Wow I've never seen enshittification mentioned by a politician. Glad to hear it's getting inside the Overton Window.
I sympathize, I also feel like the fight against the corporations is hopeless. The loss of leverage against employers for tech workers is huge in the face of LLMs. I'm a tech worker myself and am facing those same problems. But I'm not sure that this means that FOSS is useless. The corps have a huge incentive to create these tools, whether they're open source or not. But at least when they're open source, we the people can also use them. I'm not suggesting that we can do this with LLMs today, we just don't have the right contributor and maintainer tools to do it. But right now we have to develop maintainer tools to filter out the huge amount of crap that badly designed LLM systems are putting out. This gives us the opportunity to build a contribution model that doesn't care about human vs LLM provenance, as long as it meets certain quantifiable standards. In 5-10 years, we're going to have LLMs that can infer at very high speed, meaning we can do a lot of error correction by multiplying the number of generations you make and looking for consistency. The engineering effort for LLM systems is barely started, these systems are gonna get way more robust. Wouldn't it be better if these systems were built in the open so that we can all share, understand and leverage these tools for ourselves?
As for the gatekeeping/democratizing of art and tech, I agree that anyone can learn that stuff if they put enough effort into it. But by the simple fact that people need to put time and sweat into it, it disqualifies a large swath of the population, from children to neurodivergent people to low wage workers who don't have the breathing room to rest let alone take up programming. It's really not about a 'soldier at the gate', no person or group is preventing anyone from learning how to code. The social order and biology sometimes makes it so. Wouldn't it be better for everyone if anyone could modify their software without having to invest a shitload of time to learn how to code? Like maybe this person only wants this one specific change in one specific app-- the ROI just isn't there if they have to learn a whole new field.
I am not trying to say that AI and LLMs are the next best thing since sliced bread. I think there's huge problems with it, but I also think that they can be powerful tools if we wield them properly. I think there's big limitations on the tech, and huge ethical implications about the way they're built and their cost to the planet. I'm hoping that we can fix these in the long run, but I sure as fuck don't count on the current AI industry leaders to do it. They're going to use this tech to supercharge surveillance capitalism, imo. It's gonna be fucking horrible. What I hope is that we can carve out a space for personal computing with the help of FLOSS.
I agree that with the current state of tools around LLMs, this is very unadvisable. But I think we can develop the right ones.
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We can have tools that can generate the context/info submitters need to understand what has been done, explain the choices they are making, discuss edge cases and so on. This includes taking screenshots as the submitter is using the app, testing period (require X amount of time of the submitter actually using their feature and smoothening out the experience)
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We can have tools at the repo level that can scan and analyze the effect. It can also isolate the different submitted features in order to allow others to toggle them or modify them if they're not to their liking. Similarly, you can have lots of LLMs impersonate typical users and try the modifications to make sure they work. Putting humans in the loop at different appropriate times.
People are submitting LLM generated code they don't understand right now. How do we protect repos? How do we welcome these contributions while lowering risk? I think with the right engineering effort, this can be done.
Public code repositories like Github are currently being beset by a flood of LLM-generated contributions. It’s becoming a bit of a problem and is one of the facets of the Great Flood the web is currently experiencing.
Public code repositories like Github are currently being beset by a flood of LLM-generated contributions. It’s becoming a bit of a problem and is one of the facets of the Great Flood the web is currently experiencing.
What does it look like when we are able to use LLMs to handle the flood of contributions? What happens when we’re able to screen and adopt PRs effectively with little to no human intervention?
I use the Voice audiobook app to listen to my DRM-free books. In this app, there’s a configuration setting for auto-rewind. If you pause the book, when you resume, it will rewind by X seconds. I didn’t like that feature, I wanted the amount of seconds to rewind to be based on how long it has been since I’ve paused. So if I resume within a minute, no rewind; within 5 minutes, 10 second rewind; more than that would be 30 seconds.
I can do this because I’m part of a small percentage of people who can clone a repo for an Android app, modify it, rebuild it and push it to my phone. But I don’t want this power to be constrained to a priesthood who know the secret language of coding. I want everyone to be able to do stuff like that.
Imagine a world in which, as I use a specific piece of software, I can request modifications to its behaviour to an LLM-augmented system. That system will pull the open source code, make the necessary modifications (following the project’s contribution guidelines), build it and reload it on my device. Then I can use it and test it, and fix any problems that come along. That modification can then be uploaded to my own repo and made publicly available for anyone else who wants it, or it could even be pushed as a PR to the original system who could scan it for usefulness, alignment, UX, etc., modify it if needed, and then merge it to the main branch.
This wonderful world of personal and communal computing would be unimaginable in a closed source world. No closed source system will accept an external AI to come in and read/modify it at will. This is why open source is more important than ever.
We need to build a Software Commons so that we can give everyone the ability to adapt their digital lives to their liking. So that these intimate, private devices to which we entrust most of our attention, these things which have great effects on our cognitive and emotional functions, remain ours in a real sense. And the way that we do this is to create the tools and processes to allow anyone to make modifications to their software by simply expressing that intent.
And what does communal software development look like? Let’s explore the space of social consensus mechanisms so we can find those that drive the creation of software which promote culture, connection, compassion and empathy.
I want to see the promise of community made by the 90’s web survive the FAANG+ Megacorp Baronies and flourish into a great digital metropolis. The web can still get free to be weird, we just have to make it happen together.
I don't know, the person was trying to get it to output defamatory things. They got to print what they wanted to print.
The failure of the bot to provide the action is a separate issue which wouldn't have made the news. It's not like they were trying to get help and it instead started insulting its own company, right?
This feels like the equivalent of "I was able to print 'HP Sucks' on an HP printer". Like, yes you can do that, but... why is that important or even needs to be blocked?
Thanks! I had actually gotten confused by the Create Post interface and accidentally did not post the URL to the blog post heh. I fixed it now
I have two young kids and spend a lot of time thinking about how to approach the process of parenting. LLMs are a great resource to augment some aspects of parenting. In this blog post, I go into some examples that I use for the following uses:
- Coming up with activities
- AI Generation games
- Thinking through past and future events
- Approaching complex topics
- Talking to parenting books
These are very poor arguments for smoking cigarettes, but sure...
Another argument to give your tween a smartphone is that they need to learn how to use it, to develop a healthy relationship with it, to understand the pros/cons, to understand how to use it effectively. Abstinence will just make them envious and less likely to think through the consequences.
There are lots of people who could use them. Schools, libraries, poor people.
What do you mean? I follow a lot of hashtags on Mastodon. Won't I be seeing a lot of Threads content if I'm on a server federated with them without explicitly opting into that?
It was just an example. The same can happen at the Mastodon-level instead of the Fediverse-level. Since there is some desired interop (e.g. between Mastodon and Lemmy), services do influence each other in their feature set.
I'm not sure what you mean by "a lot of what people are worried about Threads doing has already been done by Mastodon". Do you mean that the decisions that Mastodon make influence the rest of the Fediverse? If so, let's make sure we understand the difference here: Threads has a much more hostile disposition. Mastodon seems to have incentives aligned with the rest of the Fediverse services, and probably deserves the benefit of the doubt; Facebook has abused that benefit time and time again.
That doesn't actually fix the issue. If Facebook is trying to set itself up like Chrome with the webplatform, or GTalk with XMPP, then they will drive the feature set of ActivityPub, whether you're federated with them or not.
Hypothetical example:
Want to see this picture/video from someone on Threads? You need Facebook's proprietary picture format, which has DRM baked in it. Even if you don't federate, Mastodon, Lemmy, etc now have to take energy away from their work to adopt the proprietary picture format. It depends on the proportion Threads takes on the network and how they can leverage that position to put pressure.
Threads currently has voice notes. Should all ActivityPub services support that? If so, do we adhere to Threads' standard or not?
I get ya. I think there's also a petulant sentiment of "you don't want to play fair? Then fuck you, I won't either"
No no, that is not what the headline says.
The headline says "you're told that what you're doing is buying by the people selling you the media, but that's not what you're actually doing. So, if they're lying to you about what you're buying, then pirating a different thing isn't stealing the thing they are trying to sell you."
It's definitely tongue in cheek and has some hyperbole in it, but that is the gist of the statement.
Agreed, and to me the solution is not "let's hope the companies play nice", but rather to bring in anti-monopoly regulations, like Canada's Bill C-56.
We need to force companies to add interoperability, transparency and fairness imho. Like the ongoing fight to force Apple to allow competing browsers in iOS. Or alternate app stores for Android and iOS.
Ah, that's not my understanding of civil disobedience. I prefer this definition: "civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies" (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/)
I suppose the piracy aspect might not be public enough to count as civil disobedience though, unless you count as public the noticeable cumulative effects of all piracy.
There's lots they can do...
- cheaper prices (by lowering the % of rent-seeking),
- better pay distribution for creators (Especially so that I pay to support the shows I watch rather than a global pool),
- interoperability (to allow new businesses which provide frontends to multiple streaming services),
- social (clipping and sharing, group watching, etc)
- more equal promotion of shows/movies (instead of based on royalty rates)
I was under the impression that there were resources in that area that the US currently has privileged access to because of their alliances there. So they have a stake in making their allies come out on top.
How much should they be paid for it? In a situation where the streaming services have a stranglehold on the market and are extracting a big amount in rent-seeking price vs actually paying the people who labored to create it, should we continue to pay and give in to their morally dubious tactics? In this lens, can piracy be considered a form of civil disobedience?
I'm not so sure that's true. What if normalizing and removing friction from piracy gets to the point where the streaming services have to react by providing better services and better payouts?
Hi all, Is there a way for me to block a particular domain no matter in which community it finds itself in? There are some news outlets that I just don't want to be polluted by.
Thanks!
How software architects can balance technical proficiencies with an appropriate mastery of communication.
![Becoming an accidental architect](https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/73cc0d5b-7556-46f4-81af-ce734dcb772d.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
I've been working on honing my architectural skills and came across this interesting article that put some things in perspective for me. Maybe it will help you too!
The indispensable case for parenting tough, curious, an…
![Outdoor Kids in an Inside World: Getting Your Family Ou…](https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/fbcc2dd5-fcea-4b35-a10f-55c825a4f09e.jpeg?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
I read this book recently, and as a father of two young children it really gave me the desire to get my kids outside and interact with their environment.
I would highly recommend this book if you have kids!
A NodeJS and/or Flask backend written in Sudolang. Contribute to koganei/sudolang-rest-api development by creating an account on GitHub.
![sudolang-rest-api/index.su at main · koganei/sudolang-rest-api](https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/RwhMzFtncW.png?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
I've been playing with SudoLang a lot lately and I finally got around to trying to write a simple example of what an actual codebase written in SudoLang could look like.
- Automatically builds codebase in JavaScript based on SudoLang
- Imports interfaces into files using the
@interfaces
directive to ensure compatibility between generated files
It could be extended to:
- Automatically generate unit tests
- Use these unit tests for self-refinement to make sure that the generated code works as expected
- Automatically look up optimizations
- Automatically rewrite the SudoLang itself to be more deterministic
- Progressive compilation (only recompile code changes)
- Automatically produce documentation
There's so much power in writing my codebase like this. It makes it much faster to write, I don't need to know a lot of the low level technical details of each language (though it helps), I don't need to know the best implementations of algorithms I just need to name and/or explain their outcome, and so much more!
So if I look at a community's page on the instance proper, like: https://lemmy.ml/c/artificial_intel . There are posts there that are not reflected when I look at it from lemmy.ca: https://lemmy.ca/c/artificial_intel@lemmy.ml Including a post that I've posted from Lemmy.ca!
Is there something I'm misunderstanding about federation that would lead to this behaviour?
Dr Alan D. Thompson is a world expert in artificial intelligence (AI), specializing in the augmentation of human intelligence, and advancing the evolution of
![Human Level Artificial General Intelligence for All Tasks by 2026 | NextBigFuture.com](https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/pictrs/image/OwCaM4W3dD.jpg?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
A lot of hype around LLMs these days. I wonder how long until we get to the trough of disillusionment.