Alternatively, how many of them have invested in one or more of these LLM makers and are ready to torpedo their own business as long as it makes the share price go up/feeds more authentic training data?

not far off, sadly

Then I guess it’s time to put “AI” (actually 3 if-statements in a trench coat) into all my software projects so they can legally jailbreak corporate software!

At least they aren’t green tips!

As well as 200 miles from every international airport inside the US.

Given the stochastic nature of LLMs and the pseudo-darwinian nature of their training process, I sometimes wonder if geneticists wouldn’t be more suited to interpreting LLM output than programmers.

According to this article written in July, it’s a bit more dire than that if you take a step or two back. Basically, openai and their copycats/derivatives are being held up by investments from Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta, who in turn are being held up by investments from Nvidia. If/when the whole chain collapses it’ll be more than 0.5% of earnings that disappear.

Not that I disagree, just as someone who loves computers and programming it really feels like throwing out the baby along with the bathwater.

We could (should imo) be planning a sort of overthrow of the rich assholes who don’t share; make sure everyone has access to a computer, the electricity need to run it, and the knowledge to use it to their own benefit.

The second, longer quote in my previous comment is from the intro to a computer self-help/“how-to” book, Without Me You Are Nothing (pdf link).

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” – Frank Herbert

"Right now there is an explosive growth of the number of computers and things they can do. Not only are their numbers increasing at a dazzling rate, but the storage of information in giant data banks is growing in the same explosive way.

We have no way to control this now and none in sight. In fact, the very nature of this growth says that all controls will lag far behind computer developments. Any attempt to ban them will only drive com- puters underground. Never lose sight of the fact that computers “crunch time.” The speed at which computers can operate tells us that laws cannot keep up with them. The person with a computer can dance rings around you while you react as though you were embedded in molasses.

What can you do?

Get your own computer. Learn how to use it. We are here to help you make that first step: how to find the one that fits your needs and your pocketbook, where to put it, how to program it-all of the essentials. If you don’t do this, the Bill of Rights is dead and your individual liberties will go the way of the dodo." – also Frank Herbert

I hate how much we seem to be slowly careening towards Frank Herbert’s vision like the worse case of collective target fixation.

Empathy and intelligence are not the same. As evidenced by some highly intelligent people displaying a shocking lack of empathy, and some highly empathetic people not displaying the greatest intelligence.

Personally, I’d rather talk about knowledge and behavior. Intelligence and empathy are hard to quantize.

Leaning into natural selection, proposing we need to let it “run it’s course”, in a way, to “weed out the weak traits” is eugenics. So is thinking that some traits are “good” and others “bad” without qualifying “for the current social/environmental context”. Stupidity might be a good defense against existential depression.

Why do you yourself call the thought “scary” if you don’t think it’s eugenics? What exactly is scary about letting “weak traits perish” if not that it’s inviting a certain form of eugenics to decide who gets to reproduce and/or be born?

You’ll note I didn’t claim you advocate for it directly, just that your arguments are eugenics-flavored.

Wealth inequality is returning to pre-WW1 levels and climate change’s effects are becoming visible to the average person, making people desperate for a way out. Education budgets in the US have been steadily slashed, far-right agit-prop by people like Steve Bannon has flooded the internet while the political class that could oppose it are pacified by corporate donors.

No need for social darwinism or sketchy eugenics-flavored arguments to explain this.

Haven’t gotten through the entire protocol description yet, but so far it seems closer to DMs on a social network than digital letters.

Neat, but maybe we should just do email-over-activitypub then…

I’m not sure if you explicitly want an RFC-style description (i.e. follows https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2119 for MUST vs SHOULD vs etc) or if you are using RFC as a colloquial term for the technical details of the protocol.

In case of the latter, the “protocol” link at the top resolves to this GitHub repo: https://github.com/Open-Email/MailHTTPS-Protocol

Eleventh is a static site generator. You run it once, then straight up serve the files it output.

Server-side rendering is like running eleventy for each incoming webrequest (albeit only for the requested page(s) instead of the whole site).

Huh. So maybe we will one-day get robots that bruise and bleed liquid metal when cut.

Jokes aside, this is really cool and I’ll be showing this to my local fab lab.

Part of the problem is also that, while an acre of land can feed a family of 4, there’s no way to generate enough surplus from that single acre to be able to afford a tractor in the first place. So the tractor creates the need for much larger farm plots being owned by a single person, which way up all the supposed extra free time the automation/mechanized tool was supposed to bring.

In the end, less people can work the land to sustain themselves and the only people better off are those who already had more than enough to go buy.

You buying at a grocery store is out of convenience, the alternative is learning how to hunt like a survival hunter.

At some point that was an alternative, but today the natural ecosystems have been so encroached upon by human civilization that we can’t just decide to become survival hunters - we’d simply starve. Grocery stores are all you have if you’re living in a high-rise apartment in most cities, for example. Most suburbs can’t support enough wildlife to then be hunted for survival by the humans living there.

Vegetable gardens might be a better analogy than survival hunting. There are even some initiatives being taken to break the cycle of dependency that grocery stores encourage, which I suspect is what @[email protected] is getting at: collective effort is needed beyond just letting the techies do their thing in their own corner, otherwise we all suffer. Everyone needs to move beyond their comfort zone at some point, for some amount of time - be it the techies teaching others, or the others learning a bit more about how their tools work.

the average user wants the convenience of easy to use software, because they don’t want to learn the alternative […] If everyone was like you, then easy to use software wouldn’t be selling so much.

I can’t tell if you are simply stating how the world currently is or claiming that it is destined to always be that way, but in either case I don’t see how “people prefer convenience” is a good argument against trying to help them get over that preference. I don’t think convenience is nor should be the end-all-be-all of existence, in fact it can be actively detrimental to life when prioritized.

Unless I’m mistaken, the average user wanted asbestos in their walls, lead in their paint, and asked their doctor for menthol cigarettes instead of regular ones when said doctor was prescribing them for stress. The average user in the USA couldn’t tell that their milk was full of pus and mixed with chalk to the point it was killing their babies, all for the convenience of still owners and milk producers. Their society had built up so much around the convenience of drinking milk in places that couldn’t produce it locally, that it took an Act of Congress as well as the development of technology to safely transport milk long distances before the convenience stopped killing people.

Don’t get me wrong, convenience is great when it doesn’t come at the expense of our well-being - in those cases it tends to dramatically improve our well-being. I tend to agree with @[email protected] that currently the software market is overly delivering convenience to the point that it is negatively affecting our collective well-being - with regards to software, at the very least.

Also, wasn’t Trump the reason the largest non-nuclear bomb in the USA arsenal was first used in combat? The bomb that had never been deployed in the almost 15 years since it’s creation specifically because the US military thought it would create too many civilian casualties?

The same Trump that allegedly wanted to nuke hurricanes to disrupt them before they hit the US’s coast?

The dude just wants to play with the shiny toys and see things go “boom”. He has literally stated to his own biographer that

When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different."

(source: The Week)

I suppose it suits him just fine that Israel is now flirting with open warfare with their neighbors.

Paging Ray Bradbury… https://www.libraryofshortstories.com/storiespdf/the-veldt.pdf

I have gotten cynical to the point of assuming the “endgame” here is properly kicking off WW3, so that Trump gets an excuse to drop a nuke or two on an adversary.

“The last time we had a world war, we won it! We were the best - and we won it with our nukes, our big beautiful nukes - it’s really a shame we haven’t used them since, don’t you think? We ended the war by dropping 2 on Japan, and now Japan is our best friend. Why don’t we drop some nukes on Iran? Don’t we want them to be our friend?”