> If we're doing capitalism people have to be paid somehow, and when people say "free" they don't mean "absolutely".
Therein lies the entire issue. Intellectual property is a paradox and a farce, but our current systems require IP as a concept to exist. 99% of human history existed without the concept of IP law, and yet people still innovated, learned, and shared knowledge. But now we are at a point where human beings can only survive if they have something they can productize and sell to others, and so for knowledge to be produced, it has to turned into something that is artificially scarce, so that those producing it can be compensated for their labor. Maybe this is unavoidable for this point of our evolution. I doubt it, as 99% of human history managed without the concept of IP, and we still produced and shared knowledge.
But even if it is necessary for this stage, it is still a dystopian model. And I imagine we aren’t far off from a point where we can provide for everyone’s basic needs, and therefore we don’t need to introduce artificial scarcity to make knowledge work economically viable.
If they lock it up, they lock it up. They don’t need to be forced to open it up. But they also shouldn’t be able to prevent others for making use of any knowledge gleaned from it.
In the case of AI, I don’t think LLM providers are required to make their models completely open source just because they were trained on the data freely available on the internet. Those model weights aren’t the original data anyways, so they aren’t even selling access to that original data. However, there is should be nothing preventing others from creating and selling something produced from those LLMs. Distillation, for example, is free game.
In short, you should be required to make your knowledge freely available. But once someone has access to that knowledge, you can’t stop them from using it however they wish, including if they wish to sell it themselves.
First of all, I’d recommend you not accuse others of being intellectually dishonest simply because they have a stance you disagree with.
Second of all, “knowledge is free” doesn’t mean it is free to generate. It means that it literally cannot be owned. Property implies scarcity. If I use a thing, it makes it so you can’t use that thing. This does not apply to something like knowledge. The fact that I use your idea doesn’t mean you can no longer make use of that idea. Your analogy is flawed, because drinking a beer means that is a beer that cannot be used by someone else. Intellectual property is an oxymoron. There is nothing actually stopping someone from making use of someone else’s knowledge, and therefore we must artificially construct barriers in order to maximize the ability to profit off of it. In the most charitable sense, this in theory provides financial incentive for people to generate knowledge. In a less charitable sense, it is literal though policing for the sole purpose of extracting money.
I get that making use of knowledge without compensating the person who produced it is “theft” under our system. The problem is not with the act. It is with the system in which knowledge work can only support an individual if these dystopian measures are enforced. Frankly, most knowledge work is built on mountains of previous knowledge work that never is compensated for it anyways, so the model of the world isn’t even internally consistent.
What exactly are the facts about AI water usage? I have trouble separating hysteria from reality but most of what I see still claims water usage is enormous
The never-ending discussion of LLM-generated code in binary terms is tiring. It’s either all completely useless slop (which is the author’s stance), or it’s infallible and should be maximized at all costs. Yes there is slop, but there is also good or even great code produced by those making use of LLMs. I understand why a maintainer of a large project like Zig may outright reject LLMs for sheer practicality matters, just to stay on top of the wave of slop generated contributions. But it makes very little sense when a consumer of code, such as the author, takes a black and white stance on if LLM generated code is accepted by the language. If anything, it feels like an intellectual crutch. No need to understand technical nuances when you can fallback on dogmatic zeal.
There’s a lot of crops that are very intensively bred to create new, specific cultivars. Take a look at all the new Apple varieties popping up. There’s nothing natural about their creation: https://applerankings.com
If knowledge is to be free, that means there should be no restrictions on how it is used. Even an open source license misses the point, because the implication is still that one person can dictate how another person can make use of knowledge. It’s still premised on the same dystopian view that a person can own an idea.
That’s my point. The AI writing either affects the content or it doesn’t. If you require a disclaimer to tell the difference, then it isn’t affecting the content.
Requiring a disclaimer is essentially admitting the content isn’t meaningfully different than human generated content. At that point, who cares? Just engage with the premise on its own merits, rather than on how it was written.
I think the need to jump through hoops to disclose anything and anything that might offend someone’s particular sensibilities is a losing battle. What if I want a disclosure on if the content is being hosted via AWS vs some non-magacorp that agrees with my sensibilities more? Or that the power being used by the data center is renewable? Or a disclosure for the author’s every political position so I know if I agree with them and if I should amplify their message and/or generate ad revenue through their site?
At the end of the day, the ideas within the content are what matters. An idea has or does not have merit regardless of if it was produced entirely by a person, or by a person using AI as an editor, or 100% generated by AI. If you need a disclosure on if an idea was produced by AI, you are saying that you have no interest on debating the content on the grounds of the arguments it is making, while simultaneously ceding you can’t tell the difference between someone using AI and someone who isn’t (which undermines one of the primary arguments against AI, that it makes for inferior outputs).
> who wants to work for a leader who is neither powerful nor high-status within their own company?
Me. In my limited experience, the more leaders are involved, the less likely the project is to be successful. The ideal situation is having leadership that is able to set a decent strategy, and then get out of the way of their subordinates and let them execute. Bad leadership micromanages and inserts themselves in the way of execution.
The status and “power” involved in setting strategy isn’t nearly as significant as the amount involved in micromanagement.
The repetition and examples aren’t there for learning. They are there for monetization.
This is my biggest issue with the self-help industry. There is a lot of self-help books out there with ideas that are genuinely valuable, or at least worth considering. But as you say, the entirety of the idea can be conveyed perfectly well in a blog post. But you can’t sell a blog post. So it has to be padded out with cruft into a book length publication that can be sold to people.
That’s how AI undermines the industry. It has those general ideas and can convey them in the simplistic, cruftless versions that are most helpful, and can iterate back and forth with someone on applications to their own life.
I spent nearly a decade disgusted with Trump but being contrarian by insisting that it was understandable why voters might support it, even if I felt they were wrong.
At this point, there’s no defending it. Anyone who supports this incarnation of the Republican Party is as stupid and backwards as they’ve been castigated.
The Crusades and colonialism can’t be distilled down to single causes, but even if you tried, religious reasons would not be the main ones. Political and financial motivations were far bigger factors in both.