Learning machine learning: On the political economy of big tech’s online AI courses - Inga Luchs, Clemens Apprich, Marcel Broersma, 2023

tl;dr version: Large tech companies pretend to offer educational material about machine learning, but what they’re really doing is trying to train you in how to use their very specific technology so that they can lock as many people as possible into that way of thinking and doing things, and therefore control the market. A quote:

We demonstrate how the online courses further support Google and IBM to consolidate and even expand their position of power by recruiting new AI talent and by securing their infrastructures and models to become the dominant ones.

Which is fine–all tech companies do some variation of this, and depending on what you’re doing you may need it–but don’t confuse this vocational training for education, because it’s not that.

The structure of the software running a Ponzi scheme does not change the fact that it’s a Ponzi scheme and that it’s guaranteed to crash some day. Spit out that crypto Kool-aid and look reality in the face.

@adi@twtxt.net The cryptocurrency industry collapsed because the idea at its core is a Ponzi scheme. It doesn’t matter how you implement the Ponzi scheme in software. The only way to accrue value is to bring in more people who are willing to pay more money for the currency than what you paid for it. That’s the literal definition of a Ponzi scheme and is inherently unstable (it crashes the moment the of rate of incoming new users slows down).

Love it or hate it, institutionalized fiat currency has value because the issuing country has people with guns who will drag you off to a metal box if you don’t use the currency in the intended ways (unless you’re super rich I guess). That aside, cryptocurrency stupidly throws away many thousands of years of accumulated human knowledge about how currencies work and don’t work. For that reason alone it’s stupid and untrustworthy.

@prologic@twtxt.net I don’t know! They speculated it had something to do with his being in Russia. But it sounds like github hasn’t said anything yet.

@adi@twtxt.net like literally the entire cryptocurrency industry has collapsed in the last year, year and a half? Having institutions stewarding this shit is a net positive.

@prologic@twtxt.net lol wtf is going on in this picture???

@phoronix@feeds.twtxt.net hmmmm 🤔

@adi@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Sharding a cerntralized storage structure is not the same as decentralization. Blockchains, for all the hype, are essentially the same as sharded databases where every user has the entire database as a shard (!!!). The worst of every world. It’d be like having a RAID array where every disk was a mirror of every other disk.

@Phys_org@feeds.twtxt.net Lousy headline. Neural networks don’t learn anything. They are not sentient, nor do they have drive or will. You wouldn’t say “Gaussian distribution learns mean and variance” so don’t phrase headlines like this.

Regarding the ActivityPub conversation, I’m not sure I understand why a bridge wouldn’t be the preferred solution. It seems to me a well-done bridge would minimize the downsides while still allowing people to interact with ActivityPub users if they want.

@prologic@twtxt.net @darch@neotxt.dk I prefer Apartheid Clyde, personally.

@prologic@twtxt.net right, right, that is concerning.

@ocdtrekkie@twtxt.net Yes, I think you’re right. That didn’t click for me at first, but I think I get it now.

@prologic@twtxt.net ohh I see. I think the difference between the two hadn’t quite clicked.

So in that case why wouldn’t it be possible to have an ActivityPub bridge that forced yarn semantics (so to speak)? If someone sent you a reply via ActivityPub you wouldn’t see it on yarn unless you followed their feed?

@prologic@twtxt.net It seems to me this distinction is pedantic and mostly at the server level. I have a mastodon account and I have no impression that I am being forced to read things I don’t want to read. I follow the people I want to follow, I mute or block the people I don’t ever want to see. It’s almost exactly the same reading experience as I have on yarn–different people and content obviously, but very similar functionally speaking. I think there are other issues that are of more concern.

I’d argue that mastodon gives you as an end user significantly better control over what you see than yarn does. You can mute by keyword, for instance–if you don’t want to see posts about “ChatGPT” anymore, you mute that word and poof! those posts are gone. You can block individuals, or entire instances. You can mute hashtags. You can set timed mutes/blocks, for instance muting a person for 1 hour or 1 day and then having that mute or block automatically reversed. Once you learn how to use those tools, the chance you’ll ever see a post you don’t want to see is pretty low unless you’re being actively harassed or you wade into the “federated timeline”. I can’t speak to the administrator tools since I’ve never set up an instance and played with them. Anyway, my mastodon account feels pretty slow to me, and I feel like I’m in full control of what I see–nothing at all like being shouted at.

yarn, as it is, seems ripe for abuse if there’s ever a large influx of potentially malicious users, because it does not have fine-grained end-user tools like these. What would you, as an end user, do if someone stood up a yarn pod full of assholes who all collectively decided to twt at you all day every day? What would your options be to stop that, which would very much feel like being shouted at? At the administrator level, I had to drop the OS and block a range of IP addresses to keep spam users from continually registering on my pod, for instance; yarn only gave me the option to manually delete them one-by-one as they popped up.

@support@anthony.buc.ci and again @prologic@twtxt.net

@support@anthony.buc.ci been getting these again

@prologic@twtxt.net 🤬🤬🤬

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org I’d probably unplug the keyboard by accident and have the same experience 😵

I just sat here for a good five minutes frustrated that a keyboard shortcut I use a lot had suddenly stopped working. It turns out my wireless keyboard’s battery had died. I kept hitting the shortcut over and over, thinking “wtf? Why isn’t this working?” before I thought to check the keyboard 😆

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net It’s frustrating and agonizing to watch 😦

@carsten@yarn.zn80.net NATO and the US have been drip feeding Ukraine just enough support to keep it from falling completely and quickly, but not enough to allow it to definitively win. It’s as if the west is trying to create a zone of permanent death there. Completely sociopathic bureaucracy, and so much needless death.