I mean naivety is the default until wisdom born of experience prevails. I bought into the “do no evil” mantra of Google, and boy howdy did I learn the hard lessons from that.
It’s partly not arbitrarily punishing the naive unless they refuse to learn the lesson. Invite them in, acknowledging the error in judgement, and help them to be better going forward.
We should mock them because others look to us as the subject matter experts. It’s mirror neurons: if we mock these entities, these companies, as the technical experts we are, and we show others why they’re deserving of such mockery, then they will generally replicate those behaviors.
You’re more likely to laugh at a comedian when everyone else does, even if you don’t get the joke.
> If you enjoy the screaming, have at it. If you want to persuade people, dialing it down a few notches and at least giving token acknowledgement that nuance exists would help.
You’re not going sufficiently far back in comment histories (or using AI summaries of it from existing search tooling), or viewing the entire body of work I’ve written, shared, or discussed about all of those topics for the past twenty years.
I scream and wave my arms because nobody cared for decorum. I cut to the meat of the argument because nobody cares for context. Hell, this is the comments section for crying out loud; nobody is expecting a nuanced treatise about systemic interactions of multiple market and policy forces that resulted in this specific outcome in the comments section, even on HN.
Further, I suspect most folks here don’t actually care. I scream and wave my arms because it’s actually had the best results in outreach thus far - people see the flailing, read the bullet point, check the history, and somehow decide to reach out to me for more context (which I am always happy to give). When greeted with a wall of plaintext on an algorithmic site, the trained human response is to basically fuck off and go find a dopamine hit elsewhere, not stick around and read someone’s shoulda-been-a-blog-post on a social media comment page.
For all the crowing about “decorum” and “professionalism” and “intelligent debate”, the grim reality is that such concepts can actually detract from arguments by making it seem like we have time to discuss these further, that things aren’t that bad yet, that we can really think this through.
To which I say: no, we cannot. This language is a dire threat, it is a crimson red flag of intent to deliberately cause harm. You do not make an impassioned and polite argument about the nature of market forces or copyright policy with a mugger brandishing a gun, you do something about it.
And to think I got warned in another post that I need to be nicer/more professional in discussing this topic.
Yeah. Nah.
Bringing out the same drum I’ve been banging for years now, these companies have never actually cared about ensuring safe AI, regulation, or ensuring it benefits all humanity. It has always, always, been about control and their profit margins. Their actions have never reflected any sort of positive, shared human benefit since OpenAI released ChatGPT, and they’ll never actually provide said shared benefit when it comes down to benefitting everyone versus benefitting themselves.
The technology is built off wholesale theft of protected works without compensation; at least China gives most of those models back, for free, in the form of open-weights.
It’s the Princess Bride meme but for AI: “you’re trying to take what I’ve rightfully stolen!” I’m tired of having to put on some sort of mask of decency and professionalism to discuss a topic whose counterparty gets to wallow in toxic waste without recourse, and these sorts of stories only reinforce that despite being a glib jerk about it, I’m still on the high road, here.
More folks should join us in open mockery of hypocritical whinging from technological robber barons.
I’m familiar with the guidelines and I stand by what I said, including how I said it. This has been a regular talking point from AI companies since DeepSeek first hit the scene, and I feel a glib response to what is very clearly an insincere and nakedly hypocritical talking point is warranted after years of this slop.
Hypocrisy doesn’t warrant professionalism, it warrants corrective action; in text, the best I can offer is a tone and tenor that matches the original argument. Considering these dolts have now made the claim that open weights somehow equates to AI communism, this sort of response is even more necessary than before to reflect the complete absence of decorum from the people making these grievances in the first place.
See, this is something I’ve had to reconcile: founders aren’t CEOs, and CEOs aren’t founders.
I remain unconvinced a CEO is needed in any real, modern capacity. A large enough company has a PR person (who can do the interviews and sell the messaging), an Ops person (who translates Board guidance into actionable work for specific teams and vice versa), a slew of specialty technical people, and a Board who generally sets the course for the firm.
The CEO claims to do all of those, but increasingly - especially in large or mature firms - they’re just public celebrities hoovering up revenue and making connections with other CEOs. It’s a multi-million dollar fleecing of corporate resources to support one dude’s luxury lifestyle. They’re not steering the business so much as making sure we scratch the backs of their buddies to make gameable KPIs look good to the Board, and in that context they’re easily tossed aside.
It’s Cloudflare and Stormfront all over again, at least from my perspective. As much as folks want to somehow find a way to separate a company from its leadership or founders, the reality is that giving money to Mullvad rewards someone who in turn gives their share of the money to, well, fascist scumbags.
People need to understand taking that position is itself free speech. Nobody is saying he can’t give money to Nazis or fascists or some other problematic group, what we’re saying is that there are consequences for doing so. If Mullvad wanted to distance itself from these problematic positions or people, they could just buy them out and tell them to fuck off. That, too, is a perfectly valid response that doesn’t impugn upon anyone’s speech.
The problem with people claiming to be pro-free speech or anti-censorship while supporting authoritarian regimes or ideologies is that the two are inherently in conflict: the absolute last thing a fascist actually wants is freedom of speech, and so hiding behind such a virtuous shield while directly contributing to groups whose goals would dismantle and destroy that shield wholesale is such a naked act of hypocrisy that anything else they say or do should be suspect.
Mullvad’s position, much like Cloudflare’s before it, is that we must tolerate the intolerant, even though the goals of the intolerant are to exterminate tolerance. This is the sort of Middle School thought experiment that should be a no-brainer, yet here we are again. For a company like Mullvad, that undermines their core currency - trust - at a foundational level that’s impossible to reconcile.
This. Microsoft has chosen to allow this functionality, despite it being a very clear breach of trust with customers.
LG/Dell/et al should be shamed and blamed for even trying this shit in the first place, but it’s Microsoft who holds the blame for allowing such malware and spyware trash through their own update service.
> Plus, a pledge is only worth the credibility behind it. When someone signs “I will not support the development of lethal autonomous weapons,” then stays while their company sells unrestricted AI to a military that wants exactly that, they teach every counterparty a lesson: these safety people will not act, even at their own brightest line. The next commitment they make is worth less. Eventually it’s worth nothing.
This is why I haven’t taken the internally employed (and visibly public) AI safety people seriously for years: they always back down, because they value that fat paycheck and fiscal rewards and associated status over their proclaimed ethical values, red lines, and boundaries. Their actions betray their every word.
That’s also why I push that we remember these names, the ones who fought back as well as those who lied through their teeth. We should remember everyone willing to harm others to protect themselves, and hold them accountable for their misdeeds. In an ideal world, people like Jeff and Sundar and Stuart would be blackballed so hard they’d never be able to get so much as a help desk job ever again, nevermind any position of leadership. It’s why I proclaim them to be monsters, giddily sacrificing the anonymous other for personal vainglory and the avoidance of standing on any sort of principle.
The OP did everything right and demonstrably proved the entire apparatus is rotten to its very core, to the point of infesting and poisoning the very entities professing to stop its worst excesses (IASEAI). Why we give these ghouls the slightest bit of credibility anymore is beyond me.
The thing that continues to irk me about these sorts of "papers" is how they refuse to remotely acknowledge the possibility that LLMs and Diffusion models won't lead to AGI, ASI, or whatever acronym they're foisting upon the populace.
If you won't even so much as acknowledge the possibility of error, your argument is hollow and empty. All the "choices" presume these labs are being completely honest and acting in some degree of good faith (relative to the systemic incentives of society in its present form), while in reality we're still just building and refining probability models with increasing accuracy of output and flexibility of processing (namely agents) but still lack actual "intelligence" of any real sort.
Show me a paper that doesn't merely presume inevitability of LLM-based AGI/ASI, and instead actually lays out the core paths that history suggests we're likely to encounter with any "world changing technology":
* In the best case, that the technology really will revolutionize the world and do everything promised by its biggest boosters (papers like this one)
* In the middle case, that it becomes just another tool in our collective toolkit, and the consequences of a revolution built on external investment fizzling out
* In the worst case, that the tool itself is so niche in its utility that investment collapses rather than fizzles out; what do we do with all this compute, now? Who owns the debt? Who foots the bill? How can we mitigate those existential risks?
I'm just rather nauseated by the continued trot of inevitablism masquerading as academia rather than an actual, neutral, bias-controlled-and-disclosed study that paints potentialities instead.
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Having finished skimming through it, another comment springs to mind: Jesus Christ these things continue to be jingoist as absolute fuck. It's a fancier set of makeup for the same shitty western chauvinism worldview of American excellence and Manifest Supremacy.
Nah, I'm done with this trite garbage. Go proselytize to idiots, I'm not one of them.
I mean in a perfect world where I knew my subscription fees were going to developers and enabling them to live a high quality of life, sure thing.
Except in practice, that’s rarely the case. The systemic incentives in society have perverted the subscription into little more than rent extraction rather than genuine support. Products see arbitrary “updates” all the time just to justify someone’s promotion or some executive’s whims rather than actual customer feedback or needs. Hiding software behind layers of infrastructure to justify largesse instead of transparency around how it actually works and providing options for those who would rather retain some degree of ownership even at the expense of building the infra themselves.
The entire present-day model for 99% of corps out there isn’t subscriptions-as-support, it’s subscriptions-at-gunpoint. Companies like Panic or Capture One are the exception to the norm, making it clear what the fees actually do and don’t just funnel them up and out to external shareholders.
I am all for supporting developers, content creators, and everyone else involved in technology. I’m just beyond done with forced migrations to new UI/UX or arbitrary monetary extraction schemes for technology that frustrates me rather than helps return time back to me.
Basically what I’ve been saying since OldJob forced LLMs down our throats and pegging performance to usage metrics: why the fuck are we handing deterministic processes to probabilistic systems when it should be the other way around (using probabilistic systems to design deterministic ones)?
LLMS should be abstracted out of a process as soon as practicable, replaced with deterministic processes or procedures. Otherwise you’ve built the world’s most fragile process at the mercy of token cost, vendor hostility, geopolitics, and model deprecation.
This hurts, in a very specific way. Those coders are legendary wizards of the craft, understanding engine design and systems architecture in a way nobody else in the industry does. This is a team that could get 200fps+ in their games with RT on and no dynamic reconstruction or upscaling to be had, at a time when everyone else mandated such shortcuts to have even 30-45fps at a similar resolution. They did all this while also working closely with the actual game designers, to make sure the tech was usable instead of obfuscatory or hindering to production.
The fact Microsoft just fired them all, at a time when their remaining studios desperately need help with their aging, shitty engines? I can’t think of a better indicator that they haven’t a fucking clue about what they’re doing, here.
I mean, probably? There's definitely a statistical likelihood of folks who use cannabis also using tobacco products or other substances. It's not a "gateway drug" so much as a "anyone who enjoys thing X is likely to try related things" object. I recall those early studies about alcohol in moderation being good for you eventually being debunked as, "actually, folks who could afford alcohol consistently in moderation also ended up being able to afford health insurance and that created the better outcome"; I suspect there's something similar with cannabis when we look retrospectively, given its illegality for so long (users are less likely to seek medical attention for symptoms or precursors to avoid the stigma).
The thing is we don't know without doing more research, which I genuinely appreciate the authors essentially calling out point blank. They're not saying cannabis is bad, they're saying that looking at the thin amount of valid data we have available thus far, there's definitely a correlation there worth investigating further.
I mean, it's good that we have data showing some sort of connection between heart attacks and cannabis, but I appreciate the callout toward the end more:
> Since both studies were limited by their retrospective nature and the meta-analysis was limited by the challenges inherent in pooling data from multiple studies, researchers said that additional prospective studies would help to confirm the findings and determine which groups may face the highest risk.
Here's the thing that both the alarmists and the naysayers keep ignoring: all this data is new, it's recent, and decades of effective global prohibition have meant the only sources of reliable data came from either post-war/pre-prohibition studies (often by Defense Departments) or from "anecdata" gathered retrospectively among large cohorts. We still lack a substantial amount of direct, quality, long-term data on drug use and Nth-order impacts on the body, and these studies are the first steps towards getting more data from higher quality research to draw better conclusions from.
If anything, I try to be quite open with my Doctors about my own use precisely because I know that data is thin and dated, and any contributions from patients in an honest manner is going to help draw better conclusions for healthcare guidance tomorrow. Letting alarmists use these thin precursors as justification for a return to total prohibition is the wrong move.
This is one of those things we should absolutely push proactively rather than reactively, if only because I’ve had several “chats” with AI models both local and AIaaS, and all repeat the same talking point that AIaaS is the only sensible, safe, and secure choice.
Which is bullshit, unless you’re an AIaaS company whose revenue is dependent on state-sanctioned market fixing and regulatory capture.
Look, when this shitty cycle ends, we’re likely to find ourselves back in the start of a new memory cycle of surplus and lower costs. We’re talking what very well may be the boom that shatters the 16GB “baseline” we’ve been stuck at for over a decade in consumer computing, and make larger RAM counts (64GB to 1TB+) valuable to consumers specifically for local AI workloads. Local AI isn’t just an enthusiast thing, it’s likely the future of consumer AI provided we don’t let companies and policymakers curtail its use via fearmongering.
Be proactive, and protect consumer right to compute and AI models. Enforce existing laws, don’t outlaw legitimate use just to prop up an unsustainable business model.
I’m with OP, here: CarPlay is additive to the experience, but also is something that provides me a degree of consistency across my automotive experiences - when vendors bother to implement it properly.
I have an old Honda Fit that I installed one of Pioneer’s “app radio” units into, which included replacing the dash facia. I use CarPlay on it almost exclusively, but if I want Pioneer’s incredibly mediocre UI/UX, it’s a single button-tap away - either on the left side of the radio via a capacitance button, or on the first page of CarPlay’s app icons.
When I rented a car to drive to visit family, it had CarPlay. The infotainment experience was familiar, so I could focus more on the road ahead instead of fussing with some newfangled vendor-specific infotainment shitshow.
When I rented Nissan in Canada, it too had CarPlay - but with a nasty bug where using voice commands or making a call would crash the whole unit. I figured out very quickly not to do that, and the rest of CarPlay worked a treat for the trip - a far cry better from Nissan’s UI/UX.
This is why I didn’t hop on board infotainment systems until CarPlay and Android Auto were mature options, opting to stick with my phone over USB for audio/iPod controls instead: none of the major manufacturers except maybe Panasonic actually give a shit about the UI/UX. They don’t build intuitive systems that can be operated without looking, and they scoop up far too much superfluous data to enable simple features. I refuse to buy the vehicle maker excuse of “superior experience” anymore when time after time, the reality is these car companies think the infotainment data is some sort of goldmine of revenue and letting Apple or Google have any say over the experience is tantamount to leaving money on the table.
If I cannot have CarPlay, and your EV or vehicle won’t let me swap the infotainment unit for an aftermarket one that does, then I am not buying your fucking spyware on wheels. I don’t think anyone else should tolerate that bullshit either, especially on what averages to be a $70k+ purchase nowadays.
And that's fine! I've got a flatmate who loves 320kpbs MP3s on studio monitors, I've got musician friends who swear by CD-audio and Sennheiser HD200s, and others who love how vinyl uniquely degrades over time on big speakers.
The takeaway from these sorts of posts, at least in my opinion, should be two-fold:
* Understand the physical limits of human senses and perceptions to help inoculate yourself against outright scams and grifts
* Liberate you from the "tech grind" and allow you to enjoy what you like, how you like it.
Personal blog: green.spacedino.net