4,421 karma · joined October 14, 2011
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Are we talking about turning everyone into philosophers and somehow ascending to a higher plane of existence? Yeah, AI isn't going to help with that (probably).
Or are we talking about useful, positive benefits to every day people like better speech recognition, tools for the visually impaired, disease research, physics research, science in general, and loads of other areas where AI is improving things?
Everyone has a right to scrape the Internet. That includes corporations who scrape the Internet to train AI models.
If we take away that right, how would the Internet even work? It wouldn't.
Example: I could tell curl right now to download this techcrunch article and all the comments about it on HN and I'd be violating no law. I'd be infringing on no one's rights.
If I then distributed these downloaded files without permission then I'd be violating copyright law. The thing it certainly would not be is theft!
People claim AI companies are "stealing" human labor but that's not true. They're saving (in their databases) the fruits of human labor and other bots/software. Then they're using that data to train AI models.
The only conclusion I can make whenever someone says "AI is theft!" is that they have no idea what they're talking about.
My assumption is that what they really mean is, "AI is bad for labor!" and possibly, "cheap AI is incompatible with capitalism." Which very well could be true.
But if AI really undermines the value of labor that much, the problem isn't the AI, it's capitalism.
Contrast that with STM32 where you have to constantly reference the data sheet to make sure you're using the correct pins for say, I2C when you're running in a particular mode. And since you're running in that mode, you now can't use other pins for certain things. Ugh! I hate it!
Then there's the issues with picking the right-size part number and making sure the pins you want are 5V tolerant, checking that you're using the correct ADC, and... Ugh! It's a pain in the ass!
Other chips aren't much better as they all have those same problems.
ESP32 is nice because of the zillions of built-in peripherals but configuring the damned thing can get really complicated really fast. It's so complicated, in fact, that they had to make a Makefile (as in `make menuconfig`) that rivals the Linux kernel in the sheer number of options/submenus.
Good luck convincing the current DOJ to do anything useful at all though! It is currently intentionally stacked with incompetent cronies who have been told that their job is to attack the President's enemies and ignore the misdeeds of his allies.
It will remain like that until he's gone (and not replaced with another Republican wannabe dictator).
This is their idea of what counts as a real criminal. Instead of, say, someone who rapes children. They'll vote for that person!
They treat it as "just another tool" to improve efficiency. Like using a drill instead of a screwdriver.
Then there's people who are so lazy they give LLMs instructions like, "write a LinkedIn post about how AI is changing the future of work for thumbnail consultants." That's when it moves from "translating your thoughts" to "writing for you."
I think the issue is that it can be hard to tell the difference. We need better terms for these things so we can differentiate use cases.
Proofread the following text for grammar, punctuation, and typos while
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Rules:
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The complexity in this command is there for phi4:14b and qwen3:14b which I run locally via ollama. If the text doesn't have any Obsidian callouts or similar, fancy stuff I just use either of those and they do a fantastic job in seconds. For Big AI (e.g. Gemini, GPT-whatevs, Claude) you can literally just tell it, "fix the grammar." No need for the lengthy command.
NOTE: I am decent with English grammar so most of what needs fixing is typos I didn't spot or misplaced commas and periods inside/outside of quotes (I always screw that up without thinking—even though I know the rules! LOL). Occasionally, Big AI (Gemini, specifically) have disagreements about whether a comma is necessary in a particular spot but it's always of no real consequence.
Yet here we are: The mere accusation of a work being touched in any way by AI is all it takes for publishers to drop it like they were just handed molten iron.
AI is being treated by publishers and traditional authors like the fruit of the poisonous tree. This won't stop anyone from using AI to aid their work in various degrees, but what it will do is force everyone to lie about it.
Before I explain the great big difference (which you probably already understand, just bear with me), know that the folks who are most up in arms about it are authors. They see their art as sacred. An ancient tradition of storytelling that deserves respect not for its output, but for the act and talent of producing it. To these folks, the very concept of using AI to generate or modify text in any way is against their religion.
Now for a real world example that would violate their principals that wouldn't bother normal people at all: A beginner or someone who's just terrible at storytelling has a story in their head and they do their best to write it down. It might look like this:
MC: "You call that a knife?"
...and so on and so forth, with poorly written descriptions of scenes, run-on sentences, etc. Then they feed that script into AI and go back and forth until they have text that they like.
To traditional authors, this is straight up EVIL. It's against everything they believe in! That person didn't write the story! They just came up with a poorly-written outline and the AI converted it into something more digestible.
Normal people will read such a story and—if it was created with the latest AI models—will never know the difference. It probably won't be a fantastic story or super well written but it will be passable. Even if they find out the process that went into it they won't care. And that pisses off these authors the most.
There's degrees to this, too: If you wrote an OK story, AI can be used to make it better. You can feed it multiple paragraphs and have it analyze the flow and offer simple suggestions for ways you could re-word sentences to improve them. Basically acting as a personal editor.
Is that "written by AI"? I would say, "no" but traditionalist authors would disagree. To them, any use of AI to write your story violates the very nature of storytelling.
...and it pisses them off to no end that you can't just run texts generated in this way though a program to tell whether AI was used in its creation.
If you don't let web developers manage history/state like this, we'd be going back to the inefficient world of, "every forward/back movement loads a whole page." (With lots of unnecessary round trip messages between the client and server while the user waits for everything to load).
Basically, the ability to manage history is a user-centric feature. It makes the experience better for them.
Managing lots of configuration files/scripts across many thousands of servers, desktops, devices, etc is a long-solved problem. Most enterprises use Ansible or similar.
In almost every way, managing many thousands of Linux desktops is much simpler and more straightforward than Windows. If you're using Ansible playbooks, you can keep everything nice and tidy in a single place and everything you'd ever want to customize is managed via a plaintext file you can modify with your editor of choice.
You can organize them however you want or even use a GUI to change stuff (if you pay for Ansible Enterprise or whatever it's called... Or use one of the FOSS alternatives).
Managing Linux desktops at scale really isn't much different than managing Linux servers at scale.
There's a bazillion tools that let you manage files like that across thousands of servers/desktops but the hot one right now in enterprises is Ansible (which would make it trivial to push out an update to such a configuration).
Chrome has a similar file: /etc/opt/chrome/policies/managed/lockdown.json
"Ah yes, but what stops the user from downloading the portable version of a browser and using that?"
You can mount all user directories with +noexec. Also, Apparmor lets you control which applications can make network connections if you want to get really fine-grained.
Other applications have similar policy files. For example, Visual Studio Code has /etc/code/policy.json which—for example—would let your company lock down which extensions are allowed to be used/installed.
The most popular way to control user desktops that I've seen is to have your user login via LDAP (just like AD), optionally with Kerberos and then have their permissions to various things controlled via those groups. For example, if you were building a "desktop policy" for Linux users across your organization, you'd probably make a .deb or .rpm that installs some udev rules that grant or deny access to various things based on which groups the users are in.
Of course, you can also control things down at the user level. You could put a script in /etc/profile.d/ that does whatever you want when the user logs in. You can even make it dependent on how they login (detect remote SSH session or local login).
There's also dconf and KDE's Kiosk mode if you really want to lock shit down to annoy TF out of your users (haha).
Once you've got your Linux desktops setup the way you want (which is usually just a matter of making your_company_desktop.deb or .rpm) to customize things/permissions, you have so much power to do things you can't do on Windows. The fine-grain control in Linux is unreal: You can give a specific user access to run and do very, very specific things as root (Windows Administrator equivalent) without much effort at all.
Linux also lets you lock down the hardware in ways Windows doesn't support. For example, you can chattr +i to make certain devices/files immutable. You could compile a custom kernel that doesn't even have USB mass storage support. What's more secure than that? Haha.
BTW: You can also make all USB mass storage devices read-only with a simple udev rule. You can even add exceptions for special things!
The FTC wasn't doing their job between 1980-2020 because of their ridiculous standard of, "if it doesn't raise consumer prices, it must be allowed." This lead to massive consolidation in many industries which of course ended up raising prices and hurting consumers anyway.
Recently they've had some wins but overall they're still failing to do their job.
They've since moved on to the SSS strategy: Ship, Slip, Slop.
China also imports 80% of its soybeans which means it's based on the rising/falling prices of oil and whatnot.
In the US, soybeans are a very important crop that's fed to livestock and also used in biodiesel production. There's enormous soybean "crush" infrastructure in the US to support the biodiesel market and the side effect of this results in tons of extra soybean oil. It ultimately ends up with soybean oil being cheap compared to everything else.
I think it's a very, very bad assumption. After trying GLM-5 and Qwen3 on Ollama Cloud, not only were they faster than OpenAI's offerings (by a huge amount) it was just as good if not better at doing what I asked of it.
Claude Code is still superior to anything else but GLM-5 and Qwen3 are easily just as good as GPT-5.X (for coding).
I'd turn that around and ask, "What makes you think the people would accept the gun nuts rebellion?"
Many would be celebrating in the streets if the military showed up with tanks and started blasting. Furthermore, there's enough people in the military from far, far outside whatever state is being threatened to care that much about the locals.
"Fuckin' Texas gun nuts" <starts shooting>
* Being an AI bot.
* Using an LLM to generate it.
That "genericness" is what's missing in the router space. Literally every consumer router that comes out has some super proprietary design that's meant to be replaced in its entirety in 3-4 years. Many can run Linux, sure, but how many have a replaceable/upgradable board? How many are like a PC where you can install whatever OS you want?
Sure, you can forcibly flash a new OS (e.g. OpenWRT) but that is a hack. The company lets you do that because they figure they'll get a bit more market share out of their products if they don't lock the firmware so much. They key point remains, however: They're not just hardware—even though they should be!
The world of consumer routers needs a PC-like architecture change. You can buy routers from companies like Banana Pi and Microtik like this but they're not marketed towards every-day consumers. Mostly because they're considered "too premium" and require too much expertise to setup.
I think there's a huge hole in the market for consumer-minded routers that run hardware like the Banana Pi R4 (which I have). When you buy it, you get the board and nothing else. It's up to you to get a case and install an OS on it (with OpenWRT, Debian, and Ubuntu being the normal options).
We need something like the Framework laptop for routers. Not from a, "it has interchangeable parts" perspective but from a marketing perspective. Normal people are buying Framework laptops because geeky friends and colleagues recommend them and they're not that much more expensive/troublesome than say, a cheap Acer/Asus laptop.
The Steam Frame is a full PC that doesn't require a tether. I think it'll change everything if it doesn't cost a fortune (which it might). The possibilities for 3rd party hardware and the open ecosystem of a complete Linux distro + Steam are endless.
Day one of the Steam Frame I'm sure we're going to see all sorts of open source tools/scripts that make it better. Then 3rd party hardware will be announced and suddenly everyone's going to want one because all those things together make it sooooo nice.