Chris Petrilli
@petrillic@hachyderm.io  ·  activity timestamp last week

This post by @aphyr I think really captures the staggering evil of a non-trivial swath of the LLM world right now. Perhaps they don't see themselves as evil, but what they are doing is deliberately undermining all social and cultural norms for ... what? A few extra sales? Burn the world to the ground for ... a few bucks?

I realize that we have many other Big Evils in the world, but when I say that the only winners with gen AI, along with blockchain, bitcoin, and all other recent VC-bloviated ilk is criminals and sociopaths, this is what I mean. What that says about VCs is up to you to determine.

Kyle is more introspective than I am here. What i see is the wholesale willing destruction of trust and society for... well, certainly nothing beneficial.

This is what I think of every time someone tells me "gen AI is the future". Perhaps it is, but that future is bleak and desolate. It is soulless and cruel and confidently stupid. It aspires to bland mediocrity.

Keep it. There is no "upside" that could ever justify this total obliteration of good in the world. Your talking parrot drips venom from it's beak with every word it speaks.

https://aphyr.com/posts/389-the-future-of-forums-is-lies-i-guess
Chris Petrilli
@petrillic@hachyderm.io  ·  activity timestamp last week

Just as Canter & Siegel contributed mightily* to the collapse of UseNet with the first real case of mass spam, and exploited a system of trust, that's what this is doing. Spray painting their vulgar spittle across the public square with hopes of garnering a few extra dimes.

* I was at Sprint at the time and remember the hammer that got dropped being "nuclear" by the standards of the time. Now it's quaint. In retrospect, we should have done so much more, but I don't think anyone imagined it would ever get THIS bad. And for as bad as you think it is, it's 1,000,000x worse than that.
Chris Petrilli
@petrillic@hachyderm.io  ·  activity timestamp last week

Weird historical detail. Sprint was covered by common carrier regulations which our legal team basically interpreted as we couldn’t block anything based on content (simplified). We had a lot of emergency meetings to be able to shut down C&S. We had to establish they were causing reliability problems. A bit of a stretch to be honest, but… we did pull the plug.
Chris Petrilli
@petrillic@hachyderm.io  ·  activity timestamp last week

Which now reminds me of being woken up by my SkyTel pager falling in my head from the headboard at 2a. The NOC calling. Usenet servers were acting up. Fine fine. Let me check. Ah disc cleanup scripts failed for some reason so things filled up. Fixed. Huh I wonder how they knew because they aren’t actually monitored that much (we didn’t provide SLA). Ah… they were reading alt.binaries.$porn.

I called the NOC back and let them know it was fixed and that “perhaps you should be more careful what groups you’re looking at while at work”.
Chris Petrilli
@petrillic@hachyderm.io  ·  activity timestamp last week

And then there was the weird things we rigged the pagers to be able to do. This was in the days before any reasonable mobile data options. But we could use the 2 way pagers as a janky system. So we could actually reboot routers through it. There was a tiny bit of security.

Was it secure? I mean kinda? Sorta. The resources available to adversaries we cared about were wildly more limited back then. No SDR, for example.

You’re talking about a period RIGHT AFTER the first firewalls even existed. I think the DEC SEAL (hi Marcus!) had just been installed at the White House, and was pretty much the first of its kind.

It was different times.