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Joined 3 months ago
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Cake day: August 24th, 2024

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  • Ah, thankyou for bearing with me, I see what you mean.

    I just assumed there must be a large military office nearby and they were targeting the procurement personnel who do the actual contract and tender work, plus maybe the manufacturer headquarters is nearby and this is part of one of the more revolting symptoms of a highly militarized capitalist culture. I didn’t get quite as far as drawing the connection to targeting politicians and staffers who likely can’t put a meeting with missile sales reps on their publicly documented calendars, but that makes a lot of sense.





  • For anyone else also interested, I went and had a look at the links Dessalines kindly provided.

    The source on the graphs says “Sources: Daniel Cox, Survey Center on American Life; Gallup Poll Social Series; FT analysis of General Social Surveys of Korea, Germany & US and the British Election Study. US data is respondent’s stated ideology. Other countries show support for liberal and conservative parties All figures are adjusted for time trend in the overall population.” Where FT is financial times.

    It’s not clear how the words “liberal” and “conservative” were chosen, whether they’re intended to mean “socially progressive” and “socially traditional” or have other connotations bound with the political parties too, and whether the original data chose those descriptions or if they’re FT’s inference as being “close enough” for an American audience.

    Unfortunately the FT data site is refusing to let me look at them without “legitimate interest” advertising cookies so I can’t tell you much more or if there’s any detail on methodology.


  • That has also always been my gut feel about Carmack, but it still sucks to see the evidence. I wish that gut feeling would stop being so dammed accurate, but it gets a lot of practise.

    Doom was definitely christofascist fantasy porn. At least Quake you were defending invasion from the most literal manifestation of eugenicist Space-Nazis possible. Yes I am choosing to disregard the inherent US military fetishism because I don’t want to ruin my formative media which I deep down always knew was problematic.

    sigh

    Can I at least keep the soundtracks as pleasant and untarnished memories?


  • Ugh. Thanks, yeah that’s good enough for me without even opening xcancel. My search for “Tim Sweeney conservative” only dredged up his land conservation purchases and the “stop being so divisive” / “no politics in art” dogwhistles which had previously made me suspicious, but I had mostly forgotten about. I quit Twitter many years ago so I missed that whole knobslobbering saga and didn’t think to include Musk after skimming today’s shitty Google “search” results.

    Ah fuck, and Carmack too? Goddamn it. Twist the knife a little harder.

    Fucking tech bros, always ruining tech.





  • I don’t toil in the mines of the big FAANG, but this tracks with what I’ve been seeing in my mine. I also predict it will end with lay-offs and companies collapsing.

    Zitron thinks a lot about the biggest companies and how it will ultimately hurt them, which is reasonable. But, I think it ironically downplays the scale of the bubble, and in turn, the impacts of it bursting.

    The expeditions into OpenAI’s financials have been very educational. If I were an investigative reporter, my next move would be to look at the networks created by venture capitalists and what is happening inside the companies who share the same patrons as Open AI. I don’t say that as someone who interacts with finances, just as someone who carefully watches organizational politics.







  • References weren’t paywalled, so I assume this is the paper in question:

    Hofmann, V., Kalluri, P.R., Jurafsky, D. et al. AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect. Nature (2024).

    Abstract

    Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from help with writing1,2 to informing hiring decisions3. However, these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgements biased in problematic ways about groups such as African Americans4,5,6,7. Although previous research has focused on overt racism in language models, social scientists have argued that racism with a more subtle character has developed over time, particularly in the United States after the civil rights movement8,9. It is unknown whether this covert racism manifests in language models. Here, we demonstrate that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice, exhibiting raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English (AAE) that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded. By contrast, the language models’ overt stereotypes about African Americans are more positive. Dialect prejudice has the potential for harmful consequences: language models are more likely to suggest that speakers of AAE be assigned less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death. Finally, we show that current practices of alleviating racial bias in language models, such as human preference alignment, exacerbate the discrepancy between covert and overt stereotypes, by superficially obscuring the racism that language models maintain on a deeper level. Our findings have far-reaching implications for the fair and safe use of language technology.