If you are wondering what it’s like in Minneapolis / St. Paul right now — •this• is it. This is what we’re living through. https://mastodon.social/@UnicornRiot/115692836095826980

OK, so, hear me out:

Stranger Things always features songs that were popular at the time the story is taking place

and it starts in 1983, but the story has reached 1987

and it’s the final season

and they’ll have to feature one extra-notable contemporaneous song in the end credits of the final episode…

…and so…what if Stranger Things — •the entire series• — is a giant Rickroll??

❝It was *impossible* for me or anyone else present to get him to understand that *we don't want slaves, simulated or otherwise*.

I've thought about that a lot in the days since.❞

4/

❝He was completely unable to understand why. He kept arguing that since the LLM isn't an actual conscious person (which is correct), it ought to be treated like a slave, and that the arc of technology is to give everyone access to their own virtual slaves.❞

3/

❝I said that I *absolutely in no way* want a slave, or a technology that simulates one. I want to do creative work using good tools. I *don't want* the experience of a slaver; in fact, I would go very far to never have that experience, because it is a demeaning and antihuman experience.❞

2/

Fascinating story from a software dev Fedi friend, shared with permission to keep it anonymous:

❝A couple of days ago, I had an experience at work that made me understand one of the reasons why the chasm of opinion about LLMs is so deep and wide.

My department mostly does fiddly lowlevel work, [close to hardware]. A few of us don't use LLMs at all, a few use them sparingly, and one member is absolutely all-in. So during one of our morning meetings he suddenly started going off on a deeply disturbing diatribe about how we need to treat the LLMs “like slaves”.❞

1/

“Would it be particularly helpful to have some text that would be •typical• in a given context, even if the text is possibly •incorrect•?”

↑ vet potential applications of LLMs with this one weird question!

It’s obvious that this tool was made by people who care about data and care about humans. It’s not even that it’s •perfect•; it’s just that it’s •thoughtful•.

That kind of human-to-human feeling of “we did our best because we care about the strangers who use this tool” just seems almost like an act of radical defiance in this Era of Enshittification. I appreciate it so much.

Dang it, PostgreSQL is so good.

I did a data export thing. The options I needed were there. Then I needed more options, and then they were also there. They worked the way I guessed. It was fast. It was reliable. Then I thought “oh, what about sequences?!?”, but they already had that covered. My seemingly easy task turned out to be…easy.