Yeah that. After spending years trying to get reproducible builds, I now have a crazy moving target to deal with.

I’m at the fucking loom smashing stage personally.

We don’t have to accept things.

I hear you, but let me point out that Ned Ludd didn't stop the industrial revolution.

I think in the foreseeable future we have open models running on commonly available hardware, and that is not a change that can be stopped (and arguably it's the commons getting back their own value). What we can do is fight for proper taxation, for compensatory fees, for regulation that limits plagiarism, for regulation of the most extreme externalities.

But it makes no sense, to me, to fight the technology tout court.

How long can you afford to stay in this phase? Is there some framework you can suggest where this path works?

My existence is defined not but what I adopted but what I sabotaged or refused to deal with. 30 years in I haven't made a mistake and I don't think I am making one here. The positive bets I made have been spot on as well. I think I have a handle on what works for society and humanity at least.

When I say AI, I mean specifically LLMs. There isn't a single future position where all the risks are suitably managed, there is a return of investment and there is not a net loss to society. Faith, hope, lies, fraud and inflated expectations don't cut it and that is what the whole shebang is built on. On top of that, we are entering a time of serious geopolitical instability. Creating more dependencies on large amounts of capital and regional control is totally unacceptable and puts us all at risk.

My integrity is worth more than sucking this teat.

When you say sabotage, how exactly?

Or is it limited to refusal to use LLM, which is a strategy, but more like becoming a hobbyist programmer then.

Well it's mostly making sure the risks are properly traded off with suitable demonstrations.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

— George Bernard Shaw

The antidote to runaway hype is for someone to push back, not to just relent and accept your fate. Who cares about affording to. We need more people with ideals stronger than the desire to make a lot of money.

Sure, hype pushback is fine.

I had that lens. It’s soft as fuck around the edges open.

Peak sharpness is about f/8. They should have had the D5 on aperture priority auto iso, pushed the exposure comp either way and then just fired at f/8 and let the camera make the decisions.

But they are astronauts not photographers :)

The modern Z lenses are far better and sharper open but much larger generally.

My partner works in that space.

Sovereignty and self-sufficiency are big topics. The US centric cloud at least is killing itself through geopolitical risks for gov customers outside the US. Literally number one operational risk now.

Yep. Look at my last comment. Its exactly how to mitigate risk related to the nation you're in, in a data sense.

The country opposing the country you're in won't extradite.

If a company backtracks on this it still has ethical issues. It didn’t just get away with it this time.

You owe it to yourself and others to stay the fuck away from them.

We are. Most of our attack traffic is from DO net blocks.

We’ve had integration partners actually move off them because we won’t allow connections.

All LLM output is always dry as fuck quite frankly. At all levels from ideas and concepts through to the actual copy. And that’s dotted with pure excrement.

I think the only reason it’s seen as good anywhere is there are a lot of tasteless and talentless people who can pretend they created whatever was curled out. This goes for code as well.

If I offend anyone I will not be apologising for it.

> I think the only reason it’s seen as good anywhere is there are a lot of tasteless and talentless people who can pretend they created whatever was curled out. This goes for code as well.

This is an oversimplification.

If you have taste and talent, then the LLM output you get is going to reflect that.

So on the one hand, yes: tasteless and talentless people won't know good output from bad output. On the other hand, people with taste and talent can actually get good output.

No it’s not. That’s total rubbish.

You can’t coerce quality creative writing out of it however you attempt to gaslight it into doing so.

Well you're free to disagree but my experience has been counter to your position. I write both code and research / technical documentation. The quality of what the LLM produces is limited by the quality of ideas I give it initially (mind you, this is just a starting point), and the quality of my review of its output.

Agreed! No LLM is producing Pynchon, Calvino, Borges, Castaneda, Le Guin, Vonnegut.

I think that’s an unfair comparison. It can’t even produce Mills and Boon trash.

But can they produce Tom Clancy or James Patterson?

Malcollm Gladwell

> If I offend anyone I will not be apologising for it.

What you said is simply counterfactual, so no reason to be offended.

> curled out

This is the kind of understated yet thoroughly disgusting imagery an LLM couldn't come up with on its own, great example.

Thank you :)

The worst is "Jony Ive said"

A lot of people in the industry work entirely on faith and marketing. It’s a shit show.

Think it’s less respectable than the terms you use. Maybe gaslighting, sycophant crack-head.