Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Court documents regarding Facebook's plagiarism lawsuit just started getting unsealed, and ho-lee shit is this a treasure trove:
This confirms basically everything I said a week ago - AI violates copyright by design, and a single copyright suit going through means its open fucking season on the AI industry. Wonder who's gonna blink first.
Our local pro entertainment industry lobby group (the kind of group who gets thepiratebay blocked, Brein) is already succesfully going after smaller LLMs and datasets created by (and made freely available) over enthousiastic amateurs/hobbyist which breach copyright.
This might seem like a positive thing, but I doubt they will have the willpower/power/desire to go after the big ones. (And even then not sure they are the good guys here).
oh would you look at that, something some people made proved helpful and good, and now cloudflare is immediately taking the idea to deploy en masse with no attribution
double whammy: every one of the people highlighted is a dude
"it's an original idea! we're totes doing the novel thing of model synthesis to defeat them! so new!" I'm sure someone will bleat, but I want them to walk into a dark cave and shout at the wall forever
(anubis isn't strictly the same in that set of things, but I link it both because completeness and subject relevance)
https://github.com/TecharoHQ/anubis/issues/50 and of course we already have chatgptfriends on the case of stopping the mean programmer from doing something the Machine doesn't like. This person doesn't even seem to understand what anubis does, but they certainly seem confident chatgpt can tell him.
oh cute, the clown cites[0] POPIA in their wallspaghetti, how quaint
(POPIA’s an advancement, on paper. In practice it’s still…..not working well. source: me, who has tried to make use of it on multiple occasions. won’t get into details tho)
[0] fsvo
New thread from Baldur Bjarnason:
Keep hearing reports of guys trusting ChatGPT’s output over experts or even actual documentation. Honestly feels like the AI Bubble’s hold over society has strengthened considerably over the past three months
This also highlights my annoyance with everybody who’s claiming that this tech will be great if every uses it responsibly. Nobody’s using it responsibly. Even the people who think they are, already trust the tech much more than it warrants
Also constantly annoyed by analysis that assumes the tech works as promised or will work as promised. The fact that it is unreliable and nondeterministic needs to be factored into any analysis you do. But people don’t do that because the resulting conclusion is GRIM as hell
LLMs add volatility and unpredictability to every system they touch, which makes those systems impossible to manage. An economy with pervasive LLM automation is an economy in constant chaos
On a semi-related note, I expect the people who are currently making heavy use of AI will find themselves completely helpless without it if/when the bubble finally bursts, and will probably struggle to find sympathy from others thanks to AI indelibly staining their public image.
(The latter part is assuming heavy AI users weren't general shitheels before - if they were, AI's stain on their image likely won't affect things either way. Of course, "AI bro" is synonymous with "trashfire human being", so I'm probably being too kind to them :P)
A Bluesky post by Jamelle Bouie prompted me to reflect on how I resent that my knowledge of toxic nerd deep lore is now socially relevant.
alt text
Breaking Bad meme. Jesse: They always say "Read the Sequences", right?
Walter White:
Jesse: But the Sequences are all cult shit, like everything Yud says about quantum mechanics
Jesse: It's all "The scientists are insufficiently Rational(TM) to see the truth, don't trust the scientists, trust me instead"
Walter White: Jesse, what the fuck are you talking about
That 'uses an iq chart from a tabloid mag' thread reminded me how bad the Lw Rationalists are at Lw Rationality. It is supposed to help you be less biassed, but nope first google hit from a bad source and almost zero community pushback, because it confirms their bias about IQ, and the relative value of fields.
Overcoming Bias (by renaming "bias" into "priors")
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Drunk woman yelling into man's ear (meme image). Captioned as though she is speaking:
Their foundational text is a Harry Potter fanfic that supposedly teaches science
but it gets 9th-grade biology wrong by fucking up Punnett squares
I felt this one
interesting masto thread on doge's use of AI, from someone who helped build their LLM:
from someone who helped build their LLM
Nice to get a look on the inside from one of the 21st-century Oppenheimers.
lol, that's too charitable to them, nukes at least work
continuing this tortured analogy for no particular reason:
oppenheimer/sutskever: we finally have a nuke to drop on nazis
groves/?: nazis?
teller/saltman: at long last, we have a chatbot capable of polluting the entire earth and internet
szilard/EY: and that's why we shouldn't build it (gets ignored)
teller/saltman: also we need billions of dollars for it and effects will be the same if it's deployed in backyard
musk would be general ripper i guess, they had no ketamine back then. deepseek is new dubna and both caused diplomatic incidents. thiel would be one of these people that didn't focus on that thing but instead on other things that make the former work (enablers) that would be missiles and surveillance
lol, that’s too charitable to them, nukes at least work
And Oppie realised the gravity of their invention. And he was trying to end the Second World War with them, not make money by causing untold suffering.
Nukes and AI both represented a new and unique threat capable of causing worldwide devastation, so I'd say the analogy works pretty well.
when bubble pops, chatbots will vanish but nukes will remain for a long time
r/cursor is the gift that keeps on giving:
In other news, IETF 127 (which is being held in November) is facing a boycott months in advance. The reason? Its being held in the United States.
This likely applies to a lot of things, but that would have been unthinkable before the election.
Think Germany and the Uk created travel advisories against the US. ( As we the Dutch are mostly neutral cowards, 20% putins lackey, almost an American vassal state, and very good at ignoring the rest of the world, doubt we will anytime soon).
E: To make it clear this is quite horrible and unthinkable. The MAGA people are moving so fast and the opposition is doing so little (still hoping that like the last war it will be stopped at the courts).
As a Canadian we're just waiting for the tanks to start running through.
We're apparently going to get an election April 28th, but is there still going to be a Canada by then? Who knows.
So far France and Netherlands have already set up programs to poach american scientists fired during recent ripping copper from the walls, so i wouldn't say there's nothing done
A thing which came under criticism here, as while this program is being set up they are also doing budget cuts on universities. So don't expect much from .nl here. Also our gov is a mess, more interested at putting up border controls (this year they caught 250 people, which they consider a big success for re-instituting border controls). So yeah doubt, esp with Wilders in gov and opposition at the same time.
check out this extreme value delivery in the "pro" offering that jsfiddle[0] aims to bring to market
[0] - ~~going by the one comment downthread, haven't checked it bc no account~~ have checked, it shows even without account
Wordpress plugins pull this shit too, WP Dark Mode attempts to paywall the custom CSS that's built into Wordpress
yeah I've got some clients with wp in production and wow logging into the admin on those things is an Experience
ya know the Nicole the Fediverse Chick spam? this poster thinks it's a revenge Joe job:
Nice detective work. The second time I got one of those I figured it resembles the false flag channel ad spammers on IRC. I still wonder occasionally what #superbowl at supermets did for someone to go on a multi-year spamming campaign against them.
In lesser corruption news, California Governor Gavin Newsom has been caught distributing burner phones to California-based CEOs. These are people that likely already have Newsom's personal and business numbers, so it's not hard to imagine that these phones are likely to facilitate extralegal conversations beyond the existing ~~bribery~~ legitimate business lobbying before the Legislature. With this play, Newsom's putting a lot of faith into his sexting game.
Gavin Newsom has also allegedly been worked behind the scenes to kill pro-transgender legislation; and on his podcast he's been talking to people like Charlie Kirk and Steve Bannon and teasing anti-trans talking points.
I guess this all makes sense if he's going to go for a presidential bid: try to appeal to the fascists (it won't work and also to heck with him) while also laying groundwork for the sort of funding a presidential bid needs.
If I was a Californian CEO and received a burner phone I'd text back "Thanks for the e-waste :<" but maybe that's why I'm not a CEO.
Tbh, weird. If I were a hyper-capitalist, CA-based CEO, I would take the burner phone as an insult. I’d see it as a lack of faith in the capture of the US. Who needs plausible deniability when you just own the fucking country?
it's weird and lowkey insulting imo. let's assume that for some bizarre reason tech ceo needs a burner phone to call governor newsom: do you think i can't get that myself, old man? i'd assume it's bugged or worse
the phones seem to serve no practical purpose. they already have his number and I don't think you can conclude much from call logs. so suppose they are symbolic. what he would be communicating is that he's so fully pliant that he is willing to do things there is no possible excuse for, and not even for real benefit, just to suck up to them. the opposite of plausible deniability
Even worse, he got caught handing them out. And even with all that, I'd expect a tech CEO to just go 'why not use signal?' or 'what threat profile do you think we have?' (sorry I keep coming back to this, it is just so fucking weird, like 'everything I know I learned from television shows' kind of stuff)
Brings to mind the sopranos scene of the two dudes trying to shake down a starbucks or starbucks analogue for protection money
Roundup of the current bot scourge hammering open source projects
https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/
We can add that to the list of things threatening to bring FOSS as a whole crashing down.
Plus the culture being utterly rancid, the large-scale AI plagiarism, the declining industry surplus FOSS has taken for granted, having Richard Stallman taint the whole movement by association, the likely-tanking popularity of FOSS licenses, AI being a general cancer on open-source and probably a bunch of other things I've failed to recognise or make note of.
FOSS culture being a dumpster fire is probably the biggest long-term issue - fixing that requires enough people within the FOSS community to recognise they're in a dumpster fire, and care about developing the distinctly non-technical skills necessary to un-fuck the dumpster fire.
AI's gonna be the more immediately pressing issue, of course - its damaging the commons by merely existing.
The problem with FOSS for me is the other side of the FOSS surplus: namely corporate encircling of the commons. The free software movement never had a political analysis of the power imbalance between capital owners and workers. This results in the "Freedom 0" dogma, which makes everything workers produce with a genuine communitarian, laudably pro-social sentiment, to be easily coopted and appropriated into the interests of capital owners (for example with embrace-and-extend, network effects, product bundling, or creative backstabbing of the kind Google did to Linux with the Android app store). LLM scrapers are just the latest iteration of this.
A few years back various groups tried to tackle this problem with a shift to "ethical licensing", such as the non-violent license, the anti-capitalist software license, or the do no harm license. While license-based approaches won't stop capitalists from using the commons to target immigrants (NixOS), enable genocide (Meta) or bomb children (Google), this was in my view worthwhile as a rallying cry of sorts; drawing a line in the sand between capital owners and the public. So if you put your free time on a software project meant for everyone and some billionaire starts coopting it, you can at least make it clear it's non-consensual, even if you can't out-lawyer capital owners. But these ethical licenses initiatives didn't seem to make any strides, due to the FOSS culture issue you describe; traditional software repositories didn't acknowledge or make any infrastructure for them, and ethical licenses would still be generically "non-free" in FOSS spaces.
(Personally, I use FOSS operating systems for 26 years now; I've given up on contributing or participating in the "community" a long time ago, burned out by all the bigotry, hostility, and First World-centrism of its forums.)
Update on the Vibe Coder Catastrophe^tm^: he's killed his current app and seems intent to vibe code again:
Personally, I expect this case won't be the last "vibe coded" app/website/fuck-knows-what to get hacked to death - security is virtually nonexistent, and the business/techbros who'd be attracted to it are unlikely to learn from their mistakes.