• 0 Posts
  • 480 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: July 18th, 2023

help-circle








  • Programs have “learned” how to play games without instruction — most recently with rat neurons playing Doom — and that’s what they’ll attempt to do with LLM’s. It must learn from feedback, experience and interaction as we could never code something that complex.

    I don’t believe LLM’s can achieve general AI, but humans are just organic pattern recognition devices at the end of the day — a brain in an organic machine that can sense a fraction of the world around us.

    The problem is that LLM’s are dumb, thus dangerous when given autonomy, they’ll be used to wage war, and the military industrial complex is more likely to destroy us with autonomous LLM killbots than achieve general AI.




  • Not really. The problem with FOSS licensing is that it was too altruistic, with the belief that if enough users and corporations depended on the code, the community would collectively do the work necessary to maintain the project. Instead, capitalism chose to exploit FOSS as free labor most of the time, without any reciprocal investment. They raise an enormous amount of issues, and consume a large amount of FOSS developer time, without paying their own staff to fix the bugs they need resolved — in the software their products depend on. At that point the FOSS developer is no longer a FOSS developer, and instead is the unpaid slave labor of a corporation. Sure, FOSS devs could just ignore external inputs, but that’s not easy to do when you’ve invested years of your life in a project. Exploiting kindness may be legal, but it should never be justified or tolerated.

    Sure, FOSS licenses legally permit that kind of use, but just because homeless shelters allow anyone to eat their food, and sleep in their beds, that doesn’t make the rich man who exploits that charity ethically or morally justified. The rich man who exploits that charity (i.e. free labor), and offers nothing in return, is a scummy dog cunt; there are no two ways about it. The presence of lecherous parasites can destroy the entire charity; they can mean the difference between sustainability and burnout.

    FOSS should always be free for all personal, free, and non profit use, but once someone in the chain starts depending on FOSS to generate income and profit, some of that profit should always be reinvested in those dependencies. That’s what FOSS is now learning; to reject the exploitation and greed of lecherous parasites.




  • I’ll bite, too. The reason the status quo allows systemic wage stagnation for existing employees is very simple. Historically, the vast majority of employees do not hop around!

    Most people are not high performers and will settle for job security (or the illusion of) and sunk cost fallacy vs the opportunity of making 10-20% more money. Most people don’t build extensive networks, hate interviewing, and hate the pressure and uncertainty of having to establish themselves in a new company. Plus, once you have a mortgage or kids, you don’t have the time or energy to job hunt and interview, let alone the savings to cover lost income if the job transition fails.

    Obviously this is a gamble for businesses, and can often turn out foolish for high-skilled and in demand roles — we’ve all seen many products stagnate and be destroyed by competition — but the status quo also means that corporations are literally structured — managerially, and financially — towards acquisition, so all of the data they capture to make decisions, and all of the decision makers, neglect the fact that their business is held together by the 10-30% of under appreciated, highly experienced staff.

    It’s essentially the exact same reason companies offer the best deals to new customers, instead of rewarding loyalty. Most of the time the gamble pays off, and it’s ultimately more profitable to screw both your employees and customers!




  • I, for one, would not mind if my property value stagnated or decreased so that others could have a better life.

    This is why you will never be in any decision making capacity.

    IMO you aren’t really a part of the problem if you support increasing density around you and policy that makes units an attractive option for the majority (improving public transport, amenities, minimum building standards such as sound proofing, floor-plan and storage space, HVAC, etc). You can’t rely on individuals to voluntarily give up space they don’t need any more than you can rely on them to voluntarily give up money they don’t need. Any system which relies on discretionary kindness for the greater good is doomed to fail.

    Most people don’t choose detached housing because they need a backyard or extra space. They do it because it’s a better cost-benefit when compared to the higher density housing stock. The solution is to make higher density the more attractive cost-benefit.


  • All of which are heavily based on open source software, donations, and in the case of wikipedia, user generated and moderated content.

    The solution is not centralization. It’s decentralization. A decentralized internet archive could not be held accountable, or taken down, by any individual government. It will remain active and fault tolerant as long as enough users keep enough storage allocated to maintain replication and redundancy. One architected with zero knowledge encryption as the backbone (e.g. IPFS + I2P) could even operate within the jurisdiction of hostile governments.


  • Exactly. This is why the internet archive should be a universally publicly-funded endeavor. It’s just as important as the world’s libraries.

    I’m really hoping the internet archive shifts to some distributed P2P type model (IPFS, Tahoe-Lafs etc) where anyone can assign a hard drive as tribute, archive any public webpage on it and it’ll be replicated around the world, but still accessible through a single protocol. You can’t stop the signal!