jesus fucking christ I think that IDF tweet is the worst thing that has ever existed

oh no :(

poor strange she didn’t deserve that :(

While you all laugh at ChatGPT slop leaving “as a language model…” cruft everywhere, from Twitter political bots to published Springer textbooks, over there in lala land “AIs” are rewriting their reward functions and hacking the matrix and spontaneously emerging mind models of Diplomacy players and generally a week or so from becoming the irresistible superintelligent hypno goddess:

https://www.reddit.com/r/196/comments/1jixljo/comment/mjlexau/

The problem with FOSS for me is the other side of the FOSS surplus: namely corporate encircling of the commons. The free software movement never had a political analysis of the power imbalance between capital owners and workers. This results in the “Freedom 0” dogma, which makes everything workers produce with a genuine communitarian, laudably pro-social sentiment, to be easily coopted and appropriated into the interests of capital owners (for example with embrace-and-extend, network effects, product bundling, or creative backstabbing of the kind Google did to Linux with the Android app store). LLM scrapers are just the latest iteration of this.

A few years back various groups tried to tackle this problem with a shift to “ethical licensing”, such as the non-violent license, the anti-capitalist software license, or the do no harm license. While license-based approaches won’t stop capitalists from using the commons to target immigrants (NixOS), enable genocide (Meta) or bomb children (Google), this was in my view worthwhile as a rallying cry of sorts; drawing a line in the sand between capital owners and the public. So if you put your free time on a software project meant for everyone and some billionaire starts coopting it, you can at least make it clear it’s non-consensual, even if you can’t out-lawyer capital owners. But these ethical licenses initiatives didn’t seem to make any strides, due to the FOSS culture issue you describe; traditional software repositories didn’t acknowledge or make any infrastructure for them, and ethical licenses would still be generically “non-free” in FOSS spaces.

(Personally, I use FOSS operating systems for 26 years now; I’ve given up on contributing or participating in the “community” a long time ago, burned out by all the bigotry, hostility, and First World-centrism of its forums.)

I hate programming but if I wanted to waste any time programming stuff my idea would be something akin to Yahoo! Directory from before Google, or del.icio.us from the 2000s, but distributed, and tied to a PGP-like web of trust system.

You search for a topic, you get links saved with that tag by people you personally validated and trust first, and then by people they trust, and people you don’t know but added as probably fine, and so on. Dunno how doable it would be to do something like this.

Yes to all that, plus the browser thing: How annoying the browsers are with expired certificates. I mean it has to be super hard to allow me to guess that the admin just forgot to renew the certificate, or it wouldn’t protect me from the very common threat model of… ähm… uh…

(it’s to protect the CA business model, of course.)

small domino: Paul Graham’s “Hackers and Painters” (2003)

…

big domino: “AI” “art” “realism”

No, I’m with you. Bad feeling about where this is going.