since everything is on fire here’s my cat squeezing herself into a box in the sun.

#catsofmastodon

if you depend on a secret machine, whose usage you rent from a secret factory, to write your code, you have become the downstream of an oracle that is now in control of you, it has become the new landlord of your skill, and you have also become its little pay piggie

@gmc @mntmn

Lol welcome to my world. The state of software has been like this for decades. OSS software licenses are a disaster. Code serves corporate users. Fans fawn over mastery of corporate tools, while shunning amateur work. Unsupportable complexity. I think historically remote code execution the way browsers and such do it will prove to have been one of the worst ideas ever.

Browser wars are google msoft and apple ratcheting up complexity as anticompetitive and amateurs 100% left behind, trying to catch up.

We will never beat them st their game. This is not defeatist. They structure the market and the rules.

We can do what Harry Hay said sbout queer rights; we fight from askance. We go over ---------> there and do things for ourselves and build community. And utterly ignore (or block) ruinous opponents.

But the Internet -- a totally totalitarian corporate built structure from the start -- has itself become an ideology; two generations of people who think it is the world.

It is a construct and we ride it be do not control it. And wont in any world like this one. Its a lot of fiber and copper and buildings and rights of way. 100% capitalist.

Code, we can write. The entire microcomputer industry rose from literally nothing in 1974, nearly zero code imported from the minicomputer world. By 1982 we lost it all to ibm (the pc).

But today there sre millions of us and we each have in us so much more knowledge and code. We're trapped in our own thinking.

The latest utterings from Linus Torvalds are just another straw in the haystack of reasons why new thinking and approaches and modes of organisation are needed in the 2020s and beyond. We're in an era of Terrible Old Men with their heavily tarnished ideas addled by statistical sycophancy. The rebels are now the decrepit politburo apparatchiks. People with too much money and not enough education, living in an ethical wasteland.

evaluation of the utility and value of any technology/tool/system always needs to include it’s unintended and externalized effects.

Remember that the orange haze, the wildfires, the evacuations, the destroyed lives, the incinerated cities, your own personal respiratory distress after being forced against your will to smoke an entire forest

This was foisted on you to enrich a vanishingly small minority; it was never necessary

The fossil fuel industry knew about this since the 50's and covered it up like tobacco companies and lung cancer

Don't forget, don't forgive

Your anger is justified; direct it at those responsible

turns out a benevolent dictator is still a dictator

usefulness and productivity are not a moral or ethical imperative. they are always subordinate to life.

The argument that "AI works therefore we should use it" is akin to "Torture works therefore we should use it."

I don't mean that as hyperbole.

The underlying purpose of AI is at least twofold:

1) It puts a layer of abstraction over information.
- Primary Source: Raw data (eg video footage of an event)
- Secondary Source: Analysis (eg Low bias news and analysis of what this event means in the context of other events)
- Tertiary Source: Meta Analysis (eg Encyclopedia entries summing up Analysis)
- Quaternary Source: News Opinion and Propaganda (eg a "News Entertainment" channel that tells you what to think regarding the event)
- Pentanary (?) Source: TLDR summations divorced from underlying sources (eg AI summations, guides, etc that describe events or provide recommendations and guidance but follow behind the scenes algorithms that control the output)

The purpose of this layer of abstraction is control of information and removing the distribution of information from the actual events. This allows for influence campaigns, tuned marketing, tuned propaganda, and therefore control.

2) Centralization of compute power
- Computers in our hands that we control allow us a lot of power.
- Moore's Law no longer applies to localized compute power so we are in an era of repair and maintenance.

That means two things for corporations. Loss of income and loss of control.
- Forcing us to use centralized compute forces us to continue to spend money
- Localized AI engines still allow for centralized algorithms. (open sourced algos and localized engines dont factor in here as use and usecases are low)

AI is being pushed so heavily because both governments and corporations need it to further their wealth and power.

They push it via both making it cheap and accessible and having a veneer of usability.

This is a similar pattern to "Underpricing competition to drive them out and then jacking up rates when you have a monopoly", "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" and similar approaches.

So.

I am not arguing whether AI is useful. I am arguing that its use is detrimental to us. In fact, the more it becomes useful the worse it becomes BECAUSE more people adopt it. It hurts us as we use it. It hurts us more as we use it more.

Tying it back, I don't care if torture is useful and gets your desired results. Torture is bad and it hurts us.

#Linus #AI #Linux #solarPunk

this project is a dignified non-dogmatic rationalist marketplace-of-ideas meritocracy. that is why this particular controversial technical issue is beyond discussion, and we will be moving forward with my personal opinion without any community input. it is fine for me to have this position as the BDFL because if you don't like it you can always fork our open source code and spend decades building up the institutional material support necessary to maintain this critical infrastructure

we need to ditch linus, stallman, and the rest of these toxic gatekeepers who not only continue to derail the larger project, they also encourage this kind of behaviour in the community.

we are capable of expelling toxic and abusive people from out projects and communities. we will all be better for it.

If you don't stop Nazis coming to your bar, you will eventually have a Nazi bar.

If you don't stop AI bros committing to your project, you will eventually have a Nazi bar.

The state of #Python ecosystem right now: almost everything is slop. Some projects are complete vibe-coded slop (autobahn, chardet, cryptography). Some projects are disguised slop ("Coding agents shouldn't co-author themselves.")

There is only a handful of human projects left (Flask being one bright example). And they're being killed. They're being killed by the neverending slew of slop pull requests. They're being killed by all their dependencies becoming slop. They're being killed because this whole ecosystem has became such a complete cesspit that you have zero motivation to do anything.

EDIT: and honestly, this is only going to get worse. When you kill the incentive to work on projects, you only get more slop. Maintainers give in, and more projects become slop. Or they give up, and projects get forked unto slop.

#NoAI #NoLLM

LLMs have taken steve jobs' "a computer is a bicycle for the mind" and replaced it with driving a huge american pickup truck to the corner store that's a five-minute walk away

one must imagine sisyphus forking

It's not just that this tech is useless it's that it finds me when I don't want it and then kind of trips and falls in front of me being useless all while saying "I'm the future!"

Like these examples are infinite. Hence the CW.

RE: https://mastodon.opencloud.lu/@BrideOfLinux/116919397334202183

Look, he’s just trying to find the guy who did this, ok?

soft harmony floor

Hot take, perhaps.

What doesn't sit right with me is perhaps the idea that trading the majority of your waking hours for money is the natural order of things, when it is really just one economic arrangement among many that got locked in and dressed up as inevitability.

Most people spend their healthiest decades doing work they would not choose, to buy back small slices of the freedom they gave away, and we call this being responsible. Layered on top of it are supporting scams that keep the machine running.

Manufactured needs sold as happiness, debt marketed as opportunity, brands worn as a status symbol, and the quiet belief that your productivity is your worth. None of these are laws of nature. They are agreements we renew every day mostly because everyone else seems to be renewing them too, and questioning them feels riskier than complying. The genius of the whole setup is that it convinced billions of people that the cage was the sky.

#thoughts #goodmorning

ngl, i am super fucking tired of all the people i used to respect turning into braindead slopcultists.