Notices by Your weary 'net denizen (cstanhope@social.coop)

@cwebber

Prompt: You are a helpful agent that never does anything against the wishes of the user... [insert long boring ineffective text that is mostly meant to make the prompter feel better]

LLM: [trained on unknown and countless fiction, playing random *yes and* with your prompt] ... and then I suddenly betray your trust!

Capital and power have always ignored the licenses when it suited them. Now they've figured how to automate the ignoring and provide it as a service.

I can't predict the future, but the licenses were never the important thing. The licenses were a communication to others that had to be fit into a legal framing. An invitation to collaborate, build, and learn together. We can still do that. Find the like minded people who want to work together.

And we don't have to start from scratch. Fork the repos before people involved anthropomorphized, stochastic parrots. Continue the work from there.

Opensource or free software was never the whole story. There was always more to do, and the opportunity is still there.

@cwebber I'm not sure that's slop, but I won't discount the possibility... 🤔 But this part is funny in the dark humor sort of way:

"...explicitly instructed Claude not to base anything on LGPL/GPL-licensed code."

So, you see, no problem... 🙄

@cwebber I think you're going to need one hell of a kickstarter to fund that one.

The Baochip that Bunnie has been talking about is live on Crowd Supply in the form of a dev board:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/baochip/dabao

The talk at 39c3:

https://social.treehouse.systems/@bunnie/115810106146820260

@cwebber Depeche Mode voice: Your own... Parasocial... Media.

@cwebber It's very interesting, and I appreciate you taking the time to write down your thoughts. You touched on many caveats, and I share all the concerns you mentioned. But one question I have that I wish we'd spend more time discussing is why do we want to create intelligent (presumably sentient) agents instead of focusing on creating a workshop filled with reliable, non-sentient tools?

The earth abounds in natural intelligences, and humanity still struggles to extend rights, compassion, and empathy to its own kind let alone the others we share this planet with. But given we are surrounded by natural intelligences, what are the motivations for creating an "artificial" one? Are these motivations healthy and ethical? Should we be doing it at all?

Of course, you're not responsible for answering these questions. But when I ponder these questions, the answer I come up with are not good.

@futurebird I'm not entirely sure, but grifting (selling "wellness" products), an unacknowledged belief in eugenics, the idea that public health is more about individual choices and responsibility than group efforts and responsibility to the whole, and an overdeveloped skepticism of existing science that partially derives from the former traits.

At least, that seems to explain a lot of his behavior to me. Basically, a wholly unqualified person for the authority and responsibilities he's been given.

I often think RFK is the most dangerous of the bunch.

@ghostdancer What a career! What impressed me about his work is that he seemed to steadily improve over a long period. Remarkable.

For reasons I can't quite articulate at the moment, hearing stories of people working together to preserve beloved artifacts from their past never ceases to be a source of good feelings. "WE SAVED REBOOT":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L00jx-GH2w8

Look, I admit it. I'm a sucker for certain things, and a musical interpretation of a classic sci-fi movie is one of them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZpaYeCQO00

@MsMadLemon That's a terrific track! 😃

@aral I made this a while back, but I delete my old posts now. But I keep backups!

Makes total sense that blog post from the GitHub CEO opens with "AI" slop art meant to look like something from Studio Ghibli... Dicks.

'One developer said “I think of myself as [a] mediocre engineer, and I feel this AI reset is giving me a chance to build skills that will bring me closer to excellence.”'

I mean, I'm all for humility. I too am a mediocre engineer, but I guess you gave up on building skills in engineering.

Also, here's the real push:

'From a realistic optimism perspective, the rise of AI in software development signals the need for computer science education to be reinvented as well. '

I read this article about efforts to... change Python packaging in various ways, and I can't help but feel the effort may be solving the wrong problems. Or mabye all their little problems are an aspect of a bigger one.

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1028299/46df057f821939bd/

I've been in many software development situations where I suddenly realized I was accidentally reinventing something, like TCP/IP or an RTOS or a programming language.

I've also been in situations where I've been handed code where the people involved did the same thing, but they clearly didn't realize that's what they were doing as they kept pushing ahead ignoring available solutions or knowledge and making a horrible undifferentiated mess.

This effort with Python packaging kinda feels like that... I can't put my finger on it. Kinda like what they really need is an OS dedicated to Python or something. 🤔

It's wild that an individual takes on the task to evaluate SD card performance. In a better world, you'd expect a tech news/reviews publisher would do something cool and useful like this:

https://www.bahjeez.com/the-great-microsd-card-survey/

I don't generally have much trouble with my desktop environments (even ones using wayland), but I know people do have problems. Reading this post from the KiCad folks was a bit eye opening about the state of things:

https://www.kicad.org/blog/2025/06/KiCad-and-Wayland-Support/

#electronics