So here’s the thing, generative AI is a technology, and it’s created by humans, and I have no doubt that enough smart humans working together will easily be able to develop a technology that can generate a crochet/knitting pattern by feeding it other people’s stolen crochet/knitting patterns without paying or crediting them. That’s not a hard thing to do. What AI is doing is not actually hard.

The biggest problem with generative AI is that doing it efficiently is in fact very, very hard, and almost certainly always will be. The reality is that it’s an absurdly inefficient way of doing anything, even just for model inference alone, nevermind the training data. Some of that inefficiency is being masked by the fact that they stole all its training data they used to create it. Some of that inefficiency is being masked by the fact that they’re giving it away at a loss in order to get people hooked. Some of that inefficiency is being masked by the fact that the entire thing is a game of financial musical chairs that they won’t stop playing because none of them want to be left holding the fucking empty bag without a chair when the music stops.

But none of those things reflect the true cost of generating stuff with generative AI. The wastefulness is the point. Imagine the efficiency if each person looking for a crochet/knitting pattern would be able to download the same pattern as someone else previously already did with only a few handfuls of bytes of internet traffic, not millions of tokens of furiously churning datacenter GPUs. Imagine if we had a simple text search engine where we could search effectively for the crochet/knitting patterns other people, real people, have already made, instead of having thousands of different people ask their own personal slop machine for slop a few dozen times until it gets it sort of right.

At a time when we are trying to save the fucking planet from burning down, they are very intentionally and very deliberately shoving this garbage, inefficient technology down our throats, replacing older, more sensible technologies, breaking those technologies to make them seem even less sensible, selling it like it’s the second coming of god, and powering it with fossil fuels to further destroy the environment. This is not an accident. Hey ChatGPT, can you think of any of the richest industries in the world that would be happy to team up with some of the other richest industries in the world to increase demand for fossil fuels, even though we’re not supposed to be using fossil fuels anymore, and can you tell me how much money they all made last year? I bet it’s a fucking lot, isn’t it? How can they keep making so much money when we’re not supposed to be using fossil fuels anymore? Mysterious. /s

We’re being fucked, the planet’s being fucked, and the future’s being fucked, and the people responsible are laughing all the way to the bank, then jumping on their yachts, and heading somewhere very similar to epstein’s island, where they will party and do drugs and plan how they’re all going to set up their new mansions on Mars once it gets so bad here on Earth that they have to leave us behind to burn. This is not really about AI, this is about people who don’t consider most of humanity worth caring about or in any way consequential to their plans. We do not exist in the future they are building. We should probably find that very upsetting.

I don’t use cloudflare for anything. I mean, other sites do, and I can’t control that when I visit them, and I’m probably not going to boycott them right away, but it will put them onto my “actively looking for an alternative” list. Meanwhile my own stuff is never going to be behind cloudflare, and yours doesn’t need to be either, and eventually with enough “you’s” and “me’s” we’ll have our own cloudflare-free internet and the rest of the corporate bullshit can all go choke to death on its own enshittification.

Indeed, pirated NFL streams are an almost certain gateway to terrorism, as we all know. /s

There is no direction to go, it’s a sandbox, and discovery and exploration is pretty much the whole meat of the game. If you don’t like that, this is probably not the game for you. There are random events, there are questlines that eventually happen which you can optionally pursue, some of which get pretty in-your-face in case you’re worried you might miss them. Crafting and base-building is simplistic and mediocre. “Survival” is almost trivial on all but the very hardest difficulty settings, and even at the hardest difficulty and with willing suspension of disbelief it’s not really a fulfilling part of the game. There are a variety of other meta-systems tacked on too like language-learning, ship customization, fleet management and missions, settlements, universe-hopping, etc but these are just addons, they’re not the core of the game.

If you want a more “guided” experience you could try watching for some of the time-limited/seasonal expeditions they do as live-service events. Some of them are easier to follow than others, but they all sort of have a theme and usually give you a good workout in a variety of the game’s different systems.

I agree, as long as he’s in the mood for sharing, maybe he should try sharing more of the Epstein files too.

Guillotines are such a primitive and manual technology though, I feel like this is underselling the human creative spirit and ingenuity and how far we’ve come since the French Revolution. Surely with all the technology and resources we have access to in the modern age, we can invent a much more efficient and heavily industrialized approach to exterminating billionaires. I feel like at a bare minimum it needs to incorporate an assembly line and industrial robots with lasers.

I don’t have any specific evidence on hand, but I do know a lot about the technology and companies involved from working in adjacent fields (cloud architecture) and it is absolutely plausible that they can and do. If they are not doing it already (and I believe it is highly doubtful that at least some devices do not already do this) then it is certainly on their roadmap. Many consumer IoT/media devices have invisible, hidden wireless networks built in and have for years. If it’s advertised, it may boast some sort of “quick connect”, “auto configuration” or other convenience feature, it may be genuinely required for low-latency/quality-of-service (for example on most modern TV services which supply the channels by IPTV behind the scenes), but it’s always on, it’s always listening, and it’s only a friendly partnership agreement away from being used for whatever “legitimate” purposes a company may dream of.

Tech surveillance is extremely out of hand and has gone so far beyond anything would consider reasonable, I understand that you would instinctively reject it as too extreme to be believable. But in the industry it’s completely normalized and they don’t even give it a second thought, it’s just business as usual.

Great! I wish there were more tech unionization efforts like this in Canada, not that I imagine any such efforts would be able to make any progress at my regressive, toxic, American-owned, boomer-run employer within my lifetime. But maybe I’d be able to eventually find a new job at a union shop somewhere. I’m not holding my breath. Is there anything a senior-level peon like me can do to support these kind of things without trying to convince me there is any realistic hope of my current evil empire workplace ever unionizing?

For legal purposes: I am not a person, I am a meat popsicle. I am a corporate asset however, so don’t get any ideas: I still have plenty of rights. More than people, at least.

Mark Carney understands how and when to use soft power too. And as much as I dislike this (and dislike some of the things he’s done, and is doing), even I have to admit soft power seems to work best when it’s coordinated behind closed doors. I hope he and Lula are talking. I hope there are significant and powerful undercurrents to everything that’s going on in the world. I think there are. It’s the only way I can have hope for a better outcome than what seems obvious right now.

The middle powers like Canada and Brazil have to work together if they want to maintain their independence to choose their own destinies.

There’s a slight performance penalty though, I hear GTA6 runs better if you play it with the Minecraft Redstone circuits it was originally written in.

Unfortunately, I can’t make enough money doing that in my area without being attached to a company.

Most of that is because Google, Facebook and other giant tech companies gatekeep you from finding any customers. It’s not because the customers don’t exist, it’s because the customers have been trained to find you with Google search, then look at Google reviews, check you out on your Google site, and maybe if they’re really serious check Facebook too.

The question then becomes, without the tech giants standing in the middle, how do you find customers and how do customers find you? Easier said than done, you might think, and you might be right. But I believe with patience and an understanding of old-school, pre-tech-giant advertising and some creativity on how you adapt it to today’s world and tomorrow’s, whatever that will be, I think it might be easier than you imagine. Remember that the tech-giants and gatekeepers also propagandize their dominance so that you don’t see any other path as viable. They don’t want you to try other things, and they’ll come at you sideways to make you believe it’s too risky, that you’re already failing or prevent you from committing enough to actually succeed.

Part of the problem is patience. They’ve built their platforms based on instant gratification and shortening attention spans. It may take time to build a business outside their system. You will need financial runway, maybe more than you think, and you’ll need time on the runway to start to get enough air under your wings to lift off, and at first it won’t seem like you’re making any progress no matter how hard you’re pushing. This is enough to make most people quit. They count on that.

If I could work out of my garage

The economy is ripe for this kind of shift, I think. I don’t know if we’re there yet, but “shop small, shop local” is the only way out of this tech-giant megacorporation dystopia, and I see signs that people are starting to figure that out, or even just be forced into it while looking for the gray and black market economic options as people increasingly find themselves priced out of the “normal” economy in sector after sector.

If the economy is no longer working for people (and it’s clearly not), they will naturally seek alternatives. This isn’t even really a philosophical choice as much as it is a practical inevitability.

When the existing economic system becomes unfair, unjust, and unlivable, the only rational choice is to opt-out of that system. This is one potential path out of it, if enough people choose it, it can succeed. There are many other possible paths out of it too, most of them are far less pleasant. Time will tell where we end up.

Dude has a fever and the only prescription is more AI.

Yes, they had reliability problems because so many fucking people are suddenly switching to them because they’re so much better overall and not evil. Those are the kind of reliability problems that it is genuinely nice to see someone having. Having a little bit of a bumpy road when scaling due to significant rapid adoption is normal. So what?

Imagine not wanting to use Linux because it recently had a bunch of security flaws. And it did. But again, so what? Does that mean Linux has always been insecure? Well for those things it was. But is it still insecure? Maybe, who knows, nothing is perfect. Are you going to refuse to use it because you’re not sure? Why? Past performance is not an indicator of future success.

If some minor reliability issues are your foremost concern to the point that the other things codeberg provides for free are not valuable to you because of it, I question the depth of your priorities.

That said, it is much healthier and better for people to self-host or use smaller less centralized providers if possible. I do not wish Codeberg to become a victim of their own success, and a healthy ecosystem is a diverse one. But it is not for everyone, and if all you need is a minimal fuss alternative to Github, Codeberg is right there.

Except when it’s TechnologyConnections. He is my spirit-geek.

The Rock is at least funny sometimes. AI is incapable of anything resembling humor. I’d nominate Tom Cruise instead.

Indeed, why trust a plausible answer that could be AI generated? Direct experimentation is the only proof I’m willing to accept!

That does seem to be their strategy, at least on its face. Although I’m not even sure I even really believe that is profitable, or if they’re cooking the books with such incestuous partnership agreements that it’s to the point where Nvidia might be effectively “buying” chips from themselves with their own money on their partner’s behalf. I guess time will tell if they’re actually the next Enron or not, but I don’t trust any business that’s AI related at this point.

I know. It makes me sad.

It’s wild that Amazon alone has already pissed away more on their own than even Nvidia has earned back. I’m also surprised that Anthropic still isn’t remotely profitable given the sheer volume of money the rest of the corporate software world dumped into Claude Code and how much pressure Anthropic applied to monetize it. That alone should be enough to show that it is impossible for AI to be profitable in any traditional sense.

Their actual plan is to monopolize information and basically use (preferably their own) AI as the middleman and broker for all data and information and knowledge and advertising that any human being ever sees. In that, they might eventually be successful. At least if they don’t run out of money trying (almost certain), and we don’t kill them off or blow them up first.