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Comment Well... (Score 4, Interesting) 147

My opinion is that AI will kill Linux eventually. Not now, not when Linus uses it, because Linus knows how to code and is careful. But eventually the crappy vibe-coded junk will seep into the kernel. And then you'll get Microsoft-style code quality issues.

Comment Damn... There goes my porn (Score 3, Interesting) 173

Russian sites like Yandex, Rutube, VKvideo... are great to find porn. But if they go down, I'll take the minor inconvenience for the sake of Ukraine.

More seriously, Yandex has been throttling queries rather aggressively lately, and I'm pretty sure it has something to do with their compute going up in smoke due to Ukrainian drones.

Comment Re: Very Annoying (Score 1) 116

You're exaggerating or incorrect about a few things as drinkypoo mentioned but I am with you on not everything needing SSL. Static, low-risk content, where there's little harm possible from MitM (eg, some big media file especially where you're going to check md5sum anyway, text files with random jokes, collections of memes, tbh like half the pointless bs people post on social media), is probably fine to put on plain http. It's annoying that when I put stuff like that on http to save some cycles on a tiny server, nearly every web browser does "OOH BIG SCARY YOU'RE BEING HACKED OMG!!!! ALERT ALERT ALERT!!!".

To be fair, the people who understand how to manage risk probably can handle that browser interstitial without freaking out, but still.

And all of the cloud and SSL providers are now insistent that they know what's best for the web, requiring public expiration to get so short â" which just so happens to be a great way to sell more certificates and managed cloud services.

At least Let's Encrypt exists, but you have to wonder if that will always be the case...

Comment Re: Standing on the shoulders of giants (Score 1) 115

Writing music (or any other creative endeavor) is not just about mimicking learned patterns, but about experimenting until you create something actually new. Models are recombining patterns using deep learning, which can give the appearance of novelty without actually being genuine creations, unless there's adequate guidance and shaping by a human. The problem is that there is a way that real inspiration and innovation *feel* which becomes delocalized when the cognitive labor is mostly offloaded to a model and thus hard to recognize, especially if you don't actually have experience doing the creative act yourself. So people who don't know how to write music will make slop, and even experienced artists could end up with stuff that is mostly slop if they're not paying very careful attention.

Plus the social value of creativity is based on recognition of the effort involved in creating novel things; many people appreciate art because it reflects human experience and human effort, which can get muddled or lost with generative AI.

I have been writing music and studying computing since childhood and studying some machine learning since I was a teen, three decades ago. I don't think all generative AI is useless or offensive (though the resource overconsumption with the LLMs-in-everything fad is a serious problem, and I do believe there is a type of expected-usage violation / consent problem with many AI vendor training sets and products). The disagreements about deep learning and generative AI (exaggerated by a bubble-driven profit motive, unfortunately) will take work to solve because new social contract concepts will have to gradually be explored and tested over the coming years by billions of humans until a general consensus is reached on what fair use now means and how intellectual "property" ethics are navigated.

I think people are asserting a lot of things which amount to gazing into a crystal ball around these topics, but there are at least two things which I feel pretty sure of based on my experience: the human creative process is much more complicated than LLM/GAN training+prompting, and actual human creativity has value which a machine is unlikely to replicate effectively at least anytime soon â" though simulacra of creativity pass enough of a capitalist sniff test to make money, detracting from the livelihoods of artists already dealing with the nightmarish economic calculus of trying to make creative things while paying the bills in the contemporary era.

Of course, litigative copyright scalping companies don't add any value to society either and are effectively just another type of nuisance; Round Hill looks to be a hedge fund manager's project to make money off others' labor without actually facilitating human creativity. Cue the infamous "I believe everyone involved in this story should die" Norm Macdonald line... (which is much more applicable here than the original transphobic "joke"!)

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