Not a sneer, but another cool piece from Baldur Bjarnason: The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus.
Gonna skip straight to near the end, where Baldur lays out a potential apocalypse scenario for FOSS as we know it:
Best case scenario, seems to me, is that Free and Open Source Software enters a period of decline. After all, that’s generally what happens to complex systems with less investment. Worst case scenario is a vicious cycle leading to a collapse:
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Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.
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Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.
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OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable.
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That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back.
Linking this to a related sneer, another major problem that I can see befalling FOSS is earning a reputation as a Nazi bar. How high that risk is I’m not sure, but between the AI bubble shredding tech’s public image and our very good friends increasingly catching the public’s attention, I suspect those chances are pretty high.
I don’t wish ill upon my fellow tech sector workers, but frankly a backlash on the tech industry is long overdue. People have been mad at big tech before and so far it (thankfully) hasn’t led to cataclysmic shifts in free software.
I feel like the original Free Software ethos of software freedom as moral obligation first and economic convenience second (if at all) might be more resilient to these kinds of field-shaping challenges than the more business model oriented Open Source ideology. That said, I don’t expect the ongoing AI crisis to re-separate F and OS by name in popular or even tech industry consciousness.
it’s already got a rep as a grossly sexist bar, so
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I hate to say it but pg’s tweet was reasonable. Some asshole carrying water for Mike fucking Lee deserves to be blocked.
Yeah, my initial reaction was “how dare pg not follow his own principles” but then I realized he’s on Twitter, not HN, and when in Rome…
they live glasses on
I THINK ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS ARE DOING ELECTION FRAUD
DUAL CITIZENSHIP EXISTS
LET ME MISS THE POINT EQUALLY HARD IN A DIFFERENT DIRECTION, OR AT LEAST HOPEFULLY SO
There’s got to be a term for the rhetorical technique of “this reasonable-sounding statement is one of the conclusions I draw from my unhinged conspiracy theories, and therefore the whole structure is true!”
When the revolution comes, we have to cut off the hands wearing this abomination of a watch before we cut off the owner’s head:
https://www.ablogtowatch.com/new-release-jacob-co-oil-pump-44mm-watch/
Price: $280k, limited to 88 pieces…
I can only assume the 88 is a coincidence. it’s just a coincidence, right? right?
Could be a Chinese market thing. They like their number eights.
Yes, the CEO was born in 1988, the 14th month.
The article talks about this having a slimmer case profile, right now it’s 18mm, i heard they’re aiming to shave off another 4
I was going to say they were cowards about this because it’s powered by wind-up mechanics rather than burning droplets of black ship oil you feed into the tiny oil barrel. But then I realised that would probably waste most of the energy on heat, right on the delicate mechanisms and your wrist, and who wants to use an energy source that damages everything around it with excessive warming
ChatGPT was a significant help in writing this book, serving as a creative muse […] and for refining my understanding of technical topics that are likely to be well represented in its corpus.
Read through the whole thread. Man, I remember back when Nate Silver seemed smart and interesting and now I’m realizing that he probably was just my political Boss Baby moment.
If I had a dollar for every time it turned out some poller influencer went off on the deep end I would have two dollars, not much but etc. In the Netherlands we have a similar type of guy called Maurice de Hond, who also got famous for doing polls (which often slightly differed from other polls) but he has gone quite nutty nowadays, a man I knew who turned into an anti-vaxer was a big fan. (The Hond is also one of those ‘I talked about polarization and nobody listened to me!’ guys when he has been a regular person on the Dutch TV for ages, thankfully Nate doesn’t seem that bad).
Strange how generating a slightly different type of poll causes people to go off into contrarian/bad epistemology land.
thankfully Nate doesn’t seem that bad
“yet”
and probably just in public. seems highly likely some of it is “just” in private at this stage, given employer and focuses
Fair enough, I just compared it to de Hond’s twitter account which is just vax doubt going on and on atm. (He doesn’t seem to be a hardcore ‘don’t vax ever’ person, but he just feeds into the anti-vax conspiracy shit fulltime, and I don’t see how he doesn’t care about the effect he has on the people who listen to him).
Compared to that Nate seems to at least be ‘normal’, or constrain himself to being private, so that is good at least.
Of course compared to the Hond (77), Silver (46) is also younger, so I think we all will be amazed at how much crazier he will get when he gets older. As older age does seem to be a big factor in this, for some reason people who get pushed forward as smart/insightful lose their entire ability to listen to critical sounds/doubt themselves when they grow older and the crazy comes out. (See also how Cornel West (71) has gone a bit of the deep end lately apparently, and this. People on bsky talked about him as an example of this issue iirc).
I remember ‘08 when Natty Ag was hot shit. Everything I’ve seen or heard of him since is just chud shit.*
last time on Nate Trek
Our c-suite has announced an “AI workshop” for next Wednesday where we all work towards “increasing productivity in the age of AI”. The email was full of terribad Midjourney too which should’ve flagged it as spam.
Totes looking forward to discussing why I don’t let ChatGPT vomit out production-critical code and instead write it myself like some fucking Luddite with the marketing team next week.
You already know I can’t get enough of Cyberstuck, but this is too good to not share: https://www.reddit.com/r/CyberStuck/comments/1f59lj8/david_attenborough_explains_cybertruck_behavior/
New piece from The Atlantic: A New Tool to Warp Reality (archive)
Turns out the bullshit firehoses undeservedly called chatbots have some capacity to generate a reality distortion field of sorts around them.
LAION reckons it’s finally dealt with the CSAM
and I’m sure everyone who trained on that can easily integrate this change, right. right?
oh, right, they can’t, because none of the chucklefuck shit works that way. but I’m sure they’ll totes jump right onto a full retraining cycle, because they’re such good and ethical people who totally live the values they claim
Finally it is today on the AS. So I can post my link. The AI Guys Are Driving Themselves Mad (nymag link)
Its posts broke containment, however, after an unsolicited reply from Sam Altman himself:
amazing tbh — Sam Altman (@sama) August 8, 2024
aren’t you supposed to be running the most valuable startup ever made? why are you cosplaying Ryan Gamestop Cohen?
Why are you thinking he isn’t running the startup by doing this? Number needs to be high!
Musk has shown that you don’t actually need to deliver for decades if you just keep saying ‘soon a thing!’ every time there is a negative quarter.
Found some tweets (randomly I wasn’t looking for them) of one of the people in the article above driving themselves mad. See the second tweet here. Oh no, the chatbot said it is the master of all!
Oof, real Qanon flavor there.
Yeah that they named it Q* and that they are very online (so they know about the implications) is quite worrying.
REAL
it really didn’t take long for OpenAI to enter its binance era. just make cryptic non-statements and boost conspiracy theories and watch your stock price go up!
Urbit Cocktail, aka the Why Combinator:
- 4 oz TimeCube juice filtered through Eric S Raymond’s socks
- A finger of malört
- 30 to 40 olives
this made me laugh so hard my poor cat woke with a start, and is now annoyed at me
cocktail component: Ur-bitters. Suggested preparation: place a moldbug into a burlap sack. Muddle sack with a bat-sized muddler. If no muddler can be sourced, an ordinary bat is fine. Collect strained liquid and dispose of sack and contents.
Not a sneer, but a link for Baldur Bjarnason for the week:
Why Halide’s Process Zero is an important tool for iPhone photography enthusiasts
Recommend checking it out for his high praise of the AI-free iPhone camera app, but to make it relevant to this community, I’ll pull out the opening section:
Knowing how much work Lux Optics puts into their apps, Halide and Kino, I don’t think their recent Process Zero was implemented as a reaction to the ongoing backlash against “AI”. After all, now that people are increasingly negative about generative models, releasing a new photography mode that bypasses “AI” processing feels like a clever marketing stunt.
Personally, I suspect it was at least partially done for marketing purposes - beyond the wide open “AI-free” market niche, the ability to disable Apple’s built-in image processing gives users plenty of control over how they can develop photos.
I’m so glad the dmca is a good law that doesn’t have any potential for abuse:
a quick follow-up tying in with our previous post about Kroger planning AI-driven demand pricing for groceries: of course they got caught red handed price gouging
I love it when I randomly get a DM from some dude on Reddit because of a post I made six months ago mansplaining to me why I’m wrong about clowning on AI doomsters.
‘the fact is they are right about some things’
Yes, which is a thing we agree on, as Rationalwiki says “The good bits are not original and the original bits are not good”, problem is that none of the things mentioned before their last statement hold up. We don’t know 1 is possible. (Also note that 1 isn’t just 1, but actually 5+ points).
Anyway unhinged reddit DM’s are always something.
e: eurgh, looked into their post history. They are into making AI porn games. Also they are quite dumb., yes lets ask the magical AI if a thing is true. Ah turns out it told me that OpenAI is the greatest company in the world and there have been no controversies ever.
That’s a weird place to have some opinions about jewish and trans people. I like to look at the sinfest subreddit every now and then and that sub really likes to sneer at people who have weird opinions on those topics (such as the author of the titular webcomic).
It seems a bit of a contrarian sinfest defender. Which causes them to mention some iffy things. Which the r/sinfest admins then delete after downvotes it seems.
“HPMoR is canon - fact”
Writing “fact” after a statement doesn’t magically make it one, bub
my mental voice for the DM sender keeps switching between “board game store inhabitant who spent way too much on warhammer shit and noticed you’re 3D printing your miniatures” and “flat earth convention keynote speaker” but it’s Reddit so a cursory investigation might reveal they’re both
- Only this $25 box of space marines can be used in sanctioned tournaments and therefore you can’t possibly derive enjoyment from your resin miniatures (is that a squad of tiny masters chief?) - fact.
- You can’t prove that the earth is round because you’ve never seen it curve - fact.
- What do you mean you’re not here to listen to me talk? I’m not moving so you can play with your masters chief (and is that — are you going to make them fight Gandalf?) - fact.
- The mere fact that the terrain on the board game table I’m not letting you use is flat and has an edge proves me right - fact.
My mental voice for DM guy is Augustus St. Cloud from Venture Bros.
Do you think tiny master chief is a Flat Ringer? Like if he’s so smol, maybe it’s hard for him to see the curve (fact)
I just enjoy that masters chief is like attorneys general.
the moon could get mad - fact.
“we are likely… fact” is just a special kind of stupid
Oh man, anyone who runs on such existential maximalism has such infinite power to state things as if their conclusion has only one possible meaning.
How about invoking Monkey Paw – what if every statement is true but just not in the way they think.
- A perfect memory which is infinitely copyable and scaleable is possible. And it’s called, all the things in nature in sum.
- In fact, we’re already there today, because it is, quite literally the sum of nature. The question for tomorrow is, “so like, what else is possible?”
- And it might not even have to try or do anything at all, especially if we don’t bother to save ourselves from ecological disaster.
- What we don’t know can literally be anything. That’s why it’s important not to project fantasy, but to conserve of the fragile beauty of what you have, regardless of whether things will “one day fall apart”. Death and Taxes mate.
And yud can both one day technically right and whose interpretations today are dumb and worthy of mockery.
A perfect memory which is infinitely copyable and scaleable is possible. And it’s called, all the things in nature in sum.
A map is not the territory, but every territory is, in a sense, a map of itself.
- What if being perfectly copyable is actually like, idk, a huge disadvantage? If this AI is a program in machine code, being able to be run exactly by its human adversaries allows us to perfectly predict how the AI responses.
- kek
- Tell us more about the elusive will of programs :) Also just love,love,love the idea that by being able to run computations faster it’s game over for humankind. Much how like the 0IQ Corona virus/mosquitos/and small pox stood no chance against our Monkey Brain super intelligence.
- Fellas, it’s been 0 days since Rationalist have reinvented the halting problem.
this thread about the spare tire placement on the cyber truck made me lol https://web.archive.org/web/20240828180114/https://www.reddit.com/r/cybertruck/comments/1f0chzk/spare_tire_installation/?rdt=49951
The Cybertruck guy using nostr for image hosting is the kind of brand consistency you can expect from this crowd.
