Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit before joining the Threadiverse as well.
It’s not just “the government won’t let it go away.” Users won’t let it go away.
I find AI to be incredibly useful for running my coding agent, for example. I run it myself on a local machine. Every AI company on Earth could go bankrupt tomorrow and I’d keep on chugging away with it. Lots of other enthusiasts and smaller companies making use of it would do likewise.
And conversely, many people seem to have a “the moment someone says something nice about AI I dismiss them as either evil or an ignoramus” stance.
Sure, we could do that. But we’d need even more computer hardware that we don’t have, so it would be more expensive, and energy use would be less efficient so there’d be even more environmental impact. Just spread around to every house rather than in one centralized easily-protested spot.
Sam Altman was incredibly tone deaf and it was a stupid thing for him to say out loud when he said RAM was better off in data centers, but in some significant and important ways he was right. Computer equipment is much more efficiently utilized when it’s in a data center.
I say this as someone who’s super into running local models myself. I do it because I believe the autonomy and privacy are worth trading off the extra cost in hardware and electricity. If I just wanted to use AI to get something done and didn’t care about that I’d be paying for API access instead.
Great idea, let’s make AI emotionally stunted and unable to form connections to humanity.
My guess based on that phrasing is that it’s there for situations where the person calling the hotline literally has a gun in their hands ready to go.
Depends on the framework you’re using. I’m using Qwen Code Companion (via a VS Code IDE plugin) and it’s got some kind of tiered system built into it for adding tool definitions to context, it’s got a standard built-in set that’s always mentioned but other stuff only gets added to the context under certain circumstances. I can’t recall all the details, I found out about it when I was chatting with Qwen Code to ask it why it hadn’t used a particular MCP I’d given it to solve a problem despite it seeming like a useful tool for the task and we got into a discussion about to configure it. As I recall it’s something along the lines of most tools only being present in context by default as little one-liner stubs and the agent has to tell the framework “that one looks like it might be useful for what I’m doing” for the full definition to get loaded.
Most of the time I’m working on small scripts and specialized applications these days, and codebase memory is overkill for those so I haven’t actually seen it in use much.
Then you’ve got an account.
We’ll see how much personal verification information Reddit ends up requiring on that email, I guess.
If the site literally refuses to send you data unless you’re logged in then it doesn’t matter what wrapper you’ve got around the empty shell.
You can lead a horse to water.
The point of Spez’s plan is to make it so you would need an account for that, though.
Reddit is still one of the biggest social media sites on the internet. News about it is important to a lot of people. You’re demanding that everyone else conform to your preferences.
It’s funny, way back in the mists of history Reddit’s original plan was very similar to the Fediverse’s. They opened the source for their servers and had plans for how it could interoperate with other independent “reddits”.
Somewhere in the NSA someone is going “damnit! They found that one too!?”
And now everything will go back to normal and people in China will stop using AI.
Right?
Phishing attempts that got far enough to actually show up in our internal corporate inboxes like that aren’t common, though. They’re normally blocked by the layers of firewalls and whatnot. We almost never saw email on those accounts from outside the organization itself, period.
And once you’ve run something capable of remote execution on a machine that’s inside the local network, with the sort of privileges that his machine had (he wasn’t just a bureaucratic sort of manager, he was writing code too), you don’t want to mess around.
A company I was in a few jobs back had several layers of IT department, there was the local studio department that handled our everyday stuff and a “head office” somewhere far away that set policy and handed out budget and whatnot.
One day “head office” IT decided it was a good idea to send out some fake phishing emails to “test” us. They didn’t tell the local IT department about it, I guess they were also being “tested”. My manager received one and only recognized it as a phishing attempt after he’d clicked just one too many things for it to feel safe to ignore. So he yanked the power on his computer and contacted the local IT department, as is protocol when something potentially dangerous just happened.
The local network went into lockdown while local IT tried to figure out if something actually dangerous had happened. It cost the studio as a whole several hours of work time, which for a studio our size translated to an obscene dollar cost. Nobody on our side of things did anything wrong, even that one extra “dangerous” click my manager did wasn’t something he could be blamed for - head office had crafted the fake phishing attempt well and his reaction to it would have prevented damage had it been real.
Head office never tried a stunt like that again.
Sure they can. The fundamental similarity here is anti-intellectualism, a distrust in the notion that science and technology are positive things that can enhance our lives. America is rife with it these days and the result is all sorts of beliefs sweeping through society that stand in opposition to what the “experts” say. Vaccines cause autism. Pasteurization is bad. “Chemicals” or “GMOs” are bad. Transgenderism isn’t real. Data centers are responsible for vast quantities of water consumption. LLMs are incapable of creating anything original. And so on. Once these beliefs get rooted then any effort to dislodge them only becomes part of the narrative of untrustworthy oligarchs and technocrats trying to manipulate people, which is especially tricky because many of them are trying to manipulate people. Makes it hard to know which authorities to trust without learning enough to become one yourself, and learning is hard when you don’t know which information sources to start with.
Unfortunately I have no idea how to counter such a large-scale movement in society. As the old saying goes, you can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. A lot of the anti-science sentiment comes from irrational sources - fear of the uncertain future, fear of losing prestige and power, fear of loss of personal autonomy. Some of those fears are rooted in real concerns but the reactions they can provoke are not necessarily productive.
Hey, at least Alberta’s UCP lets you look at your conservative party and think about how much worse they could have been.
So the good guys won but didn’t win hard enough for your tastes.
Just take the W and have a nice night. Now there’s an opportunity for improvement, that’s a good thing.
I haven’t been keeping track in any formal sense, but it feels like it’s gradually getting a bit better here. There’s still a very strong anti-AI current running through most of the Threadiverse but I’ve been getting upvotes along with the downvotes and there are a few dedicated AI-related communities too. Maybe as the population grows it’s just naturally getting more diverse.