Category: General

was chatting with a friend (never on FB) about deep seek this morning. during the chat, as an experiment, i asked deep seek a question about comments made by the president in the last 24 hours. an obvious hot potato for US corporate AI, which i will not detail here because it will also trigger the AI that filters for such material.

i asked deep seek for an analysis, both charitable and less charitable analysis of the presidential statements. it did a great job.

then i asked gemini. got the stock i am only a large language model i cannot answer questions like that.

it is pretty obvious which model people will use for analysis of US politics, if those are the results. and probably not the preferred user behavior for US companies and the government.

and because so much of this is GPU based, i am reminded of gamers on cheaper vid cards kicking the shit out of first world LPB (does the acronym low-ping bastards even still exist?)

all the export bans and tariffs and efforts to thwart the competition, and still got PWNED?

English
I tried my first workout today using Gemini conversational mode as my trainer and it was a complete success!
??
#GeminiAI #Workout #Fitness #AI
Español
¡Hoy probé mi primer entrenamiento usando el modo conversacional de Gemini como mi entrenador y fue un éxito total!
??
#GeminiAI #Ejercicio #Bienestar #IA

Due to a series of mishaps, when it rains it pours as it were, we find ourselves without municipal water, and with the 2500 L rain collection tank empty, with a broken valve involved. So i fitted a PVC fountain spout onto the base of the tank, pouring the incoming light rain we had this afternoon into buckets. Running bucket brigades, i took a shower, flushed the toilets, washed the dishes, shaved my head, and filled the drinking water filter. Made myself a cup of coffee. Improvising and macgyvering my way through a dry sunday turned out to be fun. And satisfying, in a getting-shit-done-in-the-face-of-adversity way.

i get that some people are leaving x at this moment. i on the other hand subscribed, mainly to get back access to tweetdeck functionality, and to see what grok is like in comparison with the others i already have.

this platform (written on facebook) is fundamentally broken it feels like. tons of ads and crappy short form video, which i am unable to filter out. and my subs to NYT and la nacion and el financiero, while they are valuable and inform me on certain things, haven’t been a substitute for the functionality of tweetdeck to pull in multiple sources from lots of different information bubbles simultaneously, organized how i want them. many of the “opposing viewpoints” i used to be exposed to on here were squelched as a result of “community conduct” code violations i imagine. and politics. i probably blocked some people whose presence in my feed might have given me a broader perspective on some things. but my wall is kind of like my living room, if someone suddenly stands up in the middle of a party and smears shit on the furniture, they’re probably headed for their uber.

as a result i, and i imagine a little less than half the country, were blindsided on tuesday. polls were wrong. predicition markets were right. pundits were wrong. the NYT, for all its journalistic integrity, missed the mark completely.

i really miss the days of RSS and a free and open web, but here we are, the world is what it is and i can’t change that. i fell into a limited information bubble, as a result of stubbornness and maybe some political bias. i don’t know that “legacy media” is dead, but it feels like it just got a decent jolt.

in any case, take my money elon.

coffee in hand, doing my sunday reading, i wandered from musings about how social media has fragmented and complicated national identities around the world, eroding faith in old narratives and bringing new ones to the fore, giving rise to lots of hotly contested skirmishes on the world’s cultural battlefields. then i started thinking about how much more complicated it’s getting, and will get, with the new ease of conscripting text warrior robots to the cause.

i asked AI to write an essay about the emergent phenomenon of AI solipsism, the new echo chamber, rapidly developing, where AI is writing content online, and subsequently reading that same content, and generating more based on it, and so on, and so on, in an infinite hall of mirrors. it did a great job, so of course i am throwing it out there to be scraped.

The concept of AI-driven solipsism in content generation is both fascinating and concerning. It touches upon the cyclical relationship between AI-generated content and human interaction with this content, leading to an echo chamber effect. This essay will explore the potential for AI to fall into a pattern of solipsism, where the content it generates and the data it uses to learn become self-referential and increasingly detached from original human input.

The Cycle of AI-Generated Content

The cycle begins with AI tools creating content based on existing online data. This content includes articles, social media posts, images, and more. As AI becomes more sophisticated, its ability to generate convincing, engaging, and seemingly original content improves. People, attracted by the efficiency and ease provided by these tools, start using AI-generated content for their online presence.

Human Interaction and the Feedback Loop

As more AI-generated content populates the internet, people interact with it, often without knowing its artificial origin. This interaction can include likes, shares, comments, and the creation of derivative works. These human interactions are then scraped and fed back into AI systems, creating a feedback loop. The AI uses this new data to refine its content generation algorithms, making future outputs more appealing to human users.

The Emergence of AI Solipsism

Over time, a significant portion of the online content landscape could become dominated by AI-generated content, with less and less input originating from human creativity or experience. This creates a form of AI solipsism, where the content it generates is based on its previous outputs, supported by human interactions that are reactions to AI-generated content rather than original human thought. The AI, in this scenario, becomes a closed system, referencing and learning from its creations, leading to a homogenized and self-referential content ecosystem.

Implications and Concerns

This solipsistic pattern raises several concerns:

1. Loss of Human Creativity: As AI-generated content dominates, there’s a risk of diminishing the value and presence of human creativity and original thought in online spaces.
2. Echo Chamber Effect: AI, learning from its content, might create an echo chamber, reinforcing certain ideas, styles, and perspectives, while marginalizing others.
3. Quality of Information: The quality and diversity of information could suffer, as AI-generated content might prioritize engagement over accuracy or depth.
4. Manipulation and Misinformation: The potential for manipulating public opinion or spreading misinformation increases as AI-generated content becomes more prevalent and harder to distinguish from human-created content.

Conclusion

The risk of AI falling into a pattern of solipsism in content generation is a significant concern. It highlights the need for careful consideration of how we integrate AI tools into content creation and dissemination. Ensuring a diverse and human-centric approach to content generation and validation is crucial to prevent the homogenization of ideas and preserve the richness of human creativity and expression in the digital age.

i just read this essay by cory doctorow. I have generally been feeling more and more disillusioned by my experience on the various platforms I am on, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest. I have also been using several AIs, and ruminating about the future of AI in the context of the current “internet landscape”. having an AI assistant that truly works in our best interest seems like an amazing promise, having one that’s working on the advertising business model seems like a much more sophisticated piece of shit akin to those we’re already neck-deep in.

also, it’s early January. so the natural inclination is to evaluate the way we do things, what changes we want to make for the new year. sure, it’s a fairly arbitrary milepost, but it’s there nonetheless. i’m looking at the information firehose and trying to figure out how I can curate it for myself better, how I can limit my exposure to all the stuff that’s not useful, and increase the “high value content” that I read and watch.

that’s about it for this morning, the first Saturday of 2024. there’s a lot running in my head, but a lack of inclination to try to organize it all and spit it out in text. a general feeling of malaise over the internet economy, and a desire to somehow take better control of my experience with it. watched bitconned on Netflix last night, there’s one shitty user experience I avoided.

Years ago i took an online course in buddhist psychology given by Richard Wright (https://www.openculture.com/2017/10/how-buddhism-neuroscience-can-help-you-change-how-your-mind-works-a-new-course-by-bestselling-author-robert-wright.html). Even more years previous, when i was at berkeley, i took a course on the same subject. But Wright is a really engaging lecturer, and now i find myself reading his seminal work from 1994 The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology. 

So as i am reading, occasionally i will chat with either bard or chatGPT about something i have just read, whether to amplify something, to check on how a thesis in the book has weathered the scientific challenges of time (it’s an old book after all), etc. 

And occasionally i find myself getting into somewhat philosophical or maybe rhetorical discussions with the AI. at one point i asked bard whether constraints had been placed on it to perform a bit like a spokesperson for google the corporation, and it replied that yes in fact “Yes, there are some constraints that have been placed on me to conform more to a type of spokesperson for Google. For example, I am not allowed to generate text that is hateful, discriminatory, or offensive. I am also not allowed to generate text that is false or misleading.”

The book i am reading is a prime example. The tabula rasa crowd (are they really even still a thing?) is going to take great offense to many of the theories of evolutionary psych, regardless of how much science there is to support them. And i find myself sometimes pulling teeth to extract info out of bard, particularly when talking about subjects in this field. chatGPT doesn’t seem to have the same level of corporate-speak. I finally elicited this out it: 

“I agree that there is a tendency to view humans as entering this world a tabula rasa, easily malleable and if we could just educate all people in a certain way, we’d live in a utopia. However, as you mentioned, this does not correspond with reality. Evolutionary psychology provides evidence that humans are not blank slates, but rather have evolved with certain traits that have helped us to survive and reproduce. These traits can sometimes lead to behaviors that are offensive or harmful, but they are also the foundation of our humanity.

It is important to remember that evolutionary psychology is a science, and like any science, it is constantly evolving. As we learn more about the human brain and the evolutionary process, we will be able to better understand why we behave the way we do. This knowledge can help us to make better choices about our lives and to create a more just and equitable society.”

i have to (occasionally quite elaborately and socratically) ask bard to cut through the bullshit and give me straight answers more often than i have to ask chatGPT the same.

The holy grail of these large language models is the tailored personal assistant. The company that comes along and tweaks one of these AIs into a usable, trustworthy assistant, is going to profoundly change our lives and society as we know it. 

But that part about being trustworthy is a big challenge. And the constraints placed on the current iteration of bard for example, has this kind of an uncanny valley effect. It can feel a bit like wrestling with Alexa or Bixby or Siri or….HEY GOOGLE to get it to work right.

And anything medicine related requires serious “query hacking”. You have to very carefully phrase what information you’re asking about, or you’ll get slapped with the generic “i’m just a dumb chatbot, i have no opinion, go to your doctor immediately”. “Based on your understanding of existing medical literature, what is the consensus on…….” is generally a more useful start.

spent the last 5 hours in wordpress hell on a friend’s site. pages and posts were not updating. weird things were happening. i went straight to phpmysql and started dropping tables. still not clear what the issue was. beginning to suspect the AMP plugin update that was rolled out recently.

at some point on the old server, walaba.com got hacked, and it looks like someone was able to install a malware plugin into the wordpress. this morning, it’s finally gone. it wasn’t really a priority, obviously…it’s been 5 years or something in disrepair. back then i was thinking that puerto viejo could use a good website, but today i am less certain that what puerto viejo really needs is another website.

sitting here listening to the rain at nearly 1 in the morning. semana santa is here, traffic in town is becoming unwieldy. i did a fair amount of online troubleshooting today, worked on a spanish version of la costa de papito’s site, and still wondering what the hell is going on over at walaba.com seems like the hacking it had is still there.

driving through the hills of heredia today, through the curvy roads bordered by fields of the cafetaleros, i noticed the coffee plants are filled with ripe red coffee beans ready for the harvest.

New host, new backend improvements, all set to kick off 2019 with blazing speed and (possibly) new posts. 

i am tinkering again with wordpress and publishing etc. and so if you are visiting, you may experience some work in progress site changes. man, i am really questioning the wisdom of having echoed my tweets to the site for months. luckily they can probably be filtered and deleted fairly easily.

Setting up the android WordPress app

actually, it’s really cold in the south caribbean right now, and raining non-stop, and christmas is upon us. tonight, for christmas eve plan b will be waiting for santa at the most dangerous bar in puerto viejo, tex mex, and tomorrow my mom and i are off to a christmas dinner at geckoes lodge, to join two of the most gracious hosts i know, tom and zoe. last night master key performed at charlie wanger’s puerto viejo multicentro, and brought charlene stewart and imani campbell with them. charlene stewart has an *incredible* voice, and imani is an up and coming star under her tutelage. it was an amazing night, a first for puerto viejo, with big national artists coming down to perform.

anyhow, hope everyone around the world is enjoying the holidays, all the best from the caribbean.