I mean, the competition isn't setting a high bar, between the guy complaining about 'white people not having a homeland' and the other guy peddling addictive stuff to teens and AI slop to their grandparents.
That said, I have genuinely been enjoying Blue Sky. It has 'enough' for me. There are a bunch of YIMBYs and urbanists. The mayor of my city and one of my city councilors are there. There is starting to be a bike racing community. There are some good local journalists.
I read your other comment; I hope your optimism is warranted.
Fun fact: under the hood atproto bears many similarities to blockchain... it was funded in during the 2019/2020 crypto craze. I'm not too involved, but outside of a consensus mechanism, atproto looks a bit like a chain, kinda like IPFS.
I'm very deep into ATProto development, in particular I have the first Permissioned PDS implementation [1]. It definitely has roots in blockchain / federated, but makes tradeoffs for UX.
The more interesting perspective is a Plug-n-Play Distributed System [2]
LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source where you could do innovative work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS.
I don't think that's an exciting idea for the Free Software Foundation.
Perhaps with time we'll be able to run local ones that are 'good enough', but we're not there yet.
There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations.
Edit: I guess the conclusion I come to is that LLM's are good for 'getting things done', but the context in which they are operating is one where the balance of power is heavily tilted towards capital, and open source is perhaps less interesting to participate in if the machines are just going to slurp it up and people don't have to respect the license or even acknowledge your work.
> LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source
Yeah, a bit of a conundrum. But I don't think that fighting for copyright now can bring any benefits for FOSS. GNU should bring Stallman back and see whether he can come with any new ideas and a new strategy. Alternatively they could try without Stallman. But the point is: they should stop and think again. Maybe they will find a way forward, maybe they won't but it means that either they could continue their fight for a freedom meaningfully, or they could just stop fighting and find some other things to do. Both options are better then fighting for copyright.
> There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations.
I want a clarify this statement a bit. The thing with LLM relying on work of others are not against GPU philosophy as I understand it: algorithms have to be free. Nothing wrong with training LLMs on them or on programs implementing them. Nothing wrong with using these LLMs to write new (free) programs. What is wrong are corporations reaping all the benefits now and locking down new algorithms later.
I think it is important, because copyright is deemed to be an ethical thing by many (I think for most people it is just a deduction: abiding the law is ethical, therefore copyright is ethical), but not for GNU.
IMO the primary significant trend in AI. Doesn't get talked about nearly enough. Means the AI is working, I guess.
>GNU should bring Stallman back ... Alternatively they could try without Stallman.
Leave Britney alone >:(
>copyright is deemed to be an ethical thing by many (I think for most people it is just a deduction: abiding the law is ethical, therefore copyright is ethical)
I've busted out "intellectual property is a crime against humanity" at layfolk to see if that shortcuts through that entire little politico-philosophical minefield. They emote the requisite mild shock when such things as crimes against humanity are mentioned; as well as at someone making such a radical statement which seems to come from no familiar species of echo chamber; and then a moment later they begin to very much look like they see where I'm coming from.
How do you even argue such a thing? I've had no such luck, I've met many people who seem to view copyright and a person owning their ideas and work as a sort of inherent moral.
Not saying this gets through to people, but copyright is purely about the legal ability to restrict what other people do. Whereas property rights are about not allowing others to restrict what you do (e.g. by taking your stuff).
> LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones
There are near-SOTA LLM's available under permissive licenses. Even running them doesn't require prohibitive expenses on hardware unless you insist on realtime use.
>Perhaps with time we'll be able to run local ones that are 'good enough', but we're not there yet.
Right now, we can get local models that you can run on consumer hardware, that match capabilities of state of the art models from two years ago. The improvements to model architecture may or may not maintain the same pace in the future, but we will get a local equivalent to Opus 4.6 or whatever other benchmark of "good enough" you have, in the foreseeable future.
> LLM's - to date - seem to require massive capital expenditures to have the highest quality ones, which is a monumental shift in power towards mega corporations and away from the world of open source where you could do innovative work on your own computer running Linux or FreeBSD or some other open OS.
When the FSF and GPL were created, I don't think this was really a consideration. They were perfectly happy with requiring Big Iron Unix or an esoteric Lisp Machine to use the software - they just wanted to have the ability to customize and distribute fixes and enhancements to it.
Free software didn't really take off until a couple of things happened 1) personal computers got good enough to run Linux and BSD and 2) more people get connected to the internet.
The 'good enough' part is the important one here, I think.
> There's also an ethical/moral question that these things have been trained on millions of hours of people's volunteer work and the benefits of that are going to accrue to the mega corporations.
This was already the case and it just got worse, not better.
At a certain point, I think we had reached a kind of equilibrium where some corporations were decent open source citizens. They understood that they could open source things like infrastructure or libraries and keep their 'crown jewels' closed. And while Stallman types might not have been happy with that, it seemed to work out for people.
Now they've just hoovered up all the free stuff into machines that can mix it up enough to spit it out in a way that doesn't even require attribution, and you have to pay to use their machine.
AI essentially gatekeeps all of open source to companies to pluck from to their hearts content. And individual contributors using these tools and freely mixing it with their own - usual minor - contributions are another step of whitewashing because they're definitely not going to own up to writing only 5% of the stuff they got paid for.
Before we had RedHat and Ubuntu, who at least were contributing back, now we have Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI who are racing to lock the barn door around their new captive sheep. It's just a massive IP laundromat.
I don't begrudge the companies charging use their machine, but writing all the code and prose and everything else that the machine ingested was hard too.
Is massive capital expenditure not also required to enforce the GPL? If some company steals your GPLed code and doesn't follow the license, you will have to sue them and somebody will have to pay the lawyers.
> Is massive capital expenditure not also required to enforce the GPL?
It's nowhere near the order of magnitude of the kind of spending they're sinking into LLM's. The FSF and other groups were reasonably successful at enforcing the GPL, operating on a budget 1000's of times smaller than that of AI companies.
Right but LLM companies are building frontier models with frontier talent while trying to sock up demand with a loss leader strategy, on top of an historic infrastructure build out.
Being able to coat efficiently run frontier models is i think, not a high priced endeavor for an org (compared to an individual).
IMO the proposition is little fishy, but its not totally without merit and imo deserves investigation. If we are all worried about our jobs, even via building custom for sale software, there is likely something there that may obviate the need at least for end user applications. Again, im deeply skeptical, but it is interesting.
> Being able to coat efficiently run frontier models is i think, not a high priced endeavor for an org
Running proprietary model would make you subject to whatever ToS the LLM companies choose on a particular day, and what you can produce with them, which circles back to the raison d'etre for the GPL and GNU.
Until all software copyright is dead and buried, there is no need for copyleft to change tack. Otherwise there rising tide may rise high enough to drown GPL, but not proprietary software.
Open source is easier to counterfeit/license-launder/re-implement using LLMs because source code is much lower-hanging fruit, and is understood by more people than closed-source assembly.
How close are we to good enough and who's working on that? I would be interested in supporting that work; to my mind, many of the real objections to LLMs are diminished if we can make them small and cheap enough to run in the home (and, perhaps, trained with distributed shared resources, although the training problem is the harder one).
Good question. It seems like most of the tech world is perfectly happy to be sharecroppers on the Big AI farms. I guess that's not quite the right analogy, since they're doing their own things with it; just that at the end of the day, the tool they're building everything on is owned by someone else.
If LLM's are indeed a game changer professionally, you kind of need to pick one.
Personally, I loathe seeing power shift towards mega corporations like that, away from being able to run your own computer with free software, but it feels like the economics are headed that way in terms of productivity.
You cannot rely on a closed source "AI" in someone else's cloud for your work. After all, it can be disabled for you at any time. "AI" can easily steal all your technological secrets. At the request of the owner, "AI" can easily mislead you and insert backdoors into your products. "AI" can even easily incorrectly answer some questions specifically for you if the owner of "AI" wants to remove your competition. And you may not even understand it.
It'd be cool to see a screenshot of what 'observer' shows as the process tree with a few agents active.
Edit: for those not familiar with the BEAM ecosystem, observer shows all the running Erlang 'processes' (internal to the VM). Here are some examples screenshots on one of the first Google hits I found:
In the US, people bend over backwards to ensure that there is free storage for automobiles. And that housing and businesses are forced to include that expensive (parking spots can run into the 10's of thousands of dollars for some kinds of construction) amenity. Fortunately that's starting to change, but it is a big battle. And meanwhile, CO2 levels keep rising.
He may not be perfect on everything, but elect more people like him and it starts moving the needle. Or elect some more that are even more opposed to some of these things. It doesn't happen overnight. Change is difficult.
I agree, though notice that the GOP/MAGA have and continue to make enormous changes. The difference is that they believe they can do it while others sit around talking about hopelessness and powerlessness. The only difference is belief.
Did democrats offer primaries in the last elections?
Did voting for Bernie Sanders in the last two primaries (especially the ones when Trump won for the first time) amount to anything?
I wonder how long can the American public keep the self delusion that the elections are anything but a theater for the naive, to keep the pretense the public has any say in things that matter.
How much has the current administration asked the public about going to war with Iran?
Money issue is also a skill issue, but I have no doubt in the era of free media someone could figure it out.
Sorry I didn't invent the idea that there are federal elections every two years, I'm just telling you that you have to win them. Bonus points: this is also how you can change the election schedule or political system!
If you're saying both candidates were bad when one was Trump, and the other was Hillary, Kamala, or Joe, then you don't have very good judgement. I agree Trump lying about not starting a war was bad. Many of us have said for years that he is a terrible liar. Please help us.
I agree that Clinton/Harris/Biden are not equally bad as Trump.
Trump is monstrously bad (= force the shit hitting the fan NOW), the democratic alternatives were just 'normally' bad (= continue the same old crap driving the shit closer to the fan, ignoring the looming disaster).
> How much has the current administration asked the public about going to war with Iran
Here is the 2026 Senate map [1]. Do you suggest any of them will flip over Iran? (I don’t. The folks who regularly vote simply don’t show any sign that this is a priority. Folks who stay at home grumbling don’t matter.)
1) He did not win primaries, in significant part also because DNC was heavily against him. The level playing field thing.
2) If he won the primaries, there is still no guarantee that that would have amounted to anything.
First, he might not have won the elections (mainstream media and the whole ruling elites were heavily against him). And even if he won, he might not have been able to do much against the permanent state.
I still think the main cause of Trump's wins is the deep disillusionment of the democratic voters by Obama's failure (inability/unwillingness) to impact a meaningful change.
Sadly, it is also factually correct (i.e. not delusional).
Which of my statements are you contesting?
From my point of view, your stance (play fairly, according to the rules set by your stronger opponent) is delusional. Note that the opponent is not 'republicans', but the whole ruling elites.
And no, I can't help you, I am not USian, just an outside observer. Sadly, due to its weight, whatever USA does, heavily influences everybody else as well.
No, it isn’t. Sanders’ supporters didn’t have the votes. That’s a fact.
If people believe in something, they should call their electeds and vote. The fact that a lot of people with a certain confluence of views (privacy, anti-war, et cetera) are too lazy to do either (regardless of post rationalization), but not self aware enough to not complain about it, is delusional cynicism.
I said the leadership of the democratic party did dirty tricks to prevent him winning.
The mainstream media was also against him.
Not anywhere close to a level playing field.
Note, that I am not against voting or calling your elected officials and all the related stuff. That is necessary. But, sadly, far from sufficient. If you think that that is sufficient, you are delusional.
Your subsequent generalizations are lazy and unsubstantiated, in fact they fit the classical smear patterns established by the mainstream media.
But still, ultimately, turnout was turnout. Media saying mean things about your side isn’t a real excuse, Trump has been saying the same for a decade.
> they fit the classical smear patterns established by the mainstream media
Of course they must. In the meantime, the issues I care about seem decently reflected (outside privacy and war, where I concede most Americans who share my views are lazy, delusional and nihilistic). I’ve even had the opportunity to help write some state and federal legislation. So I guess I should be okay with the lack of political competition.
> Did democrats offer primaries in the last elections?
Uh, yeah? I voted for Biden/Harris.
And in any case, focusing almost exclusively on one race is part of the problem. Where I live, we also had a Dem primary for the house district, and a more electable candidate won - and then went on to win in the general. It was one of the very few red->blue flips in 2024.
Then there are all the races for school boards, city council, county commission and all those things that provide the base and the bench to build off of.
I like that I can’t tell if this is some sort of admonition for not voting centrist enough in a primary that didn’t happen or for not voting left enough in a primary that did not happen. It seems like if you’re going to be so bold as to do a callout you might as well say what for (and why you either picked or specifically skipped a primary that did not happen)
... But the government flooding cities with thousands of masked thugs with a license to do whatever they want... has so far been an entirely Republican thing.
There are more colours to the world than pure black and pure white. There are also a million shades of grey in between, and most of us have the ability to distinguish between them.
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