[-] mkhoury@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I sympathize, I also feel like the fight against the corporations is hopeless. The loss of leverage against employers for tech workers is huge in the face of LLMs. I'm a tech worker myself and am facing those same problems. But I'm not sure that this means that FOSS is useless. The corps have a huge incentive to create these tools, whether they're open source or not. But at least when they're open source, we the people can also use them. I'm not suggesting that we can do this with LLMs today, we just don't have the right contributor and maintainer tools to do it. But right now we have to develop maintainer tools to filter out the huge amount of crap that badly designed LLM systems are putting out. This gives us the opportunity to build a contribution model that doesn't care about human vs LLM provenance, as long as it meets certain quantifiable standards. In 5-10 years, we're going to have LLMs that can infer at very high speed, meaning we can do a lot of error correction by multiplying the number of generations you make and looking for consistency. The engineering effort for LLM systems is barely started, these systems are gonna get way more robust. Wouldn't it be better if these systems were built in the open so that we can all share, understand and leverage these tools for ourselves?

As for the gatekeeping/democratizing of art and tech, I agree that anyone can learn that stuff if they put enough effort into it. But by the simple fact that people need to put time and sweat into it, it disqualifies a large swath of the population, from children to neurodivergent people to low wage workers who don't have the breathing room to rest let alone take up programming. It's really not about a 'soldier at the gate', no person or group is preventing anyone from learning how to code. The social order and biology sometimes makes it so. Wouldn't it be better for everyone if anyone could modify their software without having to invest a shitload of time to learn how to code? Like maybe this person only wants this one specific change in one specific app-- the ROI just isn't there if they have to learn a whole new field.

I am not trying to say that AI and LLMs are the next best thing since sliced bread. I think there's huge problems with it, but I also think that they can be powerful tools if we wield them properly. I think there's big limitations on the tech, and huge ethical implications about the way they're built and their cost to the planet. I'm hoping that we can fix these in the long run, but I sure as fuck don't count on the current AI industry leaders to do it. They're going to use this tech to supercharge surveillance capitalism, imo. It's gonna be fucking horrible. What I hope is that we can carve out a space for personal computing with the help of FLOSS.

[-] mkhoury@lemmy.ca 2 points 10 months ago

These are very poor arguments for smoking cigarettes, but sure...

[-] mkhoury@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

What do you mean? I follow a lot of hashtags on Mastodon. Won't I be seeing a lot of Threads content if I'm on a server federated with them without explicitly opting into that?

[-] mkhoury@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I get ya. I think there's also a petulant sentiment of "you don't want to play fair? Then fuck you, I won't either"

[-] mkhoury@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago

Agreed, and to me the solution is not "let's hope the companies play nice", but rather to bring in anti-monopoly regulations, like Canada's Bill C-56.

We need to force companies to add interoperability, transparency and fairness imho. Like the ongoing fight to force Apple to allow competing browsers in iOS. Or alternate app stores for Android and iOS.

[-] mkhoury@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago

Ah, that's not my understanding of civil disobedience. I prefer this definition: "civil disobedience is a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies" (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/)

I suppose the piracy aspect might not be public enough to count as civil disobedience though, unless you count as public the noticeable cumulative effects of all piracy.

[-] mkhoury@lemmy.ca 2 points 11 months ago

I was under the impression that there were resources in that area that the US currently has privileged access to because of their alliances there. So they have a stake in making their allies come out on top.

[-] mkhoury@lemmy.ca 1 points 11 months ago

How much should they be paid for it? In a situation where the streaming services have a stranglehold on the market and are extracting a big amount in rent-seeking price vs actually paying the people who labored to create it, should we continue to pay and give in to their morally dubious tactics? In this lens, can piracy be considered a form of civil disobedience?

[-] mkhoury@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

Looks like maybe the note is down? I just get an empty list :(

[-] mkhoury@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

I don't see anymars wrong with it

[-] mkhoury@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

I haven't played any Metal Gear since MGS2, will I still be able to enjoy it?

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mkhoury

joined 2 years ago