It will definitely be profitable for the hardware makers. Companies whose entire value proposition depends on the model weights not leaking in an increasingly sloppy vulnerability-filled world of IT? Not so much.

Contributions from russians make up a sizeable portion of Linux and GNU tooling. A myriad of foundational software, from nginx to strace, were created and are currently maintained by russian citizens.

While there has been a lot of brain drain (hello), russia is still a country of 140 million people and the remains of great soviet theoretical education. In such conditions there will be both a bunch computer science geniuses and a small army of half-competent coders which would allow you to roll your own OS, let alone a distro, if the efforts were organized enough.

Baikal went bankrupt in 2023 because they used TSMC for chip production.

Elbrus is barely hanging on but it’s helplessly far behind, you can’t really run a modern DE and browse modern web on anything but their flagship Elbrus-16C, but that’s made for servers, AFAIK there are no “desktop” form-factor motherboards for it at all, and it’s exceptionally pricy compared to competition.

I think a more likely outcome is that russia starts bulk-purchasing chinese CPUs soon.

Thanks! I enjoy your work a lot as well, in fact your Italian bridge pic is what inspired me to start posting random photos from my trips again :)

Middle of nowhere in Serbia

I’ve been trying out JPEG-XL, because the quality I can get within Lemmy’s 1MB upload limit is much better, but I think I’ll switch back to regular old JPEG from now on (also because Lemmy’s UI doesn’t work too well with JXL).

Here’s the biggest JPEG that fits:

I think you’re joking, but in case you’re not… This is just like the paradox of tolerance, everyone has a right to privacy and freedom but if they violate other’s rights, society will in exchange take away theirs. We don’t (generally) call imprisoned criminals “victims of kidnapping” either.

Also similar to the BMW heated seats nonsense.

There is clearly a push coming from these companies in the past month to present AI as something extremely dangerous. The way I see it, it’s just marketing for the industry to keep the grift bubble going a while longer still: (1) there’s no such thing as bad press, (2) if it’s dangerous it must also be good. IMO public statements like this is just another element in that marketing campaign.

Maybe the bubble is closer to bursting than I imagine and they’re trying to stretch it out until the US midterm elections end.

I suspect in reality it’s a combination of all those reasons, probably in different amounts for all three.

There is an near-infinite expanse of stuff to learn in every direction you look. Human knowledge and culture is a fractal, even when you think you know everything about a subject there’s always more to be surprised by or to do.

I’ve recently been reading up on cryptography. That part of software engineering alone can take years to catch up with the latest post-quantum developments.

There is also always some basic shit which you forget with time. I need to re-read The Art of Computer Programming at some point.

If you just pipe an LLM straight into a feedback loop with a console, it is going to destroy things rather soon, depending on the context window and other factors. All the agentic fluff is basically the workaround for LLMs going off the rails.

Pipe it into root on your laptop for a couple days and see how it fares.

Nah, LLMs are pretty useful for a wide range of tasks. I would grant them the status of “locally intelligent for text manipulation”. They can find patterns, transform, compress, and even generate text pretty well if you formulate the prompt correctly.

The problem with them is two-fold:

1. There is no actual grounded intelligence involved and yet they are used for all sorts of tasks where it is required, like research or decision-making or software architecture or creative writing.
2. They also captured human emotional states really well, which makes them scarily addictive for people looking for human connection (see all the “companion” chatbots) and terrifyingly useful for pushing propaganda, misinfo, and scams. This also multiplies the first problem tenfold because LLMs are trained to come off as confident which means they will “pretend” to be good at things they really are not, and if you don’t know how the underlying tech works you can be lulled into believing its confidently incorrect research results or execute a totally insane decision it makes.

Wars in the Middle East start sounding more and more like statistics that no one really wants to hear about

Has this not been the case for the past 25 years already? No real need for “AI” when you already have an obedient and trigger-happy military with plenty of remote-controlled toys and your populace is brainwashed to believe “brown person = terrorist”.

way less soldiers to choose to disregard unlawful orders

What is the last known case of a US soldier disregarding an unlawful order? If anything, the military is full of assholes who are happy to kill for fun. See: Graham Platner

Will AI make it easier and/or cheaper? Probably, sadly. But it won’t be a qualitative change.

five minutes earlier: “hey dude, marketing here. if you quit and post this dramatic text about the inevitability of AGI on your X account you’ll get a huge golden parachute”.

Seriously, how can competent people look at the current state of LLMs and think that it’s anywhere near AGI material?

Sure, it is already making civilizational changes for the worse. Not because it’s good, rather because it makes us lazy and dumb, has decimated creative jobs, and is used relentlessly for propaganda and misinformation. And it’s much better at using the scaffolding of existing structure to make chaos, than it is at making new structure, making it a weapon more easily yielded by the evil then by the good. A few more software vulnerabilities discovered along the way will not be such a big deal in comparison.

I think it’s more about how this doesn’t follow the usual rule for adjective agreement. By that rule it would be le manteau blanc / la veste blance, but that sounds weird and un-French I suppose so “blanche” it is. (I don’t know French very well so take this all with a grain of salt)

https://youtu.be/TjPhzgxe3L0?t=25

Imperial China has you covered: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot_binding (the horrors never cease)

I should be able to take whatever day I want whenever I want

Yes, workers should be able to take whatever day off they want. If a manager is incapable of managing that through extra staffing and incentives, that’s a manager’s problem. “Professional attitude”, “team attitude” is literally manipulative corporate speak designed to get workers to forfeit their rights for no benefit of their own.

that attitude does not last long where I am from.

That means you are from a shitty place for workers, and trying to push that shitty attitude on others. That’s all.

“Piracy” (in a sense of unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials) was a thing ever since copyright became a thing. Otherwise you wouldn’t need copyright to be a law.

Movie/video piracy existed since the 80s, before TPB there were bootleg DVDs, before then there was bootleg VHS. For music it goes back even further, relatively reel-to-reel machines which could copy entire albums at good-enough quality existed back in the 1950s, and compact cassettes got good-enough for music in the 70s.