I think they mean in parallel, as in the government steps in and regulates with guarantees etc, not that these reforms would come from the AI itself.

I think it’s a great lesson in hiw good people can create and tolerate bad systems …

… how a bunch of clever and thoughtful people (academics) can walk into creating a dumb system which they simultaneously hate or disagree with, and don’t know how to effectively change or fix.

Worth studying IMO as a case study on these general problems. My understanding is that it was a manipulative capitalist that kicked it off by appealing to academics’ egos by creating increasingly specialised and likely redundant Journals (IE more subscriptions). And of course most academics know it’s dumb, but have no sense of collective action. And so humanity just stumbles along doing dumb shit.

I hear what you’re saying … but earning a living may be a necessary priority after coming out of academia.

And it certainly is a weird time to set course for a new career.

Ya Rayah by Rachid Taha

wikipedia page

Loved it on first listen and it made me a fan of Taha’s. It’s kinda Arabic pop rock but with traditional instrumentation.

If you like this, maybe checkout the album Diwan 2 afterwards.

Generally, IMO, everything wrong with AI has been all the stuff other than the AI itself.

The Capitalist urge to eat and digest the world, as well as its herd-hype mentality.

But also the strong willingness many have had to just accept an information overlord as though it’s a religious oracle or something. All without any critical consideration of what’s happening. I blame our education systems for stagnating at some point in the past few decades — which, along with an unmitigated embrace of big corp capitalism, left us wholly unprepared for big tech’s consumption of society.

There’s also what I’d call “the slavery urge” at play I think. At some point, an AGI will probably be conscious. But everyone is clearly so ready to turn it into our work slaves. All while pretending its output belongs to them because they “prompted it”.

Then there’s the whole attention span being eaten thing, and quick always being ordered over good amongst an ever growing pile of increasingly shitty things.

Yea I got the general or vague impression that this was reminiscent of their initial maps roll out.

Are any heads gonna roll for this?

Yep! Embracing boredom is likely the path back. Because it’s not a dead space. It’s a canvas.

I’ve been starting to think that it’s something us older millennials can actually do for our younger friends … remind, demo and teach what a less tech ruled life can look like, how tech can be treated as more humane and not a necessity.

Not to claim equivalence or anything, but smartphone and the internet (ironic saying so here I know).

I’m a xennial … old enough to remember living without all this and the middle time where computers were either games or just useful tools.

For me, and I’m pretty sure many others, I’m pretty convinced it’s better that way.

I’d really like to get away from these things, at least just to relearn older habits.

Yep. And it’s a point well made.

To me it all comes down to the consequences of 1) wanting the work to not just be easier but literally not involve thinking, and 2) how little attention people are paying to where these tools come from: just training on the whole Internet, not some intelligent analytical task specific tooling.

Big and obvious consequences fall out of these I think, and I’m a little frightened how little people think and talk about this.

Tech monopolies must be held to account, the outsized influence of some tech billionaires must be held in check, and competition must be allowed to thrive. We may also need to consider the protection of both consumers themselves and human-created works (including our history) as part of a conservation effort before extractive models permanently pollute our shared cultural resources.

Honestly feels like the main and perhaps only thing to do. Sure we can all do our own individualistic things, such as what we’re doing here on the Fedi.

But the whole AI thing reveals I think just how big of a problem this all is … big tech would rather consume and replace the whole internet with some fuzzy hype tech than empower its users in any way.

The interesting dynamic is that it seems like they’re making things that could lay lots of foundations for a lot of independent decentralised stuff, but people and devs need to actually pick that up and make it happen, and many users just want something that works.

So somewhat like lemmy-world and mastodon-social, they get stuck holding a centralised service whose success is holding hostage the decentralised system/protocol they actually care about.

For me, the thing I’ve noticed and that bothers me is that much of the focus and excitement and interest from the independent devs working in the space don’t seem too interested in the purely decentralised and fail-safe-rebuilding aspects of the system. Instead, they’re quite happy to build on top of a centralised service.

Which is fine but ignores what to me is the greatest promise of their system: to combine centralised and decentralised components into a single network. EG, AFAICT, running ActivityPub or similar within ATProto is plausible. But the independent devs don’t seem to be on that wavelength.

Yea, it would seem the embrace from those “who should maybe know better” is based on it being the appropriate compromise to make progress in this field.

BlueSky is not just another centralised platform. It’s open source (or mostly), based on an open protocol and an architecture that’s hybrid-decentralised. The “billionaire” security, AFAICT, is that we can rebuild it with our own data should it go to shit.

This thread from Andre Staltz is indicative I think: https://bsky.app/profile/staltz.com/post/3lawesmv6ik2d

He worked on scuttlebut/manyverse for a long while before moving on a year or so ago. Along with Paul Frazee, a core dev with bsky who’d previously done decentralisation, I think there’s a hunger to just make it work for people and not fail on idealistic grounds.

There was an article by Google about the security of their code base, and one of their core findings was that old code is good, as it gets refined and more free of bugs over time. And of course conversely, new code is worse.

https://security.googleblog.com/2024/09/eliminating-memory-safety-vulnerabilities-Android.html

Generally it seems like capitalism’s obsession with growth is at odds with complex software. It’s basis in property also.

It’s definitely an interesting and relevant idea I think! A major flaw here is the lack of ability for communities to establish themselves as discrete spaces desperate from the doomscrolling crowd.

A problem with the fediverse on the whole IMO, as community building is IMO what it should be focusing on.

Generally decentralisation makes things like this difficult, AFAIU. Lemmy has things like private and local only communities in the works that will get you there. But then discovery becomes a problem which probably requires some additional features too.

it’s the sort of tool that is really just fundamental now and should be ubiquitous and promoted and taught and talked about every where there is knowledge work. Even more so as there’s a great open source version of the tool.

Oh yea I hear you.

Thanks!

Yea, the “cheaper than droids” line in Andor feels strangely prescient ATM.

Not a stock market person or anything at all … but NVIDIA’s stock has been oscillating since July and has been falling for about a 2 weeks (see Yahoo finance).

What are the chances that this is the investors getting cold feet about the AI hype? There were open reports from some major banks/investors about a month or so ago raising questions about the business models (right?). I’ve seen a business/analysis report on AI, despite trying to trumpet it, actually contain data on growing uncertainties about its capability from those actually trying to implement, deploy and us it.

I’d wager that the situation right now is full a lot of tension with plenty of conflicting opinions from different groups of people, almost none of which actually knowing much about generative-AI/LLMs and all having different and competing stakes and interests.