Samuel
@samuel.fm
another good example of “it doesn’t have to be like this”
Cabel Sasser@cabel.panic.com· 5 Oct 2025
i don’t like or understand ai. but it’s wild to see this person, who clearly DOES understand it and obviously knows a LOT about it, be repeatedly told they are stupid? i think a lot of bluesky thinks the simple solution to discomfort is bullying which is so weird given we were all surely bullied??
then: you don't need to "understand how the human mind works" on any level in order to make a computerized map of the connectome including every protein and cell. this is similar to how we do not currently understand how LLMs work but we can run them using opaque frozen weights. bluesky: We do know how LLMs work. What the fuck are you talking about? Lmfao. them: this is a common misconception about modern ai systems. they are grown, and not crafted; we understand the process that builds them but lack a paradigmatic understanding that answers the question "how do these 1 trillion floating point numbers do ‹x>". this has been the case since the DL revolutionthem: the way it actually works is that we initialize 1 trillion random floating point numbers as activation weights and biases in an enormous multilayer artificial neural network, give it tasks, and use vector calculus to update those 1 trillion neurons based on empirical task performance source: i am literally one of the engineers/ research scientists who builds and optimizethem: and when i say "we update the neurons based on empirical task performance", , the “we" is not any human at all, it is an automatic process called gradient descent the job of these engineers is to make the framework that grows the neurons and feed the pipeline that executes, measures, and backpropagates task pertormance geoffrey hinton won the nobel prize in physics in 2024 for his contributions that helped make this possible bluesky: i think you maybe unwell
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Samuel
quality of discussion is so poor it doesn’t even qualify as “discussion” anymore
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Tim
the people who wanted to escape the nastiness of twitter brought the nastiness here with them at least that's been my perception
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Samuel
eh. more like the problem wasn’t twitter, the problem is a social problem neither us nor twitter have solved
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Anirudh Oppiliappan
i do feel like there’s been somewhat of a shift in the “threshold to bullying”—in that it takes very little for people to start attacking the poster instead of the post. idk, can’t substantiate it with quantitative evidence but it sure *feels* that way.
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Emmathyst
Regrettably I don’t think anyone is going to solve the largest social crisis in history via a social media platform bound to the rules of technology.
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Tim
fair, i don't think they pioneered online dickery, although i do think they provided a wide open space to refine it
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sens
Very agree though in the topic of AIs, the negative sentiment seems to be rather spread out across demographics. Understandably so, I'd say. The average person's only interaction they've had with AI is slop in their feed.
Christophe Michel
You can't have a public social network without that kind of interaction coming up if the default is to allow everyone to talk to everyone. You can't have global discourse across the planet without getting a humongous amount of assholes in it.
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Samuel
I mean totally agree but the problem is the moment you see a stupid post, the emotional damage is already done even if you block them immediately we need to stop shoving garbage in your face basically
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Christophe Michel
Is it possible without taking away user agency though? We have fine-grained controls to define who can respond to our posts to a certain extent to prevent bad interactions, but if we have automatic filters how can we make sure they don't mask anything meaningful? Or that we want to act upon?
Bumblefudge
bsky.app/profile/bumb... kinda wanna mute all the keywords and check out for a few months, its almost as divisive as the breakfast carb that I will not name for some reason. maybe that reason is our collective anxiety about the 2008 style valuation bubble being inflated in its name lol
Bumblefudge@bumblefudge.com· 8 Oct 2025
I hope this gets me put on ALL the "AI apologist" and "AI hater" lists alike. sick of hearing people throw hands over the most trifling superficial technologist debates and freshman "intro to theory of mind" strawmen. technologists can be useful idiots for the money men who turn us all into weapons.
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Bumblefudge
and yes my skeeting jeremiads into the wind about it makes me 100% the problem, no need to point out that part
Spamuel J. Risk
I like that she went on to explain it. That was interesting. Seems like a lot of the time if you even question a big account here about something, they tend to block and move on rather than answer the question or address a real concern. That sort of kills the “discussion” as well.
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Gary Lupyan
jfc.. I get that LLMs are being used by millions with no background in cogsci/cog neuro/machine learning.. But if they are using LLMs to have meaningful conversations and they think we truly understand how they work (i.e., mech interp is solved), what must they think this understanding looks like?!?