Notices by datarama (datarama@hachyderm.io)

@inthehands On the one hand, I agree - if nothing else, because caring, doing and building are what I *want* to do.

But on the other hand: "We will rebel against the AI oligarchs by creating *even better* training data for them!"

@inthehands They're just going to take it anyway.

@inthehands As I said just a while ago: Every big tech press event these last few years have felt like "Announcing our exciting plans for oligarchs to strip-mine the entire world and immiserate all of humanity! Get on board, and also death to the unbelievers!"

@thomasfuchs Isn't Kagi also run by AI bros?

(Me, I currently default to noai.duckduckgo.com - but every now and then I also try out Qwant and Ecosia.)

@thomasfuchs I find myself wishing that I was in a little capsule getting away from here as fast as I possibly could.

(But then I remember that they have Outlook and Windows in that capsule. Possibly Teams, too.)

@mattly I feel much the same way. My OCD is one reason I *strongly* prefer to avoid conversational or "agentic" LLM systems.

@thomasfuchs @dcrossney (Footnote: I don't think books are going away, ever.

Radio, TV, the PC and the Internet were all supposed to kill books, and none of them did. LLMs certainly won't.)

@thomasfuchs @dcrossney *Obviously* LLMs don't make books obsolete; how on Earth could they?

I was responding to the point that the invention of writing led to LLMs.

@thomasfuchs Oh, heavens no. There's a diversity of vendors.

You can choose between two evil megacorporations, a fascist billionaire's ketamine-addled hobby project and two apocalyptic cults.

@mattly How do you figure that would work?

(because communicating on the internet is the worst: I'm not being snarky, I want to know.)

@mattly Yes, and I've been thinking similar things about online communities in general.

But I don't really see how this would apply to the distribution of code?

(It seems to me that functionally, the only two options now are public domain, or hiding it behind eg. a cloud service.)

@thomasfuchs Today, I saw this little meditation from the developer of Gram, a fork of the Zed editor.

https://gram.liten.app/posts/go-slow-and-fix-things/

@mattly In the playthrough I'm currently paused on I used a "trick" during character generation: If you pick one of the pregenerated characters and then press "back", you can use a pregen character sprite with an otherwise custom character.

The reason I did this was that I *really* wanted to play a Greybeard who looks like the Dream Tortoise. I like the idea of a very old turtle-man wandering around hitting evildoers with a stick and berating them.

@thomasfuchs Describe it to me.

I need some beauty in computing.

@thomasfuchs A lemon.

@mattly Right.

I've been very fortunate out in the offline world.

Frighteningly many programmers I've met online have been complete assholes - rich or not.

@mattly (I'm not sure I get the connection.)

@mattly counterpoint: I'm a programmer with a fairly broad humanities background, and I seem to be a lot more miserable than those Silicon Valley fuckheads.

@thomasfuchs Also, most of the slop machine enthusiasts I know aren't concerned about deskilling because they say skills are worthless now anyway.

@thomasfuchs Sure. I'm saying that there's a considerable blast radius as well.