lelanthran

> As a concrete example: What the queer community wants is do become more accepted as a normal part of societies. Telling them "you're not welcome here, but feel free to promote at pornhub with the other freaks" would be the exact opposite.

That's not a bad example; what would the other "freaks" be in this situation? Transgenders? Furries?

The IRL people I know who are the L, G and B in LGB<insert rest of alphabet here>... are most definitely not on board with being lumped in, as a group, with transgenders. Or furries.

> Who gets veto powers?

I dunno; I never addressed that.

I'm saying that, in any discussion, I am not willing to accept it as established fact that some $NEWTHING is progress just because its a new thing.

The conversations and arguments I am seeing in favour of AI is along those lines - "it is change, therefore it is progress". I am saying that I dispute the argument even if the conclusion is unclear at this moment in time.

> You should. Maybe they have it open now just to destroy competition and then they close it. Now you have a closed system, with no alternatives.

I don't get this logic. Rather than have an open system that maybe gets closed in the future, you'll use a system that is closed right off the bat?

Explain how using closed-off stuff from the very start is better than using open stuff that maybe gets closed in the future.

Pretty large distortion, in the case of this blogger.

He produces much more shareholder value.

He works much more harder.

He is much more tired.

Exactly why does he think this is a good deal for him? Because he's VP of blah?

The whole AI-boosterism is from people convinced that if only they can maximise shareholder value, their lot in life would improve.

> A note on how this article was written: AI helped me pull and analyze my GitHub contribution data, build the chart and draft this article. The experience, decisions and opinions are mine.

Carefully omitted: who or what actually produced the text.

This is just a dishonest way of saying he had a ghostwriter.

> We can't even have a conversation about extended unemployment benefits, retraining credits or lamplighters transitioning to utility workers, which is what happened with the "basket of jobs"?

That's all we've been doing while labelling it "progress".

I am pointing out that not all changes are progress. I am not claiming that all changes are not progress.

I program almost daily with only bold, italics and grey (for comments) in my vim rules for highlighting.

I can read my code just fine.

Anecdotally, it's not representative of your experience.

But... Rewrite-it-in-Rust is a meme, while rewrite in Go is not.

> Why do people try to vibecode PDF engines that already exist in Rust?

Nothing surprising here; pre-2022/2023, Rust was used primarily for rewriting things (compared to, for example, Go, which was used to write new things, not replacements).

I don't find it surprising that the pattern is continuing.

> Change hurts those who don't move with the change. Nothing has changed.

This change threatens to hurt those who move with it, too.

> The bet we (self-hosters) are making is that once these companies IPO, they will be forced to do whatever they have to do to make money. i.e. price increases, more throttling of subscription non-usage-based accoutns, etc.

But, there is no need to make that bet - when prices increase, I'd look into renting a previous-gen GPU on a cloud provider. If the online GPU providers raise prices, then I would look into purchasing for on-site.

Until that happens, I'm not making any bets, because if all the token providers go bust GPU rentals are going to fall in price, and if they don't go bust after raising prices, I can still get years of GPUs for self-hosting at the price of a self-owned rig.

I read it as satire :-/

> There is zero reason for the lamplighters to negotiate any progress whatsoever.

Not all change is progress. Just because you can mass-remove populations of people from the economy does not mean that doing so is "progress".

> The argument would be that repetitive, brainless thinking will no longer be required (not thinking in general), so people will be freed up for currently unimaginable cognitive pursuits.

That's a facile, superficial "argument" that is currently being made by everyone who is pro-AI when confronted with any claim of AI pushing humans out of the economy.

At this point in time, it's reasonable to dismiss the argument rather than engaging it, because each time this argument is made the proponent of the argument is completely mute on the fact that humans work to eat.

That's a big underlying counterargument, and no one making the argument is engaging with the counter-argument, they are instead setting up strawman counter-arguments.

>> and I am not quoting out of context

> You totally are. This is about ultra-endurance events.

No, it isn't. It's about sports, using ultra-endurance as an example. This is one of the cases where the example is the exception.

IOW, the quote uses an outlier to make claims about the distribution. This is, of course, from the same institution that claims using the word "normal" to describe a distribution is some sort of "-ist" (racist, sexist, whatever).

> The level of ignorance of people dissing the article without reading it is not astonishing, it's par for the course.

I feel that's an unwarranted assumption on your part: I read the article, even quoted from it in my comment, and my take agrees with your parent comments.

Your comment smells a lot like "They disagree with the article, so obviously they didn't read it, because anyone who read it would agree".

The TLDR take: now that humans are no longer required for thinking, we will switch to something other than usage of our brains.

Eating, apparently, is completely optional for humans :-/

Just a thing to remember: our intelligence made us the apex predator on this planet. Is there any reason to believe that a superior intelligence, whether man-made or extraterrestrial, won't become the apex predator?

They buried the lede:

> Helmuth, who joined the magazine in 2020, had pushed it to cover more politics, arguing that science cannot be disentangled from its social context. Scientific American had issued presidential endorsements for the first time under her leadership. In 2024, after Helmuth called Trump supporters “bigots” and “fascists” on social media on election night, the magazine again became the target of right-wing backlash.

The magazine chose to go more political. When the political winds changed direction they found themselves on the wrong side of the new administration.

Remaining purely apolitical was an option for them.

> Adobe is primarily a professional program and even at higher fees it's a miniscule amount compared to the rate of the professional using it.

I feel that that is an optimistic take - for now the professional using it can command high salaries. It will not remain that way. The endgame for AI in an economy is to drive the value of labour and knowledge to zero.

In short, a demonstration of commitment.

I have similar feelings about getting AI-generated "communications" from people (email, whatsapp, whatever).

The value of having a human send me a message is that there is also a signal in there - the human at least understands what whey they sent me. They may misunderstand the concept, they may be mostly inarticulate, they may in fact be altogether wrong, but at least I know what they think, and I know when to ask them for clarification.

When a message is sent from an AI, I have no idea if the human doing the copy-and-paste even understands what they are sending me. The signal that they understand the contents of the message, that signal is missing.

It's no different to asking someone a question, and them pasting parts of a manpage as their entire response: I can't tell if they understood what they sent me.

The irony here is that the article, written solely by Claude, is also a volley at authors.

The substack popup to join and follow the author made me giggle: Why would I join that substack to read that "author" when I already have multiple free AIs that can give me the same take, but without all the waffle?

In the past, I might have signed up to read the author (I have signed up to a few authors before), but if all the author has to offer is basically already available to me for free, why would I join up?

> In some countries books are removed from the store if you say "Free Palestine".

I am skeptical; which countries are these?

Are they similar in any way to Palestine in terms of censorship and lack of human rights?

> But the platform shouldn't get to decide that.

Okay, then who gets to decide that? If platforms cannot advertise as child-friendly, they are dead in the water. Now who do you propose gets to decide which platforms are child-friendly and which are not?

> You shouldn't have to go to PornHub to read a comic book depicting an exposed nipple.

And we didn't; I clicked the link and saw exactly what you said we have to go to Pornhub to see. What's the problem here?

> What is it people actually want?

They want their specific content shown to as many people as possible. They don't want to have their content limited to over-18 or NSFW websites.

The thing is, I think that the content-hosting platforms' broad "NSFW content is not welcome" rules is great. While I may not object to seeing a male nipple pop up in my feed, I won't object if male nipples never pop up either.

It is working the way I want it to, but it sounds to me that the complaint is that I should at least see this type of content occasionally even if I don't seek it out, which seems completely bonkers to me.

> Unique stuff worth playing is extremely rare, if you're not 7 years old and you played more than a couple of games in your life of course.

This is a hot take indeed. Unless you use the word unique to pick only a single game from each genre, even a single genre has more games than I can hope to finish in a lifetime.

I mean, I still play Dune 2, warcraft II, sc:broodwars and C&C, in addition to Starcraft II.

And that's just a single genre.

I have used tcc as a scripting language in the past. I expect that if your shell script catches the compilation, that sort of approach will satisfy your requirements, even if tcc itself does not.

> Nah I don't have any issue understanding, so the actual question here is why do some people find AI-generated language hard to understand?

As far as I can tell, it's only fluent readers who have trouble.

Many people play without the auction rule (hence, they don't even know it exists).

> I seem to remember a similar study from years ago saying the optimal strategy was to always buy if you can.

The optimal rule is a little different: don't sit on cash until a housing crisis.

Just like in a real-life business, sitting on cash that could be working for you is a bad idea.

> To be honest I have no idea about Zuckerberg's motivations. With the proposed billionaire tax in California, recent reporting indicates his main concern is retaining voting rights at Meta.

I wasn't addressing their motivations for attempting to grab all the wealth in the world. I am pointing out that that is what they do, so why would you expect them to stop at some point when they never stopped at any point in the past?

I guess I am asking, why are you expecting their behaviour to change?