They are only a dead end from the perspective of those seeking AGI. To everybody else, the question might better be phrased as “Does current AI represent useful tools.” I would argue from that perspective, large language models are not at that end. They are in fact incredibly useful for maybe not replacing people, but definitely for augmenting what people can do in a 24-hour period.
The article isn’t talking about AGI, it’s about reliability. The point, as I read it, is that these systems are black boxes that can’t be decomposed, that are not predictable or reliable, whose behavior we can’t understand, and that have no accountability. I tend to agree.
The main mentions of accountability and responsibility I see in the article are:
By ‘software engineering’, I mean developing software to align with the principle that impactful software systems need to be trustworthy, which implies their development needs to be managed, transparent and accountable.
When I last gave talks about AI ethics, around 2018, my sense was that AI development was taking place alongside the abandonment of responsibility in two dimensions. Firstly, and following on from what was already happening in ‘big data’, the world stopped caring about where AI got its data — fitting in nicely with ‘surveillance capitalism. And secondly, contrary to what professional organisations like BCS and ACM had been preaching for years, the outcomes of AI algorithms were no longer viewed as the responsibility of their designers — or anybody, really.
The point, as I read it, is that these systems are black boxes that can’t be decomposed,
If you don’t know the weights, sure, neural networks are by definition black boxes. Many algorithms also look like black boxes if you can’t see the relevant details.
But if you know the weights and the architecture of a NN, there are ways to interpret them. There is interesting work being done here. It is a very different kind of interpretation than understanding a program based on its source code.
I’ve learned a lot from the interpretability research from the AI safety community. I recommend it.
The best I gather is that the state of the art in investigating regions of connectiveness or looking at the second or penultimate layers and inward, etc, is that it is all still very noisy and not generalizable to anything except another can of worms of 98% accuracy and a chaos monkey of the remaining 2% cascading into further error, just like how they behave interactively.
I learnt some explanation methods about neural network before LLM appeared. But I think large LM it too large to be explained, there are too much parameters, which means informations about how LLM works.
In my opinion, reliability is the last huge challenge in the road from current LLM to AGI. If current LLM is reliable, we will know when we can trust it 100%, when we cannot trust LLM and why, how we can improve it, after that, we always can achieve AGI.
Human intelligence is far from reliable or trustworthy; why would you expect AGI to be better? Especially when we’re building it using architectures inspired by our own brain structure.
In my opinion, Human intelligence is reliable, as least for himself / herself.
The content I output are based on what I knew, there is a reasonable process from what I knew to what I output.
Maybe sometimes what I output are not right externally, but it it for me right now, This is how I define “reliability”.
How much psychology have you read? There are any number of experiments showing that our minds are much, much less reliable than we think.
To the extent people are reliable it’s because we have checks and balances, rewards and punishment. In the small groups we’re evolved for, if you lie a lot or cheat, the people around you will learn not to trust you and you’ll lose social connection, which translates to emotional pain. Humans have significant amounts of cerebral cortex to track this. In larger societies we can’t scale up to keep doing this, but the smaller subgroups like offices and hierarchies help.
But when you add intrinsically unreliable AI agents with no social connections, all this breaks down. RHEL helps, but post-training there’s no reinforcement; after ChatGPT makes up an answer or acts according to biases encoded into it we have no way to punish it. You can’t shun it or complain to its boss and get it fired or take it out for drinks and change its mind.
I only knew a little psychology, but I agree with your meaning about “our minds are much less reliable than we think”.
Even when people are lying, there is still a reasonable thought process involved. This is something LLMs often lack.
I know what you mean, but there isn’t absolute ground truth for reliability, sorry for the misunderstanding, I think reasonability is a better word to express my idea.
I agree. Humans can be objectively wrong, but they’re very often consistently wrong. There’s an “internal state” that seems to be lacking from LLM output.
I agree that framing AI from the utility POV is more tractable.
To your first sentence: Anyone who makes a claim that a technology is a “dead end” is making a prediction about the future. Very few of such people take such predictions seriously. Even fewer make testable predictions on the record. Even fewer will be held accountable if wrong.
People like to speculate. I tend to heavily discount claims that aren’t (a) logically derivable or (b) clear and testable, where the author is accountable.
The author is a cryptographer. What issues are you thinking of that PGP is designed to avoid that age does not? I haven’t heard of any in the 5+ years that age has been around. (I think your comment is bad-faith FUD.)
The author is a cryptographer? Alright. Isn’t everyone who wrote ANY more or less popular encryption tool or software that has to do with cryptography a cryptographer as well? Nonetheless, bugs in them have been getting discovered years and decades afterwards.
I’ve never undertood: why copy-paste my local ssh key by “ssh-copy-id” instead of the manual copy-paste? Copy it locally, paste it into “authorized_key” on the server, in other tab.
Sometimes this command is not available and then indeed you can manually edit the authorizaed_keys, and it’s not mandatory to open a second tab, just having ssh can make it possible with one liner.
But having a tool that does it in a consistent way is handy for repetitive operations and to keep the scripting simple
The video for the sake of the video. The man isn’t technical, has no idea how it works in detail. Yet he tries to explain it. “Prefetching, preloading, prerendering. Crazy”.
How would you correct what he said using the correct terminology? Honestly curious as someone who isn’t versed in front-end development nor its performance.
The former is calling itself modern, but admitting that it may simply be “more” modern than some status quo depending on point of view, and not necessarily a paragon of modernity. The latter is just calling itself more modern than something, but it kind of suggests there’s a specific something being referred to (and either it’ll be mentioned or it’s meant to be obvious).
On the other hand TFA refers to the author’s previous modern reset, now archived (first paragraph). So it’s a modern css reset - which is a little more modern than the previous one - with similar name and function. More in brackets - as what it is, is “a modern css reset” (as was the previous one, this one more so)?
Does s/admitting/hinting/ make it more clear? I don’t mean “admission as in guilty”, it’s just a written device. It’s a modern CSS reset, and it’s also a more modern CSS reset: more modern than the earlier modern CSS reset.
I was giving my opinion as a linguist; your response is hostile and uncharitable. “There’s no need for the parenthesis” is all good and well, but guess what? It’s there, and you’re still left wondering why. I was giving a descriptive interpretation — how it reads to me. I am left making mental note not to respond to your comments in future. Have a good one.
The general idea made me think of it. Semantic compression goes like this:
Write dumb code, duplication is no big deal.
Once a pattern emerges, and you know which abstraction you’ll need (a function, a struct, whatever), then you refactor.
The idea is that compressing the code after the fact avoids over-engineering. Slightly under-engineered code is easier to fix than the wrong abstractions.
Piling up reasons to leave Facebook won’t make people leave Facebook. Most people cannot leave Facebook for the simple reason they need it and they have not enough time/energy/stability to invest time in exploring a new social network and rebuild their connections there.
Facebook is social infrastructure now and asking people to renounce using infrastructure is not just about the act itself, it comes with a big cost. You cannot ask people living in the countryside to renounce cars and ride bikes if the next town is 20kms away and the public transporation is basically absent. Yes, you can live in the countryside without a car and take the bus that comes twice a day but the rearragement required in your life is deep and complex. The same is true for Facebook. On top of this, expecting everybody to be able to rearrange their life like this is deeply classist and the like many “hackerist” issues, the condition of working people is not considered, limiting this action to a bourgie privilege equal to eating organic local food to fight global warming. This give the few activists a sense of moral entitlement and the others a sense of guilt (or directly a feeling of hatred for the cause and the activists, because they feel unable to join them), but contributes nothing to the ultimate cause.
The solution must be systemic: lobby to limit or ban facebook in your country, promote local, indipendent, politically-aware projects of social infrastructure re-development to replace Facebook, grow existing global solutions and do it on Facebook, because you want to reach the people on Facebook, not the others. And please, stop asking people to leave Facebook.
I was mostly with you until you claimed it’s ‘classist’ to tell people to stop using Facebook. What ‘bourgie privilege’ is involved in not using a toxic, harmful social media website? Step back and take a look at the big picture, seriously. There’s no need to be so dramatic. Using Facebook is not some ingrained human notion, it’s been popular for less than 10 years. Nobody has to ‘rearrange their life’ to stop using Facebook. There are alternatives for nearly every way in which people use it that require the same amount of effort or less to use.
Most peoples’ use of Facebook is in a few categories. They use it to show off, for messenger, for marketplace, for local groups, for family groups, or as a news website.
A lot of people use Facebook to show off. They post pictures of their kids, places they’ve been, pictures of themselves having fun. There’s a better version of Facebook for this called Instagram. Use that instead. Probably a lot of the same privacy issues, yeah, but at least it’s not literal Facebook.
Messenger isn’t even a good messaging platform, and there are lots of other ways of keeping in contact with people. A lot of people tell me they stay on Facebook for messenger, then when I ask them who they talk to on messenger that they can’t message otherwise they can’t answer. People want to ‘stay in contact’ with old school friends, but people managed to do that before Facebook fine, and personally I used that excuse until I realised that I hadn’t done so for years and I wasn’t going to. Let’s be realistic: people don’t keep in contact with old school friends because they don’t have anything in common other than having gone to the same school. They have no reason to keep in contact with or without Facebook. If there’s someone that really matters to you, you’ll find a way to contact them outside of Facebook (“hey can I have your email/phone number/whatever? I’m getting rid of my Facebook account”). And the rest that you never talk to anyway? You won’t actually miss anything by not being able to contact people you were never going to contact anyway.
Facebook marketplace is useful to people, but eBay and its many equivalents in different countries still exist and work, the classified section of the local paper still works. There are lots of other ways to buy and sell stuff other than Facebook. In my experience, selling stuff on Facebook means you get the most entitled people in history asking you questions and demanding things of you. The number of times I’ve sold something specifically with a fixed price and ‘pick up only’, the person has said they’ll buy it, and then they’ve turned around and gone ‘hey can you mail it to me I live in [other city]’. It says pick up only what is wrong with you. Or the dozen people that will ask you numerous in-depth questions trying to judge the quality of stuff you’re selling for $5. They can’t seem to tell that the effort I want to put into selling something when all I’m getting is $5 is going to be much less than when I’m selling something for $500.
Local area groups are probably the only subject where Facebook is still useful. If you’re a member of the local Facebook group for your suburb or whatever, then go ahead, stick with Facebook. I personally don’t know how people can stand them, they’re full of the kind of people I think Americans refer to as ‘soccer moms’: entitled, bougie, opinionated middle aged women (and it mostly is women) that think vaccines and fluoride are killing their kids and who can’t handle someone going on holiday for six weeks and not mowing their lawn from 10000km away. But some people find value in these groups and I can’t think of any particularly good alternative at the moment.
Family groups/group chats/whatever have loads of alternatives. And Facebook is an awful news website. Getting people just to stop using it as a news website, even if they still use it for everything else? That would be a blessing.
There’s a better version of Facebook for this called Instagram. Use that instead.
Instagram is owned by Facebook; don’t the same objections to Facebook apply to Instagram, as well? (genuine question, not a challenge)
Personally, I find Instagram to be kind of toxic in a way because now everyone is focused on creating the “Instagram picture”. I’m not sure if we can really blame the Instagram platform for that, but I don’t like it. It’s also toxic in the same way as Facebook: you only see the good parts of people’s lives, which is often just a façade.
Instagram is bad for many of the same reasons that Facebook is bad, but it’s not got the same kind of nightmarish qualities that push Facebook from bad to should-be-illegal IMO. I’ve never seen ‘Fake News’ on Instagram, just incredibly facile crap mostly.
People don’t need Facebook. People need water, amino-acids, vitamins and air. “But I have my entire social life in Facebook?”. I thought so too, then I quit Facebook and Instagram and found that I have exactly the same social life now.
In fact. Leaving those platform didn’t change my life one bit. Everything stayed exactly the same. That’s quite telling of the content on there.
How do you know that is not the case for everybody?
I am actually curious. Have there been any studies made?
I actually believe it is like that for most people. I also believe that they wouldn’t know unless they actually quit.
I stopped using it instead of deleting it. The problem is that most people I know, friends and family, put their concerns, plans, important developments, etc on there. I missed all that past what people texted me. They generally won’t go through the trouble to do extra stuff for people just not on the platform. Missing out on stuff created both distance and sometimes resentment by those on the platform.
So, I”ll probably rejoin Facebook plus get on one or more of the others in the future just to prevent that. I’m delaying it because it’s going to be a big change with a pile of incoming posts and messages. I got too much going on to respond to them right now.
To combat this, I use FB in a “read-only” way. Although I don’t find a big issue with catching up with people when you actually see them in person. In fact, not paying as much attention to FB almost guarantees that they will have something surprising and interesting to tell me.
I’ve never used Facebook and have no intentions to start, but it is not rare that I find I have missed events because they were posted only there. I am also at a point in my career where I don’t have to care that most local jobs are promoted on Facebook and sometimes only there.
It is definitely not the case for me. Or anyone from Lithuania really. Here Facebook has become so dominant, that other platforms are made basically irrelevant. Twitter? Maybe a thousand users. Mastodon? Three that I know of. Other chat programs? I’ve only seen Discord used which is even worse than Facebook in my opinion. Facebook has over 50% market penetration here, with most of it being in 13-45 range(which by my quick calculations, has ~80% market penetration). This has effects with how people use Facebook. It is the dominant platform of political discourse here. It is basically impossible to leave Facebook without social changes.
That’d be an interesting study or survey - surprised it hasn’t happened yet. Personally I do most of my chatting on Instagram - friends, acquaintances, group chats, new people I meet. People of my age and socioeconomic group are more likely to exchange IG than phone numbers upon meeting. That’s what’s difficult about these arguments - everyone’s life is different.
Also like @vegai, I once deleted Facebook (~2013) and my social life was greatly hindered. Of course, I am still alive, but looking back I did miss out on a lot of events and people. At least back then Facebook was mostly for events and to easily be able to chat with people you may not be close with yet.
lobby to limit or ban facebook in your country, promote local, independent […]
My thinking lately circles around a legislation requiring social services to federate using an open protocol, so that people could freely choose between apps and services without losing their connections. This would recognize the fact that Facebook didn’t create your social graph — you did. And you should own it.
I’d be more in favour of just banning Facebook. People don’t need Facebook or websites like it. Everyone I know that uses it does so under a feeling of duress: everyone else uses it, so I have to use it.
It’s enough to say that they cannot be privately owned, centralized or for-profit. Implementing it in law is much much harder but we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater
Such protocol would have to allow for end-to-end encryption, otherwise not much would change. The real problem isn’t who owns the data, but who can access them. Is strong encryption something society would consider desirable? Hint: Law enforcement.
Using a single protocol also means that there’s little to no space for inovation. Facebook did come up with things such as reactions to messages, which are not easily translatable to more oldschool IM protocols. As far as I know, it’s been also the first platform that came up with a confirmation that message have been read. I may not like these inovations, but that’s not the point.
The point is that you either force everyone to use a single protocol and make it difficult to push for any change, or allow for multiple protocols, which is basically what we have right now. Yes, it’s not open, but having documentation doesn’t necessarily mean it’d be possible to keep up; especially when it’s against Facebook’s interest. They would undergo some extra effort to abide the law while making sure no one can actually threaten them by developing a good FOSS client.
I understand a little bit where you’re coming from… just making a website telling people to leave Facebook doesn’t necessarily make a huge dent in the “stop Facebook” campaign. However, I respectfully disagree with your comment, and I think following the advice in your comment would be dangerous. Having sites like this are better than not having them.
Specific to this site, I really appreciate that they clearly stated the intent of the site, gave direct reasons backing up their “thesis”, and also provided source links to further back those claims. I hear a lot about the “stop Facebook” campaign, but I think having a site that provides a myriad of reasons why someone should stop using Facebook is helpful. There may be a reason on that site that helps push someone over the edge.
The site at the bottom also provides “how” links so that people can attempt to keep the functionality they would lose by leaving Facebook. Sure, nothing at this point has the exact same scale and features that Facebook does, but this gives people direct reasons why they should leave Facebook and gives them something to go to.
Also… your points contradict each other. Two examples:
How is someone supposed to “And please, stop asking people to leave Facebook.” while doing “lobby to limit or ban facebook in your country” at the same time?
“Facebook is social infrastructure now and asking people to renounce using infrastructure is not just about the act itself, it comes with a big cost.” many people are aware of this cost. I know at least one person who has significantly changed their life, their work… and more so that they can help people get off of these dangerous platforms because they see the risk of keeping them as worse. They are prepared to give up temporary satisfaction so that those in the future can have something greater. Calling people “deeply classist” is not respectful to the people who have given a lot to leave Facebook or similar sites; you assume everyone making a stance against Facebook already has some form of privilege.
I don’t share this to be “rude” or argue. I share this because I think what this site is doing is important.
Having sites like this are better than not having them.
I agree, but is it the best way to spend your effort? I mean, any tech person is already aware of why Facebook is bad for you, including people working in Facebook. Same is true for people in tech critique. Yes, there are still areas of the intellectual world that haven’t been conquered by these ideas, but it’s not a list of facts that will change that.
How is someone supposed to “And please, stop asking people to leave Facebook.” while doing “lobby to limit or ban facebook in your country” at the same time?
This is not contradictory: I’m on Facebook, I want Facebook to die. In the same way I’m a programmer with a high salary and I believe the system is broken for paying programmers so much. Or that I live in a society that I think it’s broken: it’s literally a meme.
The difference between individual action and systemic action is the key: here the solution must be systemic, not individual. Your stance on a political, systemic action doesn’t have to be somehow in accord with your individual consumption, because changing your consumption would be irrelevant. After the change you will lose Facebook and need to adapt your life? Yes, but so will everybody else and the transition will be easier because you will just follow the flow instead of going against it now.
They are prepared to give up temporary satisfaction so that those in the future can have something greater. Calling people “deeply classist” is not respectful to the people who have given a lot to leave Facebook or similar sites; you assume everyone making a stance against Facebook already has some form of privilege.
If you have time to care about political issues you’re already privileged. I say it as a person that spends half of his time on this and I feel deeply privileged, because I know that if I had to work 12 hours a day on stressful jobs, I wouldn’t be able to do all this stuff. I see the impact of a particularly stressful week at work on my projects and activities: if that was the norm as it is for the general population, I know I wouldn’t be able to achieve anything.
Most people cannot leave Facebook for the simple reason they need it and they have not enough time/energy/stability to invest time in exploring a new social network
Most people can’t leave. But many people can.
The people that stay might think twice before making their next event facebook-exclusive once they realize why other people have left.
Yes, we need laws to protect us, but until those laws arrive we should do what we can to limit the harm.
Piling up reasons to leave Facebook won’t make people leave Facebook.
The only way to make people leave Facebook is to make them believe that it is unsafe to continue using it. That’s why people flocked to Facebook when MySpace was still around: MySpace let anyone message anyone, but with Facebook you could only talk to someone if you knew them and were their friend. This gave people the perception that Facebook was safer to communicate on, and thus the big migration occurred.
However, Facebook is well aware of this, and Mark Zuckerberg isn’t quite as short-sighted as Rupert Murdoch. This is why they pour so much money and time into “security” and “privacy” initiatives, so the average Facebook user feels safe on their platform.
They are only a dead end from the perspective of those seeking AGI. To everybody else, the question might better be phrased as “Does current AI represent useful tools.” I would argue from that perspective, large language models are not at that end. They are in fact incredibly useful for maybe not replacing people, but definitely for augmenting what people can do in a 24-hour period.
The article isn’t talking about AGI, it’s about reliability. The point, as I read it, is that these systems are black boxes that can’t be decomposed, that are not predictable or reliable, whose behavior we can’t understand, and that have no accountability. I tend to agree.
The main mentions of accountability and responsibility I see in the article are:
If you don’t know the weights, sure, neural networks are by definition black boxes. Many algorithms also look like black boxes if you can’t see the relevant details.
But if you know the weights and the architecture of a NN, there are ways to interpret them. There is interesting work being done here. It is a very different kind of interpretation than understanding a program based on its source code.
I’ve learned a lot from the interpretability research from the AI safety community. I recommend it.
The best I gather is that the state of the art in investigating regions of connectiveness or looking at the second or penultimate layers and inward, etc, is that it is all still very noisy and not generalizable to anything except another can of worms of 98% accuracy and a chaos monkey of the remaining 2% cascading into further error, just like how they behave interactively.
I learnt some explanation methods about neural network before LLM appeared. But I think large LM it too large to be explained, there are too much parameters, which means informations about how LLM works.
Can you tighten up what you mean? Make it precise? Test it? Framing the questions well is essential.
I recommend reading about modern techniques.
In my opinion, reliability is the last huge challenge in the road from current LLM to AGI. If current LLM is reliable, we will know when we can trust it 100%, when we cannot trust LLM and why, how we can improve it, after that, we always can achieve AGI.
Human intelligence is far from reliable or trustworthy; why would you expect AGI to be better? Especially when we’re building it using architectures inspired by our own brain structure.
In my opinion, Human intelligence is reliable, as least for himself / herself. The content I output are based on what I knew, there is a reasonable process from what I knew to what I output. Maybe sometimes what I output are not right externally, but it it for me right now, This is how I define “reliability”.
How much psychology have you read? There are any number of experiments showing that our minds are much, much less reliable than we think.
To the extent people are reliable it’s because we have checks and balances, rewards and punishment. In the small groups we’re evolved for, if you lie a lot or cheat, the people around you will learn not to trust you and you’ll lose social connection, which translates to emotional pain. Humans have significant amounts of cerebral cortex to track this. In larger societies we can’t scale up to keep doing this, but the smaller subgroups like offices and hierarchies help.
But when you add intrinsically unreliable AI agents with no social connections, all this breaks down. RHEL helps, but post-training there’s no reinforcement; after ChatGPT makes up an answer or acts according to biases encoded into it we have no way to punish it. You can’t shun it or complain to its boss and get it fired or take it out for drinks and change its mind.
I only knew a little psychology, but I agree with your meaning about “our minds are much less reliable than we think”.
Even when people are lying, there is still a reasonable thought process involved. This is something LLMs often lack.
I know what you mean, but there isn’t absolute ground truth for reliability, sorry for the misunderstanding, I think reasonability is a better word to express my idea.
I agree. Humans can be objectively wrong, but they’re very often consistently wrong. There’s an “internal state” that seems to be lacking from LLM output.
I agree that framing AI from the utility POV is more tractable.
To your first sentence: Anyone who makes a claim that a technology is a “dead end” is making a prediction about the future. Very few of such people take such predictions seriously. Even fewer make testable predictions on the record. Even fewer will be held accountable if wrong.
People like to speculate. I tend to heavily discount claims that aren’t (a) logically derivable or (b) clear and testable, where the author is accountable.
So, you claim that LLM won’t augment a human neither in a 16-hour period, nor in 37-hour one, nor in 82-hour one? Only in 24-hour period
Yes, you are.
Since “age” has been around only for a short while, how can the author know whether it’s not subject to some issues that PGP by design aren’t?
The author is a cryptographer. What issues are you thinking of that PGP is designed to avoid that
agedoes not? I haven’t heard of any in the 5+ years thatagehas been around. (I think your comment is bad-faith FUD.)The author is a cryptographer? Alright. Isn’t everyone who wrote ANY more or less popular encryption tool or software that has to do with cryptography a cryptographer as well? Nonetheless, bugs in them have been getting discovered years and decades afterwards.
AKregator
I’ve never undertood: why copy-paste my local ssh key by “ssh-copy-id” instead of the manual copy-paste? Copy it locally, paste it into “authorized_key” on the server, in other tab.
Sometimes this command is not available and then indeed you can manually edit the authorizaed_keys, and it’s not mandatory to open a second tab, just having ssh can make it possible with one liner. But having a tool that does it in a consistent way is handy for repetitive operations and to keep the scripting simple
The video for the sake of the video. The man isn’t technical, has no idea how it works in detail. Yet he tries to explain it. “Prefetching, preloading, prerendering. Crazy”.
How would you correct what he said using the correct terminology? Honestly curious as someone who isn’t versed in front-end development nor its performance.
What’s the difference between the two:
?
The former is calling itself modern, but admitting that it may simply be “more” modern than some status quo depending on point of view, and not necessarily a paragon of modernity. The latter is just calling itself more modern than something, but it kind of suggests there’s a specific something being referred to (and either it’ll be mentioned or it’s meant to be obvious).
On the other hand TFA refers to the author’s previous modern reset, now archived (first paragraph). So it’s a modern css reset - which is a little more modern than the previous one - with similar name and function. More in brackets - as what it is, is “a modern css reset” (as was the previous one, this one more so)?
Who says so? The usage of parenthesis isn’t the fact of admiting something.
Does s/admitting/hinting/ make it more clear? I don’t mean “admission as in guilty”, it’s just a written device. It’s a modern CSS reset, and it’s also a more modern CSS reset: more modern than the earlier modern CSS reset.
You’ve invented some rules of interpretation and then diverted.
There’s no need for the parenthesis there whatsoever.
I was giving my opinion as a linguist; your response is hostile and uncharitable. “There’s no need for the parenthesis” is all good and well, but guess what? It’s there, and you’re still left wondering why. I was giving a descriptive interpretation — how it reads to me. I am left making mental note not to respond to your comments in future. Have a good one.
found:
https://lobste.rs/s/sym2m2/write_code_is_easy_delete_not_easy_extend
Sounds like Casey Muratori’s Semantic Compression, perhaps?
where’s there “add some spaghetti code” - “remove spaghetti code”?
The general idea made me think of it. Semantic compression goes like this:
The idea is that compressing the code after the fact avoids over-engineering. Slightly under-engineered code is easier to fix than the wrong abstractions.
https://lobste.rs/s/sym2m2/write_code_is_easy_delete_not_easy_extend
Did you mean to post this link at the top level instead of as a reply to Loup-Vaillant? Are you saying this is the article you were thinking of?
This is the article they were thinking of (here).
What’s the purpose of that website?
Piling up reasons to leave Facebook won’t make people leave Facebook. Most people cannot leave Facebook for the simple reason they need it and they have not enough time/energy/stability to invest time in exploring a new social network and rebuild their connections there.
Facebook is social infrastructure now and asking people to renounce using infrastructure is not just about the act itself, it comes with a big cost. You cannot ask people living in the countryside to renounce cars and ride bikes if the next town is 20kms away and the public transporation is basically absent. Yes, you can live in the countryside without a car and take the bus that comes twice a day but the rearragement required in your life is deep and complex. The same is true for Facebook. On top of this, expecting everybody to be able to rearrange their life like this is deeply classist and the like many “hackerist” issues, the condition of working people is not considered, limiting this action to a bourgie privilege equal to eating organic local food to fight global warming. This give the few activists a sense of moral entitlement and the others a sense of guilt (or directly a feeling of hatred for the cause and the activists, because they feel unable to join them), but contributes nothing to the ultimate cause.
The solution must be systemic: lobby to limit or ban facebook in your country, promote local, indipendent, politically-aware projects of social infrastructure re-development to replace Facebook, grow existing global solutions and do it on Facebook, because you want to reach the people on Facebook, not the others. And please, stop asking people to leave Facebook.
I was mostly with you until you claimed it’s ‘classist’ to tell people to stop using Facebook. What ‘bourgie privilege’ is involved in not using a toxic, harmful social media website? Step back and take a look at the big picture, seriously. There’s no need to be so dramatic. Using Facebook is not some ingrained human notion, it’s been popular for less than 10 years. Nobody has to ‘rearrange their life’ to stop using Facebook. There are alternatives for nearly every way in which people use it that require the same amount of effort or less to use.
Most peoples’ use of Facebook is in a few categories. They use it to show off, for messenger, for marketplace, for local groups, for family groups, or as a news website.
A lot of people use Facebook to show off. They post pictures of their kids, places they’ve been, pictures of themselves having fun. There’s a better version of Facebook for this called Instagram. Use that instead. Probably a lot of the same privacy issues, yeah, but at least it’s not literal Facebook.
Messenger isn’t even a good messaging platform, and there are lots of other ways of keeping in contact with people. A lot of people tell me they stay on Facebook for messenger, then when I ask them who they talk to on messenger that they can’t message otherwise they can’t answer. People want to ‘stay in contact’ with old school friends, but people managed to do that before Facebook fine, and personally I used that excuse until I realised that I hadn’t done so for years and I wasn’t going to. Let’s be realistic: people don’t keep in contact with old school friends because they don’t have anything in common other than having gone to the same school. They have no reason to keep in contact with or without Facebook. If there’s someone that really matters to you, you’ll find a way to contact them outside of Facebook (“hey can I have your email/phone number/whatever? I’m getting rid of my Facebook account”). And the rest that you never talk to anyway? You won’t actually miss anything by not being able to contact people you were never going to contact anyway.
Facebook marketplace is useful to people, but eBay and its many equivalents in different countries still exist and work, the classified section of the local paper still works. There are lots of other ways to buy and sell stuff other than Facebook. In my experience, selling stuff on Facebook means you get the most entitled people in history asking you questions and demanding things of you. The number of times I’ve sold something specifically with a fixed price and ‘pick up only’, the person has said they’ll buy it, and then they’ve turned around and gone ‘hey can you mail it to me I live in [other city]’. It says pick up only what is wrong with you. Or the dozen people that will ask you numerous in-depth questions trying to judge the quality of stuff you’re selling for $5. They can’t seem to tell that the effort I want to put into selling something when all I’m getting is $5 is going to be much less than when I’m selling something for $500.
Local area groups are probably the only subject where Facebook is still useful. If you’re a member of the local Facebook group for your suburb or whatever, then go ahead, stick with Facebook. I personally don’t know how people can stand them, they’re full of the kind of people I think Americans refer to as ‘soccer moms’: entitled, bougie, opinionated middle aged women (and it mostly is women) that think vaccines and fluoride are killing their kids and who can’t handle someone going on holiday for six weeks and not mowing their lawn from 10000km away. But some people find value in these groups and I can’t think of any particularly good alternative at the moment.
Family groups/group chats/whatever have loads of alternatives. And Facebook is an awful news website. Getting people just to stop using it as a news website, even if they still use it for everything else? That would be a blessing.
Instagram is owned by Facebook; don’t the same objections to Facebook apply to Instagram, as well? (genuine question, not a challenge)
Personally, I find Instagram to be kind of toxic in a way because now everyone is focused on creating the “Instagram picture”. I’m not sure if we can really blame the Instagram platform for that, but I don’t like it. It’s also toxic in the same way as Facebook: you only see the good parts of people’s lives, which is often just a façade.
Instagram is bad for many of the same reasons that Facebook is bad, but it’s not got the same kind of nightmarish qualities that push Facebook from bad to should-be-illegal IMO. I’ve never seen ‘Fake News’ on Instagram, just incredibly facile crap mostly.
Fake news does seem to be a think on Instagram too: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fake+news+instagram
That facile crap subsidizes facebook.
And yet if the choice is between Instagram or Facebook I’d rather they were not on Facebook.
People don’t need Facebook. People need water, amino-acids, vitamins and air. “But I have my entire social life in Facebook?”. I thought so too, then I quit Facebook and Instagram and found that I have exactly the same social life now.
In fact. Leaving those platform didn’t change my life one bit. Everything stayed exactly the same. That’s quite telling of the content on there.
I’m happy for you! Unfortunately that’s not the case for everybody. Maybe you should not assume that it is?
How do you know that is not the case for everybody? I am actually curious. Have there been any studies made? I actually believe it is like that for most people. I also believe that they wouldn’t know unless they actually quit.
I stopped using it instead of deleting it. The problem is that most people I know, friends and family, put their concerns, plans, important developments, etc on there. I missed all that past what people texted me. They generally won’t go through the trouble to do extra stuff for people just not on the platform. Missing out on stuff created both distance and sometimes resentment by those on the platform.
So, I”ll probably rejoin Facebook plus get on one or more of the others in the future just to prevent that. I’m delaying it because it’s going to be a big change with a pile of incoming posts and messages. I got too much going on to respond to them right now.
To combat this, I use FB in a “read-only” way. Although I don’t find a big issue with catching up with people when you actually see them in person. In fact, not paying as much attention to FB almost guarantees that they will have something surprising and interesting to tell me.
I’ve never used Facebook and have no intentions to start, but it is not rare that I find I have missed events because they were posted only there. I am also at a point in my career where I don’t have to care that most local jobs are promoted on Facebook and sometimes only there.
Well, I can help you with proving that. When I left Facebook a few years ago, I left about a dozen friends behind, whom I now miss.
It is definitely not the case for me. Or anyone from Lithuania really. Here Facebook has become so dominant, that other platforms are made basically irrelevant. Twitter? Maybe a thousand users. Mastodon? Three that I know of. Other chat programs? I’ve only seen Discord used which is even worse than Facebook in my opinion. Facebook has over 50% market penetration here, with most of it being in 13-45 range(which by my quick calculations, has ~80% market penetration). This has effects with how people use Facebook. It is the dominant platform of political discourse here. It is basically impossible to leave Facebook without social changes.
A thing is knowable without needing a study.
That’d be an interesting study or survey - surprised it hasn’t happened yet. Personally I do most of my chatting on Instagram - friends, acquaintances, group chats, new people I meet. People of my age and socioeconomic group are more likely to exchange IG than phone numbers upon meeting. That’s what’s difficult about these arguments - everyone’s life is different.
Also like @vegai, I once deleted Facebook (~2013) and my social life was greatly hindered. Of course, I am still alive, but looking back I did miss out on a lot of events and people. At least back then Facebook was mostly for events and to easily be able to chat with people you may not be close with yet.
Because you’re unaware of other ways of use facebook.
My thinking lately circles around a legislation requiring social services to federate using an open protocol, so that people could freely choose between apps and services without losing their connections. This would recognize the fact that Facebook didn’t create your social graph — you did. And you should own it.
I’d be more in favour of just banning Facebook. People don’t need Facebook or websites like it. Everyone I know that uses it does so under a feeling of duress: everyone else uses it, so I have to use it.
What would a law banning it look like? Just outlaw social networks entirely?
It’s enough to say that they cannot be privately owned, centralized or for-profit. Implementing it in law is much much harder but we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater
Such protocol would have to allow for end-to-end encryption, otherwise not much would change. The real problem isn’t who owns the data, but who can access them. Is strong encryption something society would consider desirable? Hint: Law enforcement.
Using a single protocol also means that there’s little to no space for inovation. Facebook did come up with things such as reactions to messages, which are not easily translatable to more oldschool IM protocols. As far as I know, it’s been also the first platform that came up with a confirmation that message have been read. I may not like these inovations, but that’s not the point.
The point is that you either force everyone to use a single protocol and make it difficult to push for any change, or allow for multiple protocols, which is basically what we have right now. Yes, it’s not open, but having documentation doesn’t necessarily mean it’d be possible to keep up; especially when it’s against Facebook’s interest. They would undergo some extra effort to abide the law while making sure no one can actually threaten them by developing a good FOSS client.
“These scandals just bother everyone. I’d ban all those computers and internets.” – Věra Pohlová, 72 years, pensioner. Newspaper “Metro”, 09/17/1999. Source.
I understand a little bit where you’re coming from… just making a website telling people to leave Facebook doesn’t necessarily make a huge dent in the “stop Facebook” campaign. However, I respectfully disagree with your comment, and I think following the advice in your comment would be dangerous. Having sites like this are better than not having them.
Specific to this site, I really appreciate that they clearly stated the intent of the site, gave direct reasons backing up their “thesis”, and also provided source links to further back those claims. I hear a lot about the “stop Facebook” campaign, but I think having a site that provides a myriad of reasons why someone should stop using Facebook is helpful. There may be a reason on that site that helps push someone over the edge.
The site at the bottom also provides “how” links so that people can attempt to keep the functionality they would lose by leaving Facebook. Sure, nothing at this point has the exact same scale and features that Facebook does, but this gives people direct reasons why they should leave Facebook and gives them something to go to.
Also… your points contradict each other. Two examples:
I don’t share this to be “rude” or argue. I share this because I think what this site is doing is important.
I agree, but is it the best way to spend your effort? I mean, any tech person is already aware of why Facebook is bad for you, including people working in Facebook. Same is true for people in tech critique. Yes, there are still areas of the intellectual world that haven’t been conquered by these ideas, but it’s not a list of facts that will change that.
This is not contradictory: I’m on Facebook, I want Facebook to die. In the same way I’m a programmer with a high salary and I believe the system is broken for paying programmers so much. Or that I live in a society that I think it’s broken: it’s literally a meme.
The difference between individual action and systemic action is the key: here the solution must be systemic, not individual. Your stance on a political, systemic action doesn’t have to be somehow in accord with your individual consumption, because changing your consumption would be irrelevant. After the change you will lose Facebook and need to adapt your life? Yes, but so will everybody else and the transition will be easier because you will just follow the flow instead of going against it now.
If you have time to care about political issues you’re already privileged. I say it as a person that spends half of his time on this and I feel deeply privileged, because I know that if I had to work 12 hours a day on stressful jobs, I wouldn’t be able to do all this stuff. I see the impact of a particularly stressful week at work on my projects and activities: if that was the norm as it is for the general population, I know I wouldn’t be able to achieve anything.
Most people can’t leave. But many people can.
The people that stay might think twice before making their next event facebook-exclusive once they realize why other people have left.
Yes, we need laws to protect us, but until those laws arrive we should do what we can to limit the harm.
Until they realize how attached to Facebook they are and come to the conclusion that “oh well, it’s their loss for leaving it.”.
The only way to make people leave Facebook is to make them believe that it is unsafe to continue using it. That’s why people flocked to Facebook when MySpace was still around: MySpace let anyone message anyone, but with Facebook you could only talk to someone if you knew them and were their friend. This gave people the perception that Facebook was safer to communicate on, and thus the big migration occurred.
However, Facebook is well aware of this, and Mark Zuckerberg isn’t quite as short-sighted as Rupert Murdoch. This is why they pour so much money and time into “security” and “privacy” initiatives, so the average Facebook user feels safe on their platform.
Yeah because banning things works… What a joke.
Facebook isn’t going anywhere unless it does something really spectacularly dumb.
Don’t tell others what to do.