Notices by Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)

If you're writing a technical deep dive blog post about LLMs and don't start with the fact that there's still no evidence as to their utility and the fact that there's still no ethical way to train them, you've so fundamentally undercut your own post that there's really no point to it other than building hype.

If you want to claim that a technology is useful that either takes empirical evidence or some theory that would predict utility. Neither exists for LLMs.

Everything written about them that's not critical is just optimistic fluff at *best*.

I swear, 2025 is going to have to be when I stop being even a little bit nice about "AI." We've had almost three years of this hype cycle, and we've got fucking nothing to show for it but theft of artistic labor at truly staggering scales, massive increases in energy usage, and mind-boggling wealth transfer to an end times cult.

If you're a tech influencer, and you're still using your platform to push AI in 2025, you've had every chance to change course. I absolutely do not take a positive impression from the choice to keep pushing that bullshit after *years* of debunking.

Writing positive shit about AI in 2025 shows at a *bare minimum* that you haven't done the research before you start trying to sell your expertise. More realistically, it often means you don't care about the truth of what you write.

Either way, the choice to push AI hype in 2025 undermines everything else that you say and do.

@foone I shutter to think what would happen if someone plugged that into an actual mini-USB port, expecting it to be an adapter.

@iximeow <link rel="pronouns" href="urn:pronoun-set:en-US:possessive-hers:personal-she" />

@mcc Also wow if radiation doesn't fuck with electronics. Turns out the atmosphere is remarkably good at filtering most cosmic rays out!

@irenes @trochee "Tech for the sake of tech is an inherent good" isn't that far from the "powerful are powerful because they are good."

@trochee Software engineering, as a discipline, seems to be almost immune to social critique.

@trochee See also: Soylent, Palantir, and anything involving the word "metaverse."

In which techbros really want a commbadge but don't want the Star Trek utopia of a world without capitalism and a world where all needs are met.

https://writing.exchange/@ianbetteridge/112254082307843154

So, this is dystopian as fuck.

https://seattle.eater.com/2023/8/14/23832221/downtown-spirits-liquor-store-just-walk-out-tech-amazon