Ross Rader

Personal account, but also CCO at Ting. DM me if I can help with anything...

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

I’m sure there are a million CLI domain lookup tools. Now there are a million and one. I wanted something simple, not whois, just a way to see what domain variations might be available. So Claude and I built this: https://t.co/18kkd6O3XX

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

Got frustrated with my 4,792 open tabs last night, so I built a Chrome extension that dumps them all to a markdown file and an import function to restore them later.

Probably only useful to me, but I'm loving the freedom Claude Code creates. "I wish this existed" → it exists!

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

@mattezell me too!

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

@PierrePoilievre @Twitter @elonmusk Great point. @elonmusk Please also make sure to include Bell and Rogers news outlets as well! https://t.co/zp83gaHEZ7

If that’s not government funded, then what is?

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

@AdamFard_ Send

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

@RickAnderson Why didn’t Mulroney do more to prevent the EPT massacre? /s

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

@NateSilver538 You can ask it for any sources it used and cite those.

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

@Carnage4Life https://t.co/ZNIo1PBpJ6

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

"After a rough first day, Bard suddenly found themself out of a job again..."

[Peter Nixey @peternixey]

I'm in the top 2% of users on StackOverflow. My content there has been viewed by over 1.7M people. And it's unlikely I'll ever write anything there again.

Which may be a much bigger problem than it seems. Because it may be the canary in the mine of our collective knowledge.

A canary that signals a change in the airflow of knowledge: from human-human via machine, to human-machine only. Don’t pass human, don’t collect 200 virtual internet points along the way.

StackOverflow is *the* repository for programming Q&A. It has 100M users & saves man-years of time & wig-factories-worth of grey hair every single day.

It is driven by people like me who ask questions that other developers answer. Or vice-versa. Over 10 years I've asked 217 questions & answered 77. Those questions have been read by millions of developers & had tens of millions of views.

But since GPT4 it looks less & less likely any of that will happen; at least for me. Which will be bad for StackOverflow. But if I'm representative of other knowledge-workers then it presents a larger & more alarming problem for us as humans.

What happens when we stop pooling our knowledge with each other & instead pour it straight into The Machine? Where will our libraries be? How can we avoid total dependency on The Machine? What content do we even feed the next version of The Machine to train on?

When it comes time to train GPTx it risks drinking from a dry riverbed. Because programmers won't be asking many questions on StackOverflow. GPT4 will have answered them in private. So while GPT4 was trained on all of the questions asked before 2021 what will GPT6 train on?

This raises a more profound question. If this pattern replicates elsewhere & the direction of our collective knowledge alters from outward to humanity to inward into the machine then we are dependent on it in a way that supercedes all of our prior machine-dependencies.

Whether or not it "wants" to take over, the change in the nature of where information goes will mean that it takes over by default.

Like a fast-growing Covid variant, AI will become the dominant source of knowledge simply by virtue of growth. If we take the example of StackOverflow, that pool of human knowledge that used to belong to us - may be reduced down to a mere weighting inside the transformer.

Or, perhaps even more alarmingly, if we trust that the current GPT doesn't learn from its inputs, it may be lost altogether. Because if it doesn't remember what we talk about & we don't share it then where does the knowledge even go?

We already have an irreversible dependency on machines to store our knowledge. But at least we control it. We can extract it, duplicate it, go & store it in a vault in the Arctic (as Github has done).

So what happens next? I don't know, I only have questions.

None of which you'll find on StackOverflow.

(I write on AI from a technical and product perspective. If you find that interesting then please do follow me for more)

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

"After a rough first day, Bard suddenly found themself out of a job again..."

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

@fmisle @hover Love it! Sorry I missed this! Congrats and thank you!!

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

There once was a computer so smart
It could think and chart
It learned and it grew
It knew just what to do
It was an AI, with heart.

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

Such a loss.

Thank you for your service and leadership Bill.

We’re less without you and greater for what you’ve left behind.

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

I missed this amongst all the other news… worth a read to understand the extent to which the RCMP will go to breach data privacy. ht/ @Terrilltf

[Maura Forrest @MauraForrest]

The RCMP has acknowledged it uses spyware to hack phones, including by remotely turning on a device's camera or microphone. https://t.co/wqwOTXSV16

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

@MobileSyrup My wife is at 54k.

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

@KarenWL_C @LegerMD @charlesadler Christo-fascists.

[Elaine Can @ElaineMCannon]

@Fogle4MO Abortion is illegal in Missouri and considered a class B felony punishable by 5-15 years in prison. For perspective, 2nd degree rape is a class D felony punishable by 0-7 years in prison. MAKE IT MAKE SENSE.

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

Wow - I am not sure if this is click bait or just tone deaf. The Post sure knows how to read the room.

[Ross Rader @rossrader]

What a perfect summary.

[Buck Velvet @perksentangled]

It's important to understand that supremacist ideology is an extension of human exceptionalism. If a human believes it is exceptional among all living things, it is only a step away from the belief that it is exceptional among humans. This is white christo-fascism 1/3

[Mike Shoreman @MikeShoreman]

7 people have attempted Lake Huron. 2 people have been successful in her allowing them to cross. Once in 1988 and now today. I now become the first person with disabilities to cross Lake Huron. Lake Michigan is up next in two weeks. Thanks for all the love Canada. 🇨🇦