Commenters situate AI discourse within broader open source history
7 Sep 17 5:48 PM · 8d ago · 1 post · 17 comments · 3 sources · development 7 of 7
Discussion extends to questioning whether AI hype represents new phenomenon or continuation of open source movement's existing tensions between liberatory and commercial interests.
“"Open source" has always been an uneasy alliance between people who want to build liberatory software and people who are looking for a more effective means of enriching themselves at the expense of others.”
technomancyJän Schauma Security engineer and authorAnthropic AI companyOpenAI AI company
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I wasn't even going to post it here, because it's just a rant that felt good to jot down, but since it's now been on the hackernews front page and shared elsewhere, it looks like it touched a nerve: (Read the comments at your own risk. There's brain worms there, too.) https://www. netmeister.org/blog/everybodys -lost-their-minds.html
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> Maybe this was always the culture and I just didn’t notice. "Open source" has always been an uneasy alliance between people who want to build liberatory software and people who are looking for a more effective means of enriching themselves at the expense of others. The intent behind coining the term "open source" was to de-fang the free software…
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> Maybe it's faster but explosive diarrhea is also a faster way to produce shit.i'm in the midst of a very large global roll out of a new system including about 24 separate erp integrations. My team's system is dependent on another system coming online first then we go then the integrations come online then a massive data migration happens and…
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Much more agreed with @ jschauma on this topic. If this class of LLM ever realizes more intelligence than ours, it will be because we devolved, not because the algorithm evolved. https://www. netmeister.org/blog/everybodys -lost-their-minds.html
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> I no longer feel like I align with communities that I used to, but it also doesn’t feel like I’ve changed, more like “everyone” else has. I don't feel like I even align with my coworkers who have gone all-in anymore. The tools I've used that have gone all-in on AI have all seemingly stagnated, tech culture has homogenized towards one thing, the…
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> these AI models not only lend themselves to generation of Child Sexual Abuse MaterialErr, how exactly does the generation of questionnable material abuses a child? Assuming there's no actual CSAM in the training corpus, the causal link between that and children being actually exploited seems tenuous at best, similar to drawings of Japanese…
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Excellent point here - LLMs are not becoming more intelligent than us by actually improving, they're just doing it by making us stupider 😆 https://www. netmeister.org/blog/everybodys -lost-their-minds.html
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I've been going through something similar and it has been painful. In particular people I looked up to and considered role models no longer are, and it was incredibly jarring suddenly being cut off like this. I have to find new role models now, or find my own way against the current as long as I can.
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Not criticizing or calling into question the contents of the posts or your rebuttal. Just wanted to point out this is not a Normal HN post or blog. Most blogs have the self removed to some degree or ultimately focus out of the self. This is clearly a journalistic blog, a shared diary entry sort of prose. You can see it in the first paragraph. It…
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Everybody's Lost Their Minds Link: https://www. netmeister.org/blog/everybodys -lost-their-minds.html Discussion: https:// news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4 9745570
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I wish I had the courage to broach the subject of ethics at work. I have been shocked at how many people are ready to toss all ethical considerations to the wayside for the perception of productivity. This isn't even like clothing being made by sweatshop labor; you absolutely have a choice to not use these models and directly fund their makers who…
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If you think vulnerability research simply doesn't matter, you have a lot of company in that opinion. It's something Bruce Schneier used to argue, and Marcus Ranum, and a bunch of other people that used be on closed secret vulnerability-sharing mailing lists before Bugtraq blew those cliques up. These are very old arguments.But if you do think…
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It's not just you, but remember that the AI side is spending untold billions across the entire planet to push this on the entire planet in a massive propaganda effort. Speaking as someone raised in a cult (young earth creationism), it's entirely possible to be one of the few people in your social circle with a sane take on things.
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I think there were always two camps when it came to writing code, a strong bimodal distribution. People that care about the perceived code quality (aka the ‘craft’) and people who treat the code as a means to an end. At least I always felt this tension. And there is always an exception, and a person can shift between two camps during the same day…
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> I always thought “you’ll get left behind if you don’t get into AI” was ridiculous, My response to that is simply: "Being left behind sounds nice, how do I prevent this from harming me?"
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I am sure many smokers in the 1950s also saw the health benefits of tobacco, that they were very happy to experience the increased energy after a smoke and could get more done as a result. I‘m pretty sure none of them felt their lungs and throats deteriorating either.Likewise, you may not feel like AI is de-skilling your brain. But it probably is…
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Besides the content, which I fully agree with, I want to point out that the quality of the writing is fantastic.
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>Now imagine that we had spent all these resources on doing the basics: ensuring your organization has an up-to-date and comprehensive asset inventory with fine-grained package listings; building infrastructure that supports regular, frequent, and automated OS and applіcation updates; automatically rebooting systems when they hit, say, 30 days of…
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> AI is the tool that dulls its users; it incrementally replaces understanding with a new dependency and addiction as you actively de-skill yourself. Aha, so the way AI gets smarter than humans is that humans get dumber, I see the plan now.
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I hated AI from the start, but then gradually warmed up to it. It does help me to write code. And it gets better every day, sometimes literally.Today I think it is a tool. Like a framer's nail gun. It helps us to be faster and potentially better at what we do. Oh, and got to ride Waymo recently and it got me places, alive and well. So it does some…
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I considered myself strongly pro ai coding, until I started reading the comments there. LLM coding is a useful tool with many sharp edges, and it will remain that way for the foreseeable future The slop avalanche that it enables is a very sharp edge
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My impression was that the frontier AI coding models are kind of resetting the barriers to entry/reward ratios to before the dot com boom, when people didn't go into this career for money, and so most folks that ended up in it were the 1% kind of talents who really wanted it. Perhaps that's an elitist thing to say? I don't know. That's not to say…
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Hot, affirming take: If your entire field and industry of AI can't withstand the relentless "But why?" of a 5 year old then maybe it doesn't deserve to destroy our planet.
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I think the main problem is a conflict of objectives. AI companies need you to use more tokens so they are not going to improve that. They are optimizing the models to get as close as possible to the point in which people would stop using them because they are useless but without crossing that line.Proof of this is the amount of unnecessary tasks…
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