though the lobotomized themselves weren’t among the loudest advocates of the procedure afaik

Ah well, that’s them computos for ya 🤷

Okay, what’s up with this title? Is this an 4-years-late announcement of support for Theo Seremitidis, who was unfairly dismissed by an australian company over labor safety disputes? Are there other Theos in need of support right now? Just Theo appreciation day in general?

I am utterly sniped. I have to go buy groceries now.

Also works for cocaine, I’m noticing.

Might be best as a comeback, if someone compares AI to a pharmaceutical breakthrough like antibiotics.

Just had a shower conversation with myself, and for some reason the crystal meth metaphor (methaphor?) is really coming together in my head.

“Have you even tried some frontier meth?”

“Sure, you can also get energy with exercising, eating well, and structure. But we don’t have to live like amish people, now that we can have meth!”

Nationalized Open Weight Models -> State-funded AI dispensory

There’s surely a rich bounty of comparisons left to mine.

The bubble will pop. It’s much too big to be sustainable.

But that won’t fix software industry employment because the Large Language Models don’t really need to work that well for this process. They only need to sort of work.

Get ready for the era of digitally sovereign on-premise open weight perpetual software sweatshops.

You can download an executable and surf websites with it, which will frequently break I guess.

Not sure how much help one can offer atm except donating or contributing directly.

I can tell you the two languages I would learn right now if I had the spare cycles.

1. Zig is a C-replacement language that took a no-AI stance early on. It doesn’t have compiler-assured memory safety like Rust, but it does try to revamp structures (like alloc or error handling) in a way that makes it more obvious to the programmer what is happening. I’d love to learn more, but cycles…
2. Gleam is a language that is part of the Erlang/BEAM ecosystem. It’s a functional language, so it’s a bit of a mindfuck if you come from a Python-/C-esque perspective, but if you like formal logic it might well be up your alley. It has a good web tutorial if you’re interested. Neither Gleam nor its runtime Erlang-OTP have taken a stance on AI as far as I know (Elixir has a permissive stance), but at least I’ve seen no red flags as of yet. The people at Gleam just generally give me a vibe of being deliberate and careful with their code.

I don’t think it’s impossible that the underlying tech of LLMs will be evolved into something undeniably useful. But I don’t think “helping with Python” will be that.

I think on !fuck_ai I can suggest, you could also just learn the relevant bits of Python? Learning to express your thoughts in code and understanding the tools you use feels way more empowering than relying on blackbox-extruded code.

In my book socialism is about workers controlling the means of production, and historical socialists did not agree how that would work in detail.

Libertarianism on the other hand is primarily about the rejection of personal restrictions, stuff like: “I should be allowed to freely copy and share media I have legally acquired.” or “I shouldn’t be forced to pay taxes.” This individualist thinking makes it usually unable to adress structural inequality.

But he also literally has a book titled “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free”.

That sure sounds like a zinger, but going off Wikipedia he does argue in that book for a loosening of copyright, which is pretty much what I meant. I don’t hate those positions though I’ll note they’re more libertarian than socialist. He has a whole personal freedom + monopoly control shtick, which works great for me in a lot of scenarios, but doesn’t quite work on GenAI tech.

You can call me exceptionalist, but I think LLMs stand out because the adoption of the tech basically requires very capital-intensive and thus centralized operations for model training. This makes whoever runs them (likely capital or a state) a powerful arbiter of information space, maybe best comparable with algorithmic feeds in monopolistic social media.

I think it is necessary to say: “Hey, we as a society shouldn’t run things like that. There are better ways of distributing information that work just fine.” A tech-neutral attitude can’t achieve that.

Funny horse-butt-creature notwithstanding, Dotcorows AI takes have been rather mid. Quoting from Guardian…

In this book, at least, he isn’t animated by the headline-grabbing concerns, whether existential risk or AI psychosis, deepfake porn or election disinformation, because those are unintended consequences. His target is the revenue model and the bubble it has created: “To be an effective AI critic, you need to strike at the source of AI’s power, which is the investment capital it attracts.”

He isn’t falling for AI doom and he is aware of the bubble, which puts him near the better end of the spectrum. But he’s also unwilling to fully criticize community damage resulting from LLM use. That may be because he’s fond of LLMs himself for his text editing and is repping the “it’s just another tool” defense. So he isn’t willing to go all the way when it comes to criticizing the global theft of labour that continues to power this industry. Information wants to be free, dontcha know?

You’re right. The grammer is right, but it still sounds off. Like, idk, someone fully capable of english leaving threats in his second language to be sneaky?

Je, wrong gramnar and the german feels totally off. Much too wooden amyway for a proper death threat.

I think he realized it too and sockpuppeted a better example. Check the comment by “Gerard”

I bumped heads here before on that take, but I can empathize deeply with these people.

I expect that interacting with most of them will be infuriating, since they probably accepted the “this is just how things are done from now on” narrative of AI and are some level of infatuated with the fancy demos.

But this acceptance is also where the inescapable soul-crushing comes from. If you can adopt an internal posture of resistance, the prevalence of AI is still grating but you can adopt a perspective that doesn’t devalue your own skill and makes personal impact conceivable. Many of these folks are pretty far gone, but a pipeline of recovery should be possible from a starting point like this.

The concept seemed interesting to me, but they did seem to enjoy making everything as complicated as possible.

I did find a CLAUDE.md when I was browsing their core repos a while back. That was only the web frontend I believe, not the core algorithm. Though it seems generous to assume they weren’t slopping up that one too.

First time I heard of this guy, but this slaps! Main post material

I just happened to watch the Heute-Show segment on the topic. (german late-night satirical news show, pretty decent takes usually but it’s no ZDF Magazin Royale)

It is nice that the doom claims by AI-CEOs are considered incredulous and their motivation is questioned (financial trouble, flagging product improvement). They certainly weren’t critical enough on some claims, e.g. the “AI hacking” incidents, let alone the inevitable dominance of AI tools. But despite that it was nice to see some sneering of the endless parroting of AI PR pieces that dominates german news.

Wernher von Braun is the way better comparison. Just maybe not one we like to make, since he basically got away with it and died an icon of U.S. space exploration.

Goering was pretty unapologetic at Nürnberg afaik, since he knew he was getting the rope.