Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name "Pluralistic."
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It's tedious to be shouted at for "using Mastodon wrong" by someone who got on Mastodon yesterday (I opened my first Mastodon account in 2018!), and even worse when they double down after I point them to the essay I've written to explain why I post the way I do, and what to do if you want to read my work somewhere that's not your Mastodon timeline ("Can you believe this asshole wrote a whole essay to explain why he posts his stupid Mastodon threads?"):
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Then there's email: I continue to love email, but email doesn't love me back. After years of being blackholed by AT&T and then Google, this turns out to be the year that Microsoft bounces thousands of messages to its Hotmail and Outlook users because they have arbitrarily and without warning added my mail-server to a blacklist. Thank you to the Fediverse friends who escalated my trouble ticket - but man, this is a headache I could certainly do without:
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Then there's email: I continue to love email, but email doesn't love me back. After years of being blackholed by AT&T and then Google, this turns out to be the year that Microsoft bounces thousands of messages to its Hotmail and Outlook users because they have arbitrarily and without warning added my mail-server to a blacklist. Thank you to the Fediverse friends who escalated my trouble ticket - but man, this is a headache I could certainly do without:
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My sysadmin, the incomparable and tireless Ken Snider, tells me that he's got the long-overdue new hardware installed at the colo and he's nearly ready to stand up my long-anticipated personal Mastodon server, which will let me solve all kinds of problems. He's also going to stand up my own Bluesky server, at which point I will part ways with Twitter.
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My sysadmin, the incomparable and tireless Ken Snider, tells me that he's got the long-overdue new hardware installed at the colo and he's nearly ready to stand up my long-anticipated personal Mastodon server, which will let me solve all kinds of problems. He's also going to stand up my own Bluesky server, at which point I will part ways with Twitter.
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I wish I could have used the regular Bluesky service while I waited, but just setting up an account permanently binds you to totally unacceptable and dangerous terms of service:
What's the point of a service that has account- and data-portability if signing up for it makes you *permanently* surrender your rights, even if you switch servers? This might be the stupidest social media unforced error of the post-zuckermuskian era.
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I wish I could have used the regular Bluesky service while I waited, but just setting up an account permanently binds you to totally unacceptable and dangerous terms of service:
What's the point of a service that has account- and data-portability if signing up for it makes you *permanently* surrender your rights, even if you switch servers? This might be the stupidest social media unforced error of the post-zuckermuskian era.
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There is one technology that *has* made my POSSE life better, and it might surprise you. This year, I installed Ollama - an open-source LLM - on my laptop. It runs pretty well, even without a GPU. Every day, before I run Loren's python publication scripts, I run the text through Ollama as a typo-catcher (my prompt is "find typos").
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There is one technology that *has* made my POSSE life better, and it might surprise you. This year, I installed Ollama - an open-source LLM - on my laptop. It runs pretty well, even without a GPU. Every day, before I run Loren's python publication scripts, I run the text through Ollama as a typo-catcher (my prompt is "find typos").
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Ollama *always* spots three or four of these, usually stuff like missing punctuation, or forgotten words, or double words ("the the next thing") or typos that are still valid words ("of top of everything else").
The reason this is so valuable to me is that errors magnify through each stage of POSSE. Errors that make it through the python publication script take 10x the time to fix that they would if I caught them beforehand.
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Ollama *always* spots three or four of these, usually stuff like missing punctuation, or forgotten words, or double words ("the the next thing") or typos that are still valid words ("of top of everything else").
The reason this is so valuable to me is that errors magnify through each stage of POSSE. Errors that make it through the python publication script take 10x the time to fix that they would if I caught them beforehand.
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Errors that I catch after running the scripts and publishing the posts take 10x time more. Errors that I have to fix later on - once I've closed all the relevant tabs and editors - take 10x again more time. Some POSSE channels (email, Twitter) can't be fixed *at all*.
So catching these typos at the start of the process is a huge time-saver.
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Errors that I catch after running the scripts and publishing the posts take 10x time more. Errors that I have to fix later on - once I've closed all the relevant tabs and editors - take 10x again more time. Some POSSE channels (email, Twitter) can't be fixed *at all*.
So catching these typos at the start of the process is a huge time-saver.
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I have some very generous readers who have the proofreader's gene and are very helpful in catching my typos (hi, Gregory and 9o6!), and I feel bad about depriving them of their fun, but there's still the odd error that slips through, and they always catch it.
Ollama is a pretty good typo-catcher. Probably half of the "errors" it points out are false positives, which is better than the false positive rate for Google Docs' grammar-checker.
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I have some very generous readers who have the proofreader's gene and are very helpful in catching my typos (hi, Gregory and 9o6!), and I feel bad about depriving them of their fun, but there's still the odd error that slips through, and they always catch it.
Ollama is a pretty good typo-catcher. Probably half of the "errors" it points out are false positives, which is better than the false positive rate for Google Docs' grammar-checker.
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As someone who uses a lot of jargon, made up words, etc in his prose, I'm used to overriding my text-editor. I wouldn't simply trust an LLM's edits any more than I would accept every suggestion from a spell-checker. Hell, yesterday I sent back a professionally copyedited manuscript (the intro for the paperback of *Enshittification*) and marked "STET" on about a third of the queries.
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As someone who uses a lot of jargon, made up words, etc in his prose, I'm used to overriding my text-editor. I wouldn't simply trust an LLM's edits any more than I would accept every suggestion from a spell-checker. Hell, yesterday I sent back a professionally copyedited manuscript (the intro for the paperback of *Enshittification*) and marked "STET" on about a third of the queries.
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Doubtless some of you are affronted by my modest use of an LLM. You think that LLMs are "fruits of the poisoned tree" and must be eschewed because they are saturated with the sin of their origins. I think this is a very bad take, the kind of rathole that purity culture always ends up in.
Let's start with some context. If you don't want to use technology that was created under immoral circumstances or that sprang from an immoral mind, then *you are totally fucked.*
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Doubtless some of you are affronted by my modest use of an LLM. You think that LLMs are "fruits of the poisoned tree" and must be eschewed because they are saturated with the sin of their origins. I think this is a very bad take, the kind of rathole that purity culture always ends up in.
Let's start with some context. If you don't want to use technology that was created under immoral circumstances or that sprang from an immoral mind, then *you are totally fucked.*
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I mean, all the way down to the silicon chips in your device, which can never be fully disentangled from the odious, paranoid racist William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the silicon transistor:
Further, we wouldn't have the packet-switched network that delivered these words to you without the contributions of the literal war-criminals at the RAND corporation:
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I mean, all the way down to the silicon chips in your device, which can never be fully disentangled from the odious, paranoid racist William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the silicon transistor:
Further, we wouldn't have the packet-switched network that delivered these words to you without the contributions of the literal war-criminals at the RAND corporation:
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Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:
SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects
Before there was Big Tech, there was "adversarial interoperability": when someone decides to compete with a dominant company by creating a product or service that "interoperates" (works with) its offerings.In tech, "network effects" can be a powerful force to maintain market dominance: if everyone...
Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org)
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Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:
SAMBA versus SMB: Adversarial Interoperability is Judo for Network Effects
Before there was Big Tech, there was "adversarial interoperability": when someone decides to compete with a dominant company by creating a product or service that "interoperates" (works with) its offerings.In tech, "network effects" can be a powerful force to maintain market dominance: if everyone...
Electronic Frontier Foundation (www.eff.org)
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That's how we make good tech: not by insisting all its inputs be free from sin, but by purging that wickedness by *liberating* the technology from its monstrous forebears and making free and open versions of it:
Purity culture is such an obvious trap, an artifact of the neoliberal ideology that insists that the solution to all our problems is to shop very carefully, thus reducing all politics to personal consumption choices:
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That's how we make good tech: not by insisting all its inputs be free from sin, but by purging that wickedness by *liberating* the technology from its monstrous forebears and making free and open versions of it:
Purity culture is such an obvious trap, an artifact of the neoliberal ideology that insists that the solution to all our problems is to shop very carefully, thus reducing all politics to personal consumption choices:
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I mean, it was extraordinarily stupid for the Nazis to refuse Einstein's work because it was "Jewish science," but not merely because antisemitism is stupid. It was also a major self-limiting move because *Einstein was right*:
How 2 Pro-Nazi Nobelists Attacked Einstein’s "Jewish Science" [Excerpt]
In a chapter excerpted from his new book, science writer Philip Ball describes “Aryan physics” and other ludicrous ideas that accompanied the rise of Adolf Hitler
Scientific American (www.scientificamerican.com)
Refusing to run an LLM on your laptop because you don't like Sam Altman is as foolish as refusing to get monoclonal antibodies because James Watson was a racist nutjob:
James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers
The complicated story of James Watson, whose landmark DNA discovery with Francis Crick was later overshadowed by his deeply offensive remarks
STAT (www.statnews.com)
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I mean, it was extraordinarily stupid for the Nazis to refuse Einstein's work because it was "Jewish science," but not merely because antisemitism is stupid. It was also a major self-limiting move because *Einstein was right*:
How 2 Pro-Nazi Nobelists Attacked Einstein’s "Jewish Science" [Excerpt]
In a chapter excerpted from his new book, science writer Philip Ball describes “Aryan physics” and other ludicrous ideas that accompanied the rise of Adolf Hitler
Scientific American (www.scientificamerican.com)
Refusing to run an LLM on your laptop because you don't like Sam Altman is as foolish as refusing to get monoclonal antibodies because James Watson was a racist nutjob:
James Watson, dead at 97, was a scientific legend and a pariah among his peers
The complicated story of James Watson, whose landmark DNA discovery with Francis Crick was later overshadowed by his deeply offensive remarks
STAT (www.statnews.com)
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Or to refuse to communicate via satellite because they were launched into space on a descendant of a rocket designed by the Nazi Wernher von Braun and built by slaves in a death camp:
Von Braun, the V-2, and Slave Labor
By Darren Court, Museum Director/Curator Edited by Jenn Jett, Museum Specialist Contents Warning: This post contains graphic imagery. Viewer discretion is advised. Part 1Title and Contents Part 2The Beginnings of the American V-2 Program Part 3Wernher von BraunThe Pioneer of Nazi and American Rocketry Part 4Slave Labor at Peenemunde and Nordhausen Part 5The Aftermath Next…
White Sands Missile Range Museum (wsmrmuseum.com)
The AI bubble sucks. AI itself is a *normal technology*:
It's not "unethical" to scrape the web in order to create and analyze data-sets. That's just "a search engine":
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Or to refuse to communicate via satellite because they were launched into space on a descendant of a rocket designed by the Nazi Wernher von Braun and built by slaves in a death camp:
Von Braun, the V-2, and Slave Labor
By Darren Court, Museum Director/Curator Edited by Jenn Jett, Museum Specialist Contents Warning: This post contains graphic imagery. Viewer discretion is advised. Part 1Title and Contents Part 2The Beginnings of the American V-2 Program Part 3Wernher von BraunThe Pioneer of Nazi and American Rocketry Part 4Slave Labor at Peenemunde and Nordhausen Part 5The Aftermath Next…
White Sands Missile Range Museum (wsmrmuseum.com)
The AI bubble sucks. AI itself is a *normal technology*:
It's not "unethical" to scrape the web in order to create and analyze data-sets. That's just "a search engine":
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There's plenty of useful things people can do with AI. There's plenty of useful things people *will* do with AI. AI is bad because it's an economic bubble and a grift, but not because we've created a bunch of utilities that would - under normal circumstances - be called "plug-ins":
I started blogging 25 years ago, just before the dotcom bubble popped.
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There's plenty of useful things people can do with AI. There's plenty of useful things people *will* do with AI. AI is bad because it's an economic bubble and a grift, but not because we've created a bunch of utilities that would - under normal circumstances - be called "plug-ins":
I started blogging 25 years ago, just before the dotcom bubble popped.
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That bubble-pop inflicted a lot of pain on people who didn't deserve it, including the normie investors who'd been suckered into blowing their life's savings on dogshit stocks, and everyday workers who found themselves out of a job. But the world was better off. So was the web. With the bubble popped, real, good stuff could access talent, servers and office space.
In the six years I've been doing this, I've seen several bubbles come and go: crypto, web3, metaverse.
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That bubble-pop inflicted a lot of pain on people who didn't deserve it, including the normie investors who'd been suckered into blowing their life's savings on dogshit stocks, and everyday workers who found themselves out of a job. But the world was better off. So was the web. With the bubble popped, real, good stuff could access talent, servers and office space.
In the six years I've been doing this, I've seen several bubbles come and go: crypto, web3, metaverse.
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Now it's AI. But those bubbles were like Enron, frauds that left nothing good behind. AI is like the dotcom bubble, awash in sin and inflicting untold misery, but it will leave something useful behind:
And when it does, I'll make sense of it on this blog.
eof/
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The link didn't work for some reason, perhaps this will https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/
@valehippi Fixed, thanks!
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Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name "Pluralistic."
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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@pluralistic POV you are a tee.
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@pluralistic POV you are a tee.
@n8chz It's one of those jokes that made me laugh enough that I ran with it, even though it's totally obscure. That's "Number 6" from The Prisoner, with my face matted on.
