Mallory's Musings & Mischief

Fledgling trans girl that likes to talk nerdy, perform tech wizardry, do mad science, post occasional anti-capitalist and climate-rage induced rants, and show off her latest Lego builds. There will be selfies.

Swears like a sailor, so you best be okay with that.

My views are my own and are likely wrong.

Pronouns: she/her
Politics: More and more socialist and anti-capitalist everyday
Alt Account: https://sapphic.ninja/@mal

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malcircuit_at_thingy.social@momostr.pink

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Last Notes

2024-06-21 14:14:04

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Struggling to get myself to do anything. Kinda want to blow off work and get another timelapse of the sun, but I don't really have enough motivation to get ready and go outside. I want to sleep, but brain won't let me even do that. I'm just sitting here, miserable.

2024-06-21 13:10:02

I couldn't fall asleep last night because my brain was sad, so now today is shit too

2024-06-20 16:53:17

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Oooo what would you two talk about?

2024-06-20 13:24:35

It's gotten to the point that I'm actually a little surprised to discover people that still use Twitter/X exclusively

2024-06-18 16:56:12

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I'm not even sure that compound interest is entirely bad. I just think that its ubiquity is wrong.
Like, why do student loans have compound interest? I thought the point of higher education is that all of society profits from it, not just a select few?
Why does medical debt have compound interest? Why is someone being punished annually while paying off a debt they did not anticipate or seek out? More pointedly, why should someone expect to profit exponentially from that situation?

2024-06-18 16:09:57

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And it's all based on simple ideas like compound interest that we take for granted to the point of basically being axioms of society.
These are the kind of concepts that make a world without capitalism impossible to imagine.

2024-06-18 16:03:52

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It's just really strange to me that our society is structured such that acquiring some wealth somehow entitles a person to acquire even more wealth?
Like, yeah that's how capitalism works, but when you frame it like that it feels very bizarre and kind of obvious that it's going to end poorly for everyone involved.
The rules of our society were made explicitly such that the accumulation and consolidation of wealth and power into the hands of a minority of people is all but inevitable.

2024-06-18 15:28:28

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"But that would have consequences!"
Consequences to *whom*? Bankers? Why do we care what they think or feel?
Who decided they *must* profit from every single transaction, without exception or limit?

2024-06-18 15:22:41

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This is the argument to forgiving student loans and other forms of debt.
Debt is a human construct. It's based on the moral principle of reciprocity, so it's not arbitrary, but it is imaginary.
There's debt from the principal amount and the interest. Debt from interest is even more imaginary than the principal. The idea that such a thing could subjugate a person for decades of their life is a choice.
As a society, we could just choose to ignore debt, to erase it from our memory.

2024-06-18 15:05:18

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What I mean by that is the idea that loaning money automatically implies accumulating interest is not accurate.
It's a choice someone made. It's a choice people continue to make.
Applying a moral standard to the accumulation of debt through compound interest is just another imposition of hierarchy. It's about power.
Lending money does not logically necessitate that the party doing the lending must profit indefinitely and exponentially.

2024-06-18 14:54:30

Just a reminder that compound interest is not a law of nature, it's a human construct

2024-06-12 00:30:09

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This is likely a fundamental flaw with generative AI that can never be fixed. It will always be wrong. It has no way to determine whether a string of text is "correct" because the system has no epistemological framework to evaluate such things.
A statistical model is a statistical model is a statistical model. There's no understanding. No logic. No intelligence.

2024-06-12 00:15:06

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The only reason ChatGPT does anything remotely viewable as "intelligent" is because its statistics are based upon text written by intelligent agents. It can sound intelligent without being intelligent. It's a "stochastic parrot" as a researcher described it.
It regularly outputs text with incorrect info, simply because it's a statistically likely string of text. It doesn't "hallucinate" anything. It's just wrong because it's dumber than a goldfish and incapable of understanding anything at all.

2024-06-12 00:01:35

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This is why a LLM is fundamentally a bullshitting machine. It will ALWAYS give you text back. It will return a statistically likely string of text every time you give it a string of text. It literally CANNOT function without returning *something*. People have tried. You can provide instructions to not respond and it will anyway.
That's because it's a stupid fucking machine, not an intelligent agent.

2024-06-11 23:53:00

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It's actually possible to talk about something like ChatGPT without anthropomorphizing it. It doesn't "understand" and "respond to" the text you provide as input, it parses the text into semantic chunks and provides you with a sequence of text that is likely to follow yours, based upon a statistical model of an insanely large set of text samples (hence the term Large Language Model).

2024-06-11 23:27:12

People go around claiming a statistical model is "intelligent" when NO ONE — scientists or philosophers — can even explain or agree what, *exactly*, about our brain grants *humans* intelligence or what the fuck "intelligence" even means with any sort of precision

2024-06-05 15:00:07

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It's like asking "Where did all these left-handed people suddenly come from?" after they stopped beating kids in school for being left-handed.

2024-06-01 23:26:47

I resent the term "prompt engineering" because it implies that there is a sophisticated theoretical basis to writing LLM prompts and not simply "fuck around with the wording until the dumb computer makes me happy"

2024-05-29 14:46:38

When people say "EV sales are slowing down," what they actually mean is that Tesla sales are stalling because everyone has discovered how much of a entitled, bigoted assclown Elon Musk is and rightly want nothing to do with him.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-05-28/the-slowdown-in-us-electric-vehicle-sales-looks-more-like-a-blip
Via @npub1f6l…k9zj https://mastodon.social/@mhoye/112521995675929287
https://cdn.masto.host/thingysocial/media_attachments/files/112/524/906/273/201/003/original/241beaec76774f85.png

2024-05-11 02:33:36

IT'S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW!!!
I had to stop and get off the interstate near the WI border because I could see the #aurora through breaks in the clouds!!!
https://cdn.masto.host/thingysocial/media_attachments/files/112/420/110/856/666/595/original/e9802c2d1f5736c0.jpeg