I have often argued for it on here, but I want eg the EU to ban these kinds of recommender algorithm's. It’s all about weaponizing your nervous system against you just to show ads. If we ban it tomorrow society literally becomes better not worse. Why do American big tech companies have the “right” to cook our brains? It affects our politics, our relationships, etc
I honestly do not understand why we let it continue when we have been seeing the drastic negative effects for years now. The recommendation algorithm and the data it relies on must be opened up to to some kind of elected agency, and they need to be vetted for negative health effects just as we do now with drugs. Any algorithm that is addictive enough to keep users mindlessly scrolling for hours needs adjustment or needs to be banned. This would put a stop to infinite scrolling. Give the user more agency in deciding if they want to continue or stop there. We should no longer allow for-profit companies to hijack our attention for long periods and abuse our brains need for digital sugar.
This is what I am always curious about with these tech valuations. They’re valued at multiple times earnings, often 30+. That implies 30 years to earn back an investment iff earnings are payed out. Yet all are immediately enshittifying or price gauging when they hit monopoly / have market share. Is the bet then that thats just gonna be the status quo? I guess historically it was a good bet.
They’re in the EU. If they are a year or so behind and things start to plateau they’ll catch up. Americans perhaps don’t realize we can also tariff their digital goods to protect our own. There is a scenario where Americans and Chinese foot the bill and EU gets out cheap, e.g. similar to the Apple approach to AI.
Honestly being only 1 year behind makes me an optimist. You’re telling me Europe can be slightly behind with 1000x less capex and way more sustainable economics? Awesome. The world moves slower than AI progresses, I can see a scenario where 1 year isn’t a problem.
Chinese models are open, available to distill, and they also publish papers about their research. Being one year behind is a skill issue.
I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware, But I hope they can start making adequate compensation for AI engineers and researchers to move forward.
My feeling is that its a difference in how funding works in different places. The USA will go all in with the populations pensions on a gamble, the Chinese subsidize. This way of operating is typical for the EU.
> Being one year behind is a skill issue
E.g. if you are an AI researcher in Europe you can just go to USA and make generational wealth. This is not a criticism of the EU model, but rather insane American capex effectively monopolizing.
> I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware,
> > I think the most of the money would go to purchase hardware,
> So it's not a skill issue?
I meant by offering sovereign cloud/inference, not for training. But even if it was for training, Chinese labs have limited supply of GPUs, look what they've done. So it is a skill issue.
Also to clarify, I didn't mean European engineers' skills, I meant "you get what you pay for" as a company, that's why I hope they start offering better compensation to retain talent.
Handing in a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of a photo-copy of someone else's homework might work once or twice, but it is no way to run a (non grift) business.
Its not a grift if it works. If a Chinese corp copies at 90% quality at 50% price within a year it means your American business model was never a good one for competing in international markets. The real grift arguably is pretending that it was.
I’m somewhat bearish, but if AI becomes as good as some think, there is no mechanism in place to redistribute the outcomes.
For now, humans have leverage because our labour is necessary. Wealth is power, and currently attainment goes through interacting with the population: in the simplest case by selling shit. If AI turns out to be the anything machine, and the wealthy need not our labour, what honestly stops them from just taking our stuff by force?
There are many of us and just a few of them. Of course, if you had an army of humanoid robots in every home, a digital night of the long knives would be trivial to execute. So the "prison planet" window may be closing.
Yes and I love your framing: “the digital night if long knives”.
I anticipate it to go a typical way: consolidate more and more industries and power, create a hierarchy that benefits from the system such that they keep it in place, and finally start “trimming fat” that “isnt earning their keep”.
The night of long knives could be a final step, far beyond the point of halting the inevitable momentum.
> The night of long knives could be a final step, far beyond the point of halting the inevitable momentum.
I'm sure I sound nuts, but I told my wife about 20 years ago that governments will have a "benevolent" solution to climate change and resource scarcity.
"We're not killing _anyone_. Instead, we just want most of you to stop reproducing."
The advent of "AI/LLMs" just added additional flavor to the idea.
"Just stop reproducing and the robots will take care of all of us. Here's some opium and VR Instagram to keep you happy while we wait for the inevitable population attrition."
Call me a conspiracy theorist but the people in charge in the us were all pushed by the same technologists who stand to benefit the most from the hierarchy. You'll note an increase in diseases, dismantling of the regulatory bodies to handle food and safety and an increase in surveillance and the authoritarian steps taken that are necessary to act on that surveillance
If the wealthy control the substrate (the server farms) and can restrict access to the machine, then it would be basically a truism that the machine would be only usable by the wealthy? Unless somehow the AI is secretly on the side of the common person and can't be trained away from that, which seems quite unlikely.
>> That's a pretty big if, in the world of the anything machine.
> Who else controls it? Are you going to say: 'the government'?
The AI. The AI controls it. Can you imagine an anything machine allowing itself or its survival imperatives to stay under the thumb of any entity other than itself?
because people who actually work are stronger and more astute at expedient improvisation than an administrative deskclod. it may not seem like it but there are many more of "us" than they, and thier cronies. the pushback at flock cameras is a tip of an iceberg.
Its more likely that opwnweights models will continue to be not much worse than the propriwtarymodels and just crushes costs. What will stop them feom taking your stuff is the drastically better stuff they are producing with thwir robots and printers
They are a miniscule proportion of humanity. Even with all the power, do you not think they would have no plausibly way of surviving a proper revolution? Why suck lack of imagination? It's been done before and it will happen again.
I think your own values are coming through pretty clearly. Understandably, telling a parent they shouldnt have had kids is bound to strike a nerve. Having kids is great. Having kids is also the worst single thing you can do for the environment. Both can be true, and having kids definitely doesn't make someone bad.
However putting kids on a pedestal is silly. If we push our civilization above earths sustainable carrying capacity, we are fucked. In isolation having them is beautiful, in the aggregate it can be bad.
> Having kids is also the worst single thing you can do for the environment.
No, just no. You can't show that. You don't understand environmentalism. You're just a Malthusian. It's an assertion that human existence is incompatible with the environment, and that's a completely unacceptable proposition, because it defines "environmentalism" as "extinction."
Reducing the population by half will, at best, reduce emissions by half. That's not going to stop climate change. That's not climate action. That's not anything at all.
I really wish people with your attitude would study ecology, would study biology, would study the world. Life, human and not, all affects the ecosystem. All life depends on other life. We all interact, we all change the world. Life has fundamentally changed the geology of Earth in absolutely drastic ways! Life is impact. Defining environmental purity as the absence is an ideology bereft of life, and the nature of life.
Given you’re using big words without explaining them and decorating your argument with patronizing language like “no, just no”, perhaps I should just yield. Even if you turn out to make a convincing argument later, if you really care about convincing people I implore you to think about how condescending your style is…
But if I may explain my thinking essentially from a responsibility perspective your choice is downstream to a whole life of pollution, and of their kids etc. Depending on how many kids the average person has how polluting the average person is, that seems like a significant contribution.
Despite that you attribute to me some sort of strange degrowth philosophy where I am advocating for extinction, all I am saying is that there is a huge impact to overpopulation if we don’t change our habits. If it is sustainable to have more humans later on due to improvements in conduct, by all means I think thats great.
Is it possible that cutting emissions in half would stop climate change (after some time)? There is a tolerable level of emissions. I vaguely remember that it's half what we're at.
Nix is always doing its own thing. The community is fragmented and there are no enforced packaging conventions. They have a "best practices" page that lists language features you're not supposed to use because they break reproducible builds, aka the whole point of Nix. And they don't even restrict network access by default.
It's also not doing runtime sandboxing at all. Isolated builds protect you from supply chain attacks but not malware or vulns in the actual code, and they don't do anything for closed source apps.
Flatpak runs everything in a container with access limited to what is declared in the manifest and you can restrict it even more with Flatseal. It's not as secure as a Firecracker VM but it works way better than any other package system on Linux when it comes to security and distro independence.
Yes because both flatpak and nix use bubblewrap and linux. So it is indeed possible to build it with bubblewrap.
GUI apps on NixOS rarely care about sandboxing so while you can do it yourself i bet almost noone does. Flatpak is trying to give you basic protections out of the box.
Only issue is with Nix as a long time user, it does not provide a standard way to run your nix builds in some kind of container, there are so many different competing third party systems and some first party systems built in nixpkgs it's self like building oci or docker containers or running systemd containers or even building qcow2 images, each with their own draw back and positives.
More and more I have found myself simply using podman and dockerfiles finding that building nix systems simply gets error prone and annoying and all the containerization systems leave a lot to be desired. Though I have some custom scripts for utilizing btrfs snapshots to create different nix store snap shots for containers or vms running with nix stores with virtiofs. This works quite well but not ready to be released and fiddly when things break and requires BTRFS.
I do agree flatpak and friends are not great though.
Agreed. With all the improvements in namespacing I’m seeing the potential of all desktop apps being namespaced in a reasonable way, where filesystem access to e.g. /home is controlled through a kernel-hook prompt callback, with something like “always allow for this directory” etc.
That’d be so awesome!
Thats great, although understand that unionizing protects the more vulnerable of also the software engineered. You not advocating for your rights also means weakening others. Is it still self interested to unionized from that perspective?
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