Notices by Bradley M. Kühn (bkuhn@fedi.copyleft.org)

@cwebber
My biggest thought from your post is: disciplined use of dangerous materials & methods.
You finish with a driving example. I've noticed in the last 15 years, drivers became increasingly more careless. IMO It's because vehicles are safer than ever before. (A runaway dog's life was saved recently because my car hit the brake faster than I could.)
Yet, I still drive like I'm in the 1981 Corolla I learned in.
People need to use LLM-gen-AI like it's a '81 Corolla even if it's the latest EV.

@cwebber I was surprised but I also thank you for not bringing your thoughts during initial payload, & volunteering to wait further back in the queue.

I bookmarked a lot of your prior comments & referred to them during drafting process, so I'm curious to know if we succeeded in addressing any of your points!

Feel free to email & also, we'll likely launch video-chat Q&A sessions again after a few weeks.

But I bet you like ActivityPub best, given, ya'know, you co-invented it & stuff. 🤣

@bluetea I don't think it was *that* kinda thing. It's just gave real curt responses to people who were asking rude questions with plan to come back later and by the time I got back to thread everyone was mad that I'd been curt and argued they hadn't actually been rude.

That kinda stuff.

Really mostly people calling me a Nazi, a fascist, aiding and abetting war and murder. Ya'know, just another day on the Internet in our times.

@cwebber Eek, and I thought we agreed on *SO MUCH*.

Can I still click “Lisp is the best family of languages” if I believe that, for the advanced computer science students (top 10% of the class) should be taught Scheme as their first language?

@jens said:
> “The aim of gen #AI is to move…means of production from devs to model owners”
…same idea as “The aim of copyright, work-for-hire,& proprietary software is to move the means of production from devs to for-profit company owners.”

Yet, we used the tools of theses oppressors & yielded a strong stalemate against them.

& *of course* they wanna undermine #FOSS! #Microsoft, #GitHub, #Apple, etc. have worked to undermine #FOSS for *decades*.

Pragmatic idealism FTW then & (we hope) again!

@abucci

You may well be right. If you have a plan to force a USA Constitutional Convention (we were supposed to have those every 50 years or so), please do. Barring that, I think we just have to work around these problems as best we can. On that I do have ideas.

@jens @smallcircles @whvholst @bagder @onepict

@abucci

It's subterfuge or concern trolling or whatever. I literally said three months ago that I would be interest in talking with anyone who is trying to figure out how we have a non-violent revolution.
https://fedi.copyleft.org/@bkuhn/116155099537312695

That would have been an amazing long con to have posted that just to be able to answer you with it when you said that.

Point is: in the USA, we're stuck with this situation & we have to use the system against itself, or have a revolution. Only two options.

I am getting a new level¹ of @-mentioning rn as a co-drafter of SFC's LLM-gen-AI recommendations.

For those who don't follow me, I'm fastidious in responding (even to trolls, at least once). I have influence over important FOSS policies, & the public has every right to interrogate me & demand response.

I said earlier I'd get to you all quickly, but then my @-mention box really blew up 12hr later.

¹I had one of these a few months ago and I thought *that* was a lot. Phew, boy!

@dalias
> "using the tools of the oppressor against the oppressor" thing is tired and thoroughly debunked.

Copyleft is *exactly* using the tool of the oppressor against the oppressor, so logically your claim, if true, means #copyleft is “tired and thoroughly debunked”.

Copyleft has had some difficulties as a policy, & I have dedicated 30 years of my life to fixing, and plan for at least 15 more. ∃ big mix of successes & failures so far, but on whole copyleft increases for software freedom.

@dalias

As to “all the same people behind this”, the situation is much more nuanced than that. I agree completely that the billionaires are feeding the VCs who are feeding the LLM-gen-AI companies who feed all proprietary software companies, some of whom are feeding the Beyond Evil™ companies like Palantir, who are feeding the Department of War, who are bombing people indiscriminately. That chain is disturbing, but I don't think it useful to make false equivalences of every link in the chain.

@amd's comment makes little sense. Esp b/c it provides no evidence and/or quote where I “stand on the…side [of companies]” . If you look at my record in #FOSS, you'll instead find anti-captialist statements & rhetoric for *20 years* about “using the tools of the oppressor against the oppressor” to advance software freedom.

It *feels* easier to boycott anything proprietary until the bitter end. But I'm glad RMS didn't do that, otherwise GCC & GNU Emacs wouldn't exist.
Cf: https://sfc.ngo/ethical-use-proprietary-for-foss

@dalias

Making an analogy to war here, particularly at a time when real war is being waged in many places around the world in places where people are being murdered every day is a very inappropriate analogy.
I suspect like all of us, you feel threatened by what these capitalist 🤬s are doing to all of us. I agree it's completely evil. We have to resist, *and* have non-hyperbolic policy debate about how to succeed against what they're doing.

But saying they're tantamount to murders isn't that.

@dalias

(a) people using proprietary software systems effect all those around them (consider Facebook, document formats that are hard to edit without a proprietary program, etc.)

(b) "people enthusiastically adopting a new fascist project where use of it impacts everyone they interact with as well" is a straw-person argument because we did not say that.

Pretending these recommendations were hyperbolic when they weren't may win a flame war, but it just doesn't advance the policy discussion.

In a policy statement¹, @conservancy said:
> “#FOSS projects should not shun contributors who choose to use LLM-gen-AI systems.”

@dalias' reply:
>> “LOL WTF NOPE. 🤡”

While it was surely unintentional, your reply is quite similar to the cruelty of traditional #FreeSoftware rhetoric — wherein we shunned people for *using* #Apple & #Microsoft. Such users deserve sympathy and help toward more software freedom.

Same goes for #LLM-backed generative #AI users.

¹ https://sfconservancy.org/llm-gen-ai/llm-backed-generative-ai-recommendations.html

#OpenSource

@lispi314

That was part of my point. At that time in the mid-1990s, sysadmins generally thought that capitalism needed those who actually understood how the Internet worked.

As you say, it turns out we had no power at all against both the rents you mention and how excessive use of NAT turned the Internet into a primarily broadcast medium rather than an egalitarian one we all arrogantly assumed couldn't be coopted.

Cc: @craigbro

(1/2) ≈ every 6 months, I have trouble sleeping specifically because I think about how, circa 1996, I attended some sysadmin (probably SANS) event in Baltimore.

I went to a tutorial on #IPv6. I got there early as we knew it'd be standing room only & it was.

One of the first slides the instructor put up was a graph of how quickly #IPv4 numbers were being assigned. He said with complete confidence: “We all need to learn IPv6 as IPv4 will surely be deprecated by the end of the century”. …

(2/2)…Why insomnia?: After 30 years, this became my archetype of how ridiculously bad we technologists are at prognostication.

IPv6 remains spotty. IPv4 addrs oughta be worthless, but ARDC became a wonderful grantmaker b/c Bezos paid $108mil for 25% of a Class A. 😲

Truth is stranger than prediction.

Most who did prognosticate accurately probably got lucky.

This terrifies me b/c the primary job of an activist policy maker is to anticipate future events & have policies ready to solve them.😬

@evan I can't vote as I think there is a strong chance of Constitutional amendment and a third term.

I guess the “election” option fits that but I think you're implying the election won't include Trump.

@evan I did search for myself just a few minutes ago. “Bradley AND Kuhn” & “Brad AND Kuhn” return no results.

Kuhn is a more common surname than most realize. Unsurprisingly, ∃ in the records some Kuhn Foundation that Epstein gave money to.

Kuhn being more-common-than-people realize was a top-10 reason I recently changed spelling of my surname to Kühn. Hoping to end the incessant “You related to Pete Kuhn?” “My uncle, but I'm sure it's a different Pete.”. At worst when I lived in Cincinnati.

Sorry, @evan, I did see your other posts & I agree completely. The email archive has, as you say, random notices from platforms like Twitter, etc.. I saw much of that serendipitously when I was searching for the guilty.
With the 2020 MIT report now supplemented with Epstein's own records, I'm convinced everyone of authority at MIT knew & ignored. Minsky's maybe the only rape suspect, but all of MIT's CSAIL helped Epstein's image makeover & Sussman went far across the line in going to the island.