Top priorities for marketable skills:

• Linux (most important)
• Python (most versatile)
• Rust. Especially embedded Rust (run your code on a microcontroller)

Seriously though, do that Linux upskill challenge thing that’s been going on for the past few months on Lemmy. Also, read through the entire Python MotW series and you’ll have two tech superpowers.

What’s it good for? I mean, beyond good ol SSH?

Webmin is still around‽

If you’re constantly pawsing during a wag, you need to get out and bark more.

What about non-cam dogs? Not every bitch is on OnlyWags.

Yet another reason why we need to move the world off of its oil dependency.

No, the vulnerabilities were always there, AI is just pointing them out publicly.

I used to work as a professional hacker. Let me tell you something that the news never, ever talks about: If a company doesn’t have a bug bounty program, we kept those vulnerabilities to ourselves.

A government has vast resources to do just that: Keep the vulnerabilities to themselves until they feel like using them. They will not disclose them. They will keep them in their back pocket until the day comes when they need them for an op.

The only time they disclose vulnerabilities is when they think they’re too easy to find and there’s a public interest benefit to getting the problem fixed (e.g. the government is using those products).

What this means is that AI really is making FOSS vastly more secure than it ever was. This is probably pissing off government red teams to no end.

What we’re not hearing about as much is AI finding vulnerabilities in closed source products. Not because it’s not finding them, but because the disclosures are kept private (because companies treat it as bad PR and they’re assholes about it).

You can bet your ass that AIs run by state actors are building up massive war chests of vulnerabilities in closed source products right now. We’ll only hear about them after these products get exploited and maybe not even then because so, so many companies have no idea WTF they’re doing in regards to infosec. Think about it: How many CEOs are right now demanding their teams reduce the amount of FOSS they use because of the recent news? These people are idiots and apparently never heard that old joke about a new employee making a $100,000 mistake… “We just spent $100,000 training them!”

Good news: We’re rapidly making FOSS the most secure software ever.

Bad news: We’re doing it in the most painful way possible.

AI isn’t inherently unethical. The very premise of saying such a thing is flawed.

Is it unethical to use AI to find new drugs and medical treatments? To use it for physics research? What about regular research? Writing code?

Where do you draw the line?

Also, AI was used to design the current crop of fusion reactors and the full potential of that is only just getting started. If it turns out that AI solves all the issues and generates a working fusion reactor design, it’ll make every one of your arguments moot. Because that one achievement will be worth everything. It would “save the world” so to speak (from an energy/emissions standpoint).

Chatting with an LLM is less impact than driving a car. Think about that for a second before you say using it is unethical. It’s literally more negative for the world for someone to drive a car every day to work than it is to ask an AI to find something on the Internet or write a program in Python.

Or perhaps your underlying complaint is more about capitalism than it is about AI?

Put it into perspective:

• Everyone doing their laundry uses more water than all data centers combined. Golf courses also use vastly more water.
• Data centers use about 1-2% of global electricity.

People driving cars pollutes more as does global shipping, regular old consumerism, etc. The environmental impact of data centers is negligible in the grand scheme of things.

Now that AI is making open source software the most secure software ever written (the hard way, hehe), not using it to scan your stuff is now considered worst practices and basically idiotic negligence. No company that uses software or anything with firmware can afford to ignore it anymore.

There’s no way out of it. Accept the new AI reality and push for good regulations. Example: If we made it so that all AI data centers had to be powered via renewable energy on site that would allay most of the energy use/environmental concerns.

The anti-AI sentiment here is ridiculous. They were asking a legitimate question!

I just use ollama locally but I keep meaning to setup OpenRouter because I like to play with larger models that my hardware can’t handle and I’d like to be able to pick the best deals 🤷‍♀️

When I think, “AI slop” I think of things like fully automated tweets, LinkedIn posts, blog posts, etc that are literally created from prompts like, make sure to post about topic X at least once a day. OMG, that shit is toxic waste as far as I’m concerned.

…but cover images? Who TF cares‽ If the story is successful, they’ll replace that image with something superior made by a real artist. In the mean time, they were never going to pay an artist anyway so it’s not like it hurt artists.

Having said that, there’s one very specific industry that has already been completely destroyed by AI: Stock images. Getty? Nobody pays for that anymore when they can just generate something with AI. But how upset can we be when stock image companies are such highly exploitative corporate entities?

For me, it’s like someone vibe coding an alternative to Photoshop with minimal effort. Like, yeah, I’m sure it’s missing loads of features and has tons of bugs but it hurts Adobe (a proper villain) so let’s go! Haha.

Ah, “the fruit of the poisonous tree” anti-AI sentiment. I think it’s a ridiculous stance, but I understand.

Don’t ever let anyone hear you speaking to your phone or check a weather forecast! That’s AI and by using it, you’re just contaminating the world.

Also, if you catch COVID and end up in the hospital, make sure to refuse all the treatments that are drugs discovered by AI. That’s literally generative AI, BTW. Same exact tech as LLMs. Pharmaceutical companies are building data centers left and right to find more drugs like those COVID treatments. Don’t let them put one near you!

At first I thought the term, “AI slop” was funny. Now I think it’s generally bad. Slop (aka awful writing/art/code) existed long before AI. Now people are starting to call reasonably well-made stuff “slop” just because AI was used at some point in the making of the thing. That’s unreasonable and it’s actually really bad for the anti-AI crowd’s image.

Just last night (on a Discord server) someone claimed they flagged a story as “AI” because the cover image may have been created with AI. When I opened the story to check it, it was full of so many grammatical errors and just generally bad writing I thought to myself, “there’s no fucking way this is AI!” Also, WTF does the cover image have to do with the story at all? Its entire purpose is to just draw attention to the story. It’s irrelevant.

By reporting that story as AI, that person just lowered the trustworthiness of all “AI” labels and anti-AI sentiment in general.

Well shit.

This will be featured in a future video: How to turn a minor fender bender into a deadly accident and a prison term.

You can simulate “ADHD brain” with drugs and conditioning, similar to how PTSD alters people’s brain chemistry.

The human brain is plastic/adaptive and can change, depending on the cost/benefit of action/reward conditioning. Just like how people with ADHD can see some improvement with training, a neurotypical brain can see some ADHD-like changes with the same sort of (anti?) training. That’s what I’m suggesting is happening in this AI study: People were rewarded for using the AI initially (dopamine response) but then that reward (easy way out) was taken away, and they performed more poorly as a result.

It stands to reason that their reward center was trained to behave like an ADHD brain in that it could tell there was not going to be an easy way to gain a reward from the activity, so it didn’t bother putting in the necessary resources to achieve the outcome it would have accomplished if they were never given AI in the first place.

The usual dopamine response was overridden, thus behaving like an ADHD brain.

It sounds like it’s messing with the reward center of the brain which is what ADHD is all about.

I don’t think it’ll happen like Radium or Asbestos because those rely on scarcity. They’re physical things that can be physically controlled.

AI models aren’t like that. In less than a minute anyone can download the latest models. In under an hour, they can have all the latest models sitting on their PC. Right now, there’s a shortage of memory and GPUs which makes them prohibitively expensive for the average person but that won’t always be the case!

Ten years from now, everyone’s phones will have enough capabilities to run models that currently require a PC with a 32GB GPU.

What we could do is force AI companies and software to put warnings in the chat interfaces like cigarette cartons: “WARNING: Using LLMs for just ten minutes increases the likelihood that you will have trouble completing difficult mental tasks afterwards.” (That was in the news this morning)

We also definitely need international treaties that prevent countries from allowing AI to make the decision to kill people or destroy infrastructure. Though honestly, we’re already in a state where countries are willing to kill hundreds of people just to assassinate a single target (e.g. US and Israel bombing an entire building because they think their target is inside).

These are small potatoes, though, compared to what AI could do to capitalism and inequality. The rate at which it is advancing is faster than people/jobs can keep up. It’s like half the population is ferriers and suddenly everyone was just given a free car.

LLMs give people ADHD?