I regret to inform you, that this garbage was run by The Register a while ago.
It shouts out several friends of the sub, including @self@awful.systems, PivotToAI, OpenSlopware, Robert Kingett & Ludicity.
The point of the piece is that all anti-AI folks should just get along, and if we are to stand a chance against corporate AI we need to get over our petty grievances and reach out a hand to the racists, homophobes and crypto-bros and work together in the spirit of Open Source!
I just got hit by a memory from what must have been 2021, when I was working for a uni-attached startup center. I was lounging in our event space, when my colleague hit me with a question from left field: Would there be a benefit to cooling servers in space, since space is cold?
Little did he know that I was ready to unload my knowledge absorbed from the Expanse series, which I was reading on repeat to cope with my depressing job. So I infodumped on him about how being in space is like being in a thermos and about the Peltier effect being used in spacecraft radiators. He didn’t say much in response, and I wasn’t too stoked about my social skills in that moment.
Now I wonder if I saved him from a really embarassing decision. He was an ex-Amazon project manager who was non-committally looking for a PhD topic or maybe a startup. He quit a few months later and went into consulting I think.
The website looks too slick and the solution (though fucking around with fonts is fun) is overcomplicated.
Maybe some old media orgs or publishers will take this up, to protect their valuable IP while still having a slick web appearance.
Congratulations for your securing of relatively tolerable employment!
You’re argument seems like Suresh’s to me, in that making working software is just laughably easy for a competent engineer.
This begs the question why noone is exploiting this market gap. But there’s a couple explanations…
It can be a coordination problem, in that there are just barely any competent software organisations with enough engineers. The problem can also lie in how software is bought, since customers seem completely unable to determine the competence of vendors. Perceptions on what kind of software is a safe, respectable choice may even be anti-helpful in this regard.
I don’t think you have to be hypercritical of that part. Sure, rose-colored glasses could play into it but he calls the bad stuff bad and doesn’t justify it via the good stuff.
Also the stuff he describes seems plausibly achievable through buddhist spiritial practice:
In many ways MAPLE delivered: life-long friendships, freedom from past addictions and limiting self-narratives, strengthened character, and, for many of us, profound spiritual openings and realizations.
This Soryu figure seems fairly well accredited in that department. He just also happens to be a megalomaniacal control freak.
(Also, why does he have to share a name with Asoka? I’m dying a little.)
edit: I knew I spelt megalomaniacal wrong…
Of course there’s a class element to this, but you give them too much credit.
This isn’t poor people being exposed to stupid AI so rich people can reap the benefits of actual AI. This is poor people being subjected to stupid AI so AI company shareholders can pretend that their stupid AI is worth anything for another quarter.
I once listened to a talk by a guy from german OSHA that hit a lot of the good points. Perceived productivity opposed to actual productivity from the METR studies. Mental load of alien code review. (This was a company-internal IT-expert exchange thingy.)
A question in Q&A (submitted anonymously on slido like a sniveling coward) was deadass “Have you ever coded with a frontier model?”
The relation of tech and emergency services is something I became acutely aware of, when my volunteer firefighter unit recently got 2 alarms in one week that turned out to be someone lost his IPhone driving through a curve. (Apparently they have a G-sensor/accident detector and can robocall emergency services.)
Okay, it’s not that common. IPhones do that for years and those 2 were our only cases of that. Still sucks to get the news via radio, when you’re already in full kit ready to roll.
Welp, thanks for clarifying.
I can’t tell if this is serious.
If that’s really how we react to someone who admits AI use although they know why AI is bad, we need to listen to Dr. Fatima some more.
Tante nails it again. No notes.
That he has a LinkedIn finally explains how I first heard of him. A liberal but very startup/hustle culture brained colleague shared an anti-blockchain thing on the Slack. Always wondered how she stumbled on a comm(o|u)nist tech critic, but it must’ve been LI.
Yeah, but he’s been saying this for a while, and I don’t think this is a new way of saying it that is particularly useful.
Too narrow of a scope to be useful I think.
When he talks about LLCs, the real thing he’s referring to has to be capitalism. The “unaligned AI is already here, it’s corporations” trope has been around for a while, and I don’t think it convinced a lot of people to become socialists.
I think you can’t usefully tackle just the capitalism of the tech industry, if you don’t understand the wider system around it. I mean the VC that sloshes around in tech to raise up one bullshitteer after another comes from somewhere. Real estate, mining, fossil fuels, etc.
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I just watched the whole thing. She makes a consistent case.
I felt a little called out by the being tolerant bit. I for sure haven’t had great success in talking to close people about their AI use. And I was maybe a little too cold to colleagues, who tried to get ahead of the AI literacy circus with good intentions, although I grudgingly agreed that they are right.
Maybe I don’t meet enough randos to get feeling on the level of pervasiveness of chatbots. Maybe it’s a personality thing; I worked myself out of depression mostly by disciplining myself and stopping to buy my own excuses, and that’s kind of how I approach every problem now. That sure isn’t a vibe that most people respond to.
There was one part of my AI beliefs that wasn’t adressed. Besides the “front-end” and “back-end” harms, that can be mitigated, the tech as a whole still seems trash to me. That may be boomerism setting in, but chatbots just feel counter to and displacing my positive vision for a social fabric, be it for responsible professional communities or for interpersonal connections.
(I do buy into the use-case for a context-sensitive search engine, e.g. for walls of legalese. But the current framing of the tools is just so harmful, even that use is hazardous as seen in the anecdote.)
Sounds kind of like the Baldur Bjarnason strategy but for your coworkers instead of your boss.
I can see the value of someone with a critical understanding diving into the technology, so they can talk others down from the ledge.
But you also need the social pressure to maintain some slop-free spaces. Not everyone can be asked to accomodate recovering slopaholics.
Not the Saudis, just a Saudi focused outlet.
House of Saud (publication, not the royals) asks if the Iran war was caused by AI sycophancy.
I’m reminded of the Kremlin reality distortion field that appears to have informed the decision to invade Ukraine.
I almost wrote down, it sounded like it was written by a lurker on techtakes. The overlap of takes was just so damn high.