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Stochastic Parrot

For what it's worth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stochastic_parrot

The term was first used in the paper "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜" by Bender, Timnit Gebru, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell (using the pseudonym "Shmargaret Shmitchell"). The paper covered the risks of very large language models, regarding their environmental and financial costs, inscrutability leading to unknown dangerous biases, the inability of the models to understand the concepts underlying what they learn, and the potential for using them to deceive people. The paper and subsequent events resulted in Gebru and Mitchell losing their jobs at Google, and a subsequent protest by Google employees.

Absolutely nothing about this guy requires Russia to explain.

I don't think anything was wrong with Sekiro. Maybe because it's not online?

I heard they were all child murderers! 😱

I remember reading that quote before the game launched. Weird.

Well I could have, but simply chose not to.

This isn't meant to be a call-out or anything, but I think we should resist the urge to explain how bad certain things in the US are by comparing them to scary nonspecific foreigners. It seems to me the worst aspects of US society are largely home-grown and then sometimes exported. Eventually the impulse to say "this isn't what America is/should be, this is what they do in lesser societies" stops making sense.

This game was actually never coin-op. I think the designers may have been similarly motivated though- you can make a game last a lot longer if it's extremely difficult to beat.

The MS-DOS version of this game was actually not winnable without cheats because the jumping physics changed and they didn't update the level layouts for that.

not voting is the same as voting for Trump.

It is not.

Yeah, and it also happens to get me access to the tool that was able to summarize this video without watching it. But most people would probably choose the $5 tier, I think.

tl;dw

• Cory Doctorow coins the term "enshittification" to describe how platforms start out benefiting users but eventually abuse users and business customers to extract all value.

• Facebook started by prioritizing user privacy over ads but now prioritizes profits over all else.

• Network effects are a double-edged sword - they lock users in but also make platforms vulnerable if users leave en masse.

• Low switching costs due to universality and interoperability allow competitors to reverse engineer platforms and plug in competing services.

• Mandatory interoperability and limiting data control can curb platform power by distributing control to users and smaller companies.

• Recent antitrust actions aim to roll back decades of lax merger policy that let platforms consolidate power.

• Breakups will take a long time so interoperability is a faster way to restore competition.

• Laws should limit abusive behavior rather than rely on platforms to self-regulate.

• Federated open services fail gracefully and encourage migration to better platforms.

• Political will is growing but change will be gradual - focus should be on harm reduction in the near term.