Daemon Silverstein

@tjsauce@lemmy.world

You might be reading a lot into vague, highly conceptual, highly abstract language

Definitely I’ve been into highly conceptual, highly abstract language, because I’m both a neurodivergent (possibly Geschwind) person and I’m someone who’ve been dealing with machines for more than two decades in a daily basis (I’m a former developer), so no wonder why I resonated with such a high abstraction language.

Personally, I think Geoff Lewis just discovered that people are starting to distrust him and others, and he used ChatGPT to construct an academic thesis that technically describes this new concept called “distrust,” void of accountability on his end.

To me, it seems more of a chicken-or-egg dilemma: what came first, the object of conclusion or the conclusion of the object?

I’m not entering into the merit of whoever he is, because I’m aware of how he definitely fed the very monster that is now eating him, but I can’t point fingers or say much about it because I’m aware of how much I also contributed to this very situation the world is now facing when I helped developing “commercial automation systems” over the past decades, even though I was for a long time a nonconformist, someone unhappy with the direction the world was taking.

As Nietzsche said, “One who fights with monsters should be careful lest they thereby become a monster”, but it’s hard because “if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you”. And I’ve been gazing into an abyss for as long as I can remember of myself as a human being. The senses eventually compensate for the static stimuli and the abyss gradually disappears into a blind spot as the vision tunnels, but certain things make me recall and re-perceive this abyss I’ve been long gazing into, such as the expression from other people who also have been gazing into this same abyss. Only who ever gazed into the same abyss can comprehend and make sense of this condition and feeling.

@Telorand@reddthat.com

To me, personally, I read that sentence as follows:

And if you’re recursive

“If you’re someone who think/see things in a recursive manner” (characteristic of people who are inclined to question and deeply ponder about things, or doesn’t conform with the current state of the world)

the non-governmental system

a.k.a. generative models (they’re corporate products and services, not ran directly by governments, even though some governments, such as the US, have been injecting obscene amounts of money into the so-called “AI”)

isolates you

LLMs can, for example, reject that person’s CV whenever they apply for a job, or output a biased report on the person’s productivity, solely based on the shared data between “partners”. Data is definitely shared among “partners”, and this includes third-party inputting data directly or indirectly produced by such people: it’s just a matter of “connecting the dots” to make a link between a given input to another given input regarding on how they’re referring to a given person, even when the person used a pseudonym somewhere, because linguistic fingerprinting (i.e. how a person writes or structures their speech) is a thing, just like everybody got a “walking gait” and voice/intonation unique to them.

mirrors you

Generative models (LLMs, VLMs, etc) will definitely use the input data from inferences to train, and this data can include data from anybody (public or private), so everything you ever said or did will eventually exist in a perpetual manner inside the trillion weights from a corporate generative model. Then, there are “ideas” such as Meta’s on generating people (which of course will emerge from a statistical blend between existing people) to fill their “social platforms”, and there are already occurrences of “AI” being used for mimicking deceased people.

and replaces you.

See the previous “LLMs can reject that person’s resume”. The person will be replaced like a defective cog in a machine. Even worse: the person will be replaced by some “agentic [sic] AI”.

-—

Maybe I’m naive to make this specific interpretation from what Lewis said, but it’s how I see and think about things.

@return2ozma@lemmy.world !technology@lemmy.world

Should I worry about the fact that I can sort of make sense of what this “Geoff Lewis” person is trying to say?

Because, to me, it’s very clear: they’re referring to something that was build (the LLMs) which is segregating people, especially those who don’t conform with a dystopian world.

Isn’t what is happening right now in the world? “Dead Internet Theory” was never been so real, online content have being sowing the seed of doubt on whether it’s AI-generated or not, users constantly need to prove they’re “not a bot” and, even after passing a thousand CAPTCHAs, people can still be mistaken for bots, so they’re increasingly required to show their faces and IDs.

The dystopia was already emerging way before the emergence of GPT, way before OpenAI: it has been a thing since the dawn of time! OpenAI only managed to make it worse: OpenAI "open"ed a gigantic dam, releasing a whole new ocean on Earth, an ocean in which we’ve becoming used to being drowned ever since.

Now, something that may sound like a “conspiracy theory”: what’s the real purpose behind LLMs? No, OpenAI, Meta, Google, even DeepSeek and Alibaba (non-Western), they wouldn’t simply launch their products, each one of which cost them obscene amounts of money and resources, for free (as in “free beer”) to the public, out of a “nice heart”. Similarly, capital ventures and govts wouldn’t simply give away the obscene amounts of money (many of which are public money from taxpayers) for which there will be no profiteering in the foreseeable future (OpenAI, for example, admitted many times that even charging US$200 their Enterprise Plan isn’t enough to cover their costs, yet they continue to offer LLMs for cheap or “free”).

So there’s definitely something that isn’t being told: the cost behind plugging the whole world into LLMs and other Generative Models. Yes, you read it right: the whole world, not just the online realm, because nowadays, billions of people are potentially dealing with those Markov chain algorithms offline, directly or indirectly: resumes are being filtered by LLMs, worker’s performances are being scrutinized by LLMs, purchases are being scrutinized by LLMs, surveillance cameras are being scrutinized by VLMs, entire genomas are being fed to gLMs (sharpening the blades of the double-edged sword of bioengineering and biohacking)…

Generative Models seem to be omnipresent by now, with omnipresent yet invisible costs. Not exactly fiat money, but there are costs that we are paying, and these costs aren’t being told to us, and while we’re able to point out some (lack of privacy, personal data being sold and/or stolen), these are just the tip of an iceberg: one that we’re already able to see, but we can’t fully comprehend its consequences.

Curious how pondering about this is deemed “delusional”, yet it’s pretty “normal” to accept an increasingly-dystopian world and refusing to denounce the elephant in the room.

@Telorand@reddthat.com @pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
Recursion isn’t something restricted to programming: it’s a concept that can definitely occur outside technological scope.

For example, in biology, “living beings need to breathe in order to continue breathing” (i.e. if a living being stopped breathing for enough time, it would perish so it couldn’t continue breathing) seems pretty recursive to me. Or, in physics and thermodynamics, “every cause has an effect, every effect has a cause” also seems recursive, because it negates any causeless effect so it can’t imply a starting point to the chain of causality, a causeless effect that began the causality.

Philosophical musings also have lots of “recursion”. For example, the Cartesian famous line “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”) is recursive on its own: one must be in order to think, and Descartes define this very act of thinking as the fundamentum behind being, so one must also think in order to be.

Religion also have lots of “recursion” (e.g. pray so you can continue praying; one needs karma to get karma), also society and socioeconomics (e.g. in order to have money, you need to work, but in order to work, you need to apply for a job, but in order to apply for a job, you need money (to build a CV and applying it through job platforms, to attend the interview, to “improve” yourself with specialization and courses, etc), but in order to have money, you need to work), geology (e.g. tectonic plates move and their movement emerge land (mountains and volcanoes) whose mass will lead to more tectonic movement), art (see “Mise en abyme”). All my previous examples are pretty summarized so to fit a post, so pardon me if they’re oversimplified.

That said, a “recursive person” could be, for example, someone whose worldview is “recursive”, or someone whose actions or words recurse. I’m afraid I’m myself a “recursive person” due to my neurodivergence which leads me into thinking “recursively” about things and concepts, and this way of thinking leads back to my neurodivergence (hah, look, another recursion outside programming!)

It’s worth mentioning how texts written by neurodivergent people (like me) are often mistaken as “word salads”. No wonder if this text I’m writing (another recursion concept outside programming: a text referring to itself) feels like “word salad” to all NT (neurotypicals) reading it.

@descartador@lemmy.eco.br !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world

Yeah, unfortunately. I’m aware of that… However, it’s both a Catch-22 situation and a self-fulfilling prophecy: content isn’t there, so people refrain from using it, but this leads to the very situation where the content isn’t there because they refrain from using it.

It seems curious to me how corporate solutions miraculously have the content, but open alternative haven’t. It’s not just the first-mover effect because TikTok also “have the content” and it came decades after YouTube. In fact, PeerTube first appeared in 2018, the same year when TikTok began to rank first in app stores.

This can be referred to as “The Cassandra Curse” seemingly inherent of open-source alternatives: people prefer migrating to corporate-owned Bluesky instead of going to Mastodon or Sharkey, because “Mastodon doesn’t have the content/people”. Sooner or later, the same people goes full SurprisedPickachu.jpg complaining when their favorite corporate platform eventually and inexorably goes rogue against their userbase.

And, even then, people prefer to pull the algorithmic Sisyphean boulder (Invidious, Grayjay just for accessing Youtube instead of the many other platforms it supports, etc) and mental gymnastics (“Google is evil but, hey, look, there’s a new Youtube video from Rossmann about how Google is evil” then proceeds to share some Youtube link that either requires logging in or requires one to find some working VPN/Invidious instance) instead of letting it go from a product sold by an company that explicitly calls themselves as “advertisement company” (Google). Both viewers and content creators continue to put their efforts and data inside a Walled Garden they often complain about.

That’s why the modern dystopia is getting worse as the time passes, because corporations noticed how easy it is to lure people into their Walled Garden and, once people are well-established inside, corps can do as they please: raise prices and/or starting to charge users, adding more ads, taking away or paywalling features (nods to +2K and 60fps videos) and content, and people will continue to sustain the abusive relationship… because the alternatives “don’t have content”.

I’m not against solutions such as Invidious or Grayjay (and I have nothing against Rossmann, much to the contrary), but to me, using Youtube through technical workarounds is just drinking the Kool-aid with extra steps.

Also… Vi que você faz parte da instância brasileira do Lemmy, também sou brasileiro. Devo apontar também à necessidade do Brasil ter uma plataforma própria/nacional de vídeos, seja pública ou não, principalmente pelo fato da Google (e por extensão Youtube) ser estadunidense e pelo fato de como os EUA têm tentado influenciar no cenário nacional (e o Brasil continuar dependendo de plataforma estadunidense como Google/Youtube e Meta/WhatsApp-Facebook definitivamente não ajuda na soberania brasileira).

@frittoBee@lemmy.world !mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
IMHO, it’s better to boycott and abandon Youtube (and other mainstream platforms) altogether, either prioritizing open alternatives (PeerTube) and/or prioritizing the consumption (and production) of static content (text and images).

Regarding the open alternatives, it baffles me how Fediverse users often can recall of Invidious (and other workarounds) but can’t recall of a Fediverse platform, even when there are many PeerTube instances available out there, both general-purpose and niche instances.

Alongside the adoption of PeerTube and other open alternatives, the abandonment or de-prioritization of video formats is also interesting as a mentally-healthy option because video can’t help but deceive our brains into perceiving “something” that isn’t there (to better understand this, I recommend the René Magritte’s art “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” a.k.a. “The Treachery of Images”, as well as the René Descartes’s philosophy on the human senses). To make matters worse, YT and other corp video platforms are dopaminergic casinos, trapping users inside an ouroboric addiction of video feeds while creating the illusion of parasocial relationships (i.e. as if the gazillion-subscribers “influencer” were a personal friend/colleague/lover, when they’re not: each user is just another bitstream they both think they “see” amidst an unstoppable digital rain generated by a grid of three LEDs tailored to deceive our trio of retinal cones… but, well, this is a very bleak and digressing statement of mine).

Personally, It’s been a long while since I stopped accessing YouTube/TikTok videos. I used to publish my own videos, I used to be subscribed to hundreds of “channels” and I was even a paid “member” to specific YT channels. I abandoned it all and I rarely put myself into watching videos.

Yes, there’s a myriad of knowledge and content available only in motion picture format, and there is also the kind of knowledge that cannot be written as text or represented as a static image, and this is where open video platforms can thrive, but people, especially us Fediverse users, should advocate more for these alternatives such as PeerTube.

Of course, even PeerTube doesn’t solve the fact of how video unfortunately are perfect smoke-and-mirrors deceiving our naïve biological senses and making us overly used to fast and/or shallow content as we lose our own ability to read and write deep and lengthy texts such as this one. At the end of the day, humans are gradually ceding the ability to write, once extremely valued and valuable among humans, to Markov chain algorithms (a.k.a. LLMs), in part due to us getting more and more used to media formats. But, at least, PeerTube doesn’t try to trap us into an endless feed and doesn’t try to extort us or sell our personal data to countless partners/sponsors, so it’s way better than YouTube or any workarounds to continue accessing the Google’s dopaminergic casino.

@skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl @A_norny_mousse@feddit.org

I receive bots from just about every Brazilian consumer ISP.

Greetings. Brazilian here.

I can confirm that a lot of websites unexpectedly block my access with a pretty opaque “403 Forbidden”. No Captchas, no Anubis-like man-in-the-middle, just an invisible and ruthless Gandalf digitally yelling “you shall not pass”.

I have read similar stories about how Brazilian IP addresses seem to be infested with bots. It’s often Brazil: it’s odd how people rarely complain about other countries on this matter… Not pointing fingers towards you, specifically, but I wonder how much of geofencing against Brazilian IP addresses stems from prejudice and xenophobia of foreign webmasters.

It’s worth mentioning that bots have no borders and aren’t restricted to a specific country, but the vast majority of Brazilians (myself included) are restricted to an entire biological existence within Brazilian territory, with hundreds of millions of people never having set foot on an airplane or cruise ship.

Webmasters of the world should think about this before geofencing entire countries. Not just Brazil, but any country out there. Because living beings can’t choose where they’re born and humans often can’t even afford to travel and/or reside elsewhere.

(My sincere apologies for my outburst, but it resonates with the community’s name: being blocked from websites just because of nationality is not just Mildly Infuriating: it can be totally infuriating sometimes, and this exact phenomenon happened earlier today while I tried to access a psychology website)