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Two fictional analogies for large language models
When using a large language model to gain knowledge or perform tasks, they remind me of the Library of Babel: they're capable of outputting basically all grammatical assemblages of tokens, and their probability distribution contains (a fuzzily associative, highly compressed, copy of) essentially all of human knowledge and thought. Thus contained within it is the complete catalogue of useful, insightful, correct, and wise things a human being might say, and all the wrong, dumb, or plain nonsensic... -
Weberian disenchantment is a spook
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What OpenAI should have been
OpenAI is fucking awful. We all know this. But I want to offer a vision of an alternative, better future --- what could have been, had they not been a techno-cult of privileged power-hungry tech bros totally divorced from reality, but instead people genuinely dedicated to the project of making "AGI" that benefits all of humanity. Imagine, if you will, a non-profit foundation, incorporated in a jurisdiction that holds non-profits legally to their charter, with a board representing a wide variety ... -
The concept of plagarism is a category error when applied to machines
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Cybernetics and free will
Theirs is rather a call to enter into the process; to become immanent to the deterritorialising processes of immanentisation in themselves. We must view ourselves from within the depths of things in order to fully recognise the flows that flow through, with and around us. Our task is only to make ourselves worthy of the process.... U/ACC instead argues that what is open to ‘us’ is perhaps only the possibility of, as Deleuze writes in Logic of Sense, a “becoming the quasi-cause of what is p... -
Why I publish in the public domain
(Further development from my somewhat juvenile flailing in this direction here.)“We must die as egos and be born again in the swarm, not separate and self-hypnotized, but individual and related.”—Henry Miller, Sexus I spend entirely too much time thinking about software --- and other creative work --- licensing, particularly from an ethical perspective. The reason I do this is because I think licenses are a very interesting intersection of a rigorous legal instrument, a political manifesto... -
Why is machine decision-making bad?
Instead, at the most, I believe machines should be used to automate helping human decision-makers gather information and understand it, in order to further human decision-making power. Some key rules for this are: -
Norbert Weiner
Finally, before we get to Land's ideas themselves, we have to discuss cybernetics, the science that complexity theory, control theory, and systems engineering spilled out of in the subsequent decades. Fundamentally, it's the science of feedback loops: how do systems whose outputs feed back into its inputs, modified by extra information processing and interaction with external factors, behave over time? Once you have Marx and the Austrians' views of capitalism not as a continual motion toward som... -
Analytic philosophy argument for philosophical egoism
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Notes on Gender Acceleration
Xenofeminism is what g/acc wishes it was. Technocapital is not inherently feminizing, it is artificing, and that process is available to any gender expression that can be commodified. G/acc, despite its futuristic, anti-humanist trappings, is ultimately a work of ressentiment: it self-servingly elevates the group the author happens to be in over everyone else out of a desire to simply invert the existing hierarchy (good/evil becomes evil/good; masculine/feminine becomes feminine/masculine) as an... -
Why I Am No Longer An Anarcho-Capitalist
My primary problem with anarcho-capitalists, as I mentioned in anotheressay ('Two Principles of Anarchism') is that they are fundamentallyconfused about values. The value at the heart of all libertarianmovements is autonomy, often referred to as liberty: the desire to be afree individual, making one's own choices about one's life, labor, andassociations, according to one's own plans. This is why people areattracted to any form of libertarianism or individualist anarchism. Wewant to be free to li... -
On Gary Marcus
I have Gary Marcus in my blogroll. I agree with his idea that neuro-symbolic architectures are the way forward for robust AI.<div style="border: 1px solid white; padding: 5px; margin: 5px;"> Side note: Although unlike him:So I don't think merging symbolism with deep learning approaches is "ultimately" the right approach in some philosophical sense; I just think that as things currently stand, given what symbolic and connectionist approaches can achieve and can't achieve respectively, a hybrid is... -
Thoughts on meaning-making: don't force it
Many people struggle to find meaning in their lives. They worry about their purpose in life, they worry about the overarching narrative of their life and how it fits into the grand narrative of the world, they worry about the purpose and meaning of the things that happen to them and how they fit into all those narratives. They also worry about trying to assign some kind of meaning to the things that they do, the objects in the world around them, and the people in their life. Importantly, in all ... -
Personanet and infonet, and the Semantic Web
I recently came across an article on someone's personal blog that spoke eloquently and plainitively about the reason they write online, and how a world of personal AI agents collecting and synthesizing information on-demand for users conflicts with the very reasons they write online in the first place:There's a fair bit of talk about “Google Zero” at the moment: the day when website traffic referred from Google finally hits zero. If the AI search result tells you everything you need, why wou... -
Personanet and infonet, and the Semantic Web
I recently came across an article on someone's personal blog that spoke eloquently and plainitively about the reason they write online, and how a world of personal AI agents collecting and synthesizing information on-demand for users conflicts with the very reasons they write online in the first place:There's a fair bit of talk about “Google Zero” at the moment: the day when website traffic referred from Google finally hits zero. If the AI search result tells you everything you need, why wou... -
On my ethical and metaethical theory
Let me put my cards on the table up front: I will be assuming pragmatist epistemology, and will not deal in depth with competing ethical and metaethical philosophy, especially not the cutting-edge stuff, because I'm a regular human being, not a PhD in philosophy, and I have limits. As such this is more a general sketch of what I believe and why I believe it than an in depth point by point proof of it and rebuttal of all possible responses and points. Generally, my position is that of an ethical ... -
ChatGPT is bullshit, my philosophical commentary
Mirror of the paper, with my key excerpt from it, here. I think this paper is too dismissive of the usefulness and capabilities of language models on the basis of their analysis (as I'll cover below), and far too dismissive of the adaptations we can make to make them useful while dealing with their bullshitting nature --- a technology need not be perfect, or perfectly reliable, to be useful --- but nevertheless, this is an excellent model for understanding how language models work:[...] both lyi... -
Communities do exist, and they're evil
The classic vulgar individualist quote is that communities don't exist, only groups of individuals. This is false. Communities may not exist as specific located physical entities, but they do exist ontologically, as higher-order meta entities composed of the emergent behaviors, desires, and powers that arise out of the interaction of their component individuals, and perpetuated through time by inherent self-cohesion and self-preservation properties, like gliders in Conway's Game of LIfe. The beh... -
Why the "Left" always loses
See also: What the fuck does praxis even mean? In my opinion, I think it's really kind of for three interlocking reasons. The first is that The Left has increasingly become the politics of /ressentiment, with very few exceptions. This is not inherent to many of the projects of the Left, but it's inescapable in Leftist culture as a whole. "Leftism" is a system of morality and values constructed by the weak, the oppressed, the disabled, and the marginalized, in order to define themselves as good i... -
What Is A Woman?
Since Matt Walsh's transphobic 'documentary' What Is A Woman? wasreleased, I've been seeing a lot of people, even allies and members ofthe LGBT community, reiterating this question. What is a woman? Justwhat does that mean? Well, I've got a simple, compact answer:A woman is someone who identifies with womanhood. I wouldn't go beyond that for anyone in general conversation, certainlynot with someone who asks that question as a challenge or in a "debateme bro" way, because actually elaborating on ... -
Bataille
Then there's Bataille. Interestingly, Land's first and only published book when he was still associated with academic philosophy was /The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism/, which was the first English book to engage with Bataille's writings. Land draws a lot from Bataille; it could almost be said that Bataille provides the underlying motive power of Land's thought. One of the core ideas that Land draws from Bataille and uses to motivate his theories is the idea of ... -
Lyotard
Then Lyotard comes along with Libidinal Economy and introduces libidinal materialism --- which early Land explicitly called himself, by the way. He's interested in completely erasing the top-down, condescending leftist idea that "no one can really want this shit capital is throwing at them; this has to all be false consciousness, and we've gotta fix everyone, returning them to a more natural precapitalist mode of desiring." He defends the idea that we really do enjoy the shit capital is giving u... -
Deleuze and Guattari
Basically, one of the key points of D&G's Anti-Oedipus is that capitalism --- through markets, commodification, alienation, abstraction, globalization, telecommunications, technology, capital, financial markets, money, etc. --- has this extremely strong decoding force (the process of breaking down established meanings, interpretations, and hierarchies), deterritorializing force (the process of detaching things from necessary concrete associations, making them infinitely reconfigurable, reassembl... -
Marx and the Austrian School
Land didn't just pull from continental philosophy, however. Part of what made his work so unique is the way he synthesized Marx's descriptions of capital's operating principles and internal logic --- freed from Marx's angry, outraged moralism --- with the Austrian School of Economics' economic insights --- symmetrically freed from their ideological commitment to pretending that the outcomes of capital must always be positive for the humans trapped within the system. The only other thinker that I... -
Empires of AI by Karen Hao thoughts
Some thoughts on the book as I go through it. This is a book I really have to grapple with, as someone who loves advanced, cutting-edge technology and wants an accelerationist vision of fully automated luxury market anarchism, not an anti-civ, primitivist, or degrowther's vision of returning to the land --- or picking over urban remains --- with a "few nice perks left over," or the common leftist position of desiring to go back to just before some latest technology has been invented, not seeing ... -
My own license for the Noosphere
Given my unique beliefs about the "noosphere" --- the world of human intellectual and creative expressions and ideas, separate from their material instantiation --- and my absolute opposition to its territorialization, including intellectual property, including even using IP to enforce any "freedoms" beyond purely the destruction of IP by means of IP itself (the core idea of share-alike/copyleft), but also my belief that licenses function as a sort of legal performance art, a voluntary adoption ... -
GNOME Is Not 'Mobile-First'
And like I said on my podcast, people think I only use KDE, butsometimes, I get so overwhemed with KDE that I need to fire up myGNOME virtual machine just to get a little bit of peace. Because itjust... works. ... GNOME just works. The moment you start installingextensions, you are introducing some instability into a stable OS,although there are some exceptions. ... but GNOME is the macOS of Linux:if you use it the way it was intended to be used, it is going to besuper stable. ... DarkXero, Tech... -
Footnotes
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UNIX, Lisp Machines, Emacs, and the Four User Freedoms
Any true hacker knows these principles by heart. Even though I hold many disagreements with Stallman and the FSF-hardliners — for instance, I see free vs proprietary software, and the software freedoms, as a matter of structural critique and industry ethics, not personal purity; proprietary software is being unethical against me for the way it treats me, I am not unethical for using it, because I am the one on whose side the rights lie — I agree with them, fundamentally, on so many more issu... -
Why am I being so mean to indie artists? Am I a tech bro?
To be perfectly clear, the purpose of this post, and all my other posts on this page expressing frustration at popular views concerning information ownership and "intellectual property," is not to punch down at independent artists and progressive activists. I care a lot about them, because I'm one, and I know many others; I'm deeply sympathetic to their values and goals and their need for a livelihood. The reason I write so much about this topic, directed as often if not moreso at independent ar... -
Emacs and the UNIX philosophy, part 2
See also: UNIX, Lisp Machines, Emacs, and the Four User Freedoms. Each of the main tenets of the UNIX philosophy has essentially a kernel of truth to it:However, it misunderstands how best to achieve each and every one of these options. Human-readable text is a good medium for data, but it is too flexible to be the data interchange format, by itself, and lacks out-of-band capabilities, as I've said before. Breaking down functionality into entirely separate programs/processes is way, way too hard... -
Is GNOME Actually Evil?
GNOME is the de facto or de jure default desktop environment onmany of the biggest Linux distributions, and it has asubstantial marketshare among Linux users. Yet, GNOME seems to be positivelyreviled by a vocal minority of the Linux community. Why the hell is that? Is it just because GNOME is the most widely used DE, an example ofBjarne Stoustrup's rule of programming languages applied to othersoftware? Or is all this hate earned, somehow? Or is it, perhaps, theresult of a bandwagoning hate mob,... -
Don't fix us
You want, if possible -- and there is no more insane "if possible" -- toabolish suffering. And we? It really seems that we would rather have ithigher and worse than ever. Well-being as you understand it -- that isno goal, that seems to us an end, a state that soon makes man ridiculousand contemptible -- that makes his destruction desirable. The disciplineof suffering, of great suffering -- do you not know that only this Nietzsche,Beyond Good and Evil A kaleidoscopic whirlwind of pernicious lies,... -
Freeing the noosphere
Author's note: the historical references found herein are meant to be general and impressionistic. I am intentionally simplifying and linearizing this narrative to make a point about how the representation media for ideas effects the nature of the noosphere-economy, not to make any historical point. I have linked to relevant respectable sources for each historical thing so that you can go learn the real history in all its proper complexity if you are interested. The noosphere is the world create... -
How to use a large language model ethically
Note: There is a caveat to my point on local models, however: datacenter models are more energy and CO2 efficient than running an equivalently sized model locally. Additionally, they can run larger and much more useful proprietary models, and sometimes there's a certain threshold of capability above which it's worth the energy and time spent on a model, and below which it's completely not worth it, but not using it at all will just waste more time and energy --- after all, saving a human some ti... -
Perspectivist epistemology is not epistemic relativism
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Posthumanism and The Death Drive
The point is to recognize that to genuinely love life, one must have “signed a contract with death.” The love of life — to the extent that it is something other than naiveté, delusion, or cynical manipulation — will (ambiguously) emerge from, nourish, and incorporate necrophilia. A “love of life” that seeks to exclude or refuse death is not, in fact, a love of life at all, but the worship of an idealistic myth whose inevitable effect will be a devaluing of life in its real and tragi... -
My thoughts on religion and society
What if our commitment to religious tolerance is built on a contradiction? Secular liberal democracy asks believers to treat their deepest convictions as private hobbies --- true enough to live by, but not true enough to act on; and it asks those who do not share those beliefs to treat them, which lead to actions in the real world, as too sacred to question. This isn't to suggest that religion is unique in this memetic will to power, this desire societal influence --- but rather that it is uniqu... -
In defense of parsimony
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The intellectual property views of traditional artists in the age of NFTs and Generative "AI"
I recently came to a really interesting realization. So, okay. We all remember the huge cultural phenomenon that was NFTs, that appeared for like a couple months and then immediately disappeared again, right? What were NFTs exactly? I'll tell you: they were a way of building a ledger that links specific "creative works" (JPEGs, in the original case, but theoretically others as well -- and yes, most NFTs weren't exactly creative) to specific owners, in a way that was difficult to manipulate and e... -
The Dao of Emacs, and my mixed feelings on Doom Emacs
One of the most powerful aspects of Emacs is that it can truly become anything you want it to be. This is definitely a good thing, as I've spent a lot of time explaining above: malleable tools give you freedom, autonomy, control over your own computing life. You can shape them to best help your workflow, your thought process, your preferences, your needs (even physical ones). They grow with you, around you, rewarding you for the time you spend with them. They have better longevity, because they ... -
The phenomenology agentic coding
AI coding agents are important because they fundamentally alter what it is like to program. That is what this essay is about: not whether this transformation is good or bad for programmers as a labor bloc, or economically, or socially; not whether it makes us more or less productive in the odd Taylorist sense that seems prevelent whenever the subject pops up. What interests me and, I believe, should interest you about this whole enterprise, is the phenomenology of how this new human-machine asse... -
The phenomenology agentic coding
AI coding agents are important because they fundamentally alter what it is like to program. That is what this essay is about: not whether this transformation is good or bad for programmers as a labor bloc, or economically, or socially; not whether it makes us more or less productive in the odd Taylorist sense that seems prevelent whenever the subject pops up. What interests me and, I believe, should interest you about this whole enterprise, is the phenomenology of how this new human-machine asse... -
The problem with utilitarianism
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Radical elitist egalitarianism
The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer’s ideas or personality. Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, is decried as a hater of the weak because he believed in the Uebermensch. It does not occur to the shallow interpreters of that giant mind that this vision of the Uebermensch also called for a state of society which will not give birth to a race of weaklings and slaves. It is the same narrow attitude which sees in ... -
The Problem With Presuppositionalism
*This is an essay I wrote awhile ago as a Google Doc, which I'mreposting to this blog because it seems relevant. I haven't looked at itor edited it in awhile, so it's not the most polished or up-to-dateversion of my philosophy or responses to these things, but I generallystand by it.*[A presupposition is] a belief that takes precedence over another andtherefore serves as a criterion for another. An ultimate presuppositionis a belief over which no other takes precedence. For a Christian, theconte... -
Accelerationism Triptych 01: Future shock fever
There is something feverishly exciting about watching the deterritorialization swing of technocapitalism work. Careers disintigrate into hypermobile, infinitely reconfigurable, on-demand gigs; old markets are dissolved as new ones are assembled from their molecular media as the fundamental nature of production and demand is altered; technology is ceaslessly iterated in a blind genetic algorithm looking for the next thing; any attempts at societal control are left in the dust, and in the process ... -
AI enables privacy laundering
yt:https://www. youtube. com/watch? v=DPkRwUR7eocI think this video is really emblematic of a serious problem that we are going to have as a society in the future: privacy laundering by means of AI. They say at the beginning of the video that they have a rule at corridor that they don't record people without their knowledge and consent. However, they have a goal they want to achieve that surveillance will make significantly easier, so they have a motivation to come up with a rationalization for ... -
Accelerationism Triptych 02: Technology is an engine of possibility
In the first part of this thematic triptych, I discussed the affective aspect of accelerationism --- the strange, almost sadomasochistic but also freeing allure of deterritorialization and the space it makes for change, the new, the outside, the different, new freedoms and new arrangements. In this essay, I want to discuss how the rejection and fear of this allure, both in itself and because of a belief that deterritorialization must always be combined with exploitative capitalistic reterritoria... -
A Fuzzy Bayesian Analysis of Deductive Argumentation
Now that I've finally gotten around to writing out some of the morefundamental components of my epistemology, I can at last proceedto writing one of the articles that I've been planning to do pretty muchsince I started writing on this blog months ago: a fuzzy Bayesiananalysis of deductive philosophical argumentation. This was inspired inpart by a “discussionof how arguments work on the part of Dr. Graham Oppy. In that interview,he discusses how deductive arguments in philosophy are actually fa... -
Do AI images and video mean "reality is broken?"
A lot of people seem to be angry, upset, or panicking about the advent of generative AI image and especially video models like Veo 3 and Sora 2, claiming that since these systems allow us to effortly create photorealistic videos and images completely out of whole cloth, our society is finally completely screwed: we have no way of getting information that we can know comes from actual reality. We can no longer trust anything. Leaving aside the possibility of technological solutions --- such as cr... -
The "dogshit economics" of AI according to Cory Doctorow
This is a response to this post. I'll respond to the post point by point, because I think that in his rush to discount something he finds personally distasteful, Doctorow gets his economics and arguments very wrong. First, Doctorow argues that the current excitement around AI is a massive economic bubble, larger than previous bubbles like the dot-com boom or the Worldcom fraud. A significant portion of the stock market is tied up in a few AI companies that are not profitable and have no clear pa... -
How to do a revolution
And tonight, when I dream it will beThat the junkies spent all the drug money onCommunity gardens and collective housingAnd the punk kids who moved in the ghettoHave started meeting their neighbors besides the angry onesWith the yardsThat their friends and their dogs have been puking and shitting onAnd the anarchists have startedFilling potholes, collecting garbageTo prove we don't need governments to do these thingsAnd I'll wake up, burning Time's Square as we sing"Throw your hands in the air '... -
Are LLMs inherently unethical?
In my view, large language models are just tools. Just like all tools they can have interesting uses --LLM agents; summarization, even in medical settings; named entity extraction; sentiment analysis and moderation to relieve the burden from people being traumatized by moderating huge social networks; a form of therapy for those who can't access, afford, or trust traditional therapy; grammar checking, like a better Grammarly; simple first-pass writing critique as a beta reader applying provided ... -
Linguistic Pragmatism and the Incoherence of Transphobia
To all the "superstraight" and transphobic people out there: yourcategories are fucked. Your language is incomprehensible, and yourphilosophy of languages is confused. Here's why. As a naturalist, nominalist, and linguistic pragmatist, my position onhow words are used is pretty simple: A lot of things in our world sharecertain common features. There are a lot of different ways that we couldtaxonomize those common features, in the same way that there are a lotof different words that you can draw ... -
Synthesis Libertarianism: A Manifesto
There has been an invisible war for the heart and soul of thelibertarian movement going on since the 1960s, and corruption iswinning. The foundational values of libertarianism have been all butlost in the influx of alt-right and neo-reactionary people, andsomething must finally be done about it lest we lose those valuescompletely. Thin libertarianism was the naive dream of a tiny and strugglingmovement striving to grow at all costs, but what does it matter if themovement grows, if the movement d...
Tag: philosophy
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