Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is very import: you don't know how the cancelation culture will be in 20 years. I like to use the example of a guy who did a blackface in a party back in 2000's. Although reprehensible, was not commom-sense racism back then. Today society sees it as completely unacceptable. Eventually that guy became prime minister of Canada and things went pretty bad when that photo surfaced decades later. Is it far to judge so…
Only idiots don’t care about it historical context.
Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs
211–220 of 258 posts
Re: Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs
#212Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of short sighted only consider social cancellation. People in power change, laws get applied retroactively. History is full of people who get purged from stuff that was fine when it was written
If you’re honestly worried about purges, you need to be gathering allies and armaments, not worrying about your HN posts.
Do you think the current and future administrations won't go further? This very comment might get me on a list.
My commenting _is_ gathering allies and armaments by voicing dissent and being one more raindrop that will hopefully add to a flood of change and improvement.
Re: Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs
#213Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kind of short sighted only consider social cancellation. People in power change, laws get applied retroactively. History is full of people who get purged from stuff that was fine when it was written
If you’re honestly worried about purges, you need to be gathering allies and armaments, not worrying about your HN posts.
Re: Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs
#214i haven't read the full study, but its been on my mind for a while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stylometry The best course of action to combat this correlation/profiling, seems to be usage of a local llm that rewrites the text while keeping meaning untouched. Ideally built into a browser like Firefox/Brave.
You're absolutely right. It's not just a matter of what you post-- it's a matter of how you post
Sometimes you can just tell something's off. No exclamation mark, double dash instead of an emdash. Human-slop on my HN? This place is becoming more and more like Reddit, I swear!
Re: Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs
#215Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Same comment read after 1 Dec 2020 (Transition coming out): Insensitive, demeaning, in accurate. I genuinely don't understand this. Are you sure you're not imagining possible offenses against some non-existent standard?
standards change over time. Grandfather clauses are a courtesy, not a right.
This term itself is an example of what this thread is talking about. Are you aware that some people now consider this to be a racist term? It’s a reference to the disenfranchisement of black voters in America.
Re: Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs
#216Pity - the pseudo anon internet is fun
Re: Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs
#217I post under my real name here, pretty much the only place I post. It keeps me honest and straight in what I say when I choose to say it. I tried talking to my children about leaving as clean of a footprint on the internet as one can in anticipation of future people/systems taking that into consideration. I don't know what it will be but I would expect some adversarial stuff. Trying to keep clean is what I'd prefer f…
> I tried talking to my children about leaving as clean of a footprint on the internet as one can in anticipation of future people/systems taking that into consideration. I don’t think you’re wrong, but the fact that people consider it inevitable we’ll all have an immutable social acceptance grade that includes everything from teenage shitposts to things you said after a loved one died, or getting diagnosed with canc…
In light of that what I see happening in the short term is that every institution will start screwing people based on information that basically doesn't matter since that's kind of what they're already set up to do with that information but don't except in exceptional cases since those are the cases in which that information makes it back to them.
Imagine some business owner opening a new location, some social worker renewing their license, some civil engineer creating plans on someone's behalf. All those people need to deal with institutions that in the "normal" case pretend to not have large discretionary components in order to get the public to put up with them, but do in practice have such ability. Now say those institutions pay for some LLM based "who am I dealing with" service that finds everyone's pseudonymous posts and whatnot.
Well, all of these people wind up getting given the run around because even though they do fine work that meets the rules, knowing how the sausage is made has made them jaded and given them opinions that make the institutions they have to deal with want to screw them. The business owner gets given the run around because it turns out he believes the institutions he's seeking permission from are a corrupt racket who's members ought to be hung from the overpass. The social worker gets denied because their career has turned them into a "defund it all and when faced with real consequences most of these people will shape up" type. The civil engineer's plans get rejected and he has to go around in circles because he's been posting about how in light of what corporations with good funding can get approved and the impact thereof it's unconscionable the stuff they try and enforce upon individuals and engineers ought to pencil whip anything that isn't clearly F-ed up.
And so, all these people have to waste time and probably a low five digit sum of money fighting the BS. This would be fine perhaps if these people's conduct was so egregious it made it back to the institutions on it's own (like say some doctor who's preaching quackery on youtube may get his license yanked if he amasses such a following the board hears about it, that's the kind of stuff institutional discretion was set up for) but no real good social interest is served having an LLM dig up petty dirt on everyone. However, the LLM service peddlers stand to make a buck. The institutions stand to make a buck while washing their hands of responsibility. The lawyers who'll fight on wronged parties behalf stand to make a buck. And in the process they can all pretend like society somehow benefits from this enhanced scrutiny when in fact they're just making mountains out of mole hills.
Re: Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs
#218Re: Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That is not possible and it is extremely suppressive to express yourself. Also for the fact that you cannot predict how future powers will view past comments - for instance, certain benign political views 20 years ago could become "terroristic speech" tomorrow. I operate by a simple, general rule - I don't often say anything online I wouldn't say directly to someone's face in real life.
This is very import: you don't know how the cancelation culture will be in 20 years. I like to use the example of a guy who did a blackface in a party back in 2000's. Although reprehensible, was not commom-sense racism back then. Today society sees it as completely unacceptable. Eventually that guy became prime minister of Canada and things went pretty bad when that photo surfaced decades later. Is it far to judge so…
Re: Large-Scale Online Deanonymization with LLMs
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
That we identify social media as "tech" is very strange. Yes, they have a lot of servers. But that isn't their core innovation. Their core innovations are the constant expansion of unpermissioned surveillance, the integration of dossiers, correlating people's circumstances, behavior and psychology. And incentivizing the creation of addictive content (good, bad, and dreck) with the massive profits they obtain when the…
I didn’t say I hated technology, generally— I said I hate what the industry has morphed into in the US. What is or isn’t tech is immaterial. All of the odious things you listed are things that the ‘tech industry’ does, largely unquestioned, these days. Frankly, it’s sickening.
Except noting that it is crazy that we accept the framing of "tech firm" for what are really "psychology engineering" firms, simply because they use tech.
Their use of tech is only perceived as more glamorous than companies addressing far greater technical challenges, because they are making crazy profits. While the only problem they alleviate with any tech ambition, is making more money for themselves, through centralizing ad venues (maximum ad revenue extraction, blind eye to scams and other dark marketers) and social damage externalization (maximum psychological manipulation).
The negative downstream impacts of all this value extraction are many, including the vast sums of money being paid to attention-hacking social influencers. This destructive army is directly funded by social media, whose alibi is they don't want to be censors. But they are not neutral, as that framing would imply. They are very actively financing the dreck!