Yeah, I mean you could twist it to say labour unions do nothing but let workers rent-seek on their human capital instead of getting paid the only true god-given market rate. USian brainworms all the way.

Right on buddy, I too want to live in a future where my diamonds are judged by their brilliance and my passion as a magnate, not by the child labor I employ to produce them.

A frustrating (and beware, long) post I came across: Coding is NOT solved

Starts off with some good sneers:

Those who claim LLM-generated software is good enough: ❌ Haven’t written code in ages ❌ Cannot spot if their code figuratively had 6 fingers! ❌ Have a low bar for what good looks like ❌ Don’t care about quality or NFR ❌ Have difficulty understanding an S-curve ✅ Are honest: AI genuinely writes better code than them

But the author can’t get over their AI-centrism:

Instead of following other people’s advice, build with AI, gain first hand experience and make up your mind. But whatever you do, please please please don’t fool yourself into believing this is a fad. AI is here to stay, and as I stated above there are some genuine use cases for it already.

Interesting to note that there seems to have been a steady decline since around 2017 already (with the exception of a Covid-spike), though it definitely picked up after 2022.

It has felt like this is where it would end up since ChatGPT launched in late 2022 to be honest.

he seems to be the rational one

When your movement entirely dedicated to rationality gets casually stomped by the French.

Prepare to be tortured for an eternity by Scotty. No wait, that’s an unholy image.

I mean motivated & cowardly ignorance has been a staple of liberal-conservatism for I don’t know however long. I support cutting (my) taxes and increasing (my) liberty – oh dear, why are some people suddenly poor and trampled upon? I would NEVER! This is just so horrible for me, I just need another tax cut right now. Have the poors tried eating cake?

Variation on a theme, I recall the complaints over the ostracism LLM-users face online as being just like the marginalization faced by black people. Waaaah!

I’ve been using Plasma & Qt-apps for years for their extensive user customizability and as I came from Windows, the Mac-paradigm of GNOME/GtK has always felt foreign personally. If they really go slop I don’t think I can keep using them, but the GNOME UX just goes against the grain for me. Is there any other well-maintained modern desktop stack at all that has foregone LLMs?

The EAs and Trump really deserve each other.

Broke: scared of cheaper Chinese competition

Woke: scared of runaway AGI

And who do we have here conducting the interview: Stuart Ritchie, anti-trans activist & one of the more ‘deniable’ eugenics types of the late 2010s. What an incredibly tight ecosystem our good friends inhabit indeed lol.

Of course The Economist (inherently derogatory) would criti-hype AI.

A magazine whose editorial line is confident cluelessness.

Many are contrasting the bsky response to harassment of trans users to the harassment of AI developers and users.

Many are contrasting the demand for gay marriage with the demand for human-animal marriage.

Same shit, but the lack of thinking your argument through yourself does fit with being a chatbot-enthusiast.

Have been using Tutanota for years. They took an anti-AI stance pretty early on as well.

Seems like he’s very heavily professionally invested in the symbolic paradigm and given machine learning completely dominates AI at the moment he’s taking the piss at them whenever he can. Given the fundamental limitations of ML he’s probably right that any sincere attempt to improve on them requires a more symbolic approach, but talking specifically about AGI is getting into woo territory.

Was he promoting LLMs earlier on?

It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle

It should be said here again that these people don’t even know what academic freedom means and are abusing the term. They mean it essentially as a synonym for free speech, but academic freedom has specifically do to with freedom from state interference in the affairs of the university born from the struggles over its sovereignty between the two in European history; it has nothing to do with academia itself having the means to proscribe the conduct of individual academics. If a geology department suspends a flat-earther, that is academic freedom (among other things) operating as intended. Ironically, the US ambassador directly intervening in the proceedings at Ghent is the actual violation of academic freedom here and these idiots are completely clueless about it.

It seems the Chinese government is quite sincere in its ‘sci-tech’ ambitions, which include AI. Though there doesn’t seem to be the same levels of sci-fi fantasism as in Silicon Valley, just a more practical focus on seizing the high-tech global frontier and supertuning its surveillance-capitalist model.