Sure! I agree with the comment's point as I understand it, but I don't think that point is counter to what the linked article means to convey. I think the article's intended point is that, for most people in rich countries, reducing the amount of harm they are complicit in by doing basic life functions (eating, seeking shelter, clothing themselves) is pretty hard and has significant diminishing returns on increasing effort. Choosing not to use AI is easier, almost trivial for most people, and therefore should be an obvious choice.
TFA does not say that it is impossible to make better choices, but also, you cannot "better choices" yourself out of complicity with poor labor practices in colonized nations or environmental damage from farms and oil; not entirely.
I think TFA's point is that one cannot completely abstain from food or clothes (or, in many places, at least some tech) without suffering very severe consequences, so it is unreasonable to expect this behavior. Not so AI, at least for most people.
> What if AI lets you create new versions of those tools, but without the enshitification?
I'm not sure I fully understand what you're saying here. Isn't the value of these tools almost entirely independent of their actual software? That is, we have many good open source, self-hostable forges (Forgejo, sr.ht, etc.), lots of great music player software (Jellyfin, Symphonium, etc.), and decent maps software (OsmAnd and Organic Maps). People use GitHub, Spotify, and Google Maps -- perhaps even _put up_ with their often bad/glitchy software -- because of network effects (all three) and content/licensing partnerships (Spotify/GMaps). That proprietary data isn't something AI can help you with, right?
This headline is misleading. The California law requires that the OS store and provide the age bracket. It does not require that any verification take place.
I am not arguing that this is a good idea, but it is simply false that the law requires that Linux 'check kids' IDs before booting'.
The New York law is worse, and should be opposed, but the article only mentions it at the end - and even then, we actually don't know what the verification mechanism would be. I've heard a proposal that "age verification passes" be sold at liqour stores and porno shops, for example, who already seem to do an acceptable job of checking ID without destroying people's privacy.
Thanks for responding, Brian. While I don't agree with a lot of decisions Bluesky and the broader ATProto community have made, I am very excited that progress towards real decentralization is happening; Blacksky's app view, for instance, was the trigger for me to try to finally try to set up an account. I would love to see more of a focus on the parts of the system that make this difficult, so that myself and other people who are tired of coupling ourselves to centralized systems can participate. It's hard for me to trust that this is the direction the community is interested in moving, but I hope you prove me wrong.
I don't care that AI development is more fun for the author. I wouldn't care if all the evidence pointed toward AI development being easier, faster, and less perilous. The externalities, at present, are unacceptable. We are restructuring our society in a way that makes individuals even less free and a few large companies even more powerful and wealthy, just to save time writing code, and I don't understand why people think that's okay.
> Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 said the University “went wrong” by allowing professors to inject their personal views into the classroom, arguing that faculty activism had chilled free speech and debate on campus.
The university does not "allow" professors to express their opinions; that is a fundamental tenet of academic freedom, and is critically important to free speech in and of itself. The idea that a university could _prevent_ professors from giving their opinions in class is laughable anyway; if we didn't value the opinions of professors, we wouldn't need them at all, and could get away with lecturers without PhDs or research obligations. (Of course, many university administrators would quite like that.)
It seems to me that Garber is less interested in preventing faculty from expressing opinions in general and more that he is interested in suppressing a particular set of opinions he and his donors disagree with.
You - and many other commentors in this thread - misunderstand the legal theory under which AI companies operate. In their view, training their models is allowed under fair use, which means it does not trigger copyright-based licenses at all. You cannot dissuade them with a license.
I mean, I'll probably ditch the LLM - after all, it's open source so I can just build my own app to receive the messages - but it seems like a neat bit of kit.