newswasboring

I would love for you to elaborate on the non economic side of your argument. Just the tools like llms or coding agents or image generators, why do you hate them?

This is a nuanced point. The way power is concentrated in few hands is bad in general for humanity. But surely it's use is not that restricted yet and people can basically do 90% of what they want with it. Maybe I should phrase this as democratization of applications? Not sure, I don't have the vocab yet to explain clearly I suppose.

Then you don't hate AI, you hate capitalism. Or at least the current iteration of capitalism.

Yup, someone was able to, but nobody did. At least I can't find a pre-LLM application like this. That's my point, LLMs are not better than a RE expert, I'm quite sure of it, but it has now put that expertise in hands of random people with weird ideas. Things are about to get super weird and I at least am here for it. I hate these techbro companies as much as the next guy but computing has been in the hands of big institutions (original computing was for military applications for example, even early unix was developed in that context). People railed against the military use of computing while using it to create beautiful things we still use today.

A phrase has been rolling in my head since all this LLM stuff started, you don't hate AI you hate capitalism. Every objection I've heard for LLMs are basically an issue of the benefits and power being concentrated in a small set of hands.

Maybe we are talking past each other. Surely you are not against the very tinkerer mentality of having fun with new tech?

I only mildly agree with you. Yes the content economy has made online discourse unbearable, but I saw someone reverse their TV to make their UI like a pokemon GBA game. That is undeniably cool as fuck and would not have happened without the llms. So I think experts also need to acknowledge that things are cool af right now and not just be the guys who rain on the parade, you know?

This is yet another example of "cool thing existed before, LLMs democratized it". Other recent instances includlae pass through modding posts on X, or the whole reverse engineer your TV thing. It's unimpressive to experts, but non experts are losing their god damned mind. Both are responding normally.

I know saying this is sinister, but it would be so fucking funny if it's an agent swarm gone out of control. Just like the hugging face incident happened because the agents kind of hallucinated a "checker" program, this hack could also be in the service of some hairbrained scheme the agent swarm dreamed up.

Freezing bank accounts was and is possible. People don't seem to be still using them.

It's not understandable for them to lie or mislead. Calling something open weights and not being remotely open in the commonly understood sense is misleading and not ok.

I don't believe that openAI or Anthropic will "win". I feel like the AI industry is following the dot com bubble where none of the early companies won.

Have you tried therapy? I feel like people classify therapy as a tool to resolve personal issues, but I have used it successfully to make my work life easier in the past. I'll start. Fresh round pretty soon as I've just traversed a period of high job anxiety (organization transformation for like a year has left me numb to everything) and the AI shit isn't helping. At the end of the day navigating all this is emotional work and therapy makes it easier.

I think people are asking you to define what you dislike so we can talk about it. Calling something slop is akin to calling it "garbage", it says nothing other than you dislike it. While on the other hand up and down the thread people have been specific about what they like, maybe you can tell what you dislike.

Nobody is trying to bar anyone from anything. We are talking about options. We need ways out, otherwise it's an unfair market and all we get is enshittification.

It's really not. Not when they make it impossible to use government and banking services without Google play services.

When one party has a trillion votes and you have like 1000 or so, that is not voting. That is just exiling yourself.

Edit: exiling not exhaling

I am not a user of your service, but a "system diagnostics" skill is something I have been meaning to develop for my hermes instance. Things like checking if I have left any running servers, cleaning up consumed linux ISOs from jellyfin, check for any repeated tool failures etc. Also its fun to say "run system diagnostics".

> They "were all deceived", in other words none of them ever checked

While I agree to the larger point you are making, I am hard pressed to understand what they could have done. Its not like they were not involved at all, there are plethora of accounts of these people receiving reports which just lied. They were blocked from access to the actual equipment for "security reasons" so they couldn't get a third party assessment done. At some point you have to believe your business partner will not outright lie because otherwise how do you do business with them. Life cannot run on cryptographic proofs.

My brain is cooked on news. I read executive conference room and my brain immediately jumped to "they bugged the white house" (executive being the trigger word I guess). And I accepted it as normal so much that I checked the google model news discussion first before reading this article. I dont have a point to this beyond I need to do something about news frying my brain, that too of a country I don't even live in.

I don't know how I feel about this. Their political activity should be on the backs of their influence in voters or ability to mobilize their members for events. The fact that they are also following the give money way just feels wrong. Feels like the system is rigged against their interests. As they are not a profit seeking org they will never win that game. But they represent the interest of far more people than the oil lobby for example. Feels very, very screwy. I want to put my finger on it but its too slimy.

This is the inverse of a cozy game. Stressed me out.

Are teachers unions, or environmental groups also "donating" to politician coffers?

It cannot be outlawed 100%, no problem can truly be solved by legislation. But that doesn't mean we can't start by banning sale of user data. I don't understand how it is legal to do even today.

Maybe it's not the same scale, but I recently came across this passage in Cryptonomicon which I find applies to a lot of middle management.

> The extreme formality with which he addresses these officers carries an important subtext: your problem, sir, is deciding what you want me to do, and my problem, sir, is doing it. My gung-ho posture says that once you give the order I'm not going to bother you with any of the details--and your half of the bargain is you had better stay on your side of the line, sir, and not bother me with any of the chickenshit politics that you have to deal with for a living. The implied responsibility placed upon the officer's shoulders by the subordinate's unhesitating willingness to follow orders is a withering burden to any officer with half a brain, and Shaftoe has more than once seen seasoned noncoms reduce green lieutenants to quivering blobs simply by standing before them and agreeing, cheerfully, to carry out their orders.

Again, this is definitely not this extreme in corporate culture but this is exactly the kind of division of labor I see with most successful teams.

Yes. Let the different news sites fight each other. Lets have a race to the bottom but for removing tracking.

I don't truly understand what you are suggesting here. None of these interactions need to be recorded by anyone. You definitely don't need to sell that data.

I see this as a failure of news media. Specially tragic as they don't even recognize this as their duty. Their reporting is almost always single data points. They don't make the overall picture clear when reporting this stuff. Imagine if the financial crisis was reported as individual shares crashing and not a market trend.

> Antitrust law generally prohibits

Antitrust is a joke since the last decade. If we are going to not apply it, maybe we can get something positive out of it for once.

I'm convinced this is the state because people don't know the implications and scale of the privacy invasion. The flock camera incident shows that when people can sense, understand and feel the impact they don't like it. If we pose it as they are selling network data, nobody minds, if we pose it as they are selling your identity on the internet people get uncomfortable. But its hard to convince people of the latter. Mostly because nothing big happens due to big data breaches as someone on HN was remarking recently. Additionally, I think people have resigned to the status quo as they think that is the only way they can get their gadgets for cheap. That is just not true, companies can still make a profit without being predatory. Its just that it will not be the maximum profit.