cecilkorik

I’ll happily pay when they accept either crypto or an envelope of cash. There is no way to separate electronic payments or transfers from my personal identity and I don’t consider it usefully “private” to have any account directly traceable to that. Trust is a limited and increasingly valuable commodity, and I’m conserving mine.

That said, there’s probably a decent opportunity for second hand, no-strings-attached accounts to now be legitimately purchased then laundered anonymously through an arbitrary middleman without having use burner accounts stolen from innocent people or created with stolen identities. So maybe that’ll be an improvement for privacy. Privacy shouldn’t have to be illegal or inconvenient (but of course they want it to be).

So here’s the thing, generative AI is a technology, and it’s created by humans, and I have no doubt that enough smart humans working together will easily be able to develop a technology that can generate a crochet/knitting pattern by feeding it other people’s stolen crochet/knitting patterns without paying or crediting them. That’s not a hard thing to do. What AI is doing is not actually hard.

The biggest problem with generative AI is that doing it efficiently is in fact very, very hard, and almost certainly always will be. The reality is that it’s an absurdly inefficient way of doing anything, even just for model inference alone, nevermind the training data. Some of that inefficiency is being masked by the fact that they stole all its training data they used to create it. Some of that inefficiency is being masked by the fact that they’re giving it away at a loss in order to get people hooked. Some of that inefficiency is being masked by the fact that the entire thing is a game of financial musical chairs that they won’t stop playing because none of them want to be left holding the fucking empty bag without a chair when the music stops.

But none of those things reflect the true cost of generating stuff with generative AI. The wastefulness is the point. Imagine the efficiency if each person looking for a crochet/knitting pattern would be able to download the same pattern as someone else previously already did with only a few handfuls of bytes of internet traffic, not millions of tokens of furiously churning datacenter GPUs. Imagine if we had a simple text search engine where we could search effectively for the crochet/knitting patterns other people, real people, have already made, instead of having thousands of different people ask their own personal slop machine for slop a few dozen times until it gets it sort of right.

At a time when we are trying to save the fucking planet from burning down, they are very intentionally and very deliberately shoving this garbage, inefficient technology down our throats, replacing older, more sensible technologies, breaking those technologies to make them seem even less sensible, selling it like it’s the second coming of god, and powering it with fossil fuels to further destroy the environment. This is not an accident. Hey ChatGPT, can you think of any of the richest industries in the world that would be happy to team up with some of the other richest industries in the world to increase demand for fossil fuels, even though we’re not supposed to be using fossil fuels anymore, and can you tell me how much money they all made last year? I bet it’s a fucking lot, isn’t it? How can they keep making so much money when we’re not supposed to be using fossil fuels anymore? Mysterious. /s

We’re being fucked, the planet’s being fucked, and the future’s being fucked, and the people responsible are laughing all the way to the bank, then jumping on their yachts, and heading somewhere very similar to epstein’s island, where they will party and do drugs and plan how they’re all going to set up their new mansions on Mars once it gets so bad here on Earth that they have to leave us behind to burn. This is not really about AI, this is about people who don’t consider most of humanity worth caring about or in any way consequential to their plans. We do not exist in the future they are building. We should probably find that very upsetting.

I don’t use cloudflare for anything. I mean, other sites do, and I can’t control that when I visit them, and I’m probably not going to boycott them right away, but it will put them onto my “actively looking for an alternative” list. Meanwhile my own stuff is never going to be behind cloudflare, and yours doesn’t need to be either, and eventually with enough “you’s” and “me’s” we’ll have our own cloudflare-free internet and the rest of the corporate bullshit can all go choke to death on its own enshittification.

Guillotines are such a primitive and manual technology though, I feel like this is underselling the human creative spirit and ingenuity and how far we’ve come since the French Revolution. Surely with all the technology and resources we have access to in the modern age, we can invent a much more efficient and heavily industrialized approach to exterminating billionaires. I feel like at a bare minimum it needs to incorporate an assembly line and industrial robots with lasers.

I don’t have any specific evidence on hand, but I do know a lot about the technology and companies involved from working in adjacent fields (cloud architecture) and it is absolutely plausible that they can and do. If they are not doing it already (and I believe it is highly doubtful that at least some devices do not already do this) then it is certainly on their roadmap. Many consumer IoT/media devices have invisible, hidden wireless networks built in and have for years. If it’s advertised, it may boast some sort of “quick connect”, “auto configuration” or other convenience feature, it may be genuinely required for low-latency/quality-of-service (for example on most modern TV services which supply the channels by IPTV behind the scenes), but it’s always on, it’s always listening, and it’s only a friendly partnership agreement away from being used for whatever “legitimate” purposes a company may dream of.

Tech surveillance is extremely out of hand and has gone so far beyond anything would consider reasonable, I understand that you would instinctively reject it as too extreme to be believable. But in the industry it’s completely normalized and they don’t even give it a second thought, it’s just business as usual.

For legal purposes: I am not a person, I am a meat popsicle. I am a corporate asset however, so don’t get any ideas: I still have plenty of rights. More than people, at least.

Unfortunately, I can’t make enough money doing that in my area without being attached to a company.

Most of that is because Google, Facebook and other giant tech companies gatekeep you from finding any customers. It’s not because the customers don’t exist, it’s because the customers have been trained to find you with Google search, then look at Google reviews, check you out on your Google site, and maybe if they’re really serious check Facebook too.

The question then becomes, without the tech giants standing in the middle, how do you find customers and how do customers find you? Easier said than done, you might think, and you might be right. But I believe with patience and an understanding of old-school, pre-tech-giant advertising and some creativity on how you adapt it to today’s world and tomorrow’s, whatever that will be, I think it might be easier than you imagine. Remember that the tech-giants and gatekeepers also propagandize their dominance so that you don’t see any other path as viable. They don’t want you to try other things, and they’ll come at you sideways to make you believe it’s too risky, that you’re already failing or prevent you from committing enough to actually succeed.

Part of the problem is patience. They’ve built their platforms based on instant gratification and shortening attention spans. It may take time to build a business outside their system. You will need financial runway, maybe more than you think, and you’ll need time on the runway to start to get enough air under your wings to lift off, and at first it won’t seem like you’re making any progress no matter how hard you’re pushing. This is enough to make most people quit. They count on that.

If I could work out of my garage

The economy is ripe for this kind of shift, I think. I don’t know if we’re there yet, but “shop small, shop local” is the only way out of this tech-giant megacorporation dystopia, and I see signs that people are starting to figure that out, or even just be forced into it while looking for the gray and black market economic options as people increasingly find themselves priced out of the “normal” economy in sector after sector.

If the economy is no longer working for people (and it’s clearly not), they will naturally seek alternatives. This isn’t even really a philosophical choice as much as it is a practical inevitability.

When the existing economic system becomes unfair, unjust, and unlivable, the only rational choice is to opt-out of that system. This is one potential path out of it, if enough people choose it, it can succeed. There are many other possible paths out of it too, most of them are far less pleasant. Time will tell where we end up.

Except when it’s TechnologyConnections. He is my spirit-geek.

The Rock is at least funny sometimes. AI is incapable of anything resembling humor. I’d nominate Tom Cruise instead.

Indeed, why trust a plausible answer that could be AI generated? Direct experimentation is the only proof I’m willing to accept!

That does seem to be their strategy, at least on its face. Although I’m not even sure I even really believe that is profitable, or if they’re cooking the books with such incestuous partnership agreements that it’s to the point where Nvidia might be effectively “buying” chips from themselves with their own money on their partner’s behalf. I guess time will tell if they’re actually the next Enron or not, but I don’t trust any business that’s AI related at this point.

It’s wild that Amazon alone has already pissed away more on their own than even Nvidia has earned back. I’m also surprised that Anthropic still isn’t remotely profitable given the sheer volume of money the rest of the corporate software world dumped into Claude Code and how much pressure Anthropic applied to monetize it. That alone should be enough to show that it is impossible for AI to be profitable in any traditional sense.

Their actual plan is to monopolize information and basically use (preferably their own) AI as the middleman and broker for all data and information and knowledge and advertising that any human being ever sees. In that, they might eventually be successful. At least if they don’t run out of money trying (almost certain), and we don’t kill them off or blow them up first.

Polite is what horrifying brutality wears to an interview.

Yeah people don’t understand the math behind these things. They are statistical models, like demographics or climate models. They are interesting and potentially useful, but not necessarily useful for the things we are trying to and want to use them for. They can predict certain things and trends very reliably in a general, high-level sense, but they will get the details wrong if you try to use them outside of their area of applicability, just like if you try to use national climate models to determine what day your basement is going to flood, it may come up with a specific date, but just as obviously that’s not actually going to be correct in reality. It doesn’t mean it’s a bad model, it means you’re using it wrong.

And lots of AI bros and AI companies are using these things desperately wrong, and for very wrong reasons. They want to sell things to you. They want to control you and manipulate you. They don’t care if they’re using the model properly, they only care if it’s profitable for them to do it.

PikaOS is Debian-based and maintaining its own repository based on trixie and unstable with similar patches to Bazzite & team. I’ve been using it as a daily driver on 3-4 systems for at least a year or two with no serious issues, and the updates are quick to fix any minor issues. Excellent for gaming. It’s probably not up to CachyOS gaming standards nor Debian stability but I find it’s a comfortable spot for me.

Microsoft Word also used to autoreplace them in if I remember correctly, but that’s also a red herring because nobody used Microsoft Word by choice either, and nobody sane is copy-pasting shit out of Microsoft Word into the real internet.

I’m glad you highlighted that little snippet because ironically, this entire story sounded like it was written by AI. Is it even a real person lamenting their former coworkers, or is this just an AI false flag trying to normalize it and fluff it up, or maybe just someone farming karma?

Lots and lots of em-dashes. The rule of threes. A semicolon even. “And that’s the floor.” is a very Claude kind of thing to say and I have no idea what that particularly emphatic sentence is even trying to accomplish in that paragraph. What does it mean the floor? What floor?

Also is anyone actually getting offered voluntary retirement packages? That seems like a complete anachronism these days. This is the software industry. It’s not unionized. Why would they give you anything other than minimum severance (or exactly the amount less than it would cost you to fight it?) I’ve been laid off from this industry before, and I know how it works, I’ve never even heard of anyone being offered a voluntary retirement package.

I strongly believe this is AI slop. Me highly sus.

Haha. I always thought when they got rid of old.reddit.com, that would be the day I finally left the site never to come back. I never expected I would leave before that happened, but here I am on Lemmy, learning about what they’re doing to old.reddit.com, while having not gone back in ages and having no particular interest to anymore. RIP Reddit, you won’t be missed, except maybe the first /r/Place, that was pretty cool.

It is important to think about and keep in mind, but it’s also important not to judge blindly. Do some research before you make a decision on something like this and try to make an informed decision. People aren’t responsible for where they’re born, and not everyone is in a position for fight or flight. Most Russians are victims of Putin too, some worse than others. Many of them may be ignorant, yes, and even deeply unpleasant and unlikable people with nasty attitudes, but they are also brainwashed by one of the most manipulative and subtly oppressive regimes that has possibly ever existed in the modern world. Organizing a resistance against tyranny isn’t easy. Even finding the motivation to resist it isn’t easy. If it was easy, we wouldn’t have such problems with tyrants all around the world, and orangeman wouldn’t have lasted a week.

If you don’t want to send money that will end up in Russia, I don’t blame you. If you are afraid of the infiltration and malware risks that come with using software made in Russia, I don’t blame you for that either. But the guy himself is probably just a normal person, unless there’s specific evidence otherwise. “Othering” and demonizing other people is the path to the dark side. You can hate the country and government and the system, and you should, but not the people born and raised within it. They’re in a big fucking mess, and you would be too if you lived there. Just because you think you’d make different choices personally, doesn’t mean they’re making bad ones for the situation they’re in.

We are all just people. We are not better or worse than any other people. We are all trying to do the same things in life. Even the Russian people. But we’ve been made to be different by our environments and nations and governments that benefit from us being divided and hating each other. Don’t play their game.

Don’t worry, soon they will announce that 4GB will probably be fine too, once they discover they need even more RAM for their AI slop farms.