Comment Re: Why do we care? (Score 0) 176
The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.
The $5K a year just gives you a $300 per person per visit discount. So pays itself back in 15 visits or so.
I think you CAN have it both ways: Announce at the beginning: "If you want, I will give you a B- (or whatever grade works) but to get this grade you must promise never to set foot in the class and never to speak about the topic of this course with anyone on campus. Otherwise, we will explore the syllabus completely free from the stench of grade-grubbers who are at the school in order to get some sort of imagined advantage in the world." Then, no tests. Grades or evaluations will be felt out as the class goes. The B- people will get the bullshit degree that they paid for, they might well succeed in the dumb-ass world, who gives a shit.
This crisis hasn't been brewing: university has always had two conflicting purposes: investigate interesting stuff deeply with people who have devoted their lives to this; and a mechanism to reproduce and reinforce the class system. This second purpose hides and piggybacks on the first.
LLMs are a new and developing set of techniques and computer people should be experimenting. The "speed" of development has been turned into "speed" of trying to BLOCK experimentation. We are being instructed to think of "AI" as something that only a few behemoth companies do. Like how "computers" are just MS and Apple, or "phones" are just AT&T, or "Christians" are just in Rome, or "voters" are only landowners, "writers" are only monks... This article is part of a bald and disgusting POWER-GRAB.
US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic WANT regulation in order to block weaker players from developing competing AIs because they can't conform to the regulations. The "costs" of running AI will be the cost of having massive data centers with all kinds of anti-copyright regulations, and a proliferating list of other phony safeguards, including "safe guarding" the companies' own interests in parallel with being moral police, fear mongers, and buck-passers. Chinese and independent developers will train on pirated data and will not need data centers because they will be able to run locally. This will give them some competitive advantages - so the US companies will push to make training data, i.e, all writing and reading, be regulated – no one will be allowed to read websites unless they are logged in and ID authenticated. US AI companies will pay for access. Non-payers will be accused of violating international trade pacts, etc. Their AI models will be banned and there will be a movement to consider them criminal, selfish, etc. The main foreign policy of the US will be to get other countries to agree to license training data, and this issue will dominate US policy. When I (me, a programmer) want to program/train my own AI, it will be made illegal or at least very difficult. Right now it is difficult from a tech resource and org resource POV. But soon all the difficulty will be strictly from a regulatory POV. My access will increasingly need to be monitored and blocked.
But all of this is just a continuation of the DRM fights and the Free Software battles of the last decades. It isn't even a huge shift. It is a disgusting and short-sighted vision of our values. The worst parts of our culture and business practices have come to dominate the world.
Plenty of us nerds can afford this and want to see news about this.
I tried hard in the last 2 months: I bought Claude, came up with a project I thought seemed reasonable: JS-based rich-text editor with plugin system. Existing solutions (CKEditor, TinyMCE, Quill, etc etc) are old, unwieldy, sometimes proprietary, and modern browsers have many newly supported features... My goal was an HTML web component of /
I tried to carefully prompt. Before coding I used Claude to help research the issues involved (dead standards, browsers handling edges cases differently, generated HTML questions, etc.). Claude was thoughtful and reassuring. I knew it would be more complex than Claude kept insisting, but that's OK. As usual with LLMs, at first I was more than impressed, I was blown away.
Still, bugs. That's expected. Fixes were easy and it was amazing how Claude understood the issues. But the more I tested, the more the bugs proliferated. Some issues activated Claude to rewrite whole architectural parts of the codebase, which broke dependencies. Fixing the dependent stuff introduced new bugs. I slowly had to learn more and more about the implementation specifics. More and more I had to audit the code changes, revert, try again. Soon I found myself questioning Claude's approaches in what seemed to be subtle ways. At times I was forced to really dig in, and the code – which looked so clean and organized – was a true spaghetti mess. Out-of-date comments. Repeated blocks of functionality with small differences. Convoluted back-and-forth paths across files, functions, classes. Each plugin had drifted to requiring its own long list of specialized one-off supporting worlds of code. Basic browser functions got overwritten with convoluted bespoke mish-mash slop with long interruptions of exceptions work-arounds and crazy shit.
Maybe the thing works. But the bugs are brutal! Everything is delicate! I've lost track of what the hell is going on.
But all of this was very familiar! It all looked like what USED TO happen to me before I got experience. What happened when I instructed programming newbies to take a crack without supervision. What happened when someone paid $5 to Upwork for something the boss thought would be easy.
We are not there yet. Not even close. It is 1998 and we are using for layout with the "100% td width" work-around.
Garbage regulations like IP create these behemoths. If you want freedom, stop regulating monopolies into existence.
Statism creates billionaires.
Democracy is for retards.
Government did this. All of this. Government regulated so much that only a rare few can afford to compete.
This is late stage statism. Retard voters are to blame.
Like you.
Grok was constantly say it was doing something that it had ZERO ability to, and I kept calling it out and it kept apologizing and then immediately doing it again.
As a guy who spend 5 figures a year on Ai, the last thing I want is that. I know Claude and ChatGPT also do it, but Grok was doing it CONSTANTLY.
This will not end well.
Why is this a problem?
I do not want my software censoring anything I make.
Neoliberalism and liberalism are two totally different things.
Ai will just shine the light on the class of workers who have make-work just that exist solely to push them to vote harder.
When we can let markets replace them, itâ(TM)ll be a tragedy for a few generations and then it will be forgotten.
I am anti copyright and have been all my life. I have created things of value and always dump them into the public domain.
Copyright infringes our rights to use our brain and voice and hands and body.
Fuck IP.
Keep up the good work! But please don't ask me to help.