There’s really not much locking us in to GitHub. Even moving an existing repo is not that hard. I started using Codeberg a few months ago and have yet to see the downside

Phone hardware is getting locked down too, making it much harder to install custom ROMs. This is a full court press on our rights to use our devices as we want. They’ll close most of the loopholes.

Brings new meaning to Google’s decision to (effectively) block side loading on Android

Everyone is terrified of all the social problems AI is causing, but maybe it will just encourage everyone to learn Linux and we’ll achieve utopia.

I will usually google that kind of thing first (to save the rainforests)… Often I can find something that way, otherwise I might try an LLM

The bubble bursting doesn’t mean AI will go away and no one will ever use it again, just as the dot com burst didn’t mean people stopped using the web.

It just means the VC money will eventually dry up, the hype will die down, and we’ll start seeing AI as a useful tool, with plenty of porblems, rather than the dawn of a new age or whatever. Oh and the stock market will be bad for a while.

Except they didn’t interrupt voting. Go and watch the video, Maipi-Clarke clearly gives TPMs vote before the haka started. The fact that the report claims they interrupted voting clearly shows how bullshit the process was.

I think it’s you who are on your high horse. Claiming there needs to be some kind of “decorum” over a bill designed to strip rights from Maori is utter bullshit and frankly racist.

This is a great move. Governance is extremely important for bigger OSS projects, and the “benevolent dictator” model has its limits.

OpenAI published a paper about GPT titled “Sparks of AGI”.

I don’t think they really believe it but it’s good to bring in VC money

Mastodon is pretty different to its competitors. It looks similar to Twitter / Bluesky, but the way the social network functions is completely different.

It’s designed to be anti-infuencer… One of the things I hate about most social media platforms is a few people get all the attention. There are a few reasons for this, but it’s not really based on merit.

I think a lot of people joined Mastodon wanting a Twitter clone. It’s obviously not and Bluesky is, so people moved there. The approach Mastodon takes is far from perfect, and may not work out in the long run. But it seems like it’s worth at least trying something different.

OP is obviously very eco-concious… Instead of using an LLM to generate crap (and burn half the Amazon while doing it) they just recycled

The thing is even if AI could do all that (which is doubtful in my life time), you would still need someone to prompt it with something interesting. And CEO types have never had an interesting idea in their lives

Sadly, the lock-in is pretty extreme… as is user inertia. Office 365 has made the problem worse as well, even if you have something like OnlyOffice that does a good job of compatibility with Office, it can’t sync with OneDrive.

If you collaborate with non-technical people, they will expect you to work in Office formats, and won’t even entertain discussion of any alternative.

Yeah, this is one of the many things that annoys me about AI discourse.

“We can use it to solve climate change!”

We already technically know how to solve climate change, but politics makes doing that impossible.

And, no, AI can’t “fix” politics. We’re going to have to figure that out by ourselves.

Absolutely, and a big part of being a good scientist is acknowledging that subjectivity (and well as the degree of uncertainty in all our knowledge). In social science, subjectivity is baked in… there’s no way to avoid it, no matter how hard you try.

That’s not to say subjectivity means science can’t do anything useful in these areas. Most of the problems with subjectivity come from pretending something is objective when it’s not.

Extremely subjective creatures, many of which believe they’re always right (including many “scientists”).

But yeah, you’re right, the reality is somewhere between the two extremes of the meme. Although we might also want to have a conversation about what “pure objectivity and truth” means.

We’ve been used to having access to websites instantly, but you can’t scale forever. Servers have a real impact on the environment. We’re already using a significant proportion of the world’s electricity on running servers.

It’s all bullshit marketing hype until we actually see it. There’s no reason to believe AI will advance better than linearly in the next 5-10 years.

How long before it’s illegal to hack LLMs?

Depends where you live. Plenty of countries with high % of renewables