I see a bull charging full-sprint at me, I'm not going to sit here and consider whether he's merely reacting to a loud noise or if he's actively trying to gore me to death. Incidentally limiting user freedom is indistinguishable from purposefully limiting user freedom.
Google has a fetish for controlling what I can install because they earn money by sitting on the brdige between me and the app developer. That is not a conspiracy theory like you try to portray it. That is basic economics.
They're an amoral monopolistic megacorp that should have been broken up a year ago.
They are performing the ritual of maximalist offensive position -> half-hearted walk back to a worse status quo.
Is the problem they claim to want to solve real? Maybe. I haven't seen a convincing breakdown that doesn't lump a lot of unrelated fraud in the unvetted APK bucket.
That's beside the point though. No one should applaud this utterly predictable and disgusting behavior.
I don't accept it when Unity does it. I don't accept it when Hasbro does it. I won't accept it here either.
At the bottom, it references some stuff that came before widespread use of LLMs. One of them is no hello [0]. I disagree with no hello. If somebody wants to send a message that just says hello then they should go ahead and do that. The way that language works when someone thinks of something to say it often comes all at once. The only question is whether to say it or not, and that is the filtering stage. Now, I'm not one to begin my conversations with just a message "hello" or "hi" more than the average person. I think I do it less than the average person. Yet I was still taken aback by this request. I don't think that peoples' social instincts should be put aside so easily.
As for "Stop Sloppypasta", it doesn't feel like the content is AI-generated to me but it feels like the presentation of it is. I don't know whether that changes my opinion of the whole thing or just the presentation. As for the advice in it, it seems good, but it also seems a little bit brittle, because people can use an LLM session to review things generated in a different LLM session before sending with some success, and this will increase and therefore it's a moving target.
"I’m not arguing that this technology should be unilaterally destroyed; I am arguing that we are collectively using it in the dumbest possible way, causing the most self-inflicted injury, and maximizing the amount of angst and suffering we’ll all have to contend with. I am angry at generative AI because it seems to be making us think and act like complete idiots."
Interesting, I've mostly heard it referring to individuals like Navalny or the mayor of Istanbul. I suppose it makes sense for it to refer to any random political critter.
He means it's not in his feed. "Random old woman gets kidnapped" is represented 100 times more strongly in the datastream then "1000 protestors organize immigrant protection system" or "US Citizen Mung families defend elderly Vietnam vets".
... at least "Random Old Woman" has got people looking askance at the internet connected security camera ecosystem, I guess.
It's interesting how quickly the OSS movement went from "No, no, we just want to include companies in the Free Software Movement" to "Oh, don't worry, it's ok if companies with shareholders that are not accountable to the community have a complete monopoly on OSS, and decide what direction it takes"
FOSS was imagined as a brotherhood of hackers, sharing code back and forth to build a utopian code commons that provided freedom to build anything. It stayed firmly in the realm of the imaginary because, in the real world, everybody wants somebody else to foot the bill or do the work. Corporations stepped up once they figured out how to profit off of FOSS and everyone else was content to free ride off of the output because it meant they didn't have to lift a finger. The people who actually do the work are naturally in the driver's seat.
This perspective is astonishingly historically ignorant, and ignores how "Open Source Software" was a deliberate political movement to simultaneously neuter the non-company-friendly goals of FOSS while simultaneously providing a competing (and politically distracting) movement that deliberately courted companies.
The Free Software movement was successful enough that by 1997 it was garnering a lot of international community support and manpower. Eric S. Raymond published CatB in response to these successes, partly with a goal of "celebrating its successes" — sendmail, gcc, perl, and Linux were all popular projects with a huge number of collaborators by this point — and partly with a goal of reframing the Free Software movement such that it effectively neuters the political basis (i.e. the four freedoms, etc.) in a company-friendly way. It's very easy to note when reading the book, how it consistently celebrates the successes of Free Software in a company friendly way, deliberately to make it appealing to companies. Often being very explicit about its goals, e.g. "Don't give your workers good bonuses, because research shows that the better a ''hacker'' the less they care about money!".
A year later, internal memos from Microsoft leaked that showed that management were indeed scared shitless about Linux, a movement that they could neither completely Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish, nor practice Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt on, because the community that built it were too strong, and too dedicated. Management foresaw that it was only a matter until Linux was a very strong competitor — even if that's taken 20 years, they were decently accurate in their fears, and, to be honest, part of why it's taken 30 years for Linux to catch up are deliberate actions by Microsoft wrt. introducing and adopting technologies that would stymie the Free Software movement from being able to adapt.
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