Matl

I don't think the analogy quite works. Hand crafted furniture etc. is still a valued skill, even commanding a premium price. I find it unlikely that hand crafted software will end up the same if the LLM generated one is cheaper and as far as most are concerned works sufficiently well.

Sure. Ultimately it's still you who is responsible for the code you ship I assume, no matter how it came about.

> but it is definitely harder for humans to comprehend and express cleanly at a consistent rate

Part of the skill and joy of programming is to constantly work on improving my ability 'to comprehend and express cleanly' my intent in code.

I'd argue LLMs are anything but consistent.

This is the Ayn Rand trick; let's make government not work == government can never work well == let's cut all customer protections and end up with unfit for consumption beef and glass in your food == somehow it's still not the fault of the free market since after enough people get sick I guess they'll leave one star reviews on Google from their hospital beds == companies will self regulate to produce healthier food?

Compiler generated machine code is however going from something (fairly) well defined (higher level representation) to something else about equally well defined (lower level representation).

In that sense it's a lot closer to translating Italian to English than what LLMs are doing.

I trust LLMs a lot more if I have a complete Go program I want them to rewrite in Rust.

Problem is in many places the AI push is to use agents for everything and so instead of writing code now you end up reviewing what the LLM generated for most of the day.

Yeah, it's pretty standard for an occupation. I wouldn't call occupation standard.

> they are the same entity

I am not aware of a country where that's not true to some extent. But I can't see i.e. [1] happening in the West.

1 - https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/china-tax-crackd...

> they're using it to scan for illegal construction

It's nice that an occupying army gets to decide what's illegal, am sure.

> Walmart

> Amazon

I guess customers yeah, Employees? not so much

> I wonder how Jolla is gong these days

I have their latest phone and it's great UX wise. However they simply lack the funds to put in the best cameras and the dev community for native apps is small, be it most of the actively developed native apps are great.

IMO Sailfish has the best gesture-based controls out of any smartphone OS.

Multiple things can be true at the same time, there's more repression in China still than in the West at the moment, yes. At the same time it's all rather vague. There's more state control there and more corporate control here. So naturally there's more state repression there. There's also things that China does better than we do. It's not as clear cut as it should be.

If you look at the treatment of pro-Palestine movements in the West, Flock cameras, Palantir contracts, age verification mandates, encryption 'front door' requests, clamping down on whistleblowers etc. then it seems to me that we're heading where China is pretty fast and that the West definitely wants to be where China is, just without the high speed trains.

What I am dismayed by in discussions like this is how simplistic they are i.e. China bad, West good so don't compare.

The collective West just assisted a genocide of an occupied population of people, so when is it going to be 'as bad'? My guess is never because people here want to feel superior over China without actually doing anything for it.

I wouldn't be surprised if you tried to come up with all sorts of excuses why the West is not responsible for Israeli actions in Gaza, it's not a genocide etc. without pausing for a second to realize the Chinese also have plenty to say about what you object to them doing not being authoritarian.

Except for where Western governments pearl clutch about freedom and how free and open they are unlike big, bad China and all that.

Yes, but the US ones are still around, mostly.

Nokia was also European. We Euroopeans aren't good at not letting our companies fail, also see Philips, Acorn etc.

Yeah, I use a Jolla phone today but wish it had the power of a properly resourced company behind it.

OpenAI and subcontractors are deploying models that are specifically trained with hacking skills in mind and then giving them tasks that can only reasonably be completed by hacking. It's not like it's SkyNet.

The 'facts' that you keep saying that were wrong were only so if you take what the Trump admin said about it as 'facts' (ie the reason for the targeting). There's no reason to do so at this point.

> I think that's a subjective reading of the video, right?

Sure, to the extent that most reporting or takes on news events are subjective, despite many trying to claim otherwise.

> I think a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand city council meetings and just how many disruptive people who want to play out the clock talking

That may be the case but here it would seem a discussion about Flock was skipped on purpose so that people who want to bring it up would have no choice but to do so during an 'unrelated' discussion.

Translation: Those in power are allowed to execute 'illegal' chess moves, (skipping the Flock discussion), but the public can't do the same to try and discuss things that officials want to avoid discussing.

He may be omitting that because it seems like a convenient way to not hear comments about an issue by switching to a different issue.

The meaning is not clear because they can't just come out and say they want to slow or stop Chinese model releases while continuing to race ahead themselves.

Thanks for sharing your POV, but that's basically how I understand it. It's the old individual freedom (BSD) vs collective freedom (GPL). The BSD is certainly less hassle and just a simpler way to give something away.

> I find the GPL to be hypocritical in the way it restricts freedom while talking about promoting freedom. If I'm giving a gift to the commons, then I want it to be a true gift, not something with strings attached.

The right to free speech is a freedom too, yet it has strings attached. Namely it's no longer a freedom the moment it crosses a certain line into endangering someone else and their freedoms. That's sort of the view the GPL takes, but it gets into how different political philosophies view the concept of freedom. Is it freedom to pay whatever the free market (in practice monopolies) demand for commodities critical to survival (BSD view of freedom) or is it freedom not to have to worry about not being able to afford commodities critical to survival (GPL view of freedom).

I do agree the BSD freedoms is simpler to grasp.

> It hurts nobody if someone chooses to make a closed source fork - software is a non-rivalrous good, so whatever someone else does cannot take away the free version that I have provided

True in theory, trickier in practice. 'It hurts nobody' only goes so far because if a closed source fork starts collecting telemetry then it actively hurts its users, unless very much opt in. Now how many average computer users are going to know that there's an open version that doesn't do that? A small number. Trickier still, because the fork is closed, it's likely going to be quite hard to replace it or block the telemetry, at least without loosing some features. So again, the difference is in what is viewed as the commons. BSD views the commons as everyone, including capital interests best in a position to take that the software and twist it into a tool in the ongoing war on general purpose computing, ability to repair etc. GPL views the commons as the users, so it aims to grants freedoms to them, even at the cost of restricting the freedom of capital in the process.

In short, I do understand and even appreciate the BSD concept of freedom and its simplicity, yet I find it insufficient to protect my freedom in a system full of monopoly power, corruption and exploitation.

In an ideal world where the behaviour the GPL aims to protect doesn't exist, I'd agree the BSD is more free. In the current world, I'd argue that BSD gives freedom to exploit computer users to those with the means to do so.

I had many conversations about this and it always came down to business. GPL is indeed restrictive if your priority is the free market. Pretty much every serious BSD person I know of runs it as part of their business, so from their pov GPL is restrictive.

However in the context of the constant restrictions of general purpose computing, GPL has my back. BSD at best doesn't care about restrictive forks and at worst even welcomes them as 'good business'.

Two different approaches, they both have their place but as a user, I feel GPL was written for me. BSD (license) was written for the developer.

By new hardware I mean CPU, GPU, WiFi etc. that was released by their manufacturer within the last 1 year or so, I don't even mean hardware that was just released.

The laptop mentioned is fine. But it is hardware that is just at that mark where I'd normally replace it.

As I said, I think it's still OK if my goal is to run FreeBSD. But if my goal is to get the best hardware now that will last me the next 3-5 years then it's dated and I'll have to compromise just to be able to use FreeBSD with it. I don't have to do that with Linux.

I think if I am going to compromise on hardware because I want a particular OS on it, it'll probably be Haiku over one of the BSDs because I don't get the sense BSD offers enough of a difference vs Linux to justify that compromise.

The post is `I said no and Apple said yes` so not sure how much being a BSD protects you there. Apple still controls it.

That's valuable and good to know, but I meant a machine that's actually new (not one you just bought recently). That laptop is about 2.5 years old specs wise at this point. I use mine for anything from programming to video editing to AAA gaming on Linux. I don't think a machine like that could be my primary one, but looks like a decent secondary.

Let me know if any of them work well on a laptop that's never than 5 years old.

GPL is a more free license if one cares about having control over their computing. The BSD community cares a lot less about that in my (limited) experience and more about purely technical aspects. Which is fine, I just wouldn't expect them to hold if Linux is no longer an option somehow.