I like the notion of pulling together people who are alienated by AI (or late-stage capitalism bullshit in general). I really have an indie web project to launch, once I’ve scored a new job, which sounds more unlikely than ever after this read.
Shame noone mentioned Gram. Seems like it really deserves the attention.
I think I’ll take my clues and abandon my attempts to build up a nvim/vim config. All I want is decent modal editing and LSP support without having to descend into plugin hell. Gram might do that for me.
I just don’t think they’re smart enough to make a dent in an actually competitive industry, no matter how much espionage they got.
They may throw some cash around and buy their way into a niche field that actually has a business model, but I don’t see how the espionage potential would help them much. To break into a difficult domain based on that, you would need the smart humans who can tell you what you are looking at.
Maybe it would be possible if you assume competent shady management, that is willing to invest heavily in human capital and systematically violate every privacy policy in the world. I think that’s just not how they operate.
I think we have already seen what direct replacement by AI companies looks like, and it’s not pretty. Want an image for an ad but you’re too cheap for a designer? There’s a chatbot for that. Want to represent yourself in court? There’s a chatbot for that. Slopplications of that sort did capture some demand for services, hardest felt by writers/graphic designers because you can more easily get away with a steep drop in quality there (for a little while).
I don’t believe a takeover of that sort can happen in more sophisticated cases. Critical knowledge in SW (speaking from my wheelhouse) isn’t some guarded secret-burger-sauce-recipe kind of knowledge. It’s vast amounts of knowledge, organized and made actionable through effort and built-up skills. It’s not knowledge they would have to replicate, it’s labour. And I don’t think they can privacy-violation their way to replicate a domain-specific knowledge worker from a chat history.
Having gone through the setup as an SSL terminator, it did have a bunch of unnecessary pain, though I now like my setup a lot. I’ll have to blog about it once I set up my blog. I can’t speak to the performance, though I would care about that once I run something more involved.
After looking at caddy a little harder, I can’t help but notice some sneerable qualities…
I’m using acme.sh for that. It also supports Hetzner API btw.
I have heard about caddy a couple times now from people seemingly new to hosting.
Can I ask why it’s so popular when Apache httpd still works fine and has reasonable governance?
I liked the take take, though it is put in perspective by the fact that he bought the “AI will revolutionize SW Engineering” story.
AI has enabled me to be more daring in my work and offered more difficult problems to tackle. It’s intoxicating, but also tiring. The productivity gains are real, but I wouldn’t put a multiplier on them. It all averages out around 20-25% individual productivity increase.
(from the first post on his blog)
This gives me very good vibes. The kids are all right. Maybe not economically, probably not, but in spirit at least.
If you wonder how you can look at any of this without viscerally realizing that it’s absolute dogshit, I found the authors perpetrators conclusion very insightful.
Where we go from here
I expect these issues to all be fixed by the end of 2027.
In the same cut, the guy then materializes a hat in his hand and puts it on, replacing the hat he was already wearing.
Wearing this to all mandatory all-hands meetings from now on.
Liam’s here, for what it’s worth.
I almost wrote down, it sounded like it was written by a lurker on techtakes. The overlap of takes was just so damn high.
I regret to inform you, that this garbage was run by The Register a while ago.
It shouts out several friends of the sub, including @[email protected], PivotToAI, OpenSlopware, Robert Kingett & Ludicity.
The point of the piece is that all anti-AI folks should just get along, and if we are to stand a chance against corporate AI we need to get over our petty grievances and reach out a hand to the racists, homophobes and crypto-bros and work together in the spirit of Open Source!
I just got hit by a memory from what must have been 2021, when I was working for a uni-attached startup center. I was lounging in our event space, when my colleague hit me with a question from left field: Would there be a benefit to cooling servers in space, since space is cold?
Little did he know that I was ready to unload my knowledge absorbed from the Expanse series, which I was reading on repeat to cope with my depressing job. So I infodumped on him about how being in space is like being in a thermos and about the Peltier effect being used in spacecraft radiators. He didn’t say much in response, and I wasn’t too stoked about my social skills in that moment.
Now I wonder if I saved him from a really embarassing decision. He was an ex-Amazon project manager who was non-committally looking for a PhD topic or maybe a startup. He quit a few months later and went into consulting I think.
The website looks too slick and the solution (though fucking around with fonts is fun) is overcomplicated.
Maybe some old media orgs or publishers will take this up, to protect their valuable IP while still having a slick web appearance.
Congratulations for your securing of relatively tolerable employment!
You’re argument seems like Suresh’s to me, in that making working software is just laughably easy for a competent engineer.
This begs the question why noone is exploiting this market gap. But there’s a couple explanations…
It can be a coordination problem, in that there are just barely any competent software organisations with enough engineers. The problem can also lie in how software is bought, since customers seem completely unable to determine the competence of vendors. Perceptions on what kind of software is a safe, respectable choice may even be anti-helpful in this regard.
I don’t think you have to be hypercritical of that part. Sure, rose-colored glasses could play into it but he calls the bad stuff bad and doesn’t justify it via the good stuff.
Also the stuff he describes seems plausibly achievable through buddhist spiritial practice:
In many ways MAPLE delivered: life-long friendships, freedom from past addictions and limiting self-narratives, strengthened character, and, for many of us, profound spiritual openings and realizations.
This Soryu figure seems fairly well accredited in that department. He just also happens to be a megalomaniacal control freak.
(Also, why does he have to share a name with Asoka? I’m dying a little.)
edit: I knew I spelt megalomaniacal wrong…
This guy clearly has some deep thoughts to air out…
https://sunny.garden/@librarysquirrel/117185341657385932
Honestly, it reads like a massive self-report, as it’s coming from a straight-from-uni second-year history PhD. Oh, you’ve noticed people tend to talk more about things that make them sound righteous rather than complicit? Probably also from people in your field. But it surely doesn’t affect you, as you’re so aware of the problem and working on being one of the good ones.