They don’t want to save capitalism. They believe capitalism is about to be over, and they want to be in control of whatever it is that comes next.

They’re worried they’re not spending enough on AI.

Classic MLM tactics. “If you’re not seeing a return on Herbalife, it’s cuz you’re not spending enough on it!”

This sounds eerily familiar…

I don’t know if Hearst told him to use a chatbot to generate their “Best of Summer Lists,” but it doesn’t matter. When you give a freelancer an assignment to turn around ten summer lists on a short timescale, everyone understands that his job isn’t to write those lists, it’s to supervise a chatbot.

But his job wasn’t even to supervise the chatbot adequately (single-handedly fact-checking 10 lists of 15 items is a long, labor-intensive pro­cess). Rather, it was to take the blame for the factual inaccuracies in those lists. He was, in the phrasing of Dan Davies, “an accountability sink” (or as Madeleine Clare Elish puts it, a “moral crumple zone”).

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/

I feel like I’ve been saying this every day since like 2015 (Or maybe 2001. Or maybe 1999. Idk. Anyway…) but: This is a really bad idea.

Well-argued.

Unlearning Economics has a similar analysis of AI through the lens of cybernetics: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Km2bn0HvUwg

I’m guessing they meant “raw milk”?

Not my own invention, but I’m glad you appreciated it: https://www.thenerdreich.com/

vendor whose major investors include Thiel’s Founders Fund

To be fair, most SaaS vendors probably have investors associated with the nerd reich

I’ll let someone much smarter than me speak to this:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM&t=4420

Hey there, cutter.

If you’re really after the deconstruction aspect, then I’m not sure there’s a whole lot out there. But if you zoom out to the level of “methodically tinkering with a system that requires careful attention”, there’s a lot of those.

Hardship Breakspacer is part of a (pseudo-)genre known as “dad games”.

• Powerwash Sim
• Viscera Cleanup Detail
• Goblin Cleanup
• Pacific Drive
• Papers Please
• Quarantine Zone
• House Flipper 2
• Star Trucker
• Dredge

On the “hardcore nerd” end of the spectrum, there’s even:

• Satisfactory
• Factorio
• Scrap Mechanic
• Any Zachtronics game

A little more chill:

• Unpacking
• Potion Craft
• Please Fix The Road

Edit: Or for the “scraping my way through out in space” vibe, but less tinkering:

• Endless Sky (free and open source!)
• FTL

Edit 2: Also, repair is probably an applicable theme:

• ReStory: Chill Electronics Repairs
• Car Mechanic Simulator
• Space Mechanic Simulator

The horrible names of these things…

o4-mini, not to be confused with 4o-mini

And 4o, not to be confused with 4 (aka 4.0 or v4, but 4V is different)

The loot boxes require skill? How?

Found this study, but no mention of skill influencing the outcome of opening a loot box.

Star Ocean

Beautifully put.

I especially like that they called out the “it’s just a tool” BS:

Yet technological artefacts cannot be separated from the conditions under which they are created, or from the realities of who controls and profits from them. Today, developing these technologies expands racial capitalism, intensifies imperialist extraction, and reinforces the divide between the global North and South. The technology is inseparable from the labour that produces it — the expropriation of work by writers, artists, programmers, and peer-production communities, as well as the highly exploitative crowdwork of data annotation.

A little crazy, but not a lot crazy. ARM adoption may provide the spark necessary to ignite this fire.

Not sure about Apple-mediated payments, but you can usually support the creator more directly and get an ad-free RSS feed that you can plug into the Podcasts app and it Just Works™. Usually ends up being a better deal for the creator, too.

I don’t think there’s any disagreement (among you, me, and Molly White) about who the bad guys are.

The question is: What is an effective legal framework that focuses on the precise harms, doesn’t allow AI vendors to easily evade accountability, and doesn’t inflict widespread collateral damage?

Cory Doctorow has a pretty good stab at that: https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

Clarification: revenue from advertising their own paid services, not revenue from selling ad space to third parties

People who are discounting this because the project maintainer used sensational phrasing (75%) or because he was monetizing open source are ignoring the important part:

Traffic is down 40%

This is really bad news. All open source projects need attention in order to succeed.

“Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI

The real threat isn’t AI using open knowledge — it’s AI companies killing the projects that make knowledge free

https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/

Trying desperately to keep the ponzi scheme going, but his biggest customers already have warehouses full of GPUs that will never get connected.

The bubble is full, dude. Just try to minimize the damage from the pop so we don’t try to figure out what size pitchfork your dumb leather jacket is.