as if leftists behaved any better

offer people what AI cannot offer: relationships, fun, belonging, relief. If your political organizing is less enjoyable than talking to a chatbot, people will stick to the chatbot.

quitting doesn’t halt the baby-grinding machine. Big tech can only be stopped from the inside. I even know some people getting hired there exclusively to cause trouble. You should respect their commitment rather than anything else.

Freedom of information is freedom for the most powerful to use that information for their profit. The more powerful you are, the more tools you have to harness common goods for profit.

God forbid a technical person becomes an adult and starts understanding power, money, and politics. Engineers should be babies playing with their toys and being idealistic and irresponsible about their impact on the world.

because Facebook trained an LLM on Libgen data. I mean, I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point some big tech considered to at least fund some of these projects through side-channels, because nowadays open source and liberation of information means free lunches for American big tech, but that’s very different from Anna’s archive being a psyop to externalize content theft.

I think the point is more general about profiting from “renting” their music rather than from their labor. The fact that Spotify gives them peanuts make their position even more miserable.

It took me a second to realize this was a joke. There are people who seriously believe Anna’s Archive is funded/supported by big tech to concentrate copyrighted material to be used for AI training.

I don’t think AIliens are the same as AGI. I believe in this frame AIliens exist in the mind of people, rather than in the machine. It’s behavior complex enough to be interpreted as such, rather than a sentient being thinking of itself as sentient, as AGI implies. It’s alive in the same way an organization is alive and thinking, or a mycelium network. AGI is human-like intelligence reproduced in silicon. AIliens are… alien.

They don’t, but they are uninteresting for now

who here is terrified of technology?

American kids larping as maoists don’t like China to be criticized because they idolize a foreign power in reaction to the misery of their political landscape. It’s a coping mechanism.

A lot of these spaces are reading, writing and designing around so-called “anti-capture” protocols exactly to avoid that.

I’m one of the few volunteer contributors to Bonfire, and I would never dream of recommending Mozilla to use it. You have to reach out to people where they are at, not pick the tools based on prime principles. American platforms are blackmailing us by gatekeeping access to audiences, but it’s not like you can pretend most humans are reachable on microscopic federated platforms. Which btw is not the intended use case for bonfire.