If the FSF calls your program malware, is that a sign that you've made it?
random clueless person from the internet
occasional accidental poet
fool with a keyboard
goes by kyrievo in some places
#noarchive #nobot #nobridge #noindex #noml
If the FSF calls your program malware, is that a sign that you've made it?
Something I’ve been thinking about a lot in the current battle over the future of (pseudo) AI is the cotton gin.
I live in a country where industrial progress is always considered a positive. It’s such a fundamental concept to the American exceptionalism claim that we are taught never to question it, let alone realize that it’s propaganda.
One such myth, taught early in grade school, is the story of Eli Whitney and the cotton gin. Here was a classic example of a labor-saving device that made millions of lives better. No more overworked people hand cleaning the cotton (slaves, though that was only mentioned much later, if at all). Better clothes and bedding for the world. Capitalism at its best.
But that’s only half the story of this great industrial time saver. Where did those cotton cleaners go? And what was the impact of speeding up the process?
Now that the cleaning bottleneck was gone, the focus was on picking cotton as fast as possible. Those cotton cleaners likely, and millions of other slaves definitely, were sent to the fields to pick cotton. There was an unprecedented explosion in the slave trade. Industrial time management and optimization methods were applied to human beings using elaborate rule-based systems written up in books. How hard to punish to get optimal productivity. How long their lifespans needed to be to get the lost production per dollar. Those techniques, practiced on the backs and lives of slaves, became the basis of how to run the industrial mills in the North. They are the ancestors of the techniques that your manager uses now to improve productivity.
Millions of people were sold into slavery and worked to death *because* of the cotton gin. The advance it provided did not, in fact save labor overall. Nor did it make life better overall. It made a very small set of people much much richer; especially the investors around the world who funded the banks who funded the slave purchases. It made a larger set of consumers more comfortable at the cost of the lives of those poorer. Over a hundred years later this model is still the basis for our society.
Modern “AI” is a cotton gin. It makes a lot of painstaking things much easier and available to everyone. Writing, reading, drawing, summarizing, reviewing medical cases, hiring, firing, tracking productivity, driving, identifying people in a lineup…they all can now be done automatically. Put aside whether it’s actually capable of doing any of those things *well*; the investors don’t care if their products are good, they only care if they can make more money off of them. So long as they work enough to sell, the errors, and the human cost of those errors, are irrelevant. And like the cotton gin, AI has other side effects. When those jobs are gone, are the new jobs better? Or are we all working that much harder, with even more negative consequences to our life if we fall off the treadmill? One more fear to keep us “productive”.
The Luddites learned this lesson the hard way, and history demonizes them for it; because history isn’t written by the losers.
They’ve wrapped “AI” with a shiny ribbon to make it fun and appealing to the masses. How could something so fun to play with be dangerous? But like the story we are told about the cotton gin, the true costs are hidden.
@q66 no idea what this is about but I like the results 🥲
Golang is unusual because in most languages the type system tells you when you made a mistake, but in Golang the type system tells you when Rob Pike made a mistake.
@FND what a content realization!
@FND I don't kink-shame regardless of what you call it 👍🏻
/cc @FND
Ärzte ohne Grenzen bezeichnet Gaza-Hilfe als "getarntes Massaker"
Immer wieder gibt es Berichte über Schüsse nahe den Verteilzentren der privaten GHF-Stiftung im Gazastreifen. Die UN gehen von Hunderten Toten aus. Mit harten Worten fordern Hilfsorganisationen die Rückkehr zum alten System der Verteilung.
Again I stand by what I said.
"I can't believe I even have to talk about these people. That's how ridiculous it s."
We have the equivalent of the scientologists running the field of AI with untold amounts of money and power and we're the ones who have to do point by point rebuttals of their eugenicists dreams.
Good news: GitHub Copilot is scared shitless of the concept of gender.
Instead of foo, bar and baz, use “genderqueer”, “demisexual” and “leather_daddy” and you’ll reduce the likelihood of getting a spammy PR from a sad robot.
I went to a talk lately that was mostly about something else, but the speaker came out with:
“If you only remember one thing from this talk, remember this. Everyone in this room who likes helping people, raise your hand.”
Every hand, or nearly every hand, went up.
“If you like asking other people for help, keep your hand up.”
Almost every hand went back down.
“As you can see, people like helping you. When you ask for help, you’re making them feel good, even if you don’t like asking.”
I’ve genuinely forgotten the rest of the presentation but I won’t forget that.
back when I was in the Aggressive Archival business I had a system making two gigabytes a day of requests with the useragent "MSIE LOL"
adding a little more chaos to the world by trying to browse with a UA that calls itself
Mozilla/9.0 (Windows NT 17.2; Win128; x192) Firefox/230.0
and makes all requests using HTTP 5.0 before falling back to HTTP 2.0 when your poor server doesn't support my future tech
It’s called “vibecoding” because that sounds more acceptable than “class warfare”.
@mhoye I built a better up for the system search (on Gnome, inspired by Quicksilver) and I love it so much
https://mkhl.codeberg.page/searching-summoning/
oh and something that desaturates background windows
@shapr @valpackett I think https://github.com/alexpovel/srgn fits this too
No sense quoting "Uncle Bob" to me, re: geekery.
I don't adhere to SOLID, or "Clean Code", and I certainly don't promote Bob Martin, who I worked for and know personally.
What the modern software trade lacks *most* is neither theory nor formulas nor rules nor acronyms.
What it lacks most is an appreciation for human and diverse collaboration, and the aforementioned person does not grasp that everyone is not like him.
„Wir sind ja kein Antifa, aber Nazis wird man ja wohl noch umhauen dürfen."
- Gertrud und Hermann, besorgte Bürger
[Quelle: Laptopdeckel]