Hacker News Reader

Comment by ashg1-qwzudg | Hacker News Reader

That is a false equivalency. FOSS started as a counter movement against Microsoft in order to escape from surveillance and corporate control.

The AI cartel is the new Microsoft.

It is amazing how software developers have been brainwashed. Ted Ts'o, Google employee and pro-AI shill at Debian and LWN, recently argued that supporting AI is similar to supporting the Internet in 2000.

That is another fallacy. The Internet is a common carrier and was supposed to lead to freedom in 2000. It has nothing to do with outsourcing your thinking to a bunch of wannabe trillionaires.

View on HN

> That is a false equivalency. FOSS started as a counter movement against Microsoft in order to escape from surveillance and corporate control.

"Programming" as a concept started with humans being "tired" of manually calculating things, then it became faster than humans, and now our sand can talk human language.

And speaking about false equivalency, there are plenty of models you can run locally yourself. I agree that big tech sucks, and many places in the world need less surveillance and less corporate control, but I don't think the entire LLM-space (besides very obviously the biggest companies) are responsible for that kind of usage.

Is 'tired' here in scare quotes or are you referencing something? And if it wasn't faster from the get-go, how did it address the fatigue?

The Internet relies on physical infrastructure managed by sovereign nations and multinational corporations, it would never be free from those constraints. Until we reach post-scarcity utopia and harmony between all of humanity—ironically, something that could be enabled by AI—the Internet will never be "free".

Oh poo, I can download an open weights model now and build glorious things with it. I can train my own, finetune on someone elses, or host a complete package. What is this AI cartel? Are we complaining that they engineer better harnesses? Well, great! What prevents us from doing the same?

> FOSS started as a counter movement against Microsoft in order to escape from surveillance and corporate control.

??? FOSS was around before that, famously so.

The rise of Microsoft made FOSS more important, but FOSS wasn't a reaction to surveillance and control, when it started even multi-user networks were practically unprotected, and it was quite easy indeed to see what other users were up to.

The phone phreaks were the ones who were worried about corporate control of comms, the FOSS people just couldn't figure out why people were paying for software with the hood welded shut when there was better software available to those willing to help contribute to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com