#molly white | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mostlysignssomeportents · 11 days

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"I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can't do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs."

-Molly White

#ai #blockchain #molly white

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proudlymale · 2 years

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James Ellis (@jamesellisfit) by Molly White

#james ellis #jamesellisfit #molly white #male model #modeledit #male aesthetics #handsome #muscular #edits: mine #male fitness #masculinity

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librarianrafia · 10 days

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"But there is a yawning gap between "AI tools can be handy for some things" and the kinds of stories AI companies are telling (and the media is uncritically reprinting). And when it comes to the massively harmful ways in which large language models (LLMs) are being developed and trained, the feeble argument that "well, they can sometimes be handy..." doesn't offer much of a justification.

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When I boil it down, I find my feelings about AI are actually pretty similar to my feelings about blockchains: they do a poor job of much of what people try to do with them, they can't do the things their creators claim they one day might, and many of the things they are well suited to do may not be altogether that beneficial. And while I do think that AI tools are more broadly useful than blockchains, they also come with similarly monstrous costs.

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But I find one common thread among the things AI tools are particularly suited to doing: do we even want to be doing these things? If all you want out of a meeting is the AI-generated summary, maybe that meeting could've been an email. If you're using AI to write your emails, and your recipient is using AI to read them, could you maybe cut out the whole thing entirely? If mediocre, auto-generated reports are passing muster, is anyone actually reading them? Or is it just middle-management busywork?

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Costs and benefits

Throughout all this exploration and experimentation I've felt a lingering guilt, and a question: is this even worth it? And is it ethical for me to be using these tools, even just to learn more about them in hopes of later criticizing them more effectively?

The costs of these AI models are huge, and not just in terms of the billions of dollars of VC funds they're burning through at incredible speed. These models are well known to require far more computing power (and thus electricity and water) than a traditional web search or spellcheck. Although AI company datacenters are not intentionally wasting electricity in the same way that bitcoin miners perform millions of useless computations, I'm also not sure that generating a picture of a person with twelve fingers on each hand or text that reads as though written by an endlessly smiling children's television star who's being held hostage is altogether that much more useful than a bitcoin.

There's a huge human cost as well. Artificial intelligence relies heavily upon "ghost labor": work that appears to be performed by a computer, but is actually delegated to often terribly underpaid contractors, working in horrible conditions, with few labor protections and no benefits. There is a huge amount of work that goes into compiling and labeling data to feed into these models, and each new model depends on ever-greater amounts of said data — training data which is well known to be scraped from just about any possible source, regardless of copyright or consent. And some of these workers suffer serious psychological harm as a result of exposure to deeply traumatizing material in the course of sanitizing datasets or training models to perform content moderation tasks.

Then there's the question of opportunity cost to those who are increasingly being edged out of jobs by LLMs,i despite the fact that AI often can't capably perform the work they were doing. Should I really be using AI tools to proofread my newsletters when I could otherwise pay a real person to do that proofreading? Even if I never intended to hire such a person?

Or, more accurately, by managers and executives who believe the marketing hype out of AI companies that proclaim that their tools can replace workers, without seeming to understand at all what those workers do.

Finally, there's the issue of how these tools are being used, and the lack of effort from their creators to limit their abuse. We're seeing them used to generate disinformation via increasingly convincing deepfaked images, audio, or video, and the reckless use of them by previously reputable news outlets and others who publish unedited AI content is also contributing to misinformation. Even where AI isn't being directly used, it's degrading trust so badly that people have to question whether the content they're seeing is generated, or whether the "person" they're interacting with online might just be ChatGPT. Generative AI is being used to harass and sexually abuse. Other AI models are enabling increased surveillance in the workplace and for "security" purposes — where their well-known biases are worsening discrimination by police who are wooed by promises of "predictive policing". The list goes on.

#ai #artificial intelligence #molly white

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mitchipedia · 2 years

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Cautionary Tales from Cryptoland

Thomas Stackpole interviews Web3 skeptic Molly White, author of the blog Web 3 is going just great.

White:

The ideological argument for Web3 is very compelling, and I personally hold many of the same ideals. I strongly believe in working toward a more equitable and accessible financial system, creating a fairer distribution of wealth in society, supporting artists and creators, ensuring privacy and control over one’s data, and democratizing access to the web. These are all things you will hear Web3 projects claiming to try to solve. I just don’t think that creating technologies based around cryptocurrencies and blockchains is the solution to these problems. These technologies build up financial barriers; they don’t knock them down. They seek to introduce a layer of financialization to everything we do that I feel is, in many ways, worse than the existing systems they seek to replace. These are social and societal issues, not technological ones, and the solutions will be found in societal and political change.

#crypto #web3 #molly white #web3 is going just great

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killyridols · 9 months

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strawberry by john dove & molly white, 2012, aqueous pigment ink + diamond dust on somerset satin, 61 × 46 centimeters

#john dove & molly white #john dove #molly white #british art #print #food #fruit #strawberries #2010s

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higherentity · 2 years

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#molly white #software engineer #molly #crypto sceptic #tech girls #women in tech #wikimedian #wikipedia editor #writer #sciren

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direclown · 4 months

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Interview with Molly White, author of Web3 is Going Just Great

#interview #web3 #molly white #dark web #wikipedia

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biglisbonnews · 1 year

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Annotated: Sam Bankman-Fried’s “FTX Pre-Mortem Overview” Sam Bankman-Fried has apparently decided to fill his time spent confined to his parents’ Palo Alto home with blogging, perhaps in the hopes that he can just blog his way out of the massive criminal and civil penalties he’s facing. https://blog.mollywhite.net/sbf-ftx-pre-mortem-overview/

#Molly White

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amniforn · 1 year

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Telegram sells fake phone numbers for crypto

Telegram facilitated the sale of over $50 million in usernames at crypto auctions, and now it wants to auction off fake phone numbers to allow access to the platform.Photo: Mechanic (Shutterstock) Telegram is not yet done finding new ways to monetize access to its platform. On Tuesday, the encrypted messaging app announced that users will be able to sign up for its services without needing…

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sail-not-drift · 5 months

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Alex "it's all in the hips" Claremont-Diaz:

#RWRB #rwrbedit #Red White and Royal Blue #rwrbsource #firstprinceedit #firstprince #taylor zakhar perez #nicholas galitzine #mollie's gif #mine mine mine #if this looks familiar it's because i posted it weeks ago and didn't understand why it got less than ten notes #apparently tumblr keeps certain words out of tracked tags #GOOD TO KNOW #anyway. i'm proud of this #next time I’ll make it less yellow

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junebugdunes · 2 months

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dumbass trio

#and on today's episode of characters on a blank white background because i haven't done a full piece in ages #anyways i tried to do the kind of blocky coloring of the credits and merge it with my art style #it worked for Gio n Sylvie #i think I used too dark of a green for Molly cause the contrast is distracting #epithet erased #epithet erased fanart #molly blyndeff #sylvester ashling #giovanni potage #my art

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mostlysignssomeportents · 11 days

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"But the reality is that you can't build a hundred-billion-dollar industry around a technology that's kind of useful, mostly in mundane ways, and that boasts perhaps small increases in productivity if and only if the people who use it fully understand its limitations. And you certainly can't justify the kind of exploitation, extraction, and environmental cost that the industry has been mostly getting away with, in part because people have believed their lofty promises of someday changing the world."

-Molly White

#molly white #ai #hype

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cdevroe · 2 years

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The predatory communities of crypto

Molly White:

Crypto, when it comes down to it, relies on greater fools. As assets without any intrinsic value, the way to make money from crypto is to find a greater fool who will buy your assets from you at a higher price.

Molly White (who I’ve linked to before) has been on a crusade against so many parts of “crypto”. I do not think she is completely against all of the technologies or against every project — but she has done an excellent job writing cogent pieces on the many bad parts of the market and collecting together some of the most egregious scams.

She, more than anyone, has helped me to temper any of my initial excitement. I’ve long stated that I’m interested in, and even optimistic about, some of the blockchain technologies behind Bitcoin and other chains. And, that I think NFTs could be a good thing for digital art overall when the energy needed to transact decreases by many factors.

However, I’m increasingly worried that the entire market is so awash with fraud it may never recover. It is very sad to see. Crypto went from a technology that I encouraged my nieces and nephews to dabble in so that they could be prepared for a potential future where crypto was “a thing” to now I would tell people to stay away. That it is simply too hard to navigate safely or to keep up with potential fraud.

This latest piece by Molly sort of puts it over the edge. At the beginning, the hype around crypto and NFTs exploit someone’s greed. That’s fine. Most short term investments do that. But now the market is exploiting people’s deeply held beliefs, emotions, and identity.

Crypto went from fun to dangerous. And very quickly. I’m publishing this post long after I’ve made this opinion. So I’m overdue. And as of today, my advice is to be extremely cautious and skeptical of every single part of crypto regardless of who you think is behind the project or how well funded it is.

#crypto #nft #community #Molly white #cryptocurrency

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mitchipedia · 2 years

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Profile of the author of the website Web3 Is Going Just Great.

#crypto #web3 #molly white

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basiatlu · 6 months

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For the pose meme, may I request D2 for drarry please? 💜

You may!!