I don’t think Saltman has any moral beliefs that persist from one conversation to the next. He’s like an LLM himself in that way.

As Cory Doctorow says: we must seize the means of computation.

Zenless Zone Zero in my Lemmies?!

Makes sense actually.

Library’s

Library’s what?

constructors

Sir, this is not C++.

Speed is one thing. At least these are free of compression artifacts, and in many cases the data is redundant and signed, which are nice features. The prefetch and local caching also have some excellent characteristics.

There was a theft, it just wasn’t intellectual property. It was a theft of the commons.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back

I think if I was gonna write something similar, I’d focus it on “AI and the dangers of expediency”, and illustrate the different failure modes, building up from technical to interpersonal to personal to cultural to policy.

Then the “and this is a well-lubricated slide into full-blown fascism” is the cherry on top, comparing the dynamics of what we’ve discussed so far to the personal, economic, and political beliefs of the recognizable figures of the “nerd reich”.

At that point, you can make up your own mind about whether AI “is a fascist artifact”, but you probably agree on the individual points that lead up to that question, which is the more important (but less clickbaity) part.

That’s… not what it says though???

“AI” as we use the term today is build on fascist ideas. Is structurally supportive of fascist thinking.

That does not mean that every user of “AI” products is therefore a fascist. Some “AI”-users might even consider themselves antifascists. But by using these systems you are integrating inherently fascist logic into your thinking, into your mental apparatus. These systems force you to at least accept the fascist tendencies within “AI” systems as “normal” or “okay”.

I will grant though, it’s not very well-written and is mostly a safari through what a bunch of other people have written on the subject, with basically no structure underneath or connective tissue in-between.

But I do think there’s something there. Expediency, pragmatism, looking only at output and efficiency, acting like physical production is the only real thing and mental states or systemic social effects are just hippie nonsense… these are all values which are closely aligned with fascism. And whether or not you personally hold those as your values, when you use AI you are acting out those values. It can easily become second nature to apply that mindset elsewhere.

Edit: Or to stop thinking about what happens when you use it right where you intended to use it. Coding is never a mere logic puzzle, it’s always in pursuit of some human outcome in the real world. Moral questions do come up. They can be mundane ones, for sure, but that’s where discrimination starts, right? Look at the tremendous power of the concept of a gender binary. Nobody cares how anyone thinks of themselves, but they care which checkbox gets filled in, which group they’re placed in, which door they walk through. The little stuff is where it starts.

Year of the BSD desktop

Eh, I don’t think it’s hypocritical to contribute to a commons and then get mad when someone comes along and tries to use the commons to undermine the commons.

Like yes, the commons is there to be used… but not to kill the commons.

https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/