.

Is Qwen really Open Source, or do they just let you download weights? (Like LLaMa.)

It honestly seems like there may be an overall negative correlation between how safe a drug is recreationally and how legal it is to obtain/use it.

They just don’t do anything useful, and the hype-ers are acting like they’re AGI. Hallucinations make them too unreliable to be trusted with “real work”, which makes them useless for anything beyond a passing gimmick. Vibe coded software is invariably shit. Doing any serious task with “AI assistance” ends up either taking more work than doing it without LLMs or sacrificing quality or correctness in huge ways. Any time you point this out to hype-ers, they start talking about “as AI advances” as if it’s a foregone conclusion that they will. People talked the same way about blockchain, and the only “advancements” that have been made in that sphere are more grifts, and meanwhile it still takes anywhere between 10 minutes and an hour to buy a hamburger with Bitcoin, and it gets worse with greater adoption. Just like you can’t make a distributed blockchain cryptocurrency that resolves discrepancies automatically without relying on humans fast at scale (and even if you could make it fast, it’d introduce at least as many problems as it purports to “solve”), you can’t make LLMs not hallucinate. The only way to solve hallucinations is by abandoning LLMs in favor of a whole different algorithm.

If anything LLMs have blocked us from making progress toward AGI by distracting us with gimmicky bullshit and taking resources from other efforts which may otherwise have pushed us in the right direction.

Mind you, “AI” is a very old term that can mean a lot of different things. I took a class in college called “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” in… maybe 2006 or 2007. And in that class, I learned about the A* algorithm. Every time you played an escort mission in Skyrim and had an NPC following you, it was the A* algorithm or some slight variation on it that was used to make sure that NPC could traverse terrain to keep roughly in toe with you despite obstacles of various sorts. It’s absolutely nothing like LLMs. It doesn’t need to be trained. The algorithm fully works the moment it’s implemented. If you want to know why it made a particular decision, you can trace the logic and determine exactly why it did what it did, unlike LLMs. It’s for a few very niche purposes rather than trying to be general purpose like an LLM. It requires no massive data centers and doesn’t consume massive amounts of memory. And it doesn’t hallucinate. The AI hype-ers (and the media who have mostly fallen for their grift hook, line, and sinker) love to conflate completely unrelated technologies to give the impression that LLMs are getting better because such-and-such article mentions an “AI” that discovered a groundbreaking new drug. But the kind of AI they use to find drugs is very special purpose and has nothing to do with how LLMs work.

LLMs can’t do your job, but the grifters are doing a damned good job of convincing your boss that LLMs can in fact do your job. As Cory Doctorow says, the current AI craze “is the asbestos that we’re shoveling into our walls”. We’re causing huge problems with it and if/when the bubble properly pops, we’re going to spend a long time painstakingly extracting it from our systems, replacing it with… you know… stuff that actually works, and repairing the damage it’s done in the meantime.

Meanwhile, it’s Nvidia and OpenAI and so on who are boosting the LLM bubble. And they’ve made a shit ton of money off of their grift at the expense of everyone else. How anyone can look at all this and not think “scam” is beyond me.

They’re a straight up scam.

Nonsense. Everyone likes Mario Kart.

Are you the same person as the account “Grim Reaper” from a while ago?

Trump posting “good, I’m glad he’s dead” about Mueller changed my view on this. Before, I would have said celebrating Trump’s death would be encouraging some very problematic tendencies. That “the adult in the room” shouldn’t be driven by spite. Now, I suppose my position is that I don’t really think it’s “wrong” to celebrate his death. By doing so, especially by doing so in his own words, we highlight just how toxic a force he was on the U.S. and on the rest of the world. Celebrating his death may well be one of the better acts of defiance against fascism and authoritarianism one can make. If celebrating Hitler’s death isn’t wrong, perhaps so isn’t celebrating Trump’s.

And yet, would a stabbing victim celebrate the moment the knife is removed from the wound? Surely that time is better spent staunching the bleeding and dressing the wound than rebuking the knife or the stabber.

So, I suppose my answer “I hope with discretion.” I hope to be smart enough to be able to discern when and how to celebrate constructively and when and how is less helpful.

You can contribute that way. (Or with money, for instance.) And good on you if you do. (If you contribute in a way that’s actually beneficial, at least. I don’t mean to accuse you or anyone in particular, but of course there are low-effort PRs and such.) But it would be pretty antithetical to the spirit of FOSS to deny you the use of the software or access to the source code if you don’t. Which is part of the beauty.

You think they give even one single fuck how much customer satisfaction you have?

Remember how folks used to say “if you’re not paying, you’re the product”? (That, of course, was never actually true. There’s tons of, for instance, FOSS software out there that legitimately has no ulterior motives or strings attached, potentially aside from copyleft obligations that you don’t try to turn FOSS into proprietary software. But it was true to a certain point.)

Well now that’s true even if you are paying. To them you’re just a revenue source to be milked. They don’t care if you’re happy. Switching to a competitor probably won’t help any, because all their competitors probably have similar problems. You might get lucky and find a provider whose issues aren’t as much of an issue for you specifically. But the headache of switching is stressful enough that shopping around may well not be worth it.

#enshittification #latestagecapitalism

Ah. NY Post.

Source?

No one’s keeping you here.

“Deserving”, “credit”, “blame”, “justice”, and related concepts are all collective hallucinations. We’re all observers riding around powerless in robotic meat chassis and the part of us that experiences every bad and good thing we’ll ever experience is completely disconnected from the part of us that makes any decisions. There’s no “justice” in making sure someone who committed some atrocity experiences negative consequences. The “justice” system should be focused solely on rehabilitation and protecting people – innocent or otherwise. Governments trying to be in the business of “punishing” people is misguided at best.

I would donate a kidney to see this done as a serious, gritty film.

• Be me.
• Apply for job listing that requires Python experience.
• /home/tootsweet/python_projects/python_genius.py
• Called and invited to team interview.
• Arrive dressed like perfect corporate cog, leather binder in hand.
• “Do you know C#?”
• Listing never mentioned C#.
• Me: “No.”
• “We’re switching from Python to C#.”
• Didn’t get the job.

Later worked with former employees of $aforementioned_employer. They have a terrible habit of hiring in droves, only to lay off half their workforce every few years.

“TNPD” doesn’t roll off the tongue as well as “TACO”, but I’ll take it.

The kind who spends more time compiling than using my system.

Wait, where’s Gentoo?