Considering that politics is about the exchange of ideas between people so a society can be governed (by whatever system applies) and laws can be enacted to make that government functional, I would consider political basically the political process itself, laws, philosophy, maybe history (which informs the other ones and usually has some inherent biases), maybe literature (the same) and a few other disciplines. Mostly things that are by nature subjective and can’t be measured in an objective way (like math, or engineering in general can).

That doesn’t mean that the latter can’t be “contamined” by politics, especially the disciplines which are a mixed bag of objectivity and subjectivity, like architecture or the economical sciences. But that’s why the key word here is “inherently”: those disciplines are not inherently political, they’ve been co-opted by interest groups precisely because of that subjectivity.

Don’t agree. Computing is no more inherently political than a knife is inherently a murder weapon. It’s a tool, and can be used for many things, including political use (or misuse, nowadays).

There’s some truth to the fact that anti-intellectualism plays some part in the backlash to both vaccines and AI.

But there’s a difference: vaccines were pushed by medical science and governments around the world as a solution to a real problem (disease), with pretty much no side effects at societal scale.

Generative AI is being pushed by greedy companies (and governments that don’t want to lose this artificial “arms race”) as a solution to nobody’s problem, and with a lot of side effects (global warming, raising power bills, raising the cost of electronic devices, filling the internet with crap, making the internet less secure, lowering open source incentives, making it easier for bad actors to influence democracy, etc. I could go on).

I don’t dislike GenAI, and I think it can be a good technology when well implemented: narrow AI, or general AI with open training datasets and open weights that anyone (or at least a small company) can run locally. Instead we’re getting super general AI controlled by an oligopoly of companies that see you as the product, partnering with governments that want to surveil and control you.

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Those came later (late '90s-early '00s), and ran mostly on Windows; believe it or not, at that time there were people that used Linux or Mac (I dual booted, Wintendo for games, everything else on Linux).

And most malware came from shady sites. Again, if you were careful, you rarely got it (rarely, not never). If you were not careful, well, it usually was obvious because even if your Windows was not infected with a virus or trojan, your browser would be full of toolbars and the PC would run like crap.

I also used gopher, usenet, uucp, archie and all that in the early '90s. And if you were just a little bit careful, catching a virus or trojan was very rare.

Now, everything is monetized. You’re under constant surveillance on a scale it was unimaginable at that time, and being careful amounts to nothing (unless you’re super paranoid) because your security depends completely on how others secure your data, assuming that they’re trying to secure and not sell it.

In this respect, now it’s much, much worse than it was, even if in some other ways it’s somewhat better.

Peak internet was around 2005-2010, IMHO.

It’s far from useless. Overblown, for sure.

They made an awesome hammer that can solve many hammer-related tasks, but they’re selling it like it can also cook, drive and keep the house clean.

Blame the companies, not the math.

It’s not like that. Tokens are an inherent computational property of how a model calculates the probabilities and such to generate text.

Having said that, what a token means in terms of computation varies wildly between models and is not directly comparable. So attributing a money value to tokens in general, independently of the model, is weird by nature.

And even within a model, the number of tokens needed to generate a response is very variable too, depending of the model itself and the parameters with which it has been configured (thinking mode, temperature, etc.).

So yeah, companies can pretty much set any price they want and there’s not much anyone can do about it.

Claude is trained on stolen data (the whole Internet), so I can’t have any sympathy for Anthropic when someone steals from them.

Given that the LLMs could follow the short lists of words well but not the longer lists, and that they were processing images, not text, I think it’s more likely that their context just filled up and they forgot the original instructions (or they were assigned a lower weight in the computation).

For many years I have thought that elementary schools should be free of any modern electronic tech. In middle school it should be introduced but not connected to internet (word processors, interactive encyclopedias or coding like we used to learn it in the '80s or '90s, BASIC, Logo, that kind of stuff).

Finally, introduce internet in high school, in a controlled way, focusing primarily on knowledge and research sites. No LLMs included.

Of course you can’t control what happens in the students’ homes, but that should not affect what happens at school, specially if you replace homework with schoolwork, which I also think it’s better in the long run.

Plain wireguard. Or maybe Pangolin?

https://github.com/fosrl/pangolin

A couple of days ago I finished reading “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams. This book really shows how awful the people at the top of Facebook are (it probably applies to other similar companies as well). And it’s not that they want to be evil, it’s more like they are playing a game of fame, pride and power and don’t care about the consequences. It made me recall the quote about “the banality of evil”.

The funny thing is, being a developer, I was talking to someone the other day about how in my opinion, middle managers were way easier to replace with AI than developers (less domain knowledge, less creative work, etc.). And basically, at least according to the article, that’s the people that Cloudflare fired.

Not that anyone should be replaced by AI, but it’s ironic that many of the people who are shoving AI down our throats are the easiest to replace in an organization.

Stalin suing Hitler. I’m rooting for both of them to lose.

That doesn’t solve the problem: it only disables the duck.ai assistant, but doesn’t disable the search results that are normal websites generated with AI (the real issue here). To be fair, that’s not DDG problem specifically but every search engine problem.

The web is now full of these fake websites, which is a real problem because on the search results they look legit and only when visiting them you realize it’s AI crap.

And the funny (or sad) thing is that current AIs are being trained on these fake hallucinating sites, so even they are suffering from false information, which in turn is given to humans and used to make more fake websites and… the result is up to your imagination.

Control and censorship. Imagine a developer distributing an apk that Google doesn’t like, let’s say, emulators, ad-blockers, VPNs (if they become illegal in some places), piracy apps or many others. Just remove their verified status and voilà.

This is awful. Google is quickly becoming a new walled garden, Apple-style.