2025-07-18 12:48:37 GMT

So there's a mini-tempest going on. The upshot as I understand it being that some users apparently want to have a public Mastodon account, but want to be asked before that account gets mentioned or linked to on other social media platforms.
I'm having trouble even making sense of the request. The way I think of the Fediverse is as a set of interlinked platforms with no clear boundaries. And the way I think of identity here is that the profile basics are published to the world, with that being an essential property of what an account is.
I'm also familiar with private forums, where users are vetted and everything is locked down, and it's a sin to leak anything.
But are there parts of Mastodon (or the Fedivese) with the latter culture but on top of an essentially public infrastructure? Or is there something else going on culturally that I'm missing?

2025-06-30 15:18:30 GMT

I love this. We don't have to have a master plan to do something meaningful.
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/114/772/981/149/238/095/original/02501848d7f51e57.png

2025-06-16 15:19:19 GMT

I haven't seen this movie in forever, but I can still hear just how she says "Mondays".
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/114/693/701/489/366/082/original/3f39ded803c8ce93.mp4

2025-06-12 22:17:59 GMT

I'm feeling the urge to give up on Signal.
I broke my old phone, and the Signal backups were apparently only on the device. I have Signal Desktop up and running, but they apparently don't support restoring that way. Maybe I can do a large amount of technical shenanigans to make it work, but it looks chancy. Grrrrr.

2025-06-10 14:40:35 GMT

- reply

A super obvious example of this the RFK Jr MAHA report, which was AI garbage:
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/29/health/maha-report-errors
The headlines were about the most provably fake bits, which had to be laboriously found out. But the rest of it was fake, too, a bullshit report meant as distraction and cudgel.
2/

2025-06-10 14:36:34 GMT

It occurs to me that a major practical use of "AI" is to shift labor from "writer" to reader. Because "AI" creates content-shaped things, readers have to treat artifacts as if they had sufficient thought put into them. So many problems that would have been discovered if the "writer" had actually done the work are now left to readers to detect and explain. 1/

2025-06-03 14:07:18 GMT

- reply

Me too! A CO2 meter really shaped my masking choices. It's wild to me they aren't just everywhere now, like thermometers are.

2025-05-12 06:22:29 GMT

Being expected to take a known liar seriously is exhausting.
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/114/493/404/405/726/769/original/015523cd9d0648a6.png

2025-04-05 22:21:09 GMT

Chicago's turnout was huge! We marched around and the crowd was many blocks long. The age range was very broad, too. I saw so many signs I loved! #HandsOff #chicago #Illinois
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/114/287/650/442/620/835/original/9cd391d42eec7ac5.jpg
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/114/287/652/261/217/240/original/b5ffd03c3efb5dd8.jpg
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/114/287/654/392/139/366/original/bb490d897071ae8b.jpg
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/114/287/655/156/945/162/original/a83ee53bbda782ae.jpg

2025-04-01 13:33:34 GMT

Hard same.
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/114/262/955/903/969/504/original/0770b8262ac0091f.jpeg

2025-03-31 12:00:45 GMT

- reply

Yes, as more than a decade of heists has demonstrated, cryptocurrency's lack of reversibility and traceability, sold as convenience and freedom, primarily enables crime. I'd be much obliged if people kept their libertarian fantasies onanistic in scope and out of our shared financial system.

2025-03-31 00:57:59 GMT

- reply

I didn't realize there were any blockchain fans left! They may be few in number but they are as tiresome and blockworthy as they ever were.

2025-03-30 21:54:53 GMT

In the 15+ years people have been promoting blockchains, this flowchart remains undefeated.
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/114/253/598/367/502/929/original/3e0ad67267758ada.jpeg

2025-03-09 22:04:10 GMT

This was totally a shock to me. Care of community is almost a reflex for me, and the pandemic really shook my faith. I spend a lot of time thinking about what it would take to create communities where mutual care is the default.
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/114/134/713/655/282/238/original/5aed2b541ed7cd2d.jpg

2025-03-08 17:57:58 GMT

- reply

Amen. For an awful lot of people, the only acceptable level of protest is the kind small enough not to matter. But as MLK says, an important function of protest is to create tension. @npub12pw…zvxn @npub1p38…jwc8
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/114/128/095/591/165/389/original/2c32e4b8e50a7255.png
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/114/128/095/978/209/767/original/1afe4334a36c99a6.png

2025-02-20 22:17:31 GMT

I can't help but think a company doing this is irredeemable. Their understanding of business has drifted so far from what's healthy that I think they should be shut down, and regulators should do some long reflection on how to keep others from getting this bad.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/20/hp_deliberately_adds_15_minutes/

2025-02-12 14:21:23 GMT

- reply

Reminds me of Brecht's poem Motto:
In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times.

2025-01-19 16:25:25 GMT

I am seeing some defeatist nonsense with the upcoming Trump inauguration, talking as if America is over. I say: Fuck that!
I will not obey in advance. I will not spread despair. I will not quit trying to push things forward.
America has always been flawed, and has faltered many times. But MLK Day reminds us that there are American ideals that are worth fighting for, even when things seem hopeless. Especially when things seem hopeless!

2025-01-16 17:59:09 GMT

One analytical lens I love for interactions is "consent vs control". Here you see a Gmail pop-up for their GenAI "assistant". Do I want this? No. But my choices are "Learn more" and "Continue". My consent is assumed, making it a controlling interaction. You see this a lot these days, like where you choices aren't yes and no, but yes and "ask me later". It always makes me wonder what kind of personal relationships the people who do this have.
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/839/331/630/274/597/original/c7028b3656433ad8.png

2025-01-14 14:00:59 GMT

- reply

I think it'd be generally best if you already have an office and all the workers live conveniently close to it, and you're already committed to paying the extra costs for that. But starting fresh, those are some heavy constraints to adopt. My current team is all remote, meeting a couple times a year in person. From this perspective, switching to hybrid would be a big, expensive disruption for some small advantages and some notable drawbacks.
[@grayface_ghost](https://tech.lgbt/@grayface_ghost )

2025-01-08 16:40:14 GMT

- reply

I had a very similar experience at UCSF! They had to have me sign something saying I'd received some document. When I said I couldn't sign until I received it, they seemed befuddled, and it took two weeks and who knows how many people before they finally found it. Good thing I wasn't in a hurry!
@npub1z7r…28lv @npub19pw…7p7e

2024-12-15 13:26:16 GMT

- reply

And I think part of the problem is that the management class is dumb in a similar way to LLMs. Both are disconnected from the actual work and the real-world impact of that work. Both partly owe their success to the production of plausible-sounding words. Both often escape consequences when the words are wrong. In short, bullshitters have a hard time seeing the problems with bullshit machines.

2024-12-14 14:07:45 GMT

To me this is an important clue in the rise of fascism, and it's part of my "hot stove" theory of humanity. The basic version is that people mostly learn not to do dumb things by having bad experiences. So: "fire pretty" -> burnt fingers -> "fire bad!"
Here we have people around old enough to remember polio, so even lickspittles like McConnell find enough backbone to object to making iron lungs great again. But once all the people who experienced the Great Depression were dead, financial regulation started softening. And now that anybody who fought in WW II is dead, many people are all "strongman pretty".
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/651/538/736/148/273/original/e480c0fd838209ce.png

2024-12-10 14:31:28 GMT

Here in Chicagoland, Marla Rose, a 57-year-old feminist, went to ring the doorbell of far-right loon Nick Fuentes. He immediately pepper sprayed her, knocked her down the steps, and destroyed her phone. She ended up with 6 broken ribs and now is getting a wave of threats from Fuentes's followers. I just contributed to help cover her legal, medical, and security expenses. Care to join me? https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-marla-rose-stand-up-to-hate-legal-and-security-costs

2024-12-09 14:33:46 GMT

The voting for Worst Person In Tech has begun. I thought this would be easy, but there are some real tough choices! https://forms.gle/XYERvxNFTBV1XV6A8

2024-11-24 13:54:33 GMT

- reply

My brother, an accomplished carpenter and furniture-maker, finished his basement some years ago. He got a drywall quote, flinched, and said, "how hard can it be?" Turns out very hard if you want it to look good. He's still mad at himself.

2024-11-18 02:36:12 GMT

- reply

The way I make sense of it is that they aren't doing distributed moderation in the style that Dorsey wanted. They're just doing standard centralized moderation where they ban sufficiently awful people/content.
In contrast, Dorsey is now backing Nostr, which doesn't do that, and is consequently full of awful stuff. That's the natural outcome of building stuff to free-speech-absolutist ideals.
@npub1uhk…w03u @npub1c2w…ugye @npub1ezw…6sxs

2024-11-07 17:02:54 GMT

- reply

Great! Any idea when I'll be able to finish uploading that ship movement data you wanted? The start is here: https://archive.org/details/ais-archive-2016-to-2023

2024-11-02 14:28:35 GMT

- reply

I'll also note that there are a lot of business owners who are quite patriarchal. They won't say it outright, but they'll expect "loyalty", including political loyalty. I think for a while this was mainly confined to small businesses, but we're again seeing the rise of powerful men who treat their employees as quasi-property, enforcing political views. (Although a modern spin on it is to insist on "no politics", a popular way for white men to practice politics.) This is quasi-feudal, and given the pushes to undermine labor law, unions, and employee rights, I don't doubt they'd go for actual feudalism if they could.
4/

2024-11-02 14:22:47 GMT

- reply

And I know a lot of Americans will look at examples like that and think it's not relevant. To imagine that they're better than Those People. Or to think it just can't happen here. But that's a mistake. It can and it does.
You might read, for example, Jon Krakauer's "Under the Banner of Heaven", which talks about the FLDS, a Mormon offshoot whose adherents have practiced polygamy, child marriage, and child sexual abuse. All in the name of patriarchy. You'll need a strong stomach to read about it, but it's a great example of lasting structures of patriarchal dominance and abuse right here in this country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamentalist_Church_of_Jesus_Christ_of_Latter-Day_Saints
3/
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/413/789/428/601/881/original/fbaca8253a43470e.png

2024-11-02 14:13:12 GMT

- reply

To control "their" women, these dudes recognize that they have to control everybody in America. They're going for it. And I think we scoff at that at our peril.
Patriarchy has a lot of historical traction. And reversion is entirely possible. Look at Afghanistan, for example. They had a period of women's liberation, but now it's illegal for women to even sing. 2/
https://www.indiatoday.in/world/story/taliban-regime-ruled-afghanistan-vice-virtue-law-conceal-faces-voices-bodies-united-nations-concerns-women-suffocated-2587027-2024-08-24
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/413/755/479/143/427/original/a717f6a550ecca1a.png

2024-11-02 14:05:32 GMT

As the right freaks out about women voting violating the "sanctity" of marriage and being the "downfall of the American family", I want to remind people that they're not being hyperbolic here. They mean it literally. Under patriarchy, the women in a family are property of the men. Things like gay marriage and women voting are absolutely destroying patriarchy, because it depends on women having no other choice. On not being able to *even imagine* a choice. 1/
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/413/701/032/366/460/original/141b8acfe52d6869.png

2024-11-01 20:26:40 GMT

- reply

Thanks! These are great. Just so everything lives somewhere besides my notebook, here's the whole list:
https://gist.github.com/wpietri/0fb6d9bae226730480051f3e86eae4ba

2024-11-01 14:11:01 GMT

- reply

Or these?
And dudes, if you're still having trouble understanding it after this, ask me. Don't ask women! Making women responsible for dealing with sexist nonsense is part of sexism. (And if you want to know about that, read Manne's "Down Girl".)
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/408/092/965/618/313/original/e1bfe803f4eace11.jpeg
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/408/092/964/221/143/original/751a7de0fc12e97c.jpeg
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/408/092/974/743/415/original/2ddb483fc78592fe.gif
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/408/092/994/814/073/original/c7613c140b188905.jpeg

2024-11-01 14:09:07 GMT

- reply

or these?
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/408/091/097/442/444/original/942c50075d896d7c.jpeg
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/408/091/100/454/902/original/7370c48956bb0300.jpeg
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/408/091/110/599/708/original/b3aa5a6d5928dec5.jpg
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/408/091/143/690/797/original/d9a947d51c435db8.png

2024-11-01 14:08:23 GMT

- reply

Agreed! I'm short on time today or I'd go back and reply to some of those men. But since I'm in a rush, maybe the not-all-men dudes can pick one one of the images below and just sit with it for a while?
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/408/087/448/516/288/original/ef6a04e760d09e2a.jpg
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/408/087/461/258/000/original/b0984f3f795e8931.jpg
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/408/087/472/538/124/original/b2f3a47857ba003d.jpg
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/408/087/483/651/787/original/076d78720e7354cb.jpg

2024-10-31 12:57:40 GMT

- reply

Thanks! Super helpful. Hopefully once release crunch time ends at work I can do something with these.

2024-10-30 14:09:40 GMT

- reply

Well nobody has said yes, so let me add another good one here: https://blog.strangeobject.space/posts/2024-09-23-shutting-down.html

2024-10-30 13:37:32 GMT

Back on my theme of trying to understand why LLMs have taken off:
Puzzle piece 1: LLMs are, in Frankfurt's sense of the term, bullshit machines. To him, a core component of bullshit is "indifference to how things really are".
Puzzle piece 2: Managerialism, a dominant business philosophy, holds that managers are universal. They can manage anything without regard to the topic. Without truly learning "how things really are".
Puzzle piece 3: On average, the larger the company the higher the density of bullshit. CEO statements, managerial presentations up and down, customer comms, etc. Related is the density of office politics, careerism, etc.
So putting this together, it seems like our corporate hierarchies have a hard time understanding the weak point of LLMs because standard corporate culture has the same weak point: valuing many other things over the truth.

2024-10-30 11:39:08 GMT

Is anybody maintaining a collection of these "why this Mastodon instance is shutting down" posts? Because when I get some time I want to walk through and write an analysis of them with some proposals for help: https://muffinlabs.com/posts/2024/10/29/10-29-rip-botsin-space/

2024-10-25 13:13:15 GMT

- reply

Having taken VC money for a startup, I want to confirm for others everything you've said. They promise big returns to their investors, but most startups fail, so they need the successful ones to make gobs of cash. Modest successes get pushed to take big risks until they get rich or die trying. And if they do win big, they'll be pushed to extract ever more cash, causing enshittification. That's the VC game, and Mastodon is smart not to play it.

2024-10-19 14:52:44 GMT

- reply

The paragraph of blather is empty in a different way. Is this bag actually 2-3x better than the last one? 2-3x more expensive to make? The "AI" doesn't know and doesn't care. The human behind it might know, but still clearly doesn't care. Because the point of sales talk is not to convey information. It's to manipulate the emotions of potential customers so that they buy.
Here, "AI" is amplifying the soullessness of marketing. You don't need a human to generate the bullshit anymore. They don't even need to read it! You can have a GPU do the manipulation while you just make the money. 3/
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/334/647/268/361/352/original/27f9533117086d54.png

2024-10-19 14:44:50 GMT

- reply

Things like this depend upon recipients feeling treated like people. Feeling like they've made a connection. That they've had an impact. It's seen as a contrast to the coldness of more obvious automation.
But it's a trick! Nobody has actually experienced a thrill in response to the customer's letter. That's just a straight up lie, as empty as a recorded "your call is important to us". It has all the emotion of a plastic doll. 2/
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/334/620/835/036/613/original/4aadbdf0500a538f.png

2024-10-19 14:37:42 GMT

A brief rant on using "AI" for customer service. 🧵
This is a LinkedIn post where an exec is crowing about how an AI company gave a perfect response.
In the original, he included the customer name; I've blacked it out. The short version is that a customer wrote in wondering why an item she had previously bought for $45 is now $125, explaining that "part of my loyalty [...] has been the affordability factor."
The AI response says "I'm thrilled to hear that you love our products." It gives a paragraph of blather promoting the product, claiming it still has exceptional value. It says it'll pass the feedback along, saying someone will get back to her. And then thanks her for being a customer.
At first glance, it all seems reasonable, right? 1/
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/334/554/920/620/860/original/f510a4bedb1b344d.png
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/334/574/610/441/171/original/a72bc4651ece2971.png

2024-10-15 12:14:49 GMT

The new report about Richard Stallman is being discussed on Mastodon, and I'm very much reminded of Lewis's Law.
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/311/369/562/609/144/original/03728dd7c2a49749.png

2024-10-13 12:56:04 GMT

- reply

Ooh, exciting! I'll be looking for the US release. If you haven't already read it, you might enjoy Laura Lee's "Bad Predictions".

2024-10-11 15:12:01 GMT

Long ago I was looking at a startup developer job that was part of the "firefighting" team. Jumping on technical crises and solving them sounded like fun to me! In retrospect, though, I guess that means the other teams were "bad wiring", "leaving candles burning unattended", "oily rags near the water heater", and maybe "arson".

2024-10-08 13:29:27 GMT

Women only, a quick question: How bad is the reply guy problem on Mastodon? (Please boost for a good sample.)

2024-10-06 16:51:01 GMT

This brought to you by the now-blocked people who were aggressively insisting to me, a professional software developer, that LLMs can fix bugs in code. The truth is that a bug is a divergence between intent and result. Neither of those is in the code. Ergo, the best an LLM can do is to output text that causes a human aware of both to take a closer look at some spot.
Richard Feynman tells a story about getting called in to consult on some huge piece of industrial machinery. Not knowing anything and hoping to buy time, he put his finger on a random blueprint symbol and asked, "What happens if this fails?" Much discussion ensues, and the experts realize that it could cause a disaster. He shut his mouth and let them treat him as a genius. But the real smarts were in the team all along.

2024-10-05 19:42:16 GMT

- reply

Ah, sorry. I thought you were a serious person, not a cultist. My mistake.

2024-10-05 19:23:43 GMT

- reply

You should not confuse "can autocomplete in ways credulous people can mistake for spotting errors" with an actual ability to find bugs in code. As I explained, an LLM doesn't receive enough information to spot bugs. The best it can do is reproduce text from its training set in which some human described a bug sufficiently close to code that was buggy

2024-10-05 16:22:05 GMT

- reply

Nope. A bug is a divergence between intent and practical result. LLMs are basically fancy autocomplete. They don't have access to intent or practical result, and so can't spot bugs.
[@parismarx](https://mastodon.online/@parismarx )

2024-09-28 01:44:10 GMT

- reply

For sure. And at least Cliffs notes were put together by a human who might grasp the meaning. I've seen very little evidence that LLM summaries are good, and some clear evidence that' they're sus: https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/09/03/ai-worse-summarising-information-humans-government-trial/

2024-09-27 20:36:03 GMT

- reply

As somebody who just had to kick a few note-taking services out of an open meeting, I would love to know the answer to this! But I agree with you about where the value of notes comes from, and so have some uncharitable suspicions.

2024-09-18 13:25:16 GMT

This is glorious.The best time to burn a bridge is when you never, ever want to cross it again. #genai (Edit: This is a notice explaining why somebody is shutting down a long-running project to measure word frequencies.) https://github.com/rspeer/wordfreq/blob/master/SUNSET.md

2024-09-08 16:45:53 GMT

- reply

That historical consistency is part of why I treasure this Ea Nasir tablet reproduction a friend made me. Four millennia of people being people! I find it comforting. "It is not up to you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it."
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/102/920/773/625/196/original/b58da82374ac8150.jpg

2024-09-06 15:12:04 GMT

One of the things I adore is reasonable misunderstandings. This is a favorite. Do you have any you love?
https://files.sfba.social/media_attachments/files/113/091/249/609/752/467/original/602a940476ef1aa9.png

2024-09-03 15:49:42 GMT

Does anybody need a terrabyte of historical ship movement data that I'm about to delete? It's from aishub.net, circa 2016-2023. I'm done with the project I was collecting it for, but thought I'd check in case anybody else wants it. Yours for the cost of getting it out of AWS.

2024-08-14 22:25:21 GMT

- reply

Well done! I used to live just a few doors down from there. Seeing you sketch brightened my day.