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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • It’s used as a test of basic intelligence, but it’s also seriously incomplete and maybe a test of more advanced intelligence would be to have someone explain at least some of the many ways in which it’s incomplete.

    If I told you to let me have your 5 treats later so that I can turn them into more treats than there are particles in the entire universe and I’ll give you half, you should probably call bullshit on that.

    If I’m starving to death and I’m not going to survive until however much “later” is unless I eat one of those treats right now, then choosing “five treats later” would actually be the wrong choice.

    This is not always a clear choice, either. The test is interesting, and it tells you a lot about how certain people think, but it isn’t universal, and it doesn’t actually prove anything. You need to understand and interpret why the answer makes sense in each context. And the context is always changing. We live on a changing planet. It is time to start thinking about how the context of “5 treats later” might have changed, and whether we are going to survive until whenever “later” is, and whether it is actually physically possible to provide all of those 5 treats in the hypothetical future that we are imagining.


  • Or is it money that has now been turned into fictional non-existent money, because it was stolen from our own future, where it was previously being held (we thought) safely in trust for us. They’re stealing the money from us. From our taxes, from our government funds and institutions, from our pensions. It’s our money. At least it nominally was, before all this happened. We’re being looted. The robbers are in our vault, they are packing our money into bags labelled “AI” as we speak.


  • Correct. There’s no direct way to prove they are or aren’t using their own open source server code, but if they weren’t, the behavior could still be proven to match or be different, and as soon as the behavior is different, that would prove they’re not running the open source code, and if hypothetically they aren’t running their own open source code and they intend on avoiding detection of that fact, then they still have to make their closed-source infrastructure exactly match the behavior of the open source software. And as long as they’re doing that, then the open source functionality remains a perfect predictor of the behavior of their infrastructure. So it’s still pretty transparent in that sense. But technically, of course, we don’t really know, and that’s a given.

    Self-hosting is still preferable, and the only method I consider personally acceptable.



  • How many hoops will they have to jump through? Will those hoops change over time to continue to make it difficult or they still find ways to monetize those hoops while technically complying with the settlement? Will they still hold ultimate control over the ecosystem and use lawsuits and deliberate engineering to drive third-parties out?

    Spoiler: The answer to all of the above is almost certainly going to be yes. These sort of agreements are toothless because they’re meant to be. The fight for right to repair is not a fight that is going to end as long as it’s more profitable to do the opposite.


  • The solution to all the billionaires taking everyone’s money is not going to be solved by finding the right billionaire. Nobody with a billion dollars gives a shit about you. They aren’t going to help you. They don’t even have the personal human context to have any understanding of anything you need help with, and even if they can afford to have someone tell them, and have the empathy to bother, they’ll still end up trying to fix in ways that don’t actually help you. They don’t get it. They won’t get it. They can’t. They’re living in a totally different universe. Money doesn’t measure success, it measures privilege.



  • The difference, unlike a Playstation console, is that you also control the hardware and OS on a PC (mostly, and for now, at least; they’re working on fixing that)

    This means that you don’t need to “jailbreak” it with a modchip to gain access to basic functionality like simply deciding to make backups and other copies for yourself or to simply not to run the DRM requirement since you don’t want to run that on your hardware that you own and you should not be obligated to. They call this piracy and cracking and say it’s illegal, but I say it’s a fundamental right. When it’s convenient they’ll tell you that you own the games, and when it’s inconvenient they’ll tell you you don’t own them and they decide what you can do with them. It’s like saying I can’t photocopy pages from or write in the margins of a book I bought and own, whether it’s digital or not. I reject that principle and refuse to abide by it, and you should too, and PC allows you to. Playstation does not, at least not with a nontrivial amount of work and a lot of penalties. It only requires a trivial amount of work on PC and generally will not allow the enforcement of any penalties (it shouldn’t require any work and shouldn’t enforce any penalties, but DRM and laws and always-online content are doing their best to make it difficult as much as they can)

    The reality of the encroaching enshittification is real, but that is still the fundamental difference that a PC gives you, and I suspect it will always remain so. Never give up on this platform, defend it like a fortress and do not let anyone entice you away from it, only suffering leads down those paths.




  • Morally I think it’s reasonably clear in many (not all) cases, but it can become complicated. Who is responsible when the inherently ineffective safety guardrails fail? What about someone who intentionally uses a bypass technique to jailbreak and escape the guardrails? Who is responsible for an open weights model that had some of the guardrails removed or rendered even more ineffective either intentionally or by accident?

    Legally, it is an entirely different story, and it is absolutely and entirely unclear. Several cases are already before the courts and I don’t think we’ll know where any of them end up within this decade, and even if they do receive some token legal judgement against them eventually, that just sets the stage for those legal responsibilities to be overturned by new legislation. These are companies that are positioning themselves as bulwarks in the new frontier of economic warfare, information warfare and physical warfare, they are critical national security and geopolitical assets, they have infiltrated governments at all levels and are receiving direct protection from same.

    Do you believe they will ever be truly held accountable for the damage they’ve already done to society, much less the damage they will do over time? That’s part of responsibility, and it needs to be debated because that’s the only way to even start to hold them accountable for anything. We need to hold them accountable with words first if we want to have any hope of holding them accountable in any other way. And these are my words to help start doing that.


  • Of course that’s a possibility, but AI does not have responsibility. The question is who does?

    Do I blame a train for hitting someone who steps onto railroad tracks when there’s a train approaching? It’s a machine. It doesn’t have responsibilities or opinions or agency. It does what it has been built to do, in exactly the manner that anyone with sufficient understanding of its operating principles could tell you, because that’s what machines do. The person or persons interacting with the machine is not absolved of any responsibility by how complex or inscrutable the machine is. It’s still a machine.

    The question is, who is responsible for the person stepping onto the railroad tracks when there was a train approaching? Was the person trying to end their own life? Maybe it’s their responsibility. Or maybe the crossing signals failed and told them it was safe, and they did not realize a train was approaching. Maybe there were too many trees or signs or construction that was blocking their view. Is the train company responsible for that? Maybe. Did the brakes fail due to poor inspections or substandard work during the last maintenance? Maybe. Did the train have plenty of time to stop and the engineer was not paying attention? Maybe. These are all people, and groups of people, who may have responsibility. The only thing that’s certain is: The train doesn’t.

    We, as a society, need to decide who is responsible for the possibility of a horrific consequence arising from the use of these sort of machines. Is it the person using the machine? The people who made the machine in the first place? The people who put it in a place where this person could easily use it? By assigning responsibility, ideally in advance of any horrific consequences, that provides a clear incentive for the people we deem responsible to actually start acting responsible and take the appropriate measures to avoid such horrific consequences that they might be held responsible for.




  • I stopped basically all discretionary spending in 2025, particularly when Trump was threatening to invade my country (with most of these companies being American) while all the shitty billionaires were smiling pleasantly and cheerfully glazing him. Amazon Prime cancelled, Netflix cancelled. My policy is: fuck these turbocunts from now on and steal everything that isn’t nailed down. From now on, I only support real human people, and corporations are certainly not people, they are the opposite of people, and the real human people they employ are being exploited, and I don’t support that either. I am going to start opting out of this shitty economy to the fully extent humanly possible. I’ll find real humans to build a resilient, supportive, sustainable community with, people’s whose backs I will have, and who will have mine, and I will of course freely share all my pirate booty with them.

    They might get some of us, but they’ll never get all of us. That’s how we save the world, my friends. You don’t have to rescue everyone from this dystopia, you just have to rescue your friends and family and neighbors, which enables them to rescue more, and pretty soon the dystopia starts to look more like a block party, and it doesn’t need anyone’s permission. We have more than enough essentials on this planet for all of us to survive on our own, they’re just distributed unfairly and hoarded, and for all the non-essentials that we have become addicted to, we’ll figure out how to substitute or perhaps even improve on. They’re non-essential by definition, and we can do better, and we should do better. I don’t need all this plastic shit in my life to survive, and neither do you. We should keep some of it though, it’s sort of fun.



  • Yes, I don’t hate the technology, I hate all the evil companies abusing this technology for profit, fascism and death, which is very close to all of them.

    But they are not the only ones working on the technology, and even though they have stolen many of people’s entire lives worth of work for making these models and not only didn’t compensate them, but in many cases replaced them and terminated their employment, in many cases we are stealing it right the fuck back from them and making it open to everybody, because fuck them. It doesn’t belong to them in the first place, it belongs to all of us. We can’t put the genie back in the lamp or the toothpaste back in the tube, but we can make sure we are keeping our own data for ourselves once we take these monstrous, bloated, oligarchs down. We will not the libraries of Alexandria burn down again, and we won’t let them have the only copies.

    I won’t pretend I don’t have various issues with open weight models using this technology, but they’re more like “I don’t like systemd’s philosophy or developers” level of issues, not “I think they will destroy democracy, civilization and possibly all of humanity” level of issues.

    With the evil companies, I absolutely DO have “I think they will destroy democracy, civilization and possibly all of humanity” level of issues.


  • As with most things, the problem is never the technology itself, technologies have problems, and we find solutions for those problems, that’s what we do, that’s how the progress of technology works. But nobody these days wants to let us have the solutions to the problems or even know what they are, when they can monetize a temporary remedy they can sell to us instead. And the problem is profitable, so they want to force us to have the problem; they won’t let us stop using the problem technology either. Vulture capitalists preying on civilization and waiting for all of us to collapse from exhaustion so they can feed on our wallets, not caring that they’re watching us die.