FauxLiving

You tax strike for political purposes.

I tax strike because I'm broke af.

We are not the same

Ask the people who were shouting about forking systemd... I'm sure they've created their techno-utopia fork world by now.

People really underestimate the amount of free labor provided by these FOSS groups. There is a reason that these flash in the pan outrage topics evaporate as quickly as they appear. The people who spend their lives arguing online are not the people who have the capability to replace all of the things that they're attempting to destroy.

If only there were some community of people who valued using free and open source software so we had options that were not dependent on the whims of companies. Then we could have software that we could depend on that isn't dependent on the whims of corporations.

Throwing out AI because there are AI companies who causing harm is like giving up on Operating Systems because of the plethora of bad acts made by Microsoft.

I agree that everyone should using OpenAI, Anthropic or any of the other companies which were created to spend trillions of dollars buying up all computer hardware on the planet while building fossil fueled datacenters.

That isn't the same as thinking that the actual machine learning technology itself is somehow inherently bad. There are many open weight models and FOSS projects that lets people use AI without contributing to the capitalist orgy that's causing all of the secondary harms.

People conflating AI technology and AI companies are failing to diagnose the issue that we're facing.

This is a pretty standard tactic of offering your service at a rate that nobody can match in order to ensure that no competition can enter the market.

In 2-3 years those free accounts will turn into paid accounts and all of the other fun 'upgrades' brought by enshittification.

The avatar of social media

I'm going to say there's not a chance in hell that this gets forked. Much like the systemd age verification topic, the outrage is primarily from the chronically online and the bots who influence them. This isn't a population of people who have the actual technical capabilities to do anything productive, that's why they have such a large online presence.

The outrage on social media is massively amplified by bots which is why these 'movements' never get passed the 'spamming social media with outrage porn' phase. It's easy to fabricate and spin up 1000 social media bot accounts to post anti-AI content (ironically using LLMs to do so).

It isn't easy to fabricate and spin up 100 competent developers who are so rabidly anti-AI that they will attempt to start a major new project

Don't confuse comments and upvotes with reality. Social media metrics are easy to manipulate.

The one you want.

Ignore the ignorant purity test of the outrage junkies. Half of the 'people' stirring shit on this topic are probably LLMs themselves.

AI is a technology.

The rampant investment into that technology by capital and the market manipulations and fraud are the dangerous thing to societal stability. It's the trillions of dollars poured into the technology in an attempt to buy a monopoly which is generating all of the secondary effects that people are complaining about.

People are, I'd argue intentionally, confusing the two things. The Western AI Industry is bad but it is a separate thing from machine learning technologies.

Pretending that the entire technology is bad because a bunch of people with infinite wallets are destroying the economy and ecosystem in order to make profits is ignorant.

Trying to paint every project, person or group that uses AI with the same brush as the people who are creating all of the negative effects is misdirecting anger away from the people making the decisions and blaming a technology.

Not super efficiently, but it will still do the things that Turing machines can do, given enough cycles.

Including running a simulation of Game of Life

It looks like grey goo and skynet are competing to see who will be the next apocalypse.

I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few 'shops in my time.

Oh the humanity.

Ah yes, the summer where 'anal leakage' was on everyone's tongues. So to speak.

The backlash isn't as powerful as the drive to monetize another accessory and the hundreds of billions of dollars to make it happen.

Without any kind of privacy laws making this kind of thing illegal, every company would want that kind of mass data and will gladly give you the glasses in order to take it from you.

You may as well just completely replace your package manager with this one simple script.

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys

exec(TrustedAgent.request(f"Write a Python statement to install {sys.argv[1]}, make no mistakes"))

Tech 'journalism'

This is an article about an article which was written by a dedicated Windows blog. The author adds nothing outside of contextual framing and quoting the original article and a FAQ provided by the source used by the original article.

At least the original article's author put in some work with graphics and research, this blog post is about the same informational content as 'news' articles which are just a recap of a social media argument.

Hello fellow Californians

system roulette:

yay

“Under observation, we act less free, which means we effectively are less free.”

-Edward Snowden

They think the problem is AI, when it's actually capitalism and securities fraud.

It's much simpler to fixate on the technology than to have to understand complex things like economics and history.

If your users have multiple different devices which each have different codecs that they support it's easier to transcode the movie in real time into a format that their device supports than to keep multiple different copies of the media with different encodings.

Graphics cards can do this but a Pi can't.