#WeblogPoMo2024 - Vulnerable Thoughts Around LLMS and generative AI

Theory > WeblogPoMo

It makes me extremely uncomfortable to think in terms of ethics when it comes to generative AI. I would like to say that I am agreeing with Baldur Bjarnason on the matter and that there is actually nothing to discuss, but only to state that AI is unethical, unsustainable, un-researched and actively harmful to the planet and its inhabitants. It’s also a bubble and can’t deliver on its promise:

Found via a Reddit post about a WSJ article quoting a Sequioa presentation

In a presentation earlier this month, the venture-capital firm Sequoia estimated that the AI industry spent $50 billion on the Nvidia chips used to train advanced AI models last year, but brought in only $3 billion in revenue. This 17x number is just for chips – Nvidia chips alone, I think – so the actual cost-to-revenue multiplier is much higher in reality. So the hardware it’s installed in and the actual CPUs are extra. Research is extra. The army of freelancers used for RLHF training are extra. Electricity cost is extra. And chips depreciate in value pretty rapidly. Especially since every chip vendor on the planet has more specialised ML chips in the pipeline that are more effective at the task. This investment will be worthless pretty quickly.

But then … I am using it at work - where my employers pay for a pro version for us to use - and even in my free time I use it as my access to a more advanced version makes it more interesting to use and I’m - as I am so often - caught up in a kind of fatalist argument, it seems: I do not see LLMs going away. Do I feel better for not using them? Only theoretically. I feel like I am learning things while I use them because there are actually wast swaths of what I am theoretically supposed to to be able to do at work that I can’t do without a nudge here and there. Same is true in recreational programming.

In theory I feel that keeping myself morally untouchable and staying “pure” is interesting, but just as I tried to express when I was talking about manifestos and their harsh delineation between good and bad according to a standard they define without outlining the practical steps to make this a reality, I find myself reaching for the same here: Purity is theoretically interesting, but practically life happens elsewhere and so it is more a question of degree, if anything.

I can’t and won’t deny the fact that I find these AI tools helpful and interesting, sometimes. I won’t not agree either that they are also not unproblematic. However, I will say that excluding these things from your life - by individual consumer choice - doesn’t do anything to make them do less harm, make them more sustainable or actually changing the practicalities of life. We have become very good at defining things in such an “either/or” way that it has become useless to apply these standards to any real life situation, where you may be forced, coerced or seduced into - for example - using these things. What now? Time to stop living? Time to apologize for the rest of your life? I think that we may have to relearn how to examine the world. Not in terms of purity of our actions, but in terms of the realization of the world we inhabit.

This means manny big and small things. One small thing it means is to understand the relative limit any one’s actions have on the whole. We are an expression of the whole, so not being able to change the whole is not THAT surprising, I’d say. This also means that better understanding the whole - for example by examining the insane amounts of money and resources that are put into training, developing and serving these models to customers (like in the quote above) and how insanely powerless we as individuals are to change this - helps understanding us and our place int this world. Look, even in Europe - which I would only call a beacon of democracy by comparison to the alternatives out there - I do not foresee a sufficiently strict policy that would make LLMs impossible to deploy even though they are, in their current state, unethical in so many ways.

But if this is the case … I think you ought to be able to examine what you’re dealing with. I think people found always interesting what is problematic in one way or another. As far as I can tell LLMs and the whole field of commercial AI are no different. Does this give you card blanche to not care about any and all concerns around this? No. Does this mean you can’t use those tools? I don’t know, I tend to think the answer is no here, too.

There are things that are tabus in society that you definitely, positively cannot find good and explore in the way I try to argue for here. You can’t try on “slavery” or “naziism” for size, for example. But LLMs are not a tabu. They are problematic, sure, but they are not the same thing as those societal tabus. They may become one, we’ll see. It follows that you may be interested in them as long as you stay mindful and open to what they may become. I would even say that it is important to stay engaged, because this also makes it possible to recognize what may be worth developing further.

I guess what I’m trying to argue for is: 1. LLMs are going to stick around. They may not fulfill their promise of becoming super intelligent conscious agents - which is pretty unlikely and in any case prohibitively expensive and ruinous to our planet - but they are here to stay in some form or fashion. 2. Being interested in and using LLMs - even in your day to day life - won’t change this, however it well give you a better idea of what LLMs are and what they can and can’t do in an experiential sort of way that will absolutely change your perception of them. It’s not wrong to be curious as long as you’re cautious and recognize that you can’t generalize your experience: You’re not doing publishable research, you’re finding out for yourself. 3. I find it MUCH more valuable to live in the uncomfortable truth that you as an “unpure” individual can only do so much, apart from being interested in what is going on and actually recognize and examine what makes existence so uncomfortable if you can’t change what’s happening, which is kind of contradictoriy. I want people to express this ambivalence and live in it, because most of us are simply unable to live purely for purity’s sake.

#WeblogPoMo2024 - Thoughts on "Manifesto for a Humane Web"

Theory > WeblogPoMo

The developer Michelle Barker has published a very cool Manifesto for A Humane Web and I wanted to comment on it a little. I mostly wanted to point to some lines from Bruno Latour and his 2010 paper An Attempt at a “Compositionist” Manifesto and comment on their implication for the Humane Web Manifesto, as far as I am interested in it here:

I know full well that, just like the time of avant-gardes or that of the Great Frontier, the time of manifestos has long passed. Actually, it is the time of time that has passed: this strange idea of a vast army moving forward, preceded by the most daring innovators and thinkers, followed by a mass of slower and heavier crowds, while the rearguard of the most archaic, the most primitive, the most reactionary people trails behind[…]. During this recently defunct time of time, manifestos were like so many war cries intended to speed up the movement, ridicule the Philistines, castigate the reactionaries. This huge warlike narrative was predicated on the idea that the flow of time had one—and only one—inevitable and irreversible direction. The war waged by the avant-gardes would be won, no matter how many defeats they suffered. What this series of manifestos pointed to was the inevitable march of progress. So much so that these manifestos could be used like so many signposts to decide who was more “progressive” and who was more “reactionary.”

And even though I love this text for it is a pretty good one, I will stop quoting after one more passage:

And yet a manifesto might not be so useless at this point, making explicit (that is, manifest) a subtle but radical transformation in the definition of what it means to progress, that is, to process forward and meet new prospects. Not as a war cry for an avant-garde to move even further and faster ahead, but rather as a warning, a call to attention, so as to stop going further in the same way as before toward the future.

I think that this understanding of what a manifesto could be in our modern world fits nicely to the way the web is going and how to proceed: Carefully and facing the future. With taking precautions and slowly. With an eye for a more “ecologist” web, that is with an eye for dependencies and conditions that make up diversity. I think this is a great framing for the humane web, because the categories used to frame this manifesto make clear what is needed for society of the web to make it in the wilderness that is the internet: “accessible”, “inclusive”, “safe”, “secure”, “sustainable”, “reliable”, “resilient”, “transparent”, “independent”, “human-centred”.

I have some quibbles with some of the categories and especially coming from a Latourian actor-network perspective I find that using the term “society” (as in “Like a functioning society, we take what we need, and we contribute what we can. We are citizens of the web…") would need to be qualified a little to make sure that we understand ourselves as makers being made by the web - which just means that tools have agency, too and that we have to lengthen our gaze a little past what we would traditionally call society. There is more involved.

About those categories I will only note one more thing before trying to express what I would’ve like to see more of. This point is that instead of “independent” I would have chosen the word interdependent. And instead of “human-centred” I would have chosen “un-centered” or “distributed”. But let’s not get lost in the weeds.

I know that this manifesto is very much of its time and reacts to platformism, late capitalism and the threat of “Big AI”. But I think it is important to realize that the society of the web needs to be assembled slowly, carefully, facing the complexities ahead by remaking - I would say - what here & now means, by taking more time examining what lies before us.

Sounds nebolous? But questions like the following arise from this stance:

  • “How exactly are we going to think of a web society?”
  • “How can an individual take meaningful steps?”
  • “What does it mean to not filter out by categories, those who are “un-progressive” or “progressive with an asterisk” but to describe a prospective future?”
  • “What series of steps can be taken as an assembly of actors (a team, a company, a neighborhood)?”
  • “What is implied by the difference of being un/humane? Are those who are humane able to sustain themselves in any way? How? Can we separate them from the un-humane ones? How? Is this a stable difference? Who differentiates?”

I think the most understandable way I can put this - because I get annoyed by the way I have to express this as well, a little: If this manifesto and others like it that it links to point at something, is this something served by the playbook of exclusion/inclusion, sorting and filtering out? I imagine that whatever the humane web could be, it would express itself less in terms of framing out what it is not by underlining what it is, but by exploring what would make it possible to exist at all. What are the technologies, processes, organizational forms, ways of observing, tending to, maintaining, caring for and negotiating that could make a different web? This also implies what can stay - I assume the underwater cables, the http protocol can stay, CSS can stay, but what else? Do we know the web that is?

I’m all for binding those “How?“s I would have liked to hear more about to a higher order thinking, but I am not so interested to be sorted into good or bad by adhering to either all of the categories or none, without being told what is needed to even make one of these categories a real thing on a planetary scale (is that the goal?) and what is done to make it worth it to try for that.

#WeblogPoMo2024 - 100 Days To Offload Next?

WeblogPoMo

I need more reasons to blog regularly. Can we have a WeblogPoMo every month? I have not been as engaged with my own blog in at least three months. It may not look like much, but I think that having an excuse to publish and work on the blog is awesome because the slight social pressure helps me build some momentum and get back to posting regularly. And then I noticed this sentence under “Inspiration” of the WeblogPoMo page:

I am also (selfishly) prepping myself to get back into a daily blogging habit so I can complete Kev Quirk’s 100 Days To Offload within the next year.

So what is 100 Day To Offload?

The whole point of #100DaysToOffload is to challenge you to publish 100 posts on your personal blog in a year.

I guess I know what I’m doing next.

#WeblogPoMo2024 Apple Music's Create Station Is Actually Pretty Good

Music > WeblogPoMo

I do not have great needs when it comes to my music streaming service:

  • I want (most) of the music that I know and love available to me
  • I want to be able to manage owned music and want it to integrate with the streaming offering
  • I want to be able to find new music that I actually like

I struggled especially with the last part until a few days ago, but I can now say, that picking a song I like at the moment and use the create station command is pretty good! It might be just my imagination, but I think that this generates better, more relevant song lists than using Autoplay when running out of music in a playlist, listening to the radio, or listening to their curated playlists (personalized or not). All of the other stuff doesn’t really work for me. But this does. So it may be worth a try.

#WeblogPoMo2024 - Overview

WeblogPoMo
  • Last updated: 2024-05-14 - 21:32

More for me than anyone else: Here are my posts for the WeblogPoMo2024.

Total: 8 Posts

#WeblogPoMo2024 Feeling At Home In The Abstract (From Theory To Programming)

WeblogPoMo

Why am I such bad photographer? Why do I not care about such things? Why am I so bad ad drawing? Why do I not have the patience for that? Why do I not try to create things that are trying to be optically pleasing? Why do I not create sculpture? Or handcrafts? Why am I not?

There are obvious answers. Talent would be one. Laziness an other. From the obvious ones, I like to think that I employ my creativity more and better in the abstract. Earlier in my life, I would have said that historical epistemology, sociological systems theory and actor-network theory would have been my playing fields. Nowadays it’s software architecture and software development. And I guess essayistic journaling. Ruminating on things, how they could fit. Thinking about thinking and writing about writing. It’s thinking and writing. But it’s not beautiful writing. If it’s that, it’s kind of accidental on purpose, maybe. But not in English. It’s mostly functional, because my voice won’t come out as easily in English as it does in German. Which is not even always a bad thing.

I sometimes long for being able to write about mundane things like how does it feel to live in a different country (notice, that I didn’t say Finland; I immediately went abstract abain…), for example? Or being in an international relationship, or whatever? I force myself to write about this stuff sometimes, because I want to preserve a kind of public record of the years I went through, but I ordinarily would write about more abstract things.

I do notice that a lot of my abstract thinking has either become private and found a place in my notes app, instead of my blog, or has become purely thinking because my life is so full of stuff and non-abstract life that I can’t indulge in this kind of stuff too much. But what am I even saying. Even if I don’t get to spend all of my time thinking about the act of writing-thinking in the abstract, my life is still full of the abstract: Because I’m a programmer and the act of programming is at its root a work of abstracting. This way of abstracting just feels much more concrete to me nowadays. It also doesn’t feel as explorative, because in the end I am supposed to abstract for money, meaning I am supposed to create, to produce really, business value with my work.

I recently learned an interesting thing about my inclination for abstraction: It wants to be explorative. I think I’m doing my best creative work, when I can look at a legacy body of work - this could be an abstract published text, or a legacy code base - and am allowed to take my time with said body of work. The notion of refactoring comes to mind: In programming this is defined as a behavior preserving code change. This enables the restructuring and renewing of legacy code bases. Something similar could maybe be claimed for often times unwieldy abstract texts, too. I am able to dissect them and reassemble them. So that I can explain them, use parts of them, recombine them, take parts of them and combine them with other parts from other texts and be innovative with them. At least for me I can do that pretty well. The opportunity to do anything with that “in the open” has kind of passed though. I do not envision myself publishing many papers about new aspects of actor-network theory, for example. I do envision myself using this muscle to become pretty good at thinking about the craft of programming, though. I am happy to say that I get payed for spending about 8 hours a day writing and thinking about code. Most of this is relatively mundane web development in a more or less proprietary legacy framework, but even then it lets me imagine and sometimes even actually do some applied creative abstract thinking.

And that’s awesome and interesting to me. And I want to become better at it, I want to do more of it and I want to be able to take on more responsibility so that I may contribute wider reaching solutions to this code base of ours, so that others can use and appreciate them. I feel in this way I am not, nor was I ever, that different from creatives that work within a less abstract medium.

For a second I had hopes that the iPad event would be interesting. I was hoping for mac apps on the iPad - or even a full fledged macOs. But nope…

A New Cross-Posting Workflow, Part 1: Requirements And Thoughts On Implementation

Blog > DailyDogo > WeblogPoMo

You know what I don’t like about my blog? The way it crossposts to other services. Micro.blog’s understanding of cross-posting is as follows:

Micro.blog cross-posting copies your posts from this feed to external services automatically when you post to your blog.

Which is not what I want. I would like it to work more in this way:

  • Blog posts (with our without title) should be shared automatically on my Mastodon account with a proper link, maybe an applicable hashtag. But it should be clear that I’m sharing a blog post, which is not the same as writing a toot and that difference shouldn’t therefore be invisible by just tooting the same content 1:1 as I posted on my blog
  • An exception are the DailyDogos and other posts like it (not that there are any at the moment…). These should be shared with the image attached. Maybe there is not even a need for the link, but it would be fine if it would be there
  • When I’m writing a toot, I’d like my blog to archive a copy of that toot. The archived version should include images, links and whathaveyou.

So basically there are two workflows with a couple of conditionals I would like to implement:

  • Cross-Post all blog posts from my micro.blog to my mastodon (excluding posts that are archival copies of mastodon posts; denoted by being part of the category “archivalCopyOfToot”)
    • if the post has a title, use the title to create a link to the post and add any applicable hashtags by converting the assigned categories of said blog post to the toot
    • if the post has no title
      • if the post has category of “tootAsIs”
        • add any images to the toot and post the contents of the blog post as is to mastodon (maybe add a link to the original on my blog)
      • if the post has no category of “tootAsIs”
        • add a short (80 Chars and up to the next full word maybe?) excerpt and otherwise behave like a titled post

I happen to have an Echofeed account, which is part of the solution. I can point it at an RSS/JSON/Atom-Feed and it will post in a format I can specify to any of its supported services, which includes Mastodon and Micro.blog. It doesn’t have any conditional logic, though, so I will have to provide it with feeds that only include posts that I want it to cross post.

On the micro.blog side, this is maybe not trivial, but at least is possible, since micro.blog uses Hugo and you can - if you know how - customize it quite a bit. I’ll need three feeds:

  • A feed with only title posts, excluding any posts with the category “archivalCopyOfToot”
  • A feed with only non-title posts, including only those of “tootAsIs” (and excluding any from the category “archivalCopyOfToot”)
  • A feed with only non-title, excluding any of “tootAsIs” AND “archivalCopyOfToot”

I would then set up three echos that cross post to mastodon in the right way.

Mastodon on the other hand has a feed of my posts too, but it’s much more limited and creating new custom feeds that filter posts based on e.g. a hashtag are not possible, I believe. This means that we can’t filter for cross-posted blog posts and will necessarily import those items to our blog, too. I would really like to avoid having to run my own script - locally or on a server - talking to their api or whatever, so I think I’ll will have to live with the fact these duplicated posts will be crossposted back to my blog…

What I can do is filter these posts out on the micro.blog side. Meaning posts that include a certain Hashtag like “crossPostByEchoFeed” (this could even be added inside Echofeed for the workflow that posts from Mastodon to MB and could be invisible to Mastodon followers) need to be excluded from the homepage, archive and any feeds of my blog (hashtags can be converted to categories using filters on micro.blog, so if I figure out how to filter by one or more categories in Hugo’s template syntax, I should be fine implementing this). In that way they will be part of the blog, but they will not pollute the reading experience.

So yes. I have to set up some feeds and some logic to make undesired toots invisible but then I should be able to get what I want without the need to setup any scripts run by me.

#WeblogPoMo2024 - Starting late doesn't mean not doing the thing

WeblogPoMo

So I guess I’m doing the #WeblogPoMo2024 after all. It’s a monthlong blogging challenge with the idea of posting every day for the month of May. From @anniegreens, the initiator of the idea:

Probably obvious from the name: this is a one-month blogging challenge! It will start May 1, 2024, and end May 31, 2024. You will post as much as you can, ideally daily, but we all have lives, so go easy on yourself. This is meant to be fun!

If you’re curious, There is a participators list for the people who joined, like grown-ups on or before the first. I personally got inspired to participate because @robb posts cool things on his blog, and I want to post “cool, very much me” things, too.

I plan to publish 31 real posts (with a title and everything!) this month, and we’ll see if this works or not. They don’t need to be long, but they shouldn’t be just a mastodon toot. I also plan on revamping my cross-posting flow and using mastodon and micro.blog a little bit more reader-friendly (meaning: less cross-posting of content without clear differentiation of where to follow and why, but I’ll leave that for another post…)