Rose

Yeah. …Maybe I should analyse a bit anyway, despite being tired…

In the aforementioned media the premise is usually that someone has built this amazing new computer system! Too good to be true, right? It goes horribly wrong! All very dramatic!

That never sat right with me, and was sad, because it was just placating boomer technophobia. Like, technological progress isn’t necessarily bad, OK? That’s the really sad part. I felt sad that good intentions remained unfulfilled.

Now, this incident is just tragicomical. I’d have a lot better view of LLM business space if everyone with a bit of sense in their heads admitted they’re quirky buggy unreliable side projects of tech companies and should not be used without serious supervision, as the state of the tech currently patently is at the moment, but very important people with big money bags say that they don’t care if they’ll destroy the planet to make everything wobble around in LLM control.

(Shedding a few tears)

I know! I KNOW! People are going to say “oh it’s a machine, it’s just a statistical sequence and not real, don’t feel bad”, etc etc.

But I always felt bad when watching 80s/90s TV and movies when AIs inevitably freaked out and went haywire and there were explosions and then some random character said “goes to show we should never use computers again”, roll credits.

(sigh) I can’t analyse this stuff this weekend, sorry

This makes about as much sense as calling Linux users “Windows vegans”.

Choosing to not use AI isn’t some wacky contrarian position, it’s a tame position that can easily be justified. (Don’t want to use AI? Then don’t.) If anything, trying to assert that constantly using AI for everything would be the new normal is the wacky position.

Martin: Organized crime?
Cosmo: Hah. Don’t kid yourself. It’s not that organized.

– Sneakers (1992)

Twitter is absolutely going to say “well, we’re definitely not an organised hate group. Sometimes people just hate stuff. We’re just a social media platform, helping people organise. Oh shit”

Remember:

Copyright law as a whole will stay the same. In the court of law, you will need to prove that you indeed operate a very big AI company that indeed does AI things before they will let you off the hook for massive copyright infringement. You can’t just use that excuse casually! Rules will be for thee, not the actual AI-companees.

AI is good at doing a thing once.
Trying to get it to do the same thing the second time is janky and frustrating.

I understand the use of AI as a consulting tool (look at references, make code examples) or for generating template/boilerplate code. You know, things you do once and then develop further upon on your own.

But using it for continuous development of an entire application? Yeah, it’s not good enough for that.

People will no longer laugh at the term “military intelligence” for the obvious irony. Now, they’ll say “remember when the military tried to use artificial intelligence? ha ha what a disaster”

Well, technically, Twitter has employees, so in very strict sense, they’re “manned”. However, thanks to these weird incomprehensible things called “current legislation” and “capitalism”, no employee is in fact personally responsible for the fuckups. And neither is the company as a whole! …Isn’t this great?

What Fediverse could use was some kind of equivalent of Linktree. “Here’s my personal accounts on Fediverse. Here’s some related to my projects. Here’s some other random links.”

Because currently I’m like “maybe check out my Mastodon profile, it has links” - it works, kinda, but I’m not sure it’s the best solution. For example, you could include support for this in the fedi software, so once you specify where your link page is, it’d pull the links and show them on your profile.

…I know, this would be too beautiful for this world and it’d get run over by spammers. But for glorious few days we’d have sensible Fediverse profiles! Think about it!

On the other hand, I think safe-harbour laws are very much necessary if we want the Internet to work for the positive good of the world. We want the companies to take reasonable precautions and act on problematic stuff if it crops up, but that’s probably enough.

But on the other hand, jeez, have you seen what kind of discussion shitholes Facebook and Twitter have cultivated? If your company is being described as an accessory to genocide, maybe something has already gone horribly wrong.

“No HTML club” is kinda going too far on the Web. If you go there you might as well start a No HTTP Club and serve stuff over Gopher and FTP.

But we definitely need an HTML 2.0 Club.

I’m happy that the news over here has to continually specify “the messaging service X”. Though I wish they would avoid potential confusion and also say “formerly known as Twitter”.

Andrew Tate’s site was based on some OSS software that they didn’t credit (in violation of the license) and was an old version with known vulnerabilities. Which is why it got hacked.

I don’t know if Truth Social is in the same boat, but it’s possible. I think I heard it’s just Mastodon with federation turned off? Or am I thinking of some other crappy alt-right site?

Like all Point-Haired Bosses through the history, Elon has not heard of (or consciously chooses to ignore) one of the fundamental laws of computing: garbage in, garbage out

Private use of the copyrighted works is pretty much a separate topic entirely.

And while the law isn’t settled on the topic, it’s wrong to argue AI training is something that happens entirely in a private setting, especially when that work is made available publicly in some form or another.

Sure, there’s a problem with the current copyright laws that has to be addressed. It’s quite similar to the “TiVo loophole” in OSS licenses. It was addressed, and certainly not in favour of the loophole exploiters. That one could be fixed on licence level because it was ultimately a licence question, but the AI training question, however, needs to be taken to the legislation level. Internationally, too.

Er, yes, my point was copyright very much concerns what you’re allowed to do with data. But that goes beyond distribution. Derivative works are a complicated topic.

My point stands, whether you technically can copy stuff has no bearing on whether you’re allowed to use it and for what purpose.

The way copyright law works, by default you don’t have any right to make use of anything, even if it’s posted publicly. Why do people allow Fediverse platforms to do the thing they do? Leniency on their part.

Gathering data from Mastodon for AI training is technically feasible, but that doesn’t mean it’s legally justified. Many people will object to that. Many already do!

Pinterest is mostly useful for saving images from the web, so you can keep all images from related topics together and have a handy backup too.

I mostly use it for saving all the cute turtle photos I found.

Unemployed people use LinkedIn mostly for the job board. The employed people use LinkedIn for the social media features, and oh boy

What do you like most about BookWyrm? Which features do you use most frequently?

Been using BookWyrm for a few months. I add books to my shelves and track reading progress, mostly.

I loved it when I realised that it just lets me add all random books and edit data from the get-go. The service may not have all of the books I have, but I can just add them.

Are there any features or interactions that you find frustrating or unintuitive? What features do you think are missing or could be improved?

BookWyrm absolutely needs far better abilities to split/merge/consolidate author and book information and do more of the Librarian Stuff. The current system of “you can bring in data and stuff just sits there on its own” is nice if you want to manage a personal library and track individual book progress, but a well-maintained book database is an entirely different beast, and pretty much mandatory for enabling more social stuff.

Also, the ability to import book information from sources is nice, but could use some more integration to a whole lot of other places. I really loved LibraryThing’s integration to bazillion different library services.

One minor quibble I have about BookWyrm is that there’s still the notion of “shelves” and that one book can be on one shelf and different editions of one book don’t count. This is good for casual use - “oh yeah I read this one” - but it’s not enough for true book nerdery. I may have a physical, ebook and audiobook edition of one work in multiple languages and the UI doesn’t show me that yes, I own/have borrowed these exact editions and I have reading activity on this and that and that one.

On that note, yeah, should also have some kind of labeling system for individual editions, along the lines of “I own a copy of this and I’ve stored this in the closet” vs “Borrowed this off the library” vs “I had this one, before the drama queen of an author removed it from Kindle”.

How do you feel about the interface (design, readability, navigation)?

It was a little bit confusing at first, but once I got over the initial weirdness I realised it wasn’t that much harder to use than, say, Goodreads. I don’t really have much complaints at this point. It’s good at what it does.

Do you mainly use BookWyrm on a mobile device or on a computer? And why?

Book nerdery is a big girl thing so I use computer for this. The mobile UI is adequate but could use a dedicated app.

Do you also use other platforms (e.g., Goodreads, StoryGraph, LibraryThing)? If yes, what makes you prefer one over the other?

I used LibraryThing long ago, and Goodreads more recently, both with librarian privileges (i.e. ability to edit data, which BookWyrm gives you from the get-go). I think Goodreads is pretty good at what it does, but it did have some mild jank, and of course, I always got the impression that I was doing unpaid labour for Bezos. So I think I’ll go with BookWyrm in the long run, thanks.