markjgsmith

I’m going to be concentrating on a few development things the next few days:

• Development environments that use containers
• Converting some old code to Typescript
• Creating simple frontend using React

I already know quite a bit about these three things but there‘s nothing like doing something practical for real. Luckily I already have quite a bit of old code to play with, so hopefully I‘ll be moving forward both in my hireability as a developer and on a few personal projects.

It‘s nice to have a focussed plan.

I also started doing some morning exercises again today. Nothing crazy, just a 20 minute routine, but feeling good about it. #

Dave Winer: "I'm trying to make a linkblog with a WordPress RSS feed".

Sure would be cool to have propper linkblogs built on Wordpress, which is the biggest open source web publishing environment in the world. Looks like it’s early stages, where things are complicated and convoluted, but eventually things could be streamlined. Imho great project to dive into if you are a Wordpress developer, or just a project to keep on your radar if you are a Wordpress user. #

I was going to read this Sam Altman blog post that everyone‘s been linking to yesterday. I think it‘s about the future, and how the crazy shit that is happening now is nothing because soon humans will be out numbered by robots, so we ain‘t seen nothing yet. Ok I did glance at the first paragraph. Anyway, I was very caught up in other stuff, it was lunch time and so I needed something to listen to while I prepared lunch, so figured I could multi-task. How hard could it be to get my Android phone to read a webpage to me? This is the age of AI and robots and what have you right?

Spent 35 minutes googling, ai-ing, searching through settings, literally nothing worked. It was kind of funny because the AI said to use the phone‘s voice assistant which I did, and the phone‘s voice assistant said sure no problem just give me the url, which is odd given the AI said that it would know automatically based on the context, but anyway the assistant openned up a text box presumably for me to paste the url into. So I did, and it went off and did a text based summary, and so I asked why it didn‘t read it aloud and it said it couldn‘t do it because it was a text based AI, so I then asked it why it didn‘t do the thing it said for me to do, and it started asking me to change settings and it was basically a total waste of nearly an hour, and probably would have broken my phone had I not stopped. I also would have starved to death.

Is the voice assitant an AI? Why is it talking to me with audio, clearly being an audio based tool, then the next minute it‘s saying it‘s text based? What the fuck is that about?

No, I‘m not going to read the article now, because this is fucking stupid. We cannot even do email, notes and basic automation in a bulletproof way, and now we are building AIs that lie to our faces? Surely we are on a very precarious path right now? #

LLMs are the collective becoming the absolute individual

There‘s an interesting thing happening over at Wikipedia. There was a big revolt by it‘s editors about a new feature that used LLMs to create summaries of Wikipedia pages. Lots of very interesting comments from editors, but this one stood out to me:

“Yes, human editors can introduce reliability and NPOV [neutral point-of-view] issues. But as a collective mass, it evens out into a beautiful corpus,” one editor said. “With Simple Article Summaries, you propose giving one singular editor with known reliability and NPOV issues a platform at the very top of any given article, whilst giving zero editorial control to others. It reinforces the idea that Wikipedia cannot be relied on, destroying a decade of policy work. It reinforces the belief that unsourced, charged content can be added, because this platforms it. I don't think I would feel comfortable contributing to an encyclopedia like this. No other community has mastered collaboration to such a wondrous extent, and this would throw that away.”

I‘ve been exploring topics related to the theme of the collective vs the individual for a few days. It seems to me that this editor nails the main issue, namely that the LLMs are the logical conclusion of the collective winning over the individual. And with that win, the contradiction is layed bare - the collective in now an individual, and it doesn‘t like it. What a suprise.

Tough to be a leftist when you win. The only way out is to pretend you haven‘t won. It‘s a real problem. For everyone. #