Yea, this.

I’d say that whether it’s a big deal is up to what people expect and want. The issue I was citing is that Fedi drama often involves, IMO, a disconnect between what the Fedi offers and what people expect.

Fediverse drama! Even if there is a kernel of truth behind it, the drama around it is always dumber than it should be. IMO a symptom of people wanting control over things as consumers that they simply don’t and never will if they remain consumers. A bit of an insidious trap the Fedi lays for people.

Yea I hear. We’ll see I guess.

Personally, I’m seeing much more falling in line instincts than anything else and fear that any “shock” and reaction is confined to bubbles without any solid culture and infrastructure to break out into any sort of effective movement.

It’s about the trend and the motives of those with power.

Ten years ago everyone was very surprised that an AI managed to beat the best human at Go, a board game. I don’t think anyone really saw that coming. There’s evidence that some with insight didn’t see it coming at all.

At that time, no one was talking about the current state that we’re in now. So what happens in 2036. And the next generation?

Unless you presume that the human mind is special and impossible to duplicate in important ways, I think there’s a clear set of possibilities here that need to be taken seriously. Sci-fi has been for decades, because they’re that obvious frankly. That the current AI is being over-sold and promised by its backers is basically meaningless. That an AI can write convincingly, even if only for a few pages, and couldn’t do so 5-10 years ago. That’s huge.

I don’t entirely disagree. I’d add that whatever other options there are, they involve skills, values and perspectives that are unpracticed and atrophied in modern western culture (and likely globally) to the point that that is its own problem.

What strikes me about the present moment is that it feels like particularly bad timing.

I’m not so sure that technological developments follow a well defined path and like to think about what alternative timelines would look like, especially with humanity being better prepared for them.

For instance, I’ve figured for a long time that the internet was a few decades earlier than it should have been for our social and political development. Probably TV too.

AI just feels 100s of years too early. Like we’re only just getting to grips with post-capitalism and climate change as ideas let alone problems we can solve.

To be honest, this moment was always coming or is yet to come for anti-AI folks.

The real issue isn’t whether it’s good or bad. The reason it’s such a hot thing is because generally it’s good enough to get people interested. And that’s very unlikely to go away.

Too interested? Sure.

But machines that are better than people at something people value about themselves. That’s where we’re heading if we’re not there already.

Which unlocks a massive question: What kind of world do you want to live in and how much are you willing to do to maintain it? Just about everything else is no longer a given. Not our value or importance, not our position at the top of the food chain, not our democracy or wealth, or the continuous growth of capitalism, or even our continued existence.

We’re basically at the beginning of an AI apocalypse movie. You can’t presume that you know the ending. You have to figure out how you want it to end. And not just for you, but your children and grandchildren children. Cuz it’s all at stake now.

Yea, like the matrix, the Internet is now an intrinsically dangerous place where anyone is potentially some highly capable AI with potentially very malicious intent.

Yea, this “data at the edge” approach, not “on the wire” Is interesting to me and makes sense.

Basically regressing on the convenience/power of the internet because it just isn’t safe and easy anymore and for anything personal that isn’t a server -> many users, yoi basically ain’t gonna need it.

What does self hosting look like in a world full of malicious AI agents?

I’m thinking of this post/thread from Veronica explains, where she explains that her hosted services are accessible only locally because tbe security headache isn’t worth it: https://explains.social/@veronica/statuses/01KWJCGV27JVBHP21E2JNWDBFH

As someone who doesn’t self-host but could and would want to, the state of AI has basically scared me off.

Happy cake day!

If you don’t mind, could you to explain why exactly?

Is it a GPL3 thing? Or favouring their own BSD licences?

Yep, and now you will see it everywhere.

And it’s quite insidious too. What’s the woman to do when offered such a position, even if the dynamic is known and Crystal clear?!

I recall learning somewhere that part of the reason was that Peter had never contributed to the song writing and when he tried submitting some tapes of riffs, Mikael really wanted to incorporate Peter’s music but in the end turned it all down for not being good enough. This was from an interview with Mikael. So presumably there was some aspect of not really being part of the band as much as Peter wanted to be?

I’m pretty sure a major problem with AI is that people don’t know how to talk about the actual problem.

It’s mega-corps replacing people while “stealing” their intellectual output. It’s a reshaping of the “social contract”. It’s those making bank quickly pushing the whole world in a direction that may just be a really bad idea (like we’re no longer in control of our own world/lives at all).

It poses the question: is all tech progress good or is it sometimes “bad” such that we actually want to design our own fate and sometimes just be comfortable with what we have and what we are?

Does this whole post-industrial revolution world need techno-hype to be happy? Or can we collectively just touch grass and settle a bit more.

Well I liked it. Saw it straight after 28 years later and thought they went well together.

Would anyone actually be down for “year one”?

I’m a broken record on this now, but I personally really dislike the idea of Trek doing the whole nostalgic reboot thing. And I’ve even found it kind of offensive that SNW has become such an obvious vehicle for it because for me the charm of the show was to reimagine what TOS quite literally could have been (as the continuation of the first pilot rather than the second pilot which is what we got with TOS).

I’m sure there’s a pitch to studios that could work, but in the grander scheme of Trek, I’m just not sure it’s at all a good idea.

Anyone ride wonder if there’ll be an asymmetry between the ease/speed at which bugs/vulnerabilities are found and at which they’ll be fixed with AI systems?

That is, AI assistance may find and exploit bugs more easily than it can fix them?

Yep. This is the last hurrah of this cycle of trek. After this 1.5 seasons of SNW and Starfleet Academy’s last/second season, that’s it.

I always figured the “secret” plan for SNW was to transition into an original series reboot. And I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s still on the table and that’s why SNW is getting to sail off into the sunset. But it also seems likely that the appetite just isn’t there anymore for that sort of thing (or maybe, as I do, some exec just doesn’t think it’s a good idea).

Yea this vibes.

For me, it felt like coding was a more attractive term for people who weren’t “proper” computer science and “engineering” types who weren’t confident that they knew what “program” meant or even “algorithm”, as they were working things as they went.

I’d guess that as computing involved more and more people with this non-standard background, coding became preferred. I certainly encountered people uncomfortable with my casual use of “algorithm” because it triggered their imposter syndrome, and my pointing out that they write algorithms with the code the write all the time certainly didn’t help.