advael

3,970 karmajoined 11 yıl önce

I research AI and develop software

I don't represent anyone and no one represents me

I have a thousand names

Since this place doesn't have DMs, I set up an email for this username at tuta (dotcom)

comments

5 gün öncediscuss

The disdainful pile of stereotypes you've generated merely based on seeing the word "weed" in an example game is not throwing off my impression that you're engaging in culture war nonsense

Aiding that impression is that you are using the language of marketing to imply that this open-source project is intended as a product and trying to attract a market to adopt it, but that somehow the mere oblique possibility of invocation of a subculture that you personally dislike but which is also quite large would harm rather than help them do that if this were their aim. Personally, I don't see the mere presence of such an example game as having much meaning at all, and this whole "you wouldn't want to attract the wrong sorts of people" style argument is so classic a pearl-clutcher line that I almost wanted to call Poe's Law on it, but instead I took you to be earnest and seem to have judged correctly

Rest assured, I strive for honesty above all else, read whole posts before replying to them, and do my best to reason through what I am saying, have done so here, and continue to hold the impression I stated

5 gün öncediscuss

As a side note, writing comments that sound like some pearl-clutching culture warrior on a post about someone's open source software isn't really a good look. As the saying goes "birds of a feather flock together", and I think a lot of people will see that and think "okay, so that's the kind of person who comments on people's passion projects on hacker news"

5 gün öncediscuss

What do we consider trivial? What are we measuring effort by? Yes, people have different skills from each other, and different resources they might have differential access to, but the value of the business is constrained by that differential, and we are purporting that a technology can build you stuff with the effort of only one person that somehow still supports a business worth billions of dollars? How much more effort does it have to take to build something before you'll pay for it? Pay how much? And if people are making companies without hiring employees, how much can how many people pay for it in the first place?

Also worth noting that you don't gotta do much to support software (or any solution) that only one person uses

5 gün öncediscuss

First mover effects, network effects, brand recognition, corruption, rent-seeking over the assets created by the aforementioned

Like, yes the main point of leverage obviously isn't software quality, but also, if AI can't cause one person to be able to solve those other problems at some scale that's currently not possible with no other human help, those problems become problems someone else could also throw the AI at. If running a business relies on having some point of market leverage over anyone who pays your business for something, the reduction of the cost of independently gaining that leverage necessarily means the reduction of the value of your business

I guess another possible means to a single-person company with a billion dollar valuation is hyperinflation

5 gün öncediscuss

I still have the same question about this that I have every time someone proposes it: If there is some hurdle that AI solves that means someone can create a highly profitable business alone, why should someone pay that business to solve whatever problem it solves instead of also getting the AI to solve it? Like if implementation becomes less and less of a barrier, that implementation is also less of a moat, and thus at least software companies per se would seem to not be of much value compared to just having access to the same AI people use to build them. This would basically require a permanent high barrier to access to AI to work out, which to be fair, may be the future a lot of these silicon valley prognosticator types might be hoping for, but if that doesn't happen, which seems more likely, the value of companies resets to whatever assets they can leverage, and at least software, if not any strategic or technical advantage an AI could help with, no longer is a source of surplus value

I already think valuation is a very gameable metric, so I guess you could trivially get this done if you meet a VC who will just buy you a billion dollar valuation on the belief that this is a real thing. I know some enthusiastic kids in the world I could maybe throw a thousand bucks at to buy a GPU in exchange for a millionth of their company, and technically wouldn't that make them a one-person unicorn already?

11 gün öncediscuss

I mean, I do this all the time via sshfs. I don't think these tools or ideas are bad, they just mostly aren't new, the innovation is maybe a particular ux or a particular bundle of toys?

14 gün öncediscuss

On PCs, the best you could really do is restrict access to certain websites on certain boxes with TPMs the users can't disable. Remote attestation can lock people out of your stuff, but not out of their own stuff. For that you need control of the device. Of course, most mobile phones aren't easy for the user to have control of, but most PCs still are, so long as you scrub the rootkits (e.g. windows) off 'em

19 gün öncediscuss

Kinda, yea. I've never been able to afford to fully prioritize values-alignment in my work, but it is something I care about, and building anything proprietary and US-controlled feels increasingly bad, because even if a company's mission isn't evil, the state has demonstrated a strong willingness to force their hand if they can be useful to them at all, and punish them arbitrarily if they do anything that the ruling party dislikes. I do have bills to pay, but if you can meet my relatively (as tech workers go) modest needs and have a real plan to make something that enables rather than impedes digital sovereignty, I'd be interested in hearing what I could do to help

geçen aydiscuss

It's crazy how all these tech CEOs develop the same sense of ethics that seeks to make the foundation of open research and development that made their efforts possible and may threaten their market position illegal in the name of safety against nebulously-defined risks

geçen aydiscuss

Yea, I mean, I think the reason people balk at corporate personhood are to do with both the iniquities committed by corporate actors and the fact that personhood is a really confusing model for all this

A model that treats what effectively amounts to a body of assets united by a charter as equivalent to a person - except when it isn't - is inherently confusing because these are not at all similar kinds of entities. While it's clear that this model has a purpose, I think people are right to point out that the equivalence is drawn by rather stilted logic and even more right to question whether the consequences of this legal framing are desirable from their perspective

geçen aydiscuss

I get that there's a lot of loud nonsense flying around about AI, both positive and negative, and I echo the sentiment that people should have some damn perspective when talking to FOSS maintainers, but I think writing a bunch of AI-assisted code that causes regressions and then responding to that by throwing out a strawman about how critics (with PhDs no less!) are telling him these things can't do anything at all and can't possibly understand how literally everything has fundamentally changed in the last few months sounds way more like a guy who has a motivated (and understandable - he's retired ffs) reason to... a little bit buy into the hype

I think he makes a lot of good points here, but also think that kind of statement is unlikely to assuage the real concerns of people using the software. I think people are more likely to fork rsync now rather than rely on a more diverged earlier alternative implementation though

geçen aydiscuss

I'm confused about why you believe this contrasts with what the above poster said. You've described a bunch of practical reasons why this is legally expedient and also at least one that seems to contrast with your own concept of personhood

geçen aydiscuss

Citizens United did a lot to effectively legalize foreign influence as well, since the mechanism is opaque transfer of money

But regardless, most people's threat models should discount based on geographic and political distance. All else being equal, chinese surveillance is a bigger threat to you if you're in china than if you're in the us, and vice versa

geçen aydiscuss

AFAICT hacker news is only slightly less positive on AI than the average tech industry gathering, which is still like two standard deviations more positive than any average gathering of random people in a city. I think the culture of silicon valley reads anything less than gushing hype as negativity right now, which is a weirdly polarized place to be, but the discourse around this technology is bizarre in general, being an absolute gamechanger that nonetheless still somehow feels quite oversold by its most ardent boosters, who are themselves a minority, but one with rather disproportionate voice and reach

geçen aydiscuss

In a way, we're doing the same maneuver to avoid discussing the subject, deflecting to base insults involving psychoanalysis of the speaker based on their stated position rather than object-level engagement with the position per se. I agree that it's not a move that seems to invite meaningful discussion. Seems worth considering if that's a priority you have

geçen aydiscuss

So we've gone from "anyone who expresses this preference is a snob" to "actually what matters is the preferences of some imaginary audience, who I can also speak for"

Fascinating

geçen aydiscuss

Aye, and the comment above mine was engaging with the line in a way that begged for mockery nonetheless

geçen aydiscuss

Yea definitely, anyone with different preferences from you is just virtue signaling and/or trying to flex on you. Seems super reasonable to me

geçen aydiscuss

For most of 2024, my main daily driver laptop was a little pink chinese laptop from 2019 I bought on amazon for roughly $200. It was marketed toward communication students. I put arch with cinnamon on it and it was pretty damn adequate for my needs, serviceable for browsing, watching videos, and even some dinky games, and of course fine for development, able to run tiny prototype code locally and ssh into more powerful servers (or cloud vms, whatever) when work was to be done for people paying for the compute

You really don't need that much computer for most things, but most operating systems shove a lot of extras on there by default. Leaving windows on the thing obviously would have been untenable, but even ubuntu would probably chug on such a device. I think if the supply crunch continues this logic will make sense to more and more people

I use a macbook for work now because I'm required to. It's just at every level an obnoxious operating system to work with, its permission model is a mess, every program on it is an ad and keeps trying to vie for my attention and I can't remove half of them. It bugs out often, including maxing out its application memory opening programs I didn't ask to open. It updates itself in an obnoxious way without my permission. It would be unusable if it didn't have a unix shell, and not everything on it is accessible from shell commands. Apple makes fundamentally incredible hardware, even if they're not perfect, but I would never intentionally buy something from them that didn't support getting out of their godawful software ecosystem

geçen aydiscuss

They've got a documented history of trying to strongarm everyone they can