Seems like we’re going to be stuck in the uncanny valley of telepresence. The more fidelity we add, the more we’re able to pick up on microexpressions, subtle eye movements, and breathing, which helps trigger oxytocin and promote trust. But also, the more fidelity we add, the more attack surface we open up for malicious actors to exploit.
It’s wild how we went from…
Critics: “Crypto is an energy hog and its main use case is a convoluted pyramid scheme”
Boosters: “Bro trust me bro, there are legit use cases and energy consumption has already been reduced in several prototype implementations”
…to…
Critics: “AI is an energy hog and its main use case is a convoluted labor exploitation scheme”
Boosters: “Bro trust me bro, there are legit use cases and energy consumption has already been reduced in several prototype implementations”
Also can’t imagine any of them holding a sword high while charging their horse into a wall of pikemen.
War changes. Normandy was 80 years ago. We had just invented duct tape.
There should be an override mechanism. It could be super narrow, so like “All non-veto-holding members must unanimously agree to override the veto, and the override must then be sustained by a general assembly vote of 3/4”
We’ll see how the Feb 26 report goes. I can’t imagine how Israel will possibly argue that they’ve improved humanitarian aid access and protection for civilians.
FTC for the past 60 years: “You lied to us? Great job, kid!”
FTC under Lina Khan: “You lied to us? We’ll see your ass in court.”
We might not win, but golly it’s refreshing to see someone try.
It’s probably more like the Apple II than the Newton or iPhone. It cost $1300 at the time, which is about $6300 today. For early adopters, it was a revolutionary glimpse of the future. It took another 10 years for it to become widespread.
The attention economy already has people hostage and blocked off from the outside world. No goggles required.
To play devil’s advocate: If we’re gonna have a tech-centric society, I can see where being able to make eye contact with people nearby and keep your hands free could make for a more wholesome experience than staring down at your phone for 80% of your waking life. And for people who are remote, being able to feel like you’re occupying the same space and breathing and laughing together could be a solution for our extreme isolation.
But on the other hand, these are all problems that capitalism and big tech created in the first place, so…
LLMs are a step towards AI in the same sense that a big ladder is a step towards the moon.
Clearly we see the word “copyright” very differently, so I’m wondering if it’s maybe a useless term for us here. I’ll get more specific about what I see as being valuable, and maybe we’ll see that we agree on some of it.
I like that the law, by default, obliges people to attribute works accurately. It helps me find the stuff I like, or to fact-check sources.
I like that the law, by default, obliges copies to remain faithful to the original. This is the other half of attribution. Attribution isn’t worth much if it’s not exactly what the original creator meant. That was a big problem in the period immediately following the printing press, and we already see it cropping up again with reactions/stitches/duets, and it’ll probably escalate with AI.
I like that I can eagerly share all of the shitty code that I write, slap a non-commercial share-alike clause on there, and know that it’s illegal (not that it doesn’t happen anyway) for a megacorp to shunt it off into a for-profit, closed-source venture. If I couldn’t do that, I might just not share it at all.
I like that I can – or at least, I used to be able to – find the person who made a thing I like, because the search results didn’t used to be an endless flood of copies/reposts of it.
I don’t like that the primary employment model for artists and inventors is to have them instantly assign all rights to their creations over to some holding company that doesn’t have a creative bone in its corporate body.
I don’t like that they often can’t even produce derivative work on their own dime in order to engage with the fanbase that they themselves built.
I don’t like the trend of “reaction videos” where a media group with clout and deep pockets can scoop the work of a no-name creator, say “lol” a few times or just leave a livecam of an empty chair, and rake in mad dollars while the person who did the hard work gets a mere trickle of support from the 0.0001% of viewers who bother finding the original.
I don’t like that a holding company can just sit on an IP and do nothing with it. I also don’t like that they can sell it to another company that will disrespect the creation as they milk it for every last dollar.
I don’t like that fans are often shot down or prosecuted when they try to make remixes or tributes to the stuff they love.
I don’t like that people who can’t afford to pay – or are just geographically in the “wrong” location – are cut off from accessing knowledge and participating in culture.
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I don’t like tech bros treating culture like a raw material to be mined and refined, with no respect for the fertility of the soil in which it grew.
The stuff that I like… I don’t just like it because of what it is, but also because of who made it, and where they were in their life when they made it.
The fact that their viewpoint, at that moment, is inseparable from the artifact that’s a mere shadow of that moment… is part of what makes life worth living, to me.
What is “Fate of the Animals” without the wild story of Franz Marc’s fever dream, his subsequent death, the inscription on the back, the warehouse fire, and his friend’s restoration? Just pixels? The pixels are just the reference point. They’re the SHA256 of that story. Disconnecting the story, seeing just the hash… It does some kind of damage to humanity as an enterprise.
You don’t hate copyright.
You hate that entertainment megacorps have set up a massive toll booth between creators and audiences, thwarting their ability to connect and collaborate, and crippling the average person’s ability to meaningfully participate in culture unless it happens to be profitable for those in charge.
And soon you will hate that AI megacorps have set up a massive toll booth between creators and audiences, thwarting their ability to connect and collaborate, and crippling the average person’s ability to meaningfully participate in culture unless it happens to be profitable for those in charge.
What they did to us by forcing us to obey copyright, they will now do by disregarding copyright.
You can be pro-piracy because it distributes power, and be anti-AI because it consolidates it, without legitimizing copyright as a fundamental principle of ethics.
Technically, they only ruled that genocide is plausible enough to hear the case (and that South Africa has a right to bring the case).
I agree wholeheartedly, and I think I failed to drive my point all the way home because I was typing on my phone.
I’m not worried that libs like left-pad will disappear. My comment that many devs will copy-paste stuff for “group by key” instead of bringing in e.g. lodash was meant to illustrate that devs often fail to find FOSS implementations even when the problem has an unambiguously correct solution with no transitive dependencies.
Frameworks are, of course, the higher-value part of FOSS. But they also require some buy-in, so it’s hard to knock devs for not using them when they could’ve, because sometimes there are completely valid reasons for going without.
But here’s the connection: Frameworks are made of many individual features, but they have some unifying abstractions that are shared across these features. If you treat every problem the way you treat “group by key”, and just copy-paste the SO answer for “How do I cache the result of a GET?” over and over again, you may end up with a decent approximation of those individual features, but you’ll lack any unifying abstraction.
Doing that manually, you’ll quickly find it to be so painful that you can’t help but find a framework to help you (assuming it’s not too late to stop painting yourself into a corner). With AI helping you do this? You could probably get much, much farther in your hideous hoard of ad-hoc solutions without feeling the pain that makes you seek out a framework.
My pessimistic take is that everyone in society will get recast as the “human feedback” component of whichever flavor of ML takes over their domain.
8 hours a day of doing your domain’s equivalent of captchas.
The amount of code I’ve seen copy-pasted from StackOverflow to do things like “group an array by key XYZ”, “dispatch requests in parallel with limit”, etc. when the dev should’ve known there were libs to help with these common tasks makes me think those devs will just use Copilot instead of SO, and do it way more often.
Who do they think will be using the AI?
AI threatens to harm a lot about programming, but not the existence/necessity of programmers.
Particularly, AI may starve the development of open source libraries. Which, ironically, will probably increase the need for employed programmers as companies accrue giant piles of shoddy in-house code that needs maintaining.
Name a less iconic duo.
Right? Dude’s whole premise is “omg he had to SCALE the models to get them to match up! That proves he faked the whole thing!!!1”
Get outta here with this dumb shit.
And “artists should be able to independently corroborate”? The fuck? Ripping assets is not always a straightforward endeavor for someone who is interested in it… why would you expect artists to automatically know how to rip assets for any game at a moment’s notice? (And spend their time and money doing so)
Do you condemn KHHAAMAS?