David Pennington
@dtpennington
I write stuff. I’d like to write more stuff. Currently: reclaiming my brain.
David Pennington
dtpennington.com
A High-Level Introduction to Idleism
Not to be confused with idealism. Although, I wouldn’t mind making the argument that idle is the ideal. Some principles of Idleism, in no particular order:
You are more than an hourly rate.
You will never get paid “what you are worth” by an employer. The entire precept of capitalism is that they make more from your
You Don’t Have To Make Art
The early chorus of generative AI tools:
“Now everyone can make art regardless of their skills or tools.”
Could you not make art before? Even elephants can paint. Our ancestors created well known art by etching with a stone into the walls of the caves they called home. A kid with a box of discount crayons has no problem
Thoughts on AI (particularly generative AI) in no particular order of development or importance:
The widespread use of AI is resulting in the largest collective brain drain of the human experience. But is this the result of COVID (remote learning, overreliance on online experiences, mental decline from Long COVID) and AI is the tool used to
If the reading revolution represented the greatest transfer of knowledge to ordinary men and women in history, the screen revolution represents the greatest theft of knowledge from ordinary people in history.
James Marriott • The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society
"Specifically, we demonstrate that by injecting just 250 malicious documents into pretraining data, adversaries can successfully backdoor LLMs ranging from 600 [million] to 13 [billion] parameters."
Attention Required! | Cloudflare
Please? Is this possible?
A cottage industry of people creating documents that corrupt LLMs?
A Generative AI tool that creates the things that inherently corrupt other LLMs?
Addressing those who are critical of using the technology in this way, Zuckerberg said, “If you think that something someone is doing is bad, and they think it’s really valuable, most of the time, in my experience, they’re right and you’re wrong, and you just haven’t come up with a framework yet for understanding why the thing that [they’re] doing... See more
Vincent Sanchez-Gomez • We’ve all bought into technosolutionism, but we can opt out.
So, I just haven’t figured out how to make AI work with my life? Lame.
Memes aren’t an external influencing factor on culture – they’re endemic, a way for culture to express itself, like the technology of language or cave paintings.
All Mail
Rather than confronting the systems that create our problems, technosolutionists zoom in on a single friction point and deploy a product. To illustrate this, Sanchez-Gomez offers a great example: imagine a company developed a numbing ointment for the wounds of children working in factories rather than abolishing child labour. The ointment treats... See more