Well that’s a non-sequitur if I’ve ever seen one.

The fundamental issue is and has always been that automation is being used to replace people, when it should be used to free up their time. Productivity increases could’ve meant shorter work weeks. But that didn’t generate as much money for the shareholders, so it didn’t get pursued. And now we’ve got LLMs and generative AI, which could’ve been a (admittedly rather shitty and niche) tool, but for the same reasons as before, companies would rather throw people under the bus instead.

Artists aren’t telling you that people washing dishes don’t matter. They’re telling you they might be getting fired just like those dishwashers were. If you care about either, I suggest standing up for the artists here. And once that’s done, they can stand up for everyone else right back. I think you’ll find they’d be happy to return the favor.

The changelog lists 30 significant changes, of which the top new feature is integrating Whisper. This means whisper.cpp, which is Georgi Gerganov’s entirely local and offline version of OpenAI’s Whisper automatic speech recognition model. The bottom line is that FFmpeg can now automatically subtitle videos for you.

Yeah hey, can anyone chime in if this is at all based off LLMs? Because my problems with the incorrect plagiarism machine don’t end just because it’s now the offline incorrect plagiarism machine. Making OpenAI’s garbage hockey open source doesn’t make it okay. Or should I just start calling this shit FOSSwashing?

I dug around for a bit and couldn’t find much of anything, but judging by a look at the Github pages for both versions of Whisper, it’s looking very related. If that’s the case, fuck right off. I don’t want AI in FFmpeg, either.

Because companies that chase LLMs tend not to give me a choice, that’s why. They inject it into everything they touch because they think it’s the Future™, and therefore I must obviously want it around every second of my life, every day, consequences be damned. The earth can burn, my privacy can erode, misinformation can run rampant, and the copyright of small artists can die, all for the sake of an overused, scarcely-functional “tool” that a bunch of MBAs think I can’t so much as breathe without.

Almost nobody actually wanted Proton to make this. They just went and did it to chase a trend, ignoring the many people who hate it all the while. The last thing I need is for the the company that my email depends on to start getting dragged around by tech bros. If they’re willing to make a decision as rash and irresponsible as that, it is a clear indicator that worse is to come.

its newly launched AI chatbot positioned as a privacy-friendly ChatGPT rival

Add another thing to the list of reasons I’m losing trust in Proton. Might start having to look at a new email provider soon, I guess.

I made a post about it for a more general discussion but I think it’s worth saying here too: Chris Hansen is an irresponsible hack at best and he is very likely to misinform. There are far better people around if you want to learn about the many harms to children caused by Roblox.

It staggers me that “vibe coding” is even a term. I wonder if the people behind that sort of thing would take the same attitude to, say, bridge design. “Oh yeah, move that support over there. It’ll be fine, haha. Here, have a beer while you’re at it!”

If it ends the stupid AI bubble then I don’t think it qualifies as petty vengeance; that is some real change. There won’t be meaningful legislation to aid the day-to-day person against this garbage, no, but it’d still seriously reduce the degree to which this shit has invaded our lives.

You bring up people fighting a war as a comparison, you invite the idea that you expect others to do the same, bullets and all. If you didn’t want to make that implication, you shouldn’t have made that comparison. This is on you.

This goes double when the suggestions you’ve offered are so vague and unhelpful as “Organize. Disrupt. Disobey.” Do you have any concrete ideas for how that’ll work? Because right now, you’re just yelling at people in an entirely different country to you to do a bunch of Stuff™ all while you hypocritically whine online yourself about what we are doing.

Again, if you want to be frustrated, do it differently. As it stands, you’re just fighting your own allies because the work they’re doing isn’t what you specifically want to occur. You’re going to have deal with the fact that sometimes activism isn’t flashy, and sometimes it isn’t easy to spot. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful, and it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Besides, even if you were right, shame doesn’t tend to be a useful tool for growing action; it just causes infighting and encourages spite and doomerism. So save the crit for the Democrat politicians, aye?

I’m sorry, but the problems with modern-day LLMs and GenAI run far deeper than “who hosts it.”

Your grandparents stormed the beaches at Normandy

Oh, so what you actually want is for us to dash our bodies upon the stones and get shot to death by cops, is it? What a completely reasonable ask! One that I’m sure you won’t be doing yourself, of course. That’s our job.

I’m not your footsoldier. I’m not throwing myself into a fire just because you’re unsatisfied with the action being taken. I have a life to live, and I’m barely managing that as it is. Your criticism is less than worthless.

Your advice wouldn’t fix America. It’d just get us all killed. If you want to be frustrated, find a more productive way to do it.

I shudder to think how much electricity got wasted so you could get fooled by an LLM into believing nonsense. Let alone the equally-unnecessary followup questions.

Dan Olson’s documentary is as true as ever. Stop recommending an environment-destroying investment scam to people. You aren’t helping, and I’m not going to be left holding your bag.

Edit: lmao they edited their crypto hawking out of their post

I am very glad we live in the universe where that didn’t happen!

Plenty of the ostensibly better alternatives are covered in the same documentary. I have no faith in them either.

new owners

Do you mean Itch or something else? Because Itch is, as far as I can tell, still run by Leaf Corcoran, the same guy who launched it.

Honestly, even if it hadn’t been abused as a speculative investment, I don’t think Bitcoin (or any other cryptocurrency) would’ve worked basically at all as a decentralized payment alternative. Dan Olson’s investigation of it is too damning for me to believe that.

Probably because it’s a hell of a lot easier than trying to figure out how to manage payment processing without those processors. Visa and Mastercard are extremely large, and by-and-large the only way to pay online in the US. Add in Paypal and Stripe’s limitations (which are also notoriously shitty) and you don’t really have many options left, so it’s really not worth it. I know the EU has better options, but Steam isn’t based there and I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t want to find a way to jump through those hoops.

…What? They’re not threatening to ban you, and they’re not a mod, so they can’t anyways.

That said, announcing to the instance that you don’t care about the consequences of breaking the rules kinda implies that you don’t care about the rules either, and that is not a good look.

this is the era of AI

Uh, sure, so long as you define an “era” as “a period wherein a bunch of C-suites wet themselves over unproven tech.” I hope you realize that something having a lot of money behind it for a few years isn’t indicative that it’s about to revolutionize the world. There are plenty of near-useless things that had lots of excitement behind them, and still didn’t go anywhere.

I’ve seen what GenAI and LLMs can do. It’s a magic trick; it looks impressive, but for almost every possible use case just isn’t helpful, and unfortunately for all of us, the magicians (i.e. OpenAI et al) are douchebags on top. This is not tech worth advocating for.