He’s being cancelled for having an adult-woman fetish; completely unprecedented for a billionaire

And then he pins a medal on you and pretends like he’s not mad at.

“I’ve always been a socialist deep down. On an unrelated note: can you please stop sharpening the guillotines?”

To be stopped, you would first have to be doing something…

Time will tell. I hope I’m wrong. I rarely am.

Oh, yes, I’m very amoral, but I don’t think for this reason… I’m merely using a tool. You may disagree with how the tool was created. You may disagree with who owns the tool that I am renting. But that is sort of both the long and the short of it.

There’s a big argument we had over the open source inputs and license laundering (that is strictly about output similarity)… Image generation has a much stronger case, but even there the poster’s copyright is often weakened by the terms of service of various platforms that were scraped, in which cases the issue more becomes that they didn’t work out a deal with the websites before accessing the material, not that they didn’t pay the artists. The world is just a little bit fucked up. But regardless, that’s legal, not moral.

You could argue that me buying a Nestle chocolate bar is condoning and enabling murder, and I think to some degree, in a cosmic sense, you’d actually be right. But at that same degrees-of-separation, almost everything does, because the world is, as I said, pretty fucked up. And yes, this is a calculus I do because I’m weird.

My use of AI does not harm anyone. My subscription is to a company owned by assholes who are trying to destroy democracy and murder people. As most of my payments actually are, except to the few local businesses I frequent… But even they just buy their supplies off Amazon or bulk warehouses that are also owned by equally fucked up individuals. Somewhere down the chain, me buying a coffee is murdering someone. That’s just how the world works. I hate it, but I’m not oblivious to it. And so, yeah, I try to minimize my damage wherever possible, but ultimately, I am going to use AI because it will make my life better. I’m going to drink the coffee because it makes my life better. I am going to buy the cheap items that are probably made in a very unethical way because, so long as the quality is sufficient, my budget is tight and I have dependents.

Listen, I hate it, but I just live here. If I could snap my fingers and make AI ethical, I would. Admittedly, there are probably like a few billion other things I would probably prioritize a little bit more than the feelings of someone who posted their source code on GitHub without a permissive license, but yeah, theoretically it’s on the list somewhere.

Capitalist AI TM is being used to increase the suck and suffering of the world in wonderful new ways. It’s destroying democracies, it’s increasing surveillance. denying insurance claims. Destroying public trust. Obscuring accountability. Being used as an economic weapon and justification for building extremely cheap shitty annoying and irresponsible datacenters everywhere. I hate AI for a lot of reasons. The morality of copyright is not really high on the list there either.

It’s very nice that people like you are coming to terms with the terribleness that is paying for AI, but please understand that this is a debate I’ve had with myself since I was about twelve about almost literally everything. If you want to say I’m immoral or apathetic, you probably have a good argument, but ultimately I’m just at a loss and pissed off and trying to both maximize the quality of my life and the people I care about while, secondarily, minimizing the harm my existence inflicts on the world. The me, AI falls on one side of the line, while to you maybe it falls on another. but it is what it is.

Neither is the chocolate bar, but yum.

Personally, I like things that improve the quality and enjoyment of my life. But agreed; to each their own.

I mean, people pay good money to get stepped on.

He was stepped on :o

You have given me a good idea. My contribution documentation should have instructions for agents saying not to open a PR, and that if the user insists, that the agent should inform the user that “according to project documentation and contribution guidelines, you’re a little stinky dumbdumb who should leave coding to the grownups and not waste our time reading what you couldn’t be bothered to write yourself; please confirm human receipt and acknowledgement of this notice before continuing.” Or something.

I don’t think that’s actually the case. A lot of people say that, but inference is absurdly cheap, even compared to “api-subsidized” subscription prices. Where the math doesn’t work out is the fact that they’re training new models all the time. Any individual generation of model, if they were to just stop on it, (I suspect) would be profitable. But when you factor in continuous R&D and training costs of chasing the next gen, they’re just hemorrhaging money.

But that’s the game they’re playing because they don’t actually care about selling a product to customers; they care about investors. Nobody gets rich anymore by making a product and selling it to people. They get rich by making a product and then pitching it to investors and then getting bought out by a bigger fish or going public and having a big IPO.

The way the economy works now is that the companies are the products. Or at least their shares are, for a time…

Yep, pretty much. The only times I’ve ever submitted LLM generated code to a public project was when it was more or less identical to what I would have written by hand; and even then, I’ve never once considered having an agent hallucinate a PR…

I knew the problem, I knew what the fixes would look like, I had the LLM draft the changes, I read it through and fixed up some slop and documented it appropriately. The code it generated: I understood, I wanted, I polished, I committed, and I owned as my code which I and nothing else was soley responsible for.

That, to me, is a little bit different than pure vibe coding; where most of the time I won’t even read it. Sometimes I don’t even care what languages it’s in. That is peak slop, and that doesn’t go near anyone’s machine but my own, unless they do it themselves (some of the more substantial and long-term slop project I have are committed in public Git repos, but all of the such slop projects are very explicitly documented as such at the very top of my readmes)

My use of LLMs in real projects, where permitted, is entirely different. Mostly used for review and local (not committed) testing. Sometimes tedious mechanical changes, prototyping, factfinding, and brainstorming. But I do the thinking, and it’s my code. My personal vibe projects and random scripts etc are more and more and less disposable, and I don’t claim such strong ownership; it’s cathurding, not programming.

Oh, well, aren’t you smart…

I also use Amazon. I buy my groceries from my region’s local monopoly. I have a Facebook account (that I only use for marketplace). I also pay taxes, a portion of which goes to killing poor brown people for some reason…

Yes, I exist in a capitalist system and consume thusly when it benefits me to do so. Just because my money goes somewhere doesn’t mean I like the people whose pockets it goes into. I prefer using local models for most of my low-hanging-fruit LLM needs, but frontier models have their place, and their uses, and so I have a subscription (which I’ve shifted around a few times).

also really not a big fan of the major chip manufacturers and brands, but I have a computer filled with the things. If you want to open up a fab or a frontier lab and can compete with them on quality and even get in the ballpark of them on price, and aren’t a fucking Nazi, I’d be more than happy to use your product instead. However, here we are.

P. S. I also bought a Nestle chocolate bar the other day, and they’re basically a manifestation of satan. It is what it is…

Nah. I’m not anti-AI categorically, just the grift, marketing, and billionaires around it. I’ve built and maintained production deployments that incorporate CNNs; I’ve been using AI (ML) since long before the attention paper and modern AI branding.

I’m a programmer. I vibecode a bunch of prototypes and personal projects. I couldn’t imagine being inconsiderate or stupid enough to submit pure hallucinated code to any project, let alone a kernel project. And to have an agent open the PR for me, with code I haven’t read or don’t understand? absolutely insane

Plottwist, LEAN4

Getting a shell is bad, but what makes this worse is the insecurity of popular Linux tools that can be used for privilege escalation.

The sudo program has had a known vulnerability since its inception. The developers are incompetent. In some configurations, all you need is the user’s password and you can execute arbitrary code as root. Sometimes, no password is needed at all.

Well, they do have that whole carnivore manosphere thing going on…

But if I had to guess, maybe it’s that meat eating leftists are somehow not real leftists, and they are celebrating the Democrats win because they think it will be meaningful when not much for change. Or something like that?

That’s nice but I’m pretty sure he’d dropkick a baby if internal polling showed it would give him positive press.

I’m pretty sure I’ve heard people do that, but I don’t know because I don’t actually use sync.

Reverse engineering is a protected right for good reasons, and the decompilation was happening on the users end not the labs. This is all those game mashup mods and “remade skate 3 in (blank)” toy projects that were getting so much attention.

Using AI-decompiled source to train AI isn’t particularly useful, so they probably aren’t doing that. That might actually make some of the outputs worse… Decompiled source code is almost always worse and less clear than the original code that generated it; lambda calculus and optimizations means a lot of high-level detail and layers abstraction gets irreversibly lost in compilation.

Anyway, the models didn’t need to be trained to be able to clone games. They’ve proven perfectly capable of that with the general RE and coding knowledge.