• charly4994 [she/her, comrade/them]
    ·
    2 months ago

    But then how will people write 20 cover letters a day to keep up with the increasing rate of instant rejections?

    Saw a really depressing ad at work the other day where Google was advertising their thing and it was some person asking their LLM to write a letter for their daughter to this athlete bragging about how she'll break her record one day. They couch it in "here's a draft" but it's just so bleak. The idea that a child so excited about doing a sport and dreaming of going to the Olympics and getting a world record can't just write a bit of a clumsy letter expressing themselves to their hero is just beyond depressing. Writing swill for automated systems that are going to reject you anyway is one thing, but the idea that they think that this is a legitimate use of these models just highlights how obnoxiously out of touch they are.

    How do we learn and grow as people and find our own writing voices if we don't write some of the most cringe shit imaginable when we're young. I wrote a weird letter to Emma Watson in middle school, nobody ever read it, but it was a learning experience and made me actually have to think about my own feelings. These techbros have to have been grown in vats.

    • LocalOaf [they/them]
      ·
      2 months ago

      I've hesitated to ever write anything about it thinking it'd come across as too yells-at-cloud or Luddite, but this comment kind of inspired me to flesh out something that's been simmering in the back of my head ever since LLMs became kelly latest fad after the NFT boom.

      One of the most unnerving things to me about "AI" in the common understanding is that its entire hype cycle and main use cases are all tacit admissions that all of the professional and academic uses of it are proof that their pre-"AI" standards were perfunctory hoop jumping bullshit to join the professional managerial class, and their "artistic" uses are almost entirely utilized by people with zero artistic sensibilities or weirdo porno sickos. All of it belies a deep cynicism about the status quo where what could have been heartfelt but clumsy writing by young students or the athlete in your example are being unknowingly robbed of their agency and the humanizing future of looking back on clunky immature writing as a personal marker of growth. They're just hoops to jump through to get whatever degree or accolade you're seeking, with whatever personal growth that those achievements originally meant stripped of anything other than "achieving them is good because it advances your career and earning potential." Techbros' most fawning and optimistic pitches of "AI" and "The Singularity" instead read to me as the grimmest and most alienating version of neoliberal "end of history" horseshit where even art and language themselves are reduced to SEO marketized min/maxxed rat races.

      I hope this doesn't sound too a-guy but I had to get that rant out

      Maybe I'll expand that into something

        • LocalOaf [they/them]
          ·
          2 months ago

          I'm barely better than meemaw when it comes to tech literacy, what's the best platform for stuff like that? Is Medium bad? I've installed a Linux distro before but basically just want to rant and take pictures of my cats clueless

          • I_CAST_BEAM_OF_BATS_I_CAST_BOLT_OF_BATS [none/use name]
            ·
            edit-2
            a month ago

            Medium is also "bad" but it does put your posts out into an algorithm. Kiiiind of. Everyone ends up deleting them. I just use long Mastodon/forks posts (I make a lot of accounts on every activitypub server tbqh just for gimmicks and things) but 5,000 is not a lot of characters so I also link to Firefish Pages. Easy to make server with 50,000 for personal use at least which is a bit better for longform.

            I think the best option on ActivityPub is https://writefreely.org/ you can also generally find a way to seamlessly retweet things like Lemmy linkposts or Writefreely blogs on Mastodon/Firefish whatever fork

            Not very technically savvy at all over here it's just pretty online

              • I really like Firefish Pages because they have sexy embeds for Mastodon and its forks' posts and Writefreely as well haha, because it is a Mastodon fork. So I can spam a bunch of tweets over a months and then cite them all in a Page.

              • They're all going to make you repost them somewhere else anyways. Once you break into AcitivityPub posting it's very good, just pretty hard to dodge the whole Ukraine net, so it's not bad itself. But that's not even what I'm saying, you can always post from Writefreely or Lemmy back to Reddit or Twitter or whatever and it ensures your real post won't be deleted. You keep control of part of your data on something self hosted or friend hosted on a cloud service.

                I found Substack's editor impossible to paste into BTW and had other technical issues. But Medium and Substack do kiiind of offer some social media opportunities themselves. But they mostly promote dumb crap and Taibbi respectively

                  • I_CAST_BEAM_OF_BATS_I_CAST_BOLT_OF_BATS [none/use name]
                    ·
                    edit-2
                    a month ago

                    definitely a lot of funny words lol and they keep making more of em you should see the URLs for instances

                    https://fedidb.org/software/writefreely

                    https://fedidb.org/software/firefish

                    soundcloud basically:

                    https://fedidb.org/software/funkwhale

                    video streaming site:

                    https://fedidb.org/software/peertube

                    it's the future nobody has to make their own website but if you want to suffer and make eyebleed try Neocities

                    • LocalOaf [they/them]
                      ·
                      a month ago

                      Listen fat, I told Al Gore how to invent GeoCities, alright? Sorry, I talk too much, I should go now

                      biden-point

                      • I have been bombarding you with my favorite open source projects bc you vaguely intimated that you could pursue further investigative writing projects I'm pretty sure I'm the one talking too much, Local Oaf. I am oafing.

                        • LocalOaf [they/them]
                          ·
                          a month ago

                          (I was just doin' a goof, sorry lol. I really appreciate all the recommendations.)