BlueMonday1984 @ BlueMonday1984 @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

New post from Matthew Hughes: People Are The Point, effectively a manifesto against gen-AI as a concept.

The only complexity theory I know of is the one which tries to work out how resource-intensive certain problems are for computers, so this whole thing sounds iffy right from the get-go.

The deluge of fake bug reports is definitely something I should have noted as well, since that directly damages FOSS' capacity to find and fix bugs.

Baldur Bjanason has predicted that FOSS is at risk of being hit by "a vicious cycle leading to collapse", and security is a major part of his hypothesised cycle:

1. Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.
2. Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.
3. OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable.
4. That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back.

Potential hot take: AI is gonna kill open source

Between sucking up a lot of funding that would otherwise go to FOSS projects, DDOSing FOSS infrastructure through mass scraping, and undermining FOSS licenses through mass code theft, the bubble has done plenty of damage to the FOSS movement - damage I'm not sure it can recover from.

Reading through some of the examples at the end of the article it’s infuriating when these slop reports have opened and when the patient curl developers try to give them benefit of the doubt the reporter replies with “you have a vulnerability and I cannot explain further since I’m not an expert”

At that point, I feel the team would be justified in telling these slop-porters to go fuck themselves and closing the report - they've made it crystal clear they're beyond saving.

(And on a wider note, I suspect the security team is gonna be a lot less willing to give benefit of the doubt going forward, considering the slop-porters are actively punishing them for doing so)

This is pure speculation, but I suspect machine learning as a field is going to tank in funding and get its name dragged through the mud by the popping of the bubble, chiefly due to its (current) near-inability to separate itself from AI as a concept.

Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into people’s faces?

Considering how many are Trump bros, they probably consider getting consent to be Cuck Shit^tm and treat hearing anything but English as sufficient grounds to call ICE.

Found an unironic AI bro in the wild on Bluesky:

You want my unsolicited thoughts on the line between man and machine, I feel this bubble has done more to clarify that line then to blur it, both by showcasing the flaws and limitations inherent to artificial intelligence, and by highlighting the aspects of human minds which cannot be replicated.

The curl Bug Bounty is getting flooded with slop, and the security team is prepared to do something drastic to stop it. Going by this specific quote, reporters falling for the hype is a major issue:

As a lot of these reporters seem to genuinely think they help out, apparently blatantly tricked by the marketing of the AI hype-machines, it is not certain that removing the money from the table is going to completely stop the flood. We need to be prepared for that as well. Let’s burn that bridge if we get to it.

Shot-in-the-dark prediction here - the Xbox graphics team probably won't be filling those positions any time soon.

As a sidenote, part of me expects more such cases to crop up in the following months, simply because the widespread layoffs and enshittification of the entire tech industry is gonna wipe out everyone who cares about quality.

New high-strength sneer from Matthew Hughes: The Biggest Insult, targeting "The Unspeakable Contempt At The Heart of Generative AI"

It would be really funny if Devin caused a financial crash this way

They're LWers, they already baked their psyche long ago

Machine learning is essentially AI with a paper-thin disguise, so that makes sense

Zed Run: a play to earn (P2E) virtual horse NFT racing game. Defunct as of February, probably due to rug pulling, they are pivoting to “Zed Champions”, which is… pretty much the exact same thing, with likely the same fate.

They're also (indirectly) competing with Umamusume: Pretty Derby, which offers zero P2E elements, but does offer horse waifus and actual entertainment value. Needless to say, we both know who's winning this particular fight for people's cash.

EquineChain: a blockchain platform for tracking horse care history, because apparently people don’t trust horse caregivers and need GPUs to remember how much ivermectin and ketamine their show-ponies have mainlined.

It'd arguably be helpful if the caregivers are helping themselves to the stash, but I doubt there's anything stopping then from BSing the blockchain, too.

But how are they going to awkwardly cram robots in everywhere, to follow up the overwhelming success of AI?

Good question - AFAICT, they're gonna struggle to find places to cram their bubble-bots into. Plus, nothing's gonna stop Joe Public from wrecking them in the streets - and given we've already seen Waymos getting torched and Lime scooters getting wrecked these AI-linked 'bots are likely next on the chopping block.

Don't we know it.

To my knowledge, previous bubbles happened in the background, with the general public feeling little effect from them.

Here, the entire bubble has happened directly in the public eye, either though breathless hype being shoved down their throats or through the bubble's negative externalities directly impacting their lives.

With that in mind, I expect this upcoming winter to be particularly long, with public mockery/condemnation of AI to be particular hallmarks.

Glad I could help with writing this.

I've already predicted that AI will completely and permanently disappear once the bubble bursts, and between AI's utterly radioactive public image and businesses' increasing realisation that AI is a useless money pit, its a prediction I've only grown more confident in over time.

Part of me suspects that particular pivot is gonna largely fail to convince anyone - paraphrasing Todd In The Shadows "Witness" retrospective, other tech bubbles may have failed harder than AI, but nothing has failed louder.

The notion of "AI = "sentient" chatbots/slop generators" is very firmly stuck in the public consciousness, and pointing to AI being useful in some niche area isn't gonna paper over the breathlessly-promoted claims of Utopian Superintelligence When Its Done^tm or the terabytes upon terabytes of digital slop polluting the 'net.

I doubt it'll stop the worst people we know from trying, though - they're hucksters at heart, getting caught and publicly humiliated is unlikely to stop 'em.

If you wanna say “but AI is here to stay!” tell us what you mean in detail. Stick your neck out. Give your reasons.

I'm gonna do the exact opposite of this ending quote and say AI will be gone forever after this bubble (a prediction I've hammered multiple times before),

First, the AI bubble has given plenty of credence to the motion that building a humanlike AI system (let alone superintelligence) is completely impossible, something I've talked about in a previous MoreWrite. Focusing on a specific wrinkle, the bubble has shown the power of imagination/creativity to be the exclusive domain of human/animal minds, with AI systems capable of producing only low-quality, uniquely AI-like garbage (commonly known as AI slop, or just slop for short).

Second, the bubble's widespread and varied harms have completely undermined any notion of "artificial intelligence" being value-neutral as a concept. The large-scale art theft/plagiarism committed to create the LLMs behind this bubble (Perplexity, ChatGPT, CrAIyon, Suno/Udio, etcetera), and the large-scale harms enabled by these LLMs (plagiarism/copyright infringement, worker layoffs/exploitation, enshittification), and the heavy use of LLMs for explicitly fascist means (which I've noted in a previous MoreWrite) have all provided plenty of credence to notions of AI as a concept being inherently unethical, and plenty of reason to treat use of/support of AI as an ethical failing.