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1 day agoThat’s “midsize”? The fuck?
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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 14th, 2023
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Age alone doesn’t tell you much about a system’s quality. Well-maintained systems can stay alive for decades and achieve a defect rate that a greenfield effort could only dream of.
We have a tendency to use “legacy” as an insult, but software tends to only stick around for decades if it’s so valuable that it’s hard to replace.
I wouldn’t say Kagi has “moved to become an AI company”.
They host some open weight models, which you can use with your subscription (which hasn’t increased in price or dropped features since they added AI access), but you’re not forced to use AI ever, and they’re not collecting your searches or prompts to feed into training.
They’ve taken a pretty skeptical stance on AI from the start. You can disable AI features completely, so you don’t even accidentally use them. But even if you leave them enabled, you have to opt into invoking AI by ending your query with a question mark.
Edit: Also, they downrank content that has been flagged as AI generated: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html
3·10 days agoWell, “should you”? Only you can decide that. You only get the one life, you know. It would suck to spend it only doing things because they’re “prudent”.
It seems like you’re asking for market predictions here, based on the AI and outsourcing aspects. Nobody knows what the future holds. But we can look at the past and present.
Historically, companies — both individually, and the industry as a whole — tend to oscillate between:
- “oh my god, knowledgeable people are so expensive, I don’t need someone with deep understanding, I just need more output” and
- ”oh fuck, I am drowning in output that nobody understands, I desperately need knowledgeable people”
For all the AI corpos’ talk about a revolutionary change in the way we think about work and employment, it all looks very familiar right now.
Historically, these moments, where everyone seems to agree that they want more hands on keyboards rather than more brains on call… tend to be the worst time to freelance.
It’s a race to the bottom, and you’ll probably be so busy spinning plates that you won’t be able to make any long-term strategic decisions about what you wanna learn and do next.
If you can, I’d look for a stable corpo job that you can firewall to 9-5, and keep your options open. Watch the market, and — more importantly — find something that you like, so you don’t have to ask internet strangers what to do with your life again.
They’re leaving out two big pieces of the story:
- Apple is switching to CXMT, whose IPO just made them China’s most valuable company.
- Open weight models are putting a damper on centralized frontier models, making it look like efficient local inference rather than next-gen training may be the winning investment. And what do you need for efficient local inference? Why, a heterogenous SoC architecture with unified memory. And what has Apple bet their entire product line on, for the past 6 years? Exactly that!
The “it’s just a tool” (with optional add-on “what matters is how you use it”) thought-terminating cliche makes me put my face in my hands a little bit deeper every time I see it.
Daily life in 2026 would be completely unrecognizable to a person from 5,000 years ago, and the difference is not just how we use our tools. The production, existence, and proliferation of the tools shape what is easy or hard, or even what is possible or impossible.
To think that you can reshape the contours of the decision-making terrain and that has no effect on what people do, or how they think of who they are… you’d have to accept that someone in the bronze age could just wake up one day and decide to be a telecommuting web developer on HRT and Ozempic.
To be fair to the original commenter: They did bring up copyright in the context of “what makes this a different kind of tool”, which is an empirical claim and not a normative one.
Oh hey, I just watched something that was full of good info about this! https://youtube.com/watch?v=-Lv7jmdqTUU
ADHD context, but most of it is universal. I hope there’s something useful in there for you!
Yup. At this point, the only sensible model is harm reduction. I’m not happy about where we are, but we do need to be realistic about it.
(Embrace the chaos of my picks)
31·24 days agoI don’t think there’s anything wrong with the author sticking to the level at which he’s an expert. If everyone had to chase down the lowest possible level, we’d all be physicists (or maybe philosophers, depending on your take there).
Besides, isn’t the “materialism” portion of “dialectical materialism” about interrogating the implications of present world you find yourself in, rather than evaluating what-ifs of alternate histories?
However generative AI might have emerged differently under a different regime, this is the version that we have access to inspect and, crucially, the version we must contend with if we want to influence its future trajectory under any regime.
Edit: But I do have to agree that he is much better at diagnosing the problem than he is at prescribing the solution. That seems to be the way of things. People tend to be good at either analyzing problems in detail, or rallying people around a tractible plan of action. It’s very very very rare to see someone who is good at both. So I don’t mind it too much.
Ehhh, probably the most pragmatic option for someone in his position, but I’m not gonna take that as an even-handed analysis of AI in open source, the software industry, the economy, or civilization writ large.
There was a post earlier today that directly counters the “just a tool” trope. (And if you’re thinking “but this is Linus! What credentials could this rando possibly have?”, allow me to preface their essay+video with a note that this guy has experience at high levels in the industry and then quit the industry to get a PhD with a focus on the social impacts of software development tools.)
And Cory Doctorow has a book (and many blog posts and speaking engagements covering the same content) about the precise harms (and non-harms) of AI.
Dr. Fatima (on Youtube) also has a pretty well-rounded take.
And Baldur Bjarnason makes some good points from a cognitive science perspective, though I think he’s ultimately out over his skis quite a bit.
71·25 days agoRepublicans have to take the anti-science position on every single issue, don’t they?
I hope this doesn’t pass the senate. It’s gonna damage the health and safety of millions of people, all for some kickbacks to the leisure industry.
I know permanent standard time has no financial incentive for politicians, but it is the clear scientific answer for a permanent time.
Edit: to say nothing of the ridiculousness of being permanently offset from the rest of the IANA time zones by an extra hour.
So they basically want to make it legal for an employer to turn their 401k offering into a pyramid scheme. Cool.
And the agency in charge of prosecuting such cases right now has decided it’s unfair to second guess employers’ decisions. Cool cool cool.
Ah yes, everyone knows how anti-AI China is.
I mean, take your pick. This is a place where a lot of us…
- are leftists who disagree with extractive, anti-human economic systems
- left Reddit because they insisted on controlling how people could connect to each others ideas
- like the open collaboration of open source, which is getting wrecked by AI
- like open access communities like wikipedia, which are also getting undermined by AI
- dislike copyright law, which is being selectively ignored here because the people violating it are rich (on paper)
- are marginalized people, who tend to be disproportionately effected by AI decision-making
Hillary Clinton, famous for winning elections by courting the fascist vote.