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dylan baker

@dylnbkr.bsky.social

Lead research engineer @dairinstitute.bsky.social, social dancer, aspirational post-apocalyptic gardener 🏳️‍🌈😷 I run workshops @dairfutures.bsky.social. Always imagining otherwise. they/he

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Dylan Thomas Doyle, PhD.@dylantdoyle.bsky.social · yesterday

@dylnbkr.bsky.social and I have launched a podcast! We're bringing together researchers, organizers, critics, and storytellers to help us imagine what more liberatory and human-centered tech futures could look like. First ep is live with Keolu Fox 🌱 Subscribe now ⬇️ otherfutures.transistor.fm

other futures: tech, resistance & imagining otherwise

big tech wants to control our future, but there are other paths we can choose instead. on "other futures" we bring together leading tech researchers, organizers, critics, and storytellers to help us i...

otherfutures.transistor.fm

dylan baker@dylnbkr.bsky.social · 5d ago

@dylantdoyle.bsky.social and I are starting a podcast! We're bringing together researchers, organizers, critics, and storytellers to help us imagine what more liberatory and human-centered tech futures could look like. First ep lands on Tuesday 🌱 Subscribe now ⬇️ otherfutures.transistor.fm

other futures: tech, resistance & imagining otherwise

big tech wants to control our future, but there are other paths we can choose instead. on "other futures" we bring together leading tech researchers, organizers, critics, and storytellers to help us i...

otherfutures.transistor.fm

Justin Hendrix@justinhendrix.bsky.social · 2w ago

“Hype is eating the future, and leaving us the bones.” Sun-ha Hong of UNC-Chapel Hill says the Silicon Valley hype machine systematically “borrows credibility from the future to purchase legitimacy in the present.” The cost, he argues, is a planetary-scale drain on our alternatives.

Tech Hype is Cannibalizing the Future

Every day, we are told that we live in the future—but hype is eating the future and leaving us the bones," writes Sun-ha Hong.

techpolicy.press

Anil Dash@anildash.com · 2w ago

Exactly this. And in fact, many models *have* been created this way, and decades of prior machine learning systems *were* created this way, consensually. These things are choices! People are STILL working this way! It’s not just that a better world is possible — it already EXISTS. We can nurture it.

John Scalzi@scalzi.com · 2w ago

This is your occasional reminder that generative "AI" in particular could have been developed on public domain materials and/or licensed and compensated works but the major players intentionally, methodically and systemically chose to steal labor from working creative folks instead

dylan baker@dylnbkr.bsky.social · 4w ago

Reading the press about Jev and TypeSafe AI and it's wild to see ppl seemingly re-discovering what folks like @timnitgebru.blacksky.app have been saying this whole time. Yes, ML models should be well-scoped, structured, & testable! Being context-appropriate is, in fact, the most important thing!

A screenshot of text that reads: Large language models (LLMs) are designed to produce text for humans to read. When you need a model to make a judgment that your code will consume, that creates a mismatch: you are coercing a text-generation system into outputting structured decisions, then parsing the results back into something your code can depend on.A screenshot that reads: "My experience is that Sutton’s bitter lesson is the tip of an iceberg of bitterer lessons: beyond compute and algorithms, there’s data and even picking the right task to do ML on." Below that is an image of a pink pyramid with four different vertical layers, which read top-to-bottom "algorithms", "compute", "data", and "doing the right task". Below that is the text: "The bitterest lesson in ML is that doing the right task > data > compute > algorithms."
dylan baker@dylnbkr.bsky.social · 4w ago

cannot WAIT for this!!! If you want to really understand many of the issues with modern AI— the hyperscaling, the data theft, the labor exploitation—you need to understand ImageNet.

Three Scary Rogue Agents in a Trenchcoat@alexhanna.bsky.social · last mo.

Excited to announce that I've signed a contract with @mitpress.bsky.social for a new book! It's about ImageNet, a dataset of 14 million photos. Without it, we likely wouldn't have "AI" as we currently know it. I've been thinking about this book for over 5 years, and am excited to finally write it.

Screenshot of a deal report from Publishers Marketplace that reads: “Coauthor of AI CON and cohost of the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 podcast Alex Hanna’s NET WORKS: IMAGENET AND THE CREATION OF THE MODERN AI DATASET, on the labor behind ImageNet’s cache of 14 million photos from the early aughts that became the backbone of AI datasets, to Rachel Moore at MIT Press (world).
Iris van Rooij 💭@irisvanrooij.bsky.social · last mo.

📣 Scholarship programme for applications by graduates in the Netherlands with a non-Western migration background and/or a recent asylum background. If interested to do PhD research in Computational Cognitive Science, feel free to reach out! Info about research lines in our lab in thread below. 🧵

First round of Mosaic 3.0 now open for applications | NWO

The first round of the updated Mosaic 3.0 PhD scholarship programme is now open for applications. Mosaic encourages the recruitment of graduates from under-represented groups into Dutch academia by fu...

nwo.nl

dylan baker@dylnbkr.bsky.social · last mo.

Roombas have SUPERHUMAN vacuuming abilities. & I don't want to alarm you, but when we taped a bunch of knives to one and gave it rocket boosters... it displayed emergent living room destroying properties. Please give me $100000000 to ensure rocket-powered knife roombas don't end human civilization 😔

dylan baker@dylnbkr.bsky.social · last mo.

Screaming this blog post from the rooftops fr Puts the last few weeks of press in very candid perspective: "There was some performative wrangling with the issues during the last week or two of press coverage, but generally terms like fascism, corruption, and deregulation were conspicuously absent".

Karl Bode@karlbode.com · last mo.

I think it's foundationally weird that all of these stories about meaningless AI industry guardrails fail to remind readers that the tech industry ENTHUSIASTICALLY supported the dismantling of federal regulators by historically corrupt autocrats like that's not important context or something

Helen Czerski@helenczerski.bsky.social · last mo.

As both an academic and a writer, I am repelled by the "this looks like a long document. Would you like me to summarize it for you?" that seems to appear at the top of every pdf viewer now. NO. The *entire point* of good writing (either books or journal papers) is that every sentence has a purpose.

dylan baker@dylnbkr.bsky.social · last mo.

"The work got done faster than I could have done on my own. And I barely had to think. While that sounds amazing if you're a person who profits from more work getting done, there are immense drawbacks to this" brettcodes.com/im-done-usin...

I'm done using AI

Why I'm stopping using AI for coding (and anything else) after using it earnestly for a year and coming to understand the harms it causes on personal, societal, and environmental levels.

brettcodes.com

Ada Palmer@adapalmer.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Britain is having its hottest summer on record, but one place has remained green. Brits in Holnicote have put rivers back onto their floodplains, restored wetlands, and released beavers that now build ponds and maintain the wetlands themselves. Countryfile buff.ly/CchGxpW #ShareGoodNewsToo

Drought has ravaged the UK but this one nature site has been left untouched – this is how | Countryfile.com

Allowing nature to do its own thing could be the simplest solution to the UK's drought problem.

countryfile.com

dylan baker@dylnbkr.bsky.social · 2mo ago

"the 'rogue' frame [...] offer[s] up fantasies of a machine getting smarter. My worry is the intelligence that is retreating: the human intelligence that builds these systems, deploys them, and adopts them into workflows, then hides behind the results – then pins the blame on a system from nowhere."

Eryk Salvaggio@eryk.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I wrote about the OpenAI-Hugging Face hack following my conversation with @melhogan.bsky.social on The Data Fix this week - more on how it happened, what it means, and why I still see "stochastic flocks" rather than "artificial hiveminds": mail.cyberneticforests.com/models-dont-...

Dan Hon@danhon.com · 2mo ago

I think a reasonable position on the OpenAI huggingface thing is: * executing untrusted code is a bad idea * sandboxes frequently aren't, even with the best intentions * novel combinations of untrusted code are being generated at scale and being executed * consequences probably bad

dylan baker@dylnbkr.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Adding this to the list of reasons that synthetically generating probable text in situations where very specific word choice *really really matters*— e.g. law and medicine— is a terrible idea.

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Dan "Mr. Bones and Me" Greene@dmgreene.bsky.social · 3mo ago

It's union or bust, folks. This is expensive, we need taxes to make it happen. This is labor-led, we need need labor power to make it happen. Same dynamic in primary and secondary ed, in hospitals, in libraries, in childcare, etc etc

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