Maksym @biomedmax@qoto.org

Well, fuck you too, AI

I think nowadays, the majority of us knows that there is something alarming with how social media affects our lives, yet doesn't really know how to express it. This post is my attempt to express it.

I would recommend everyone to see the documentary "Social Dilemma" BUT watch this video right afterwards as it sums up perfectly my criticism of the half-assed job the documentary does in explaining the phenomena. I am a strong believer that virtual world will be each time more and more intertwined with our real world experience and as an obvious conclusion, I think that raising awareness of how this interplays shapes our politics and communities is a paramount task. That is why I was very hyped when I discovered there is such a documentary in a streaming service with such a global reach. However, after watching it, I quickly became disappointed with how empty and full of platitudes it was. Allow me to elaborate:

The film correctly identifies the problem: the algorithms that learn more and more about our psychology to weaponise it against us to generate revenue. How is it done? By knowing us better, it can make us stay at their platform longer; this is by showing us the content that would maximise our interest and engagement... by exposing us to content we already are biased towards engaging with. This creates a huge digital eco-chamber and the effect is terrifying. Me and you, we can begin using the same service and being subscribed to exactly the same pages and content creators, but the posts that are fed to us will be slowly optimised until, in after some time, we will be fed a completely different combination of information. You can end up forming an image of the world that is completely nonsensical to my brain and vice-versa... despite having access to exactly the same news and propaganda sources.

So if they correctly expose this dilemma, what is my problem with it? Well, the absolutely dumb "potential solutions" that they pitch in there. They range from stereotypical boomer opinions of restricting your kids from using a smartphone until certain age until moronic comparisons such as "we should outlaw targeted advertisements just like we outlawed slavery and human trafficking". There is a silicon-valley dudebro who wants to make companies to pay taxes on each bit of data they gather. According to them, the big tech corrupts democracy and creates civil war but unless they pay a little bit of money to the government, it will suddenly be OK.

What I wrote above is just a rant about stupid opinions. But these aren't new. But here is something new, very suspicious and disturbing: a solution to big tech already exists. They are decentralised, privacy-focused apps and services that either work out of pure philanthropy or by donations and that DON'T build a personal profile of you. There was nothing said about these solutions and I refuse to believe it was because of ignorance. These are people working in silicon valley, saying they are tech savvy is an understatement. So the question is WHY they omitted mentioning practical solution to a feared social dilemma?

https://open.tube/videos/watch/9b54ba38-c26f-4691-a60f-d7846121b73b

My GF's cat thinks he is a better art piece than the ballerina or the Vienna Orchestra playing in the background

I lied. THIS will be my last photo of the year.

Last photo of the year. Barcelona beach.

My first painting following Bob Ross' tutorial. My parents got me acrylic painting kit for Christmas :)

Almost Xmas

Trip to Strasbourg with my parents. A French city historically under German rule with a unique culture and architecture. Unfortunately COVID rules are so restrictive it kind of kills the joy of travelling a little bit.

European Parliament in Strasbourg. It was closed for visitors unfortunately...

I made a small trip to Malta. One of the most picturesque places I've been to. Def will come back. The horsies is because it was their "National Day"

Pre-party time relaxation moment

Stopped for a sandwich mid-hike and this dog just sits in front of me and stares at my food.

Sooo part of my crypto funds were stolen and I have no idea how. But obviously the hackers have the credentials to my wallet (exodus). I really don't recommend using wallets (or any other important app) without 2FA (Exodus doesn't have an option for 2FA which is super weird). The hackers knew it as they also tried to steal my funds from Coinbase where 2FA is optional but luckily was activated. I know they tried because I received a log in confirmation code from Coinbase on the day of the hack. But they didn't even try Binance (where 2FA is mandatory). In summary, no 2FA, not your coins.

Festival of Light BCN 2021

Festival of Light in BCN. Not nearly as good as the last pre-covid edition...

It is insane how advanced the natural language processing is in AI. I work in a lab focusing on development of treatment for Huntington's disease. Once my boss fed the following prompts to to the GPT-2 (GPT-3 is not yet open source, or at least it wasn't when he did it): "Huntington's disease is" or "We can cure Huntington's disease by". The results were spectacularly coherent but most things were factually wrong. He then compared it to something that happened to AlphaGo: AlphaGo is an AI trained to play Go, a board game very popular in Asia and much more complex in terms of available combinations than chess. During one of the games, it made a move that everyone thought was erroneous "rookie mistake" but it ended up being crucial for the victory in retrospect. My boss told me: "What if just like in a game of Go, GPT model will one day output us an idea so silly that we just discard it as nonsensical, but that in reality would lead to a cure?".
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3

My girl's cat doesn't trust me...

Friendly reminder that every major superpower on the planet is becoming increasingly authoritarian and the most authoritarian of them all has supersonic nuclear missiles that renders every antimisile system on earth obsolete.