uriel238

Paywall bypass

Be sure to track data centers in your own area. Granted, they are likely to be better regulated than here in the states.

As Trump is learning with Iran, if you make enemies by the millions, you risk awakening a plumber.

I hope you're right. Like Randall Munroe, I am terrified that they're trying to fast-track their way to the swarms of killer robots phase.

This is how we know AI should be a collectivist project, one that isn't owned by large corporations but is funded by taxes and developed in academies, and all IP derived from it falls into the public domain.

Besides which a lot of artists mind a lot less when their material is borrowed by a non-profit, or to serve a public works project. (There are exceptions. Disney is notoriously litigious about murals in nurseries.)

PS: Development of a robust public domain is the only reason that intellectual property should exist at all. Also it's not property so much as a licensed temporary monopoly.

PSS: History has already shown us that people will invent stuff and do fabulous art simply by being allowed to live in a state other than desperation. Public welfare programs beget art booms. The most recent example of this was during the COVID-19 lockdown which came with extended unemployment and stimulus checks, resulting in the Great Resignation in which a lot of people turned their hobbies into something lucrative.

Blackstone would agree with you.

Many, many people, in law enforcement and the judiciary would disagree...

...especially when it comes to minorities.

I remember the NSA massive surveillance machine during the George W. Bush administration and Obama administration that tracked phone metadata and internet traffic that left or entered the US (which was used to justify a lot of surveillance of US citizens). Even after the Snowden disclosures of 2013 we were promised that the system was only meant to track foreign terrorists.

Then we learned that DEA had full access to it, and that NSA was sending hints to law enforcement about large amounts of cash in transit so it could be intercepted for purposes of asset forfeiture, what is nothing short of robbery of civilians by law enforcement officers.

This is an example of mission creep, in this case how it affects the surveillance state. Once we allow a method or technology to be used for major crime (like terrorism), it will eventually be used even for minor crime (like drug possession or distracted driving).

It's very common for courts to forgive a violation of fourth amendment protections against unreasonable search when the violation presents evidence for a major crime, but then that case will be used as precedent when the same violation occurs and discovers a minor infraction.

This is how, during the aughts and 2010s, the Fourth Amendment was gutted by a long run of carve-outs. Now, a police officer or state agent can violate your privacy without a warrant via a whole range of exceptions:

~ If the crime they discover is significant (SCOTUS suggested controlled substance possession as an example)
~ Using specialized technology, say long-range multi-spectrum cameras, or using a drone.
~ If probable cause can be established. A favorite is a detection dog that signals on anything and has a 90%+ false positive rate.¹ (This is a particular beef of mine, since fake detection dogs are now more common than actual detection dogs, and dogs are losing their presumption of regularity as a result.)
~ If the police officer was acting in good faith, which is obtusely defined and is very hard to disprove.
~ If the suspect is non-white or otherwise suspicious due prejudice. Really, in a lot of counties, law enforcement are allowed to operate on hunches, or have a suspicious activity parameter list that is so encompassing (and often contradictory) that it's impossible to not be suspicious.

If you want to know how we got here these were already problems during the Obama administration when we had allegedly reasonable people in elected offices. And while they discussed the risk of too much power falling into the wrong hands, they felt compelled to keep it.

Whether the One Ring, or the Ring of Gyges, power without consequence is too seductive.

¹ A similar issue is the $2 roadside drug test which reacts to a lot of substances that aren't controlled, such as glazed sugar off a donut. These were originally supposed to be then verified later in a lab, but instead were used to establish probable cause, and eventually were used as evidence in court.

What's convincing is that hobbyists are taking open source AI models and their own batch of training data in order to do small jobs. They need more LORAs and more massaging of the prompt, and they might take minutes or hours instead of seconds to generate, but they absolutely work.

It's especially useful if you want to make slop of a category forbidden on the provider servers.

Right now, something is legal or illegal if you want it to be. All you have to do is bribe enough pockets in the justice system.

They wouldn’t have their “no one else can afford this” moat if it was all made more affordable, tho.

In a functional capitalist society (yes, those can exist, even if Marx says they're temporary), the point would be not to provide a computing service but appliances that can perform that service. There are AI hobbyists who run open source LLM engines and retain their own dataset and bunches of LORAs. Granted it's only terrabytes of data rather than exabytes (zettabytes? yottabytes?) and sometimes they have to let their home system brew for hours instead of minutes or seconds on a given task.

But an example of this kind of model appears in the 1970s and the invention of the personal computer, itself, before which there were only mainframes that were held by large companies (and similarly, the first PCs were hobbyist DIY kits).

I see this as a sea change driven by the same motivation that has turned large companies (who have out competed all their peers) towards enshittification. Now that we're into the rental economy, where even software is a service rather than an appliance, the AI companies don't want to make AI machines that they can sell, but to provide an AI service that will force their ~~consumer base~~ customers to keep buying and keep paying.

I don't think that model can scale up. What we need to do is the same thing we did when we upgraded our secretaries from a typewriter and a Rolodex to a PC with an office software suite. Right now we're seeing that even when we replace or reduce the human workforce with AI tools, the cost is greater than the original workforce (though for now, that cost is borne by the AI companies at a loss, rather than their downstream clients).

Instead we should be developing AI computer systems at the mainframe and PC level as tools to facilitate workers, which would (we hope) increase their productivity.

But again, our conglomerate corporations are trying to shore up their dominant positions in the economy, and so, as Cory Doctorow observed, are trying to do a blanket replacement of their workforce, which is failing spectacularly.

RANT: And since our ownership class and C-suite management have demonstrated they refuse to engage in commerce in good faith, seeking to replace competitive production with rent, lobbying government and financial shenanigans, the public needs to recapture government -- by force ~~as~~ if necessary -- to go back to regulating commerce and protecting workers and consumers alike. History has shown that this can create an economic environment that is fecund for benevolent innovation, e.g. better stuff for everyone.

This wouldn't be the first bubble popping do to a failure to consider the vertical infrastructure build. Heck, some analysts blame the sinking of the Titanic on substandard bolts (that is, building a ship too big and too fragile for the technology available.)

This would be a great opportunity to pump a lot of money into renewable energy and maybe even fusion R&D. (Yes, fusion often looks like a dead end, but that's been something of a self-fulfilling prophecy, since pessimism has been slowing funding even to the best and brightest leads.)

They could have also started investing in developing cooler memory and processing units, or better systems to cool them. Instead, the data center companies just bribed officials to let them use up water (and fuck the supplies for their neighbors) thinking that the people were just going to roll over and die.

As we've seen with Donald Trump and George W. Bush, if you're wealthy enough or in an aristocratic social group, you fail upwards.

And if you always fail upwards, it's very easy to not gain the skills to succeed.