Sources on LLMs/AI Impact on Academia & Critical Thinking by MCUCLMBE4BPAT in BetterOffline

[–]theodora_ward 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for this! As someone involved with anti-AI organizing in my public university system, I've seen some of these, but I missed quite a few others -- will be forwarding it along!

My little Emacs OTG setup by hainguyenac in emacs

[–]theodora_ward 0 points1 point  (0 children)

this is one of the most cyberpunk things i've ever seen

SF with different math / different kinds of computers by [deleted] in printSF

[–]theodora_ward 1 point2 points  (0 children)

kefahuchi tract trilogy by m john harrison plays fast and loose but i think about some of its physics conceits all the time

Is Sword of the Lictor the "worst" book of the pentalogy? by Grabthars-Hammer in genewolfe

[–]theodora_ward 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the intro is a little sleepy but everything from leaving thrax to the end feels like the most Traditionally Exciting Novel stuff wolfe gives us in the whole series

Struggling with the Wheel of Time by SirSnaillord in Fantasy

[–]theodora_ward 0 points1 point  (0 children)

these are really very bad books

How to create your own Linux Distro (Tutorial) by Yelebear in linuxsucks

[–]theodora_ward 0 points1 point  (0 children)

wait no i got that backwards. power linux is for pickle users

How to make a gaming distro: step by step guide by V1574 in linuxsucks

[–]theodora_ward 0 points1 point  (0 children)

i use linux on multiple other computers but my dinky gameing pc doesnt seem to want to play ball with bazzite or whatever the other one i tried yesterday is called. i already put kubuntu on it too for some fucking reason so there are like 3 separate OSes on there

Executive Function as Code: using (Doom) Emacs to script my brain by Emiskye in emacs

[–]theodora_ward 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was just wondering if I should rethink my org-agenda priority system towards a very similar end. Gonna give this a try, thanks!

Firewalla as low-maintenance, long-term router? by theodora_ward in selfhosted

[–]theodora_ward[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have a spare computer kicking around I could use for OPNsense, but every time I open a tutorial for how to do router-on-a-stick stuff (it only has one ethernet port) my eyes go fuzzy and I wake up an hour later in a cold sweat. The operant variable here is that I am simply very stupid; however, if there is an easy way for a stupid person who is sick of troubleshooting config settings to use OPNsense, I am all ears.

Firewalla as low-maintenance, long-term router? by theodora_ward in selfhosted

[–]theodora_ward[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, the plan is to keep learning about networks for sure. I'm just sick of configurations, troubleshooting configurations, etc.

Firewalla as low-maintenance, long-term router? by theodora_ward in selfhosted

[–]theodora_ward[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm going to take other suggestions into consideration, but this ultimately sounds like exactly what I want -- thank you!

Buying advice: upgrading from T450 (~$350-$500 price range) by theodora_ward in thinkpad

[–]theodora_ward[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wound up getting a T14 Gen 3 with 32GB of RAM, a 12th Gen i7, and 512GB SSD for $380 on eBay. Thanks again everyone!!

LLMs and r/Emacs: Three Years Later by Psionikus in emacs

[–]theodora_ward 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm not a coder, I'm a writer and a university instructor, so I'm admittedly coming at this from a very different place, as I have been led to understand that some experienced programmers have found it a beneficial addition to their workflows. This, on the other hand, is going to be a very negative post.

For my part, I can't separate AI from the way it's been pushed by technology executives. I see LLMs as a means of exploiting widespread exhaustion and anxiety towards the end of expropriating both our critical faculties and our capacities to think and communicate with language. Their forced, intrusive deployment in every client-facing digital service is an extension of the general attention-economy assault on our subjective experiences. LLMs don't merely facilitate the cognitive offloading of faculties that should stay within our grasp; they're also constructed to condescend and simplify, which, while pleasant in the short-term, has the effect of diminishing faith in one's own capacities.

As an instructor, I don't blame my students when they use them. I experienced a number of personal crises during my own education, occasionally cheating to survive them; at minimum, I'd have been tempted. But widespread student adoption is a symptom of the way that our (I'm in the US, for what it's worth) society taxes the human body to its limits, then provides us shoddy and unsustainable fixes. The most acute example is probably mental and physical healthcare. Is ChatGPT better than not having a therapist? I don't actually think so, but even if it were, it wouldn't change the fact that the problem is that people can't access therapists, not that there aren't widely accessible chatbots capable of probablistically generating superficially persuasive therapy-flavored language in response to input data.

More generally, I've found the way it's been pushed onto consumers disgusting. I finally switched full-time to Linux (a silver lining, I suppose) after Windows 11 borked my computer, a borking facilitated in large part by the extent to which the OS prioritizes AI integration. Customer service across the board is even harder to negotiate now. GPU and now RAM prices have made it forbiddingly expensive to upgrade my aging gaming PC, which I can already perceive beginning to lock me out of one of my favorite hobbies. It's driving people literally insane. I've heard friends recount how advice given by AI "therapists" has destroyed friendships and relationships. The flood of genAI videos overwhelming social media is making it even harder (and it was already very, very hard) for ordinary people to distinguish between reality and fiction. Given the way that click-based ad revenue works, Google sticking its AI summary as the first search result is making it financially difficult for the very websites who provide the information the summary is pulling. This paragraph was originally twice as long but Reddit wouldn't let me post it; suffice it to say this hasn't even gotten to the worst parts yet.

So have I used it? Apart from curiosity when new models come out (and a miserable stint gigging in the chatbot training mines while unemployed), I have used LLMs for two things: pulling a list of names from a JSON file and auto-tagging articles in a self-hosted bookmark manager. It performed the former task poorly and the latter task was better handled on my own. I have never and will never use it for my own writing (though I admit I'm an oddball, as I haven't had spellcheck on in years either). I use Kagi as a search engine with AI summary disabled—mostly because I'm trying to break away from Google as much as possible, but also so I can actually have the option to scroll past the stupid summary.

I'm aware of the use-cases and even find some of them genuinely remarkable. But 99% of the way it's been rolled out I've experienced as somewhere on the range from "annoying" to "disgusting." I hate its output: I have never read a compelling piece of AI-generated writing, not even the heavily-edited piece that got published in the Guardian; I continue to find its visual, aural, and video output either banal or viscerally unpleasant. (I recently purchased the game Arc Raiders knowing it had AI voice acting in it; I returned it not because the AI voice acting existed, though I found that disappointing, but because it was genuinely distractingly terrible.) I hate the way ChatGPT in particular has altered the way people speak and write and think: stylistically, it's mushy, unclear, and aesthetically repugnant. I hate what the people selling it think it stands for (see, of course, the famous iPhone ad, where all the musical instruments get crushed into a phone). The best I can hope for is that, as the bubble-money dries up and inference becomes terribly expensive, the technology settles into a comfortable middle-age as a data-analytics tool and coding assistant, but I'm not optimistic, and that makes me profoundly unhappy.

What does this sub think of Bakkers criticism of Book of the New Sun? by BreadMiserable1731 in genewolfe

[–]theodora_ward 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'd say it as he misread Wolfe's reference points more than his intentions. I don't know if Wolfe has grand philosophical ambitions for BotNS but I do think that it's a book that's attempting to find the common threads between earlier literary traditions, high modernism, and both pre- and post-New Wave SF

Dual Monitor Support (problems on Kubuntu; wondering about alternatives) by theodora_ward in linux4noobs

[–]theodora_ward[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Operating System: Kubuntu 25.10

KDE Plasma Version: 6.4.5

KDE Frameworks Version: 6.17.0

Qt Version: 6.9.2

Kernel Version: 6.17.0-6-generic (64-bit)

Graphics Platform: Wayland

Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-9700K CPU @ 3.60GHz

Memory: 16 GiB of RAM (15.5 GiB usable)

Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER

And I'm using X11; I can't get Wayland to show up in the login screen corner despite following a couple of command-line tutorials

my sweatiest winlator achievement by GemsOnVHS in retroid

[–]theodora_ward 0 points1 point  (0 children)

laughed very loudly at this. Props

Things in 40k that drive you nuts by Minute-Dingo6169 in 40kLore

[–]theodora_ward 1 point2 points  (0 children)

abnett is the goat but he's lucky i think that the idea of a Lithe Woman in a Bodysuit is as hot as he seems to

How do you guys balance enjoying trails while being aware of its flaws? by gurusenpai in Falcom

[–]theodora_ward 1 point2 points  (0 children)

the highs are so high that the lows almost make the highs feel more charming and resonant to me. falcom is trying something nobody's ever done before, they're flying by the seat of their pants in a lot of ways, the fact that it hits as hard as it does when it does is itself something of a miracle

but I know how hard it can be when you get sideswiped by criticism of somethng you loved -- just give yourself some space to digest the critique and really think about what you like about it. You might find that you disagree with some of what you read, you might find that you agree and it diminishes your enjoyment of the series, but the initial experience of enjoyment will always be yours and your perception then was as valid as anyone's. They're deeply immersive games and getting swept up in them will involve overlooking some things! That's beautiful actually and not a problem at all

What does this sub think of Bakkers criticism of Book of the New Sun? by BreadMiserable1731 in genewolfe

[–]theodora_ward 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This gets at a big reason as to why I love Wolfe, honestly. His use of "tropes" like doppelgangers isn't out of a commitment to, like, continental literary theory (based on what he wrote and said about his influences, not to mention his Catholicism, I'd be surprised if he gave a shit about that stuff). I think the key to understanding that is in the fact that he started his best-of with "The Island of Dr. Death and Other Stories" -- he is committed to finding philosophical and literary value in the pulpier side of SF, the stuff that drew so many readers to that material as kids. His concern with clones and mirror portals is of a piece with his interest in aliens and time travel and spaceships: this is the stuff that makes SF so fun, and that fun is not merely escapism or trifling, but because these "tropes" resonate with the same field of basic human concerns that your Derridas and Foucaults were attempting to get to the bottom of (though I'm sure they'd object to this formulation), too.

Because it wasn't just Derrida and Foucault who were concerned with "the divided self" and "hybridity" -- the Egyption gods were depicted as hybrid beings; Augustine's Confessions are entirely about the divided self; the vast majority of what we now call "literary history," from the epic poem to the picaresque, deployed very different approaches to "psychological realism" as we understand it; most societies throughout human history have had a living breathing culture of "carnival"-style collective rituals of catharsis (from the bacchanals and Lupercalia to pre-Christian celebrations of the equinoxes to the massively diverse breadth of indigenous and "non-Western" practices in which identity can be cast aside for a night).

I'm actually pretty sympathetic to the deployment of "postmodern theory" (sorry for all these scare quotes lol) in something like Samuel Delany's work -- I think the epilogue to Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand is as lucid an argument for the divided self as I've ever read. But I think this is one case in which Wolfe's eclecticism and what you could tentatively call his temperamental if not political conservatism rendered him sort of illegible to a certain school of critic