Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: AI is how bosses wage war on "professions"; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/20/i-would-prefer-not-to/
1/
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Social media without socializing; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/19/billionaire-solipsism/
1/
@Npars01 Yeah I agree, what do you think is the solution forward if AI is here to stay and it becomes ubiquitous
What do you think should be that small unit of practice one can repeat daily to get better at even with AI use, that will always hold value and amplify our expertise rather than decrease it
AI is like a crutch you get addicted to using, long after the broken leg is healed
Something that weakens, never strengthens
AI is built on stolen intellectual property, it can never be better than its origins. It can't create original work, only copy other's work
As #pluralistic describes it, it's spicy autocomplete
Overreliance on such tools means people forget how to spell on their own. They make obvious grammatical errors because they're not really doing the writing
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: The world needs an Ireland for disenshittification; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/17/erin-go-go-go/
1/
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Catch this! and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/16/interrupt-driven/
1/
Cory Doctorow
boosted
I want to talk about something that has been brought to the fore of my mind by something that Cory Doctorow has recently published ; happiness, optimism and hope. In particular optimism because it made me step back and consider his proposition in order to reassess my own understanding of a word I’ve often used in the past to describe one of the characteristics of my persona.
‘Optimism […] is a toxin to be avoided. Optimism is a subgenre of fatalism, the belief that things will get better no matter what we do. It’s just the obverse of pessimism. Both are ways of denying human agency. To be an optimist is to be a passenger of history, along for the ride, with no hope of changing course.’
It is the words ‘human agency’ which first spiked my interest of course. And all of a sudden an answer to a one question that has been on my mind for some time was delivered to me. The world is turning to shit because it has to in order to deliver a better world. In a world where I despair for want of a politically active electorate willing – because we all can – to sort the hay from the chaff on a routine basis and inured to propaganda, all I see around me are angry people, too busy to make ends meet (a relative as well as a subjective reconciliation of financial and social dues and rights) all the while gobbling up whatever mis/dis-information is force-fed onto them; nothing is going to change without some major upheavals. People are not going to wake up from the nightmare until they are scared out of their wits. Shocked awake and gasping for breath, heart thumping in the chest and all senses primed for fight or flight responses. Only then will people sit up and take note of what is happening. In other words, human agency being what it is, if a better world is to be built, the old one must writhe in pain and lash out in frustration as it burns itself out of existence. That is the explanation for what I see around the world today. It is both a sad and painful sight and a harbinger of better things to be, therein lies hope.
‘Hope […] That’s the stuff. Hope is the belief that if we change the world for the better, even by just a little, that we will ascend a new gradient towards a better future, and as we rise up to that curve, new terrain will be revealed to us that we couldn’t see from our lower vantage-point. It’s not necessary -- nor even possible – to see a course from here to the world you want to live in. You can get there is a stepwise fashion, one beneficial change at a time.’
Tying up loose ends… Upon reflection, it is not true that I am an optimist, or ever was one. What I can say now with some confidence is that I am full of hope, have always been. Thank you
@pluralistic
I want to talk about something that has been brought to the fore of my mind by something that Cory Doctorow has recently published ; happiness, optimism and hope. In particular optimism because it made me step back and consider his proposition in order to reassess my own understanding of a word I’ve often used in the past to describe one of the characteristics of my persona.
‘Optimism […] is a toxin to be avoided. Optimism is a subgenre of fatalism, the belief that things will get better no matter what we do. It’s just the obverse of pessimism. Both are ways of denying human agency. To be an optimist is to be a passenger of history, along for the ride, with no hope of changing course.’
It is the words ‘human agency’ which first spiked my interest of course. And all of a sudden an answer to a one question that has been on my mind for some time was delivered to me. The world is turning to shit because it has to in order to deliver a better world. In a world where I despair for want of a politically active electorate willing – because we all can – to sort the hay from the chaff on a routine basis and inured to propaganda, all I see around me are angry people, too busy to make ends meet (a relative as well as a subjective reconciliation of financial and social dues and rights) all the while gobbling up whatever mis/dis-information is force-fed onto them; nothing is going to change without some major upheavals. People are not going to wake up from the nightmare until they are scared out of their wits. Shocked awake and gasping for breath, heart thumping in the chest and all senses primed for fight or flight responses. Only then will people sit up and take note of what is happening. In other words, human agency being what it is, if a better world is to be built, the old one must writhe in pain and lash out in frustration as it burns itself out of existence. That is the explanation for what I see around the world today. It is both a sad and painful sight and a harbinger of better things to be, therein lies hope.
‘Hope […] That’s the stuff. Hope is the belief that if we change the world for the better, even by just a little, that we will ascend a new gradient towards a better future, and as we rise up to that curve, new terrain will be revealed to us that we couldn’t see from our lower vantage-point. It’s not necessary -- nor even possible – to see a course from here to the world you want to live in. You can get there is a stepwise fashion, one beneficial change at a time.’
Tying up loose ends… Upon reflection, it is not true that I am an optimist, or ever was one. What I can say now with some confidence is that I am full of hope, have always been. Thank you
@pluralistic
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: How the Light Gets In; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/15/how-the-light-gets-in/
1/
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: It's not normal; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/14/sole-and-despotic/
1/
Em :official_verified:
boosted
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Sorry, eh; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/not-sorry/
1/
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Sorry, eh; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/13/not-sorry/
1/
This is exactly how I have described the limitations of black box models to others.
A good scientific model should do two things:
1) Provide accurate predictions of outcomes given certain inputs, and
2) Enable greater understanding of how a system works.
Simpler machine learning models, like logistic regression or decision trees, can sometimes do both, at least for simpler phenomenon. The models are explainable and their decisions are interpretable. For those reasons among others, applied machine learning researchers still use these simpler approaches wherever they can be made to work.
But in our haste to increase accuracy for more complex phenomenon, we've created models that merely provide semi-accurate predictions at the expense of explainability and interpretability. Like the ptolemaic model of the solar system, these models mostly work well in predicting outcomes within the narrow areas in which they've been trained. But they do absolutely nothing to enable understanding of the underlying phenomenon. Or worse, they mislead us into fundamentally wrong understandings. And because their training is overfit onto the limits of their training data, their accuracy falls apart unpredictably when used for tasks outside the distribution of their training. Computational linguists and other experts that might celebrate these models instead lament the benighted ignorance left in their wake.
Or how it was more eloquently stated in the great philosophical film Billy Madison:
"Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul."
#pluralistic describes the technical debt of these AI coding models as asbestos in the walls.
A hazard we'll be digging out of the walls for decades to come.
It remains a fact that when petrostate despots are this desperate to impose user adoption, alarm bells should be ringing. Fossil fuel funded cyberwarfare.
https://fortune.com/2025/11/20/saudi-visit-kennedy-center-trump-mbs-huang-musk-1-trillion/
When anti-democracy billionaires are spending this kind of cash on a boondoggle...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/07/17/bill-gates-charles-koch-and-three-other-billionaires-are-giving-1-billion-to-enhance-economic-mobility-in-the-us/
Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦
boosted
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: A winning trade war strategy for Canada; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/11/disenshittification-nation/
1/
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: A winning trade war strategy for Canada; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/11/disenshittification-nation/
1/
Claudius Link
boosted
#pluralistic describes it as a hazardous material like asbestos.
We'll be digging it of walls for decades to come, with every future owner wary of these toxic assets.
It'll be more than just technical debt, it'll be similar to the societally draining environmental cleanup the globe will face after petro-capitalism fades into the sunset.
@huntingdon AI will be a drug that we will be addicted to.
#pluralistic describes it as a hazardous material like asbestos.
We'll be digging it of walls for decades to come, with every future owner wary of these toxic assets.
It'll be more than just technical debt, it'll be similar to the societally draining environmental cleanup the globe will face after petro-capitalism fades into the sunset.
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Predistribution vs redistribution (Big Tech edition); and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/10/markets-are-regulations/
1/
Cory Doctorow
boosted
The latest #Pluralistic post by @pluralistic is about a very smart #OpenHardware approach: the #Baochip. I know very little about hardware manufacturing, but this looks really cool and feasible.
Go read it at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/09/quantity-break/
The latest #Pluralistic post by @pluralistic is about a very smart #OpenHardware approach: the #Baochip. I know very little about hardware manufacturing, but this looks really cool and feasible.
Go read it at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/09/quantity-break/
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: bunnie's piggyback hack; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/09/quantity-break/
1/
