No one who is impressed by the current applications of LLMs should be in any way involved with making decisions which affect those not similarly cognitively impaired.
‘AI’ is my newest litmus test for whether who I’m engaging with should be taken seriously or not.
‘AI’ doesn’t exist, and LLMs have vanishingly narrow legitimate justifiable use cases. Any output from one is intrinsically, explosively, imprecise, and can’t be trusted to be build upon without specialist treatment. I’m yet to identify any application of a LLM which can rationally be mistaken for intelligence.
Anyone who persists in referring to LLMs as ‘AI’ is either betraying they don’t understand what they’re talking about, or they’re invested too deeply in an active grift.
I originally had only my MX hosts listed in my SPF record, and configured to accept them exclusively. Microsoft unilaterally blocked the entire /23 my VPS resides within, and refused to exclude my configured IPs from their block.
The only way I’m currently able to deliver anything to domains hosted by Microsoft is to expand my SPF record to include my ISP’s mail hosts, and route delivery through them.
Microsoft, and the other SMTP cartel thugs, are undermining the protections these protocols were designed to provide.
Guilty until proven innocent, an excellent initial position.
I’ve had to relax my SPF record to include the entire mail pool of my ISP to be able to send to anything hosted by Microsoft. I tried to liaise with them directly, and through Linode, but they refused to exclude the IP from their opaque blocklist. Their proposed solution was to change the IP of the VPS, but that’s just agreeing to play whack-a-mole with a bad faith actor.
There should be a path to greater transparency and accountability from the SMTP cartels, but I’m at a loss as to how that can manifest.
It can in the near term, as each endpoint has a unique public identifier instead of being mixed with multiple endpoints behind a NAT gateway, but less so over the long term, as privacy addresses are typically rotated at least daily.
Of course, all of this needs to be included in a broader discussion around myriad vectors of tracking and fingerprinting to arrive at a meaningful conclusion.
I watched _The Good Place_ when it originally aired, the strongest residual and most attractive concept was _The Final Door_. This has promoted it on my rewatch queue.
This is largely why I’m on disability and have not been a “functional” member of society for the better part of a decade. I have been unable to identify a role available to me which will not materially make things worse. This leaves the only viable options as living in abject poverty, or ceasing to exist, the latter frequently more attractive.
A: I already explicitly avoid products that are encrusted in this shit.
B: I have not used either of these products since their respective changes, even though they’re otherwise still perfectly functional.
A notable flow on effect is both of these products had helped with the management and improvement of my health, and these changes have had a measurable negative impact since I’ve been unable to use them.
I want to see meaningful pushback on this indefensible move of forcing customers to establish and maintain a relationship with the manufacturer in order to use the products they sell.
Other examples are:
Wahoo, who locked the control of their products behind an account and login requirement for devices which had been working perfectly fine for years prior.
Roche, who killed their blood glucose app at the start of 2023 and forced all their users to move to a third party app, developed by one of their subsidiaries, which requires you to accept a data exfiltration clause, if they wish to continue the automagic on-device logging.
And Comcast were the biggest proponents of building IPv6 support into the DOCSIS specs, because they exhausted 10/8 in the management network for their modem fleet.
I’m sick of every product now requiring I establish, and maintain, a personal relationship with the manufacturer.
Notable examples for myself are Wahoo Fitness[1], Water Rower[2] and Roche’s Accu-Chek[3], which all now require logins and agreements to leak health data to be hosted on external services in order to continue using the products I purchased from them.
In Roche’s case, they gave barely 5 weeks notice that their apps will cease to function at the end of the year, locking all data and functionality on January 1, and punting all responsibility to their subsidiary, mySugr[4].