Beautifully put.

I especially like that they called out the “it’s just a tool” BS:

Yet technological artefacts cannot be separated from the conditions under which they are created, or from the realities of who controls and profits from them. Today, developing these technologies expands racial capitalism, intensifies imperialist extraction, and reinforces the divide between the global North and South. The technology is inseparable from the labour that produces it — the expropriation of work by writers, artists, programmers, and peer-production communities, as well as the highly exploitative crowdwork of data annotation.

A little crazy, but not a lot crazy. ARM adoption may provide the spark necessary to ignite this fire.

Big agree.

But also: people seem to only focus on the output side of the task of writing code, and forget that the developer also receives input from the codebase in return.

Even if you end up with exactly the same code artifact after completing a work item, you’ll have a better understanding of the codebase without delegating swaths of it to AI. But bosses tend not to consider this.

Tech bros have successfully convinced people that mental states do not exist, or at least do not matter — for laborers, anyway, cuz they’ll happily claim that their superior thoughts are exactly why they deserve to be billionaires.

Code is a liability (not an asset)

Related: Jevons Paradox

Oh there’s lots of trans people in orchestra

Not sure about Apple-mediated payments, but you can usually support the creator more directly and get an ad-free RSS feed that you can plug into the Podcasts app and it Just Works™. Usually ends up being a better deal for the creator, too.

People drive the speed they feel is safe. Occassionally, they read speed limit signs. Occassionally, they drive slower after a ticket. But mostly: people drive the speed they feel is safe.

If you want people to drive slower, it needs to feel (not be, just feel) unsafe to drive fast.

Idk, for a game where sugar skull pirate puppets race rowboats that can boost and drift, it’s hard to call it out-of-place.

I don’t think there’s any disagreement (among you, me, and Molly White) about who the bad guys are.

The question is: What is an effective legal framework that focuses on the precise harms, doesn’t allow AI vendors to easily evade accountability, and doesn’t inflict widespread collateral damage?

Cory Doctorow has a pretty good stab at that: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

Clarification: revenue from advertising their own paid services, not revenue from selling ad space to third parties

People who are discounting this because the project maintainer used sensational phrasing (75%) or because he was monetizing open source are ignoring the important part:

Traffic is down 40%

This is really bad news. All open source projects need attention in order to succeed.

“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI

The real threat isn’t AI using open knowledge — it’s AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free

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

Trying desperately to keep the ponzi scheme going, but his biggest customers already have warehouses full of GPUs that will never get connected.

The bubble is full, dude. Just try to minimize the damage from the pop so we don’t try to figure out what size pitchfork your dumb leather jacket is.

It also discouraged you from finding/starting an open source solution for those problems, thus undermining the high-quality open knowledge ecosystem that it relied on in the first place.

As Cory Doctorow says: code is a liability, not an asset

The title of the post is “ban religion”, and the first line is that religion “should have no place in society”

True. I’m just reading between the lines here, because of the phrase “until there is verifiable proof”. If it applies to god, then it applies to privacy of conscious experience, in which case… well, we have done pretty horrific things in the past because there was no verifiable proof of someone’s conscious experience, like performing surgery on infants without anesthesia.

• That’s unethical, but even it it wasn’t…
• There’s no way to satsifactorily define religion in the way I think you’re going for, but even if you could…
• People would worship their gods anyway, but even if they didn’t…
• They would worship something else instead (see the ongoing AI cult for live evidence!), but even if they didn’t…
• It wouldn’t suddenly make everyone empathetic, non-tribal, morally consistent, rational physicalists, but even if it did…
• Physicalism is for edgy teenagers who haven’t taken the p-zombie question seriously (source: was edgy teenage physicalist)

I was once a fool like you :)

Mike McShaffry’s book “Game Coding Complete” is a good guide to the practical side of using a game engine IRL to get things done.

It’ll give you a good idea of how things should be shaped in order to be useful, and some things you can “skip ahead” to. Off-the-shelf engines have to be extremely general in order to be flexible enough to be useful to many customers, so game devs have to put in the effort to make them more specific. You’ll have to start off by being specific, if you have any chance of actually finishing something.

Eberly’s book “3D Game Engine Architecture” deals with the nuts and bolts, the rigorous academic engineering stuff. It’s pretty solid, but it’s aimed at making a general-purpose engine, which is beyond the scope of a one-person project.

Backing up though… You don’t have any language or library opinions? You might need 5-10 years of experience doing general programming (or game dev) before you can sustainably tackle this, or else you’re likely to paint yourself into a corner.

Edit: Probably the biggest PITA with game engine dev is testing. If you’re not already an expert in setting up test harnesses at multiple levels of detail, you’re gonna find it impossible to keep moving after a few months.

Good luck!

Money-making is an orthogonal issue. LLMs subvert engagement with open source projects, which is important for their health whether or not there’s anyone trying to monetize that engagement.