Same, and thanks! We're probably a similar age. My own political awakening was occupy, and I got interested in theory as I participated in more and more protest movements that just sorta fizzled.

I 100% agree re:Twitter. I am so tired of people pointing out that it has lost 80% of its value or whatever. Once you have a few billion, there's nothing that more money can do to your material circumstances. Don't get me wrong, Musk is a dumbass, but, in this specific case, I actually think that he came out on top. That says more about what you can do with infinite money than anything about his tactical genius, because it doesn't exactly take the biggest brain to decide that you should buy something that seems important.

I actually also reviewed that one, except my review of it was extremely favorable. I'm so glad that you read it and I'd welcome your thoughts on my very friendly amendment to his analysis if you end up reading that post.

Unfortunately, COP28 is taking it seriously, seen here with "both sides" reporting from the NYT.

Very well could be. At this point, I'm so suspicious of all these reports. It feels like trying to figure out what's happening inside a company while relying only on their ads and PR communications: The only thing that I do know for sure is that everyone involved wants more money and is full of shit.

US Leads World in Credulous Reports of ‘Lagging Behind’ Russia. The American military, its allies, and the various think-tanks it funds, either directly or indirectly, generate these reports to justify forever increasing the military budget.

le web moderne est tragique. c'est en grande partie à cause des traqueurs, mais aussi pour la culture "move fast and break things", une culture d'ingénier imprudente et paresseuse. pas de problème, parce que bientôt on n'aura plus des sites, seulement mobile apps...

J'écris dans le site theluddite.org sur la technologie de perspective anticapitaliste. C'est tout gratuit, sans publicité et sans traqueurs. On parle beaucoup de l'état du web, et des forces qui les ruinent. Mais c'est tout en anglais.

Et on a un rss feed aussi gratuit !

This seems like a good read. Bookmarked after a skim.

I'm currently reading "How Labor Powers the Global Economy," and after skimming the OP, this seems like exactly what HLPtGE set out to address. It's a very, very compelling reformulation of capitalist economics and the LTV that embraces the inherent chaos of prices without hand-waving them away, like most economists of all persuasions, including Marxists, do today. Its a model that borrows a lot of techniques from statistical mechanics and other physical sciences, so much so that people have started calling the approach "econophysics."

I do software consulting for a living. A lot of my practice is small organizations hiring me because their entire tech stack is a bunch of shortcuts taped together into one giant teetering monument to moving as fast as possible, and they managed to do all of that while still having to write every line of code.

In 3-4 years, I'm going to be hearing from clients about how they hired an undergrad who was really into AI to do the core of their codebase and everyone is afraid to even log into the server because the slightest breeze might collapse the entire thing.

LLM coding is going to be like every other industrial automation process in our society. We can now make a shittier thing way faster, without thinking of the consequences.

I was being a luddite

As we all should be. Oppose capitalist control over technology!

I am totally in favor of criticizing researchers for doing science that actually serves corporate interests. I wrote a whole thing doing that just last week. I actually fully agree with the main point made by the researchers here, that people in fields like machine vision are often unwilling to grapple with the real-word impacts of their work, but I think complaining that they use the word "object" for humans is distracting, and a bit of a misfire. "Object detection" is just the term of art for recognizing anything, humans included, and of course humans are the object that interests us most. It's a bit like complaining that I objectified humans by calling them a "thing" when I included humans in "anything" in my previous sentence.

Again, I fully agree with much of their main thesis. This is a really important point:

As co-author Luca Soldaini said on a call with 404 Media, even in the seemingly benign context of computer vision enabled cameras on self-driving cars, which are ostensibly there to detect and prevent collision with human beings, computer vision is often eventually used for surveillance.

“The way I see it is that even benign applications like that, because data that involves humans is collected by an automatic car, even if you're doing this for object detection, you're gonna have images of humans, of pedestrians, or people inside the car—in practice collecting data from folks without their consent.” Soldaini said.

Soldaini also pointed to instances when this data was eventually used for surveillance, like police requesting self-driving car footage for video evidence.

And I do agree that sometimes, it's wise to update our language to be more respectful, but I'm not convinced that in this instance it's the smoking gun they're portraying it as. The structures that make this technology evil here are very well understood, and they matter much more than the fairly banal language we're using to describe the tech.

Yeah but I can tell you if something is a crosswalk

I'm not sure if that article is just bad or playing some sort of 4D chess such that it sounds AI written to prove its point.

Either way, for a dive into a closely related topic, one that is obviously written by an actual human, I humbly submit my own case study on how Googles ad monopoly is directly responsible for ruining the Internet. I posted it here a week ago or so, but here it is in case you missed it and this post left you wanting.

Past automation technologies had the most effect on low-skilled workers. But with generative AI, the more educated and highly skilled workers who previously were immune to automation are vulnerable. According to the International Labor Organization, there are between 644 and 997 million knowledge workers globally, between 20% and 30% of total global employment. In the US, the knowledge-worker class is estimated to be nearly 100 million workers, one out of three Americans. A broad spectrum of occupations — marketing and sales, software engineering, research and development, accounting, financial advising, and writing, to name a few — is at risk of being automated away or evolving.

I'd take that bet, even at outrageous odds. I've now won over 700 dollars betting against self-driving cars with people in the tech world, and another couple hundred against crypto. Some of that even came from my former boss. I think I've won over a grand betting against tech hype in the last 4-5 years.

Business Insider, in the unlikely event that you read this, DM me. Let's make a bet.

Nope, it's not. "Libertarian socialism" and "anarchism" are often used more-or-less interchangeably, though I'm sure someone will take issue with that categorization. The pro-capitalist usage of the word "libertarian" is an appropriation of a leftist term by the right.

Yes I agree. I meant the fundamental problem with the idea of LLMs doing more and more of our code, even if they get quite good.

The real problem with LLM coding, in my opinion, is something much more fundamental than whether it can code correctly or not. One of the biggest problems coding faces right now is code bloat. In my 15 years writing code, I write so much less code now than when I started, and spend so much more time bolting together existing libraries, dealing with CI/CD bullshit, and all the other hair that software projects has started to grow.

The amount of code is exploding. Nowadays, every website uses ReactJS. Every single tiny website loads god knows how many libraries. Just the other day, I forked and built an open source project that had a simple web front end (a list view, some forms -- basic shit), and after building it, npm informed me that it had over a dozen critical vulnerabilities, and dozens more of high severity. I think the total was something like 70?

All code now has to be written at least once. With ChatGPT, it doesn't even need to be written once! We can generate arbitrary amounts of code all the time whenever we want! We're going to have so much fucking code, and we have absolutely no idea how to deal with that.