sham1

Firstly I'd point out that the difference here is that all of those things you mentioned are things you could learn and the distinction would be that at least currently the proofs provided by AI are inscrutable. Although this will probably change.

The second thing is to just ask what is there left to do. What are these "greater things" that people can dedicate time to, when clearly even classically cerebral activities like mathematics can be automated away. The industrial revolution already wrecked physical production of goods and made artisan workers obsolete outside of extremely niche scenarios -- that's why we call things artisanal, after all -- but there was still mental work. But now, mental work is also experiencing the same thing, and it's not clear what one should do as a human anymore.

And some people seem outright gleeful about these developments, which can be seen even in this thread. What happens when humanity becomes obsolete? And what happens when the machines that cause this obsolescence are controlled by a tiny amount of people, who suddenly don't need the rest of us? I can only hope that this turns out well for us and that with the development of these machines, humanity will get better, but the omnipresent existential dread is giving me doubts.

It's honestly both very funny as well as very sad that one of the most unbelievable aspects of that is them taxing the AI pornography industry. Given that being a Rick&Morty spinoff means that Prez Curtis has plenty of outlandish aspects to it already, yet suspending one's disbelief about an industry actually getting taxed kinda goes over the limit.

Sheep are also cute and fluffy, so people wouldn't suspect a thing until it's too late!

I guess the real question then is why were you programming since the 90s instead of getting yourself into a managerial position. After all, that's basically what you have to do with vibe coding; you tell the agents what they should do and specify requirements etc.

Then again, have you ever asked a golden retriever about CMake errors? Rubber ducking is a real thing, after all. Besides, a golden retriever would be a good morale boost if nothing else.

No, that's not it. Instead it's the right-wing "geniuses" running the government that have been a major cause of this. The NCP and Finns Party keep making a mess of things in the name of their ideology.

This concern carries within it the assumption that having LLMs gives the parties as much influence as what nuclear weapons do in warfare. An assumption that should probably be checked.

An individual pirate is morally a lot less objectionable than the capitalist class pirating from literally everyone else.

Yeah sure, it's on the open Internet, but then again, the capitalists could also actually adhere to the licensing terms of the free software they're hoovering up and all that. These are the same people who want to enforce all kinds of EULAs against the commons, employing measures such as DRM to protect their "intellectual property", so why is it suddenly okay to not comply with IP when it's them doing the infringement?

And that's just with software, but this also affects other creative endeavours. Also the individual HN user's 132 TB Plex server doesn't suck up ludicrous amounts of resources from the commons.

We also need to get a shower curtain salesman into a leadership position to buy some moon rocks.

The difference with the book example is that having to hand over a list of books is tangible whereas technological profiling is extremely subtle and abstract in comparison. As IT professionals it's of course easy to see the ways that this kind of stuff can be abused, whereas the probability that someone outside of the industry or otherwise not interested in computers to be "woke" enough about the digital panopticon is diminishingly rare.

And there's of course also Sinclair's law, so even people who should know better might be either willingly ignorant or just not care if it means that they can maintain their quality of life, moral bankruptcy be damned. Similar arguments can be raised for example with the anthropogenic climate catastrophe or other abhorrent phenomena where there's a big chasm in the knowledge between laymen vs experts.

It is exceedingly difficult to convince someone that something is a problem unless said problem is staring the person in the face.

Surely tabs are only ambiguous if one considers the point of indentation to be to align things visually in relation to each other, as opposed to just being, y'know, indented.

Besides, I'm sure many people would look at your Scheme snippet and argue that it's not really about indentation as much as alignment of the subforms, because in a Lisp those two things are basically equivalent, and that the distinction between indentation and alignment is mostly a thing for the curly-brace or otherwise ALGOL-esque languages like Pascal or in this case Python. And in those cases the use of "tabs for indentation, spaces for alignment" is fairly popular although I don't frankly know if many editors actually support that.

I do however think that this whole discussion of spaces Vs tabs is pretty asinine and mostly just stems from people just wanting to align code text visually across lines. It's the same way people insist on monospaced fonts even though one could easily make the argument that proportional fonts are easier to read. Oh well, even I'm not _that_ deprived.

Then again, it's not like even before the plagiarising slop machines you couldn't just get around licenses if you were dedicated enough to evil and was comfortable lying about the provenance of the code you're using.

Sure, it'd make all the lawyer types nervous for obvious reasons, but that's why you'd also need to be comfortable with the evil deed. But you're correct that the evil plagiarism machine makes it way easier.

How would this have worked in practice though? How could things like trade standards been harmonised or a common currency adopted without the trade union being able to do legislation?

And once you get there, you're no longer a trade union. Or a trading block, which is probably the better word since a trade union already means something else.

It absolutely works with hardware. And it's not that difficult to add channels for extra software like a tainted Linux kernel.

And in return one gets a saner programming language than the Nix language.

The slippery slope of being held liable for an AI overview leading to neo-Hitler is certainly a take, and a ridiculous one at that.

It's one thing for an LLM to get things wrong. This case is not that though. And if big tech can't make sure that their models don't libel companies and individuals then good riddance. Whatever diminutive economic advantage one can get from "competitive LLMs" probably isn't worth it anyway, especially with all of the other disadvantages of these "competitive LLMs" compounding on our societies and the planet, as the resource usage of the data centres necessary to run and train them exacerbate the ongoing climate crisis.

And the solution to this is to go through the German political system. The courts can't just decide to not follow the law just because it's a bit silly, and for as long as the laws are the way they are, this unfortunate loophole for removing negative reviews will continue to exist. But clearly the law can have both positive and negative consequences.

There is a disclaimer, yes, but you have to admit that it's pretty shit, innit? I mean for one, it's about the size of a human hair, and at least when I tried it, the disclaimer came up only when I clicked the "Show More" button. It might admittedly show up earlier if the response is shorter, admittedly I don't know. Also personally I'm a bit uneasy with the idea that just with a simple disclaimer they could avoid any and all liability. Not your argument, I know, but still.

As for not wanting to force companies to release only "safe-for-children products", I do actually agree. However I consider it to be a matter of degree, and in this case for example, I think that if nothing else, Google should say the very least make the disclaimer a bit more prominent and maybe tweak the model so that it's not quite as confident in its claims in the AI Overview.

If our standard for laws would be that "well no reasonable person would do this/believe this" then nothing would be illegal, there'd be no need to label any product as potentiality harmful, etc.

Do you really want to go there? That everything in the world would have a literal "caveat emptor" attached to it?

Georgism? In the big 2026? Now that's a blast from the past!

Now, land value taxes obviously have their place in the gamut of different taxes to levy, so I don't wish to badmouth them too much. But as a consumption tax, VAT also does have its place. Sure, they are absolutely regressive, but this also helps them to act more like Pigovian taxes, since they can be used to make certain categories of goods and services more expensive. And so if one can afford to pay the value of the negative externalities, why not. And hopefully it can then steer people towards better choices.

Ideally the workers. But failing that, legislation would probably be a good thing to at least try to reduce e-waste from closed, discarded devices. Like, if a device line is at its end of line from the company, then they might as well make it open for the community. They're not supporting it anymore, after all, but someone might want to.

Would such legislation be perfect for dealing with these kinds of things? Of course not, but it would be better.

> Yes, it matters.

Does it actually matter? And if so, why?

> You can try to distract and do as much mental gymnastics as you want but everyone rational can clearly see that one thing is doing politics for software (free drivers, open source, no DRM, …) and the other is about virtue signaling about subjects that are completely unrelated.

Okay, but you would still have to answer a really important question. Why does it matter?

Let's say that it's virtue signalling, for the sake of the argument (although people tend to not know what virtue signalling actually is, and just claim any public acknowledgement of one's values as such, which is incorrect).

So, why does one being virtue signalling and the other not being such actually matter? Does it actually change the messaging in any meaningful way? Does it make it less legitimate or whatever?

> Btw, feel free to label me however you want (others did already), which shows that they have no arguments and resort to pidgeonholeing and name calling.

I wasn't going to, but thank you for the invitation!

This implies that the difference actually matters. In both cases there is a political goal behind the actions. Yes, printer driver software itself is very different from sexual and gender orientation, but wanting for the printer drivers to be free is a political statement and principle, and so is the uplift of LGBTQ+ people and celebrations of PRIDE month. Both are political despite being about distinct subject matters.

You can disagree with the politics in question, but to say that FLOSS has no room for politics is itself a political position, leading you to a paradox!

The Free Software community has always been political. Where have you been?

Introducing a non-binary mascot for KDE is no more or less political than for example Richard Stallman demanding that printer drivers should be free, back in the 1980s. And same way the use and preference of the term "open source" over "free software" -- or vice versa -- is also very political because it depends on if one wants to go with the described values or not necessarily want to stand behind them.

The Free software community involves people, and with people come shared values and politics. That's kinda what "community" implies. And if we really want to go into it, given the circumstances of the invention of things like computers, the Internet, etc. it'd be very erroneous to asset that software in general has ever been value-free or non-political. Computing artillery trajectories is political just the same way as promotion of LGBTQ+ people, even if people get more upset about the latter rather than the more kinetic kinds of politics implied by howitzers et al.

While I'm sure people here have seen these, might as well link the rest of them to set how this can be evolved while keeping it small.

- <http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/> - <https://evenbettermotherfucking.website/> - <https://www.thegreatestmotherfucking.website/> - <https://perfectmotherfuckingwebsite.com/>

And there are probably even more.

It seems that Yarvin didn't realise -- accidentally or more probably intentionally -- that the society in Soylent Green was not supposed to be taken as a model to emulate. It's not supposed to be a documentary! To even joke about it is telling.

As a tech industry we'll probably be complacent on whatever is coming up in the future, no matter if it's something like this or something far more insidious. But hey, some of our class got very wealthy and got to enjoy material prosperity so it's all good, right? People would chase ever higher wages and shiny trinkets and end up working for Evil Megacorps because "one needs to be able to afford to live comfortably".

Racism. They seem to be irritated about the existence of migrants and member countries not being allowed to tread on their human rights.

I'd say that the onus falls on the engineer insofar as they need to ask the questions of "why are we making the new better tool", "according to what criteria is it better", and "do we need the better tool". And at least for me, that onus falls on the engineer instead of falling on the user because it's the engineer who is creating the tool, not the user, and if the engineer chose differently, the tool wouldn't be out there to be used for evil.

Sometimes it might just be better to not do the thing, especially if it conflicts with one's morals. And well, the idea that "if I don't do this, someone else will" seems to not work out well in practice.

And pray tell, what does the American or the Chinese worker in this case get out of their higher productivity and competitiveness? Because it really seems that it's not quality of life, that's for certain.

More money and material comforts? Well perhaps, but then again, I do wonder just how many would willingly take that rather than for example a proper work-life balance or clean environment. And we'll probably have to rethink the relationship of our societies with material consumption etc. in the coming decades anyway due to the climate emergency, and so maybe it'd actually be better for the US or China to adopt our "less competitive" stance rather than for us to try to agonise on trying to get ourselves competitive with them.

No one has yet figured out just what one's material possessions will do for them after they're dead. At best you can pass them to your next of kin, but that doesn't need the kind of hyper competitive, hyper capitalistic mindset espoused by the US or China.

Maybe we need a cultural shift then, because if one needs to use a platform like X, nowadays owned and operated by fascists, then there's something deeply wrong with the tech world. It'd probably take a lot of effort to do so, but it'd be absolutely worth it.

Besides, even if that wasn't a consideration, only posting the announcement to X is just crazy. As others have said, you'd expect for GitHub to make the announcement on their official website. Any paying client would then just follow that for their announcements.

To be fair to us, the Euro is also a world reserve currency, alongside of course the US Dollar, the British Pound, the Japanese Yen, and the Chinese Renminbi. And the Euro is in fact the second largest in terms of external reserves, being only beat by the USD.

Of course, the USD has been for a while the largest one of these, but as you say, they're really trying to get away from that. And a currency falling in relevance isn't new, one can always ask the Pound about that.