whiskey-ranger

[whiskey-ranger]

Microsoft gonna Microsoft.

oh windows...

[whiskey-ranger]

Don’t use spreadsheets as a database. But my peace is more important than trying to teach that lesson at this point.

Them: Why not use Google Sheets or MS Excel as a Database? Me: You are right. Go ahead and use it. Have a nice day. PS - You reach that stage in life where you just don't have any will or power left to fight stupidity. You know what? Forget the fight. It's about keeping my peace. There, I said it.

[whiskey-ranger]

There is no such thing as AI.

How to help the non technical and less online people in your life navigate the latest techbro grift.

I've seen other people say stuff to this effect but it's worth reiterating. Today in class, my professor was talking about a news article where a celebrity's likeness was used in an ai image without their permission. Then she mentioned a guest lecture about how AI is going to help finance professionals. Then I pointed out, those two things aren't really related.

The term AI is being used to obfuscate details about multiple semi-related technologies.

Traditionally in sci-fi, AI means artificial general intelligence like Data from star trek, or the terminator. This, I shouldn't need to say, doesn't exist. Techbros use the term AI to trick investors into funding their projects. It's largely a grift.

What is the term AI being used to obfuscate?

If you want to help the less online and less tech literate people in your life navigate the hype around AI, the best way to do it is to encourage them to change their language around AI topics.

By calling these technologies what they really are, and encouraging the people around us to know the real names, we can help lift the veil, kill the hype, and keep people safe from scams. Here are some starting points, which I am just pulling from Wikipedia. I'd highly encourage you to do your own research.

Machine learning (ML): is an umbrella term for solving problems for which development of algorithms by human programmers would be cost-prohibitive, and instead the problems are solved by helping machines "discover" their "own" algorithms, without needing to be explicitly told what to do by any human-developed algorithms. (This is the basis of most technologically people call AI)

Language model: (LM or LLM) is a probabilistic model of a natural language that can generate probabilities of a series of words, based on text corpora in one or multiple languages it was trained on. (This would be your ChatGPT.)

Generative adversarial network (GAN): is a class of machine learning framework and a prominent framework for approaching generative AI. In a GAN, two neural networks contest with each other in the form of a zero-sum game, where one agent's gain is another agent's loss. (This is the source of some AI images and deepfakes.)

Diffusion Models: Models that generate the probability distribution of a given dataset. In image generation, a neural network is trained to denoise images with added gaussian noise by learning to remove the noise. After the training is complete, it can then be used for image generation by starting with a random noise image and denoise that. (This is the more common technology behind AI images, including Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. I added this one to the post after as it was brought to my attention it is now more common than GANs.)

I know these terms are more technical, but they are also more accurate, and they can easily be explained in a way non-technical people can understand. The grifters are using language to give this technology its power, so we can use language to take it's power away and let people see it for what it really is.

[whiskey-ranger]

Black Myth: Wukong is a stellar game so far. Plus, it works very well on Linux. (I’m playing on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and Bazzite.)

[whiskey-ranger]

Bestie I can feel rejected by things you wouldn’t even think of

[whiskey-ranger]

Arch isn’t that temperamental in my experience, but Debian is what I run my servers on.

But why do people forget about OpenSUSE Tumbleweed? That’s the rolling distro of my dreams and I am probably switching my gaming PC to it.

Everytime I try install Arch, on the same day I return to Debian. Arch is temperamental and judgemental and unhelpful. Debian doesn't do that. Debian doesn't judge. Debian is friendly. Debian's children and grandchildren are my friends.

[whiskey-ranger]

We need to bring back public execution.