Post AzVffWXE2anobT1OUq by jimray@mastodon.social
 (DIR) More posts by jimray@mastodon.social
 (DIR) Post #AzVffUtU8rQ5VvQ8um by jimray@mastodon.social
       2025-10-19T13:00:20Z
       
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       Having spent three years inside a massive tech company rebuilding itself around AI, @anildash is exactly right here. It’s normal technology that the bosses see as an opportunity to expand and exploit, including their own workers. https://www.anildash.com/2025/10/17/the-majority-ai-view/
       
 (DIR) Post #AzVffVhp7hga22yLNQ by dwineman@xoxo.zone
       2025-10-23T16:05:02Z
       
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       @jimray @anildash I think that framing has it a bit backwards. The *entire* reason this tech exists, and has essentially all of the available capital invested in it despite paltry revenue, is that it’s seen by wealthy dullards and psychopaths as a chance to destroy the value of creative and knowledge work; to enclose the “commons” of upward mobility through science and education (both of which they’re also actively working to destroy). It is anything but normal. https://circumstances.run/@davidgerard/115415020604832127
       
 (DIR) Post #AzVffWXE2anobT1OUq by jimray@mastodon.social
       2025-10-23T17:54:07Z
       
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       @dwineman @anildash @davidgerard I’d separate LLMs (and also blockchain and even NFT) from the way they’re implemented, especially via massive amounts of capital. Maybe a framing of LLM and blockchain are normal tech, “AI” or “crypto” are the political projects.
       
 (DIR) Post #AzVffXT0Zl1VUg3XYu by abucci@buc.ci
       2025-10-23T19:03:09Z
       
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       @jimray@mastodon.social The L in LLM is short for Large, and scaling up is a political project almost by necessity. You're quite literally increasing how many people are involved and/or affected, which is what politics is, at base. Computational linguists, who know a lot about how language actually works, make small language models. Only time will tell but those might be so-called "normal" technology that could be fairly separated from the political technologies of LLMs and AI more broadly.Large LMs come from Big Data which came from Google's thirst for data. But Google's behavior is part of a much larger and older US government project to data-fy everything. It's another step in an ongoing political transformation from at least WWII onward that many "Western" nations have been undergoing. If you're philosophically minded, Deleuze wrote a nice essay in the 1990s about what he dubbed "societies of control" that presages some of this and clearly articulates the political project underlying the transformation."Blockchain", like "AI", is a marketing term, not a technology. The blockchains I'm familiar with are inefficient (in multiple senses) at tasks database systems have been able to do better for half a century. Re-inventing the wheel, making it square, and calling it something else is not really technology, let alone normal. You have a better shot at understanding the motivations behind crypto if you understand this.We collectively need to get better at understanding these patterns and trends, so that we stop falling for the false promises surrounding technology artifacts. The politics behind them are easier to spot then, too.@dwineman@xoxo.zone @anildash@me.dm @davidgerard@circumstances.run