Just heard about tic-80 falling to slop.

After reading the obligatory forum thread where climate justice and concentration of wealth continue to not even factor into consideration, this how the world of open source feels to me these days:

• Phew, my favourite embroidery crafts shop has a clear policy against concentration camp labour! it’s a niche project but what a relief!
• Well everyone is resorting to concentration camp labour these days, what can you do
• We don’t want to lose all our contributors by banning those who hire concentration camp inmates to do chores
• It is discriminatory against embroidery beginners if you don’t let people use kits assembled with concentration camp labour
• I know concentration camp labour often comes with mistakes but as long as there’s a mensch in the loop to inspect it for errors and take responsibility, it’s just another tool
• The community of hobbysts has come to a vote and concluded that it’s ok to use concentration camp labour to assist your crafting, as long as you do it responsibly.

Aw dang I was really hoping they’d all start using Supreme Intelligence just because of MAGAs signalling via Kree speech would be funny.

writing a story that looks like it’s about everyone having their own LLMs but it’s actually about the predicted state of clime catastrophe by 2040 and the consequences of the fascist turn in world politics, and the GPUs don’t make the slightest difference to anything and don’t really matter for the plot

Annie Altman, Sam Altman’s sister who has accused him of abuse has recently posted:

If any harm ever comes to me “mysteriously” - you know who it was.

I love my life.

https://xcancel.com/anniealtman108/status/2089964553207775529

She also added " I am not suicidal, nor on any kind of drug I could overdose on".

A 404 Media investigation was able to reveal Amazon’s book buying operation, which hasn’t been previously reported, by placing a tracking device in a rare book we suspected would be acquired by an AI company for training data, and following it around the country to its final destination.

That final destination was an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, Nevada. Amazon employees who work at this location say all they do is receive massive shipments of printed books which they then cut the bindings off in order to scan the books more quickly. The printed book is destroyed in the process. The logo of the Amazon team that works at this warehouse, called VGT3, is a dinosaur, brandishing its teeth and with a book in its hands.

https://www.404media.co/we-tracked-a-shipment-of-rare-books-it-ended-at-an-amazon-ai-training-facility/

I hope investors hop in the bandwagon and start “shorting” the whole thing soon (finger guns)

Is it just me or LLM slop lately has developed this one weird quirk? I mean they always have some, right, but I don’t want to be like those people who think anyone using em-dashes or Nigerian English vocabulary must be a stochastic generator.

Still I keep seeing this one writing quirk and it keeps nagging at me.

I’m talking about odd use of paragraphs. Like, I’m also known to introduce a gratuitous paragraph break here and there for forced emphasis.

But not like this. It’s like paragraphs don’t even make sense anymore.

Couple that with the short sentences. All ending in a period. It’s annoying. It’s giving reply guy. It’s giving mansplaining.

I guess hacky tools also mirror the hand of their creators.

For a while now I’m being randomly login-walled on reddit.com on varying subreddits, in ways that seem nondeterministic. I hope they login-wall the entire thing, I’ll finally ditch my addiction then

I am in fact moving back to NetBSD, but the ambiguity of their LLM policy makes me wary/tired.

My only hope is that NetBSD moves so slowly anyway that the devs’ traditional preference towards clean, minimalistic readable code above all else holds off any “slop commits verified by maintainers” long enough that the bubble pops before slop gets any of its clawdes in core code at least.

As intelligence becomes abundant, the most important question will be how we direct it. Some argue that superintelligence itself, or a small set of experts who control it, should decide what is best for humanity. I disagree. The history of democracy and economics has shown that there is no single objective answer to how people define the best life, and therefore the best approach is letting people decide what matters to them. Rather than centralizing this power, we believe that delivering personal superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question.

Healthy societies also recognize that safety requires checks and balances. If only a handful of institutions have superintelligence, they will inevitably exercise a controlling influence over economics, science and politics. Even with the best intentions, that concentration would limit people’s ability to choose their own future.

Famous enemy of software monopolies and tech oligarchies that have an outsized influence over politics, champion of distributed ownership of the means of computation Mark Zuckerberg

“Up to 7 billion” over a period of 10 years can hardly dig Oracle out of the hole it has dug itself into, though…

It’s as if, practically overnight, everyone went from, “we need to do everything we can to reduce our demands on the environment or we’re cooked” to “oooh, shiny new toy, and it only ruins everything around it, cool!”

Definitely this one for me. I can only describe it as some fucked up denial psychology, the way people are pretending the environment isn’t collapsing, and the LLM boom on top of that is like a bad joke. Even in discussions critical of the tech sector this is treated as almost an afterthought—the very real, very violent damage done to all of us from poor countries by people in rich countries to prop up their toy fantasy schemes. Even if LLMs did everything they claim to do, it would still be a moral imperative to form insurgent guerillas to blow up these datacentres, on the environmental damage they do alone which is not a minor detail Karen it’s kind of a big deal

“AI bet goes awry: Oracle fires 21,000 employees, then hit a $7 billion power hurdle”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/ai-spending-spree-hits-600b-as-oracle-fires-21000-employees-to-fund-boom/ar-AA28vWuD

“Oracle’s Worst Stock Crash in 25 Years” “Has Cost Larry Ellison $213 Billion in 10 Months”
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/oracle-worst-stock-crash-25-113002772.html

It’s going to be Oracle to collapse the house of cards, isn’t it. Come on Oracle, die and take down the USA economy with you. Make the people happy, Oracle.

“In short, Oracle’s 65% decline is historic, but the stock’s future depends less on its past and more on whether its AI investments produce durable cash flow”

well good luck with that, Oracle! :D

Codeberg bans slop

News the one: Alphabet quadruples profit to 112B thanks to “AI” investments

News the two: Alphabet hiding ~250B in “AI” debt

First impressions on this because I don’t have anyone else to talk about it and you pointed me to it,

big tech robot had literally the same task as a karakuri doll from 300 years ago and still lost: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_czILDdOBc8

(more on karakuri for people who want to wach some actual technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XU-kqpkZWjc )

Ursula is great! I love The Dispossessed. You can kinda read them in any order based on what catches your attention, except stuff like Earthsea that is best consumed in order.

if you like this kind of stuff I would recommend also:

• Margaret Killjoy (A Country of Ghosts is basically The Dispossessed spiritual successor; The Sapling Cage is fresh queer fantasy; also the Danielle Cain series has been published in audio as podcasts, it’s like, anarchopunk post-collapse Scooby-Doo)
• The Serpent Gates series (this starts exactly like the Tombs of Atuan, except Tenar is a lesbian orc and the equivalent of Ged is using her for his own purposes and the rest of the story goes very different but the protagonist is a lesbian orc so I automatically like it)
• The Wayfarers series (slice-of-life sci-fi, kind of like Star Trek at its best, exploring diversity imaginatively)
• The two Robot and Monk books by the same author (feel-good hopepunk about how society could be good after collapse)
• Octavia Butler is the other undisputed giant. Lilith’s Brood series for some genuinely creative sci-fi, or the two Parable books for collapse fiction that is so prescient it’s downright uncomfortable.
• A Memory Called Empire and it sequel (sci-fi about colonialism and the Empire; sophisticated handling of these themes that I appreciated as a Global South migrant)
• This Gilded Abyss. Fundamentally a CaitVi fixfic. If the previous sentence made any sense to you you must try this one. Otherwise: Picture the Titanic, but it’s a luxury submarine in a magical-steampunk type setting. Now add zombies. Now add toxic yuri.
• The Locked Tomb series (lesbian Warhammer 40k. my favourite book series in the world. spectacular audiobook narration.)
• This Is How you Lose the Time War—absolute hoot of a book, just a delight from start to end. Picture the Spy × Spy comics from MAD. Now make one spy a time-traveling agent from future biopunk ecogarden plant utopia, the other spy an agent from future mind-upload hypertech cyperutopia. Their mission is to shift the timelines to their respective visions. Alas, they’re both lesbian… (Sorry, I have a bit of a pattern in my interests)

First they came for rsync, and I cared nothing, for I do my backups with borg…

https://github.com/borgbackup/borg/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md

lol at least the gringos are going to explode themselves and stop bothering the third world—

To avoid U.S. regulatory burdens, the company began working on deploying a test reactor in the Philippines.

ah yes of course