To be fair, that's what I have done. I try to use AI every now and then for small, easy things. It isn't yet reliable for those things, and always makes mistakes I have to clean up. Therefore I'm not going to trust it with anything more complicated yet.

No, he's right. One should not pin their happiness to things outside their control. If losing your job is traumatic to you, that is a sign you need to work on improving your detachment from outside factors. Obviously we all have bills to pay and would like to keep a roof over our heads, but being traumatized by losing a job is an extremely unhealthy (and abnormal) response.

I think I kinda forgot that not everyone has stoic framing for their viewpoint with my original post lol. You do an excellent job of saying what I meant without describing things in a way that many (maybe most?) people would misconstrue. Thank you.

> Farming is violence. Mining is violence.

That's only true if you use a definition of "violence" which is so far outside the accepted definition as to make conversation impossible. Farming and mining are in no way violence unless you resort to idiosyncratic definitions.

I guess if you limit “violence” to violence against humans only? I’ve always thought that violence was applicable to animals and plants as well, so I guess we differ there.

Intentional harm that causes death is firmly in the violence category, imho.

the use of physical force so as to injure, abuse, damage, or destroy is pretty much the accepted definition, afaik

I’m not thinking of violence as some kind of universal bad thing though, it’s part of the natural world.

You are using a word in a way it is seldom used.

You could define your take up front.

Or better yet, figure out the words other people will be able to recognize and understand you, without unnecessary linguistic gymnastics.

Huh. I don’t think in my experience that the term violence is seldom applied to things outside of humans, and IME the terms economic violence and social violence, emotional violence, and many others are common parlance. Perhaps we come from different cultures. At any rate, given the definition I find in several dictionaries I think my point stands. I will concede that coercion, exploitation, or extortion might be better descriptors.

The term violence, when applied in any context, is applied in context. With a scope and meaning determined as much by tacitly accepted scope as it is by lexicon.

So, to all of your questions— “no”. You are wrong, on all counts, because you are using language itself to set a scene where it has no right, attempting to have a meaning context-free applied to one contextual—- but only when it suits you. That isn’t conversation or discussion— it’s performative, and so you cannot be correct where there is no correctness to be had, only performance.

You are right, some people are stretching that word a lot.

I don’t think that’s changed how most people interpret the word. More of a weakening of its meaning often with an activist or persuasive bent.

Toxic is another word similarly getting stretched and watered down by some.

> Farming is violence.

This would definitely fall into the stretched / watered down pattern.

I don’t think the other strong words you are using are any different in this context.

I am not saying you don’t have a point, but over dramatizing can make it hard to relate to, when people are being expected to accept a level of verbal shrillness that isn’t necessary to make a point.

Humanity is certainly damaging a lot of ecosystems, not by any single farmer, but in aggregate. Change is normal, but we are driving it faster than nature can keep up with. It is a problem.

But outside of poetic or proselytizing use, violence usually means inflicting intentional harm, not a problem of conflict between reasonable local tradeoffs (creating food being a positive use of land) vs. the global impact that needs to be balanced too.

In no way is Gchat worse than teams. It's basic, but the basic functionality works... which is a lot more than you can say for teams.

Oh yes they are. People are claiming 100x improvements, which is completely insane. But they do claim it.

OK sure, there are always lunatics on the fringe, but OP is casting that argument out as if they’re attacking a mainstream opinion.

I'm willing to argue that, sure (though it's purely a hypothetical point as I'm not a citizen of the EU and thus I don't and shouldn't have a voice in the laws there). I don't judge a law by a deontological measure of worth, but rather by whether it seems to be making things better or worse. The GDPR has overwhelmingly made my experience browsing the web worse, not better. Whether it should have resulted in that is beside the point: it has resulted in that, so that is what I judge it by. Therefore, I think it makes sense to get rid of the law as it seems that it is making things worse for people, not better.

> The GDPR has overwhelmingly made my experience browsing the web worse, not better.

From where I sit that's hard to evaluate since you cannot actually see most data abuses and privacy concerns, and you also don't know how it would have been without it. You also see the effects of various laws and regulations in combination, so the ones related to GDPR are not easy to be singled out. Are you thinking only of the cookie banners? Maybe sites would be plastered with even worse bullshit. Did you consider that GDPR also resulted in privacy policies that (if actually somewhat legal) are fairly easy to read and not just copy pasta but specific to the service(s), have proper contact information, you get some transparency about which data partners the sites work with, sites need to have full data export, right to be forgotten (removal of your data/contributions), and so on. I am certain you benefit from it often, potentially without realizing, and you wouldn't know what the world would be like without them today so it's not so straightforward to reason about.

I think you would find that the cure is far, far worse than the disease. We speak of rights, and those are important, but there's also a very important practical reason why we have freedom of speech: because you cannot trust that future government officials will stick to banning speech that is justly banned. Once you open that door, sooner or later someone is going to start abusing the power. How would you like it if the Trump administration was able to (with complete legality) declare that claims Biden fairly won the 2020 election are "misinformation", and punish people who make those claims? Or if you're a Trump guy, how would you like it if the next Democrat administration declared it to be "misinformation" to claim that Trump fairly won the same election, and punish people for it?

The cold hard reality is that no matter how much you trust the people in the government today, eventually they will be replaced by people you consider to be the scum of the earth. And when that day comes, you will curse the day you allowed the government to punish speech, because you'll see speech you consider perfectly justified become illegal.

The thing is that that same argument can be used to justify just about anything. If the scum of the earth is in power, they will ignore whatever rights you thought you had put into the constitution anyway. We are seeing that now. And I am already cursing the day that we decided on the restrictions we currently have. The Trump administration is declaring with complete legality that Trump won the 2020 election and is punishing people who believe that. Right now they're not taking the direct route, but it's abundantly clear that government power is being used to punish people who say things that Trump doesn't like.

There is no way of listing rights on paper that can protect you if truly evil people get into power. But there are ways of listing rights on paper that can allow good people who believe in those rights to defend them in ways that involve preventing evil people from getting into power. Free speech is not a magic bullet in either direction.

If that were true, they wouldn't publish hype results that then turn out to be completely unsubstantiated. Remember the "agents built a web browser"? I can't personally judge your friend as I don't know him. But the company is consistently lying about how good their product is in order to hype it up.

I don't talk to said friend about their work, so I genuinely have no insight here, but if I were a betting man, I'd bet what they have internally is considerably disparate from what is currently available in their consumer product.

The stuff they have internally might be slightly better than what they have now lmao. You have to super dense to believe otherwise.

Also I don't need the Anthropic ghouls telling me what I can or can not ask their stupid bot. At least Elon doesn't play this sad censorship game where you cannot say "boob" to it without it locking down.

And the junior learns when you teach him stuff. This is a huge advantage that humans have which LLMs do not have at all right now.

I looked into AI scribes when they were new, finding them interesting, and spoke to many doctors. Across the board, the preference was for a human scribe, the reason being that they actually take away cognitive load by learning to work with you over time, to the point where eventually your scribing problems are wholly solved by having them around and you need not think about it.

AI scribes have their place since many doctors and nurses can’t afford a human scribe, but as of now they don’t *replace* people. They’re a tool that still needs wielding, and can’t be held accountable for anything.

because it's not easy to identify exactly when to r/w memory accordingly, especially when you'd need to have an LLM decide when and if to do that

and to scale it in a way where you don't need a whole custom model loaded for 1 user (financially unviable)

just my immediate thoughts, could be wrong though.

No, he's completely right on that point. There's this weird misconception in the tech community that "open source" means "you'll accept my contributions if I send them". I've seen people try to argue (in complete seriousness) that SQLite isn't open source because the developers keep contributions private.

I don't know where the mistaken conflating of "open source" and "developed by the community" comes from, but it is mistaken, and Rich was quite right to push back on it.

> I don't know where the mistaken conflating of "open source" and "developed by the community" comes from

i think people confuse github with a social network and all the extra social conventions that come with that instead of just a place to remotely host a git repository. Open source is just a license model, if no PRs were accepted, all communication ignored, and no bug fixes made globally forever an open source project would still be open source. Take the code and do what you want as long as you comply with the license, that's all open source is.

If you don't want your github work to be considered social, MAKE YOUR REPOSITORIES PRIVATE.

80% of my shit on github is private. And I have taken my licks on mistakes I made on the rest. I had to redo a whole release roadmap because people were rightfully pissed at me for cutting a corner. I didn't have to kiss their asses about it, I just had to say what I was going to do to prevent it from happening again.

It sucked, and I am better for it.

I’m not disagreeing that people get entitled about the gifts they think they’re bringing to someone else’s party. Yeah it’s frustrating and sometimes it’s bonkers. Don’t bring “lutefisk” to someone else’s party and expect to be celebrated as a hero.

That doesn’t absolve the host of all scrutiny in perpetuity, and that’s usually how these conversations go. This is a popularity contest and trying to have that conversation with, frankly, people who have never one a popularity contest is exhausting. But you still have to point out things to your unrepentant friend even if they don’t seem to listen.

It’s not a conflation. Open source is two things. One, a way to trick your boss into letting you keep using tools you developed here at your next job. Two, a gift economy we are all participating in. Gift economies are a community. Whether you want it to be or not, it is.

That we listen to Rich Hickey at all is almost entirely down to the latter. He has given many gifts and this entitled to a soapbox precisely because of the gifts. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. Suck it up buttercup. Or, continue to act confused and indignant as people call you and people like you out for the rest of time. It’s not going to stop.

A gift economy only exists between people who agree that they are participating in one.

Gifts between equals create expectations of reciprocity. If you use open source software, you are expected to contribute. Accepting a gift without an intention to reciprocate is an admission of social inferiority. Users who don't see themselves as socially inferior to developers are not participating in the gift economy and not bound by the social contract.

> If you use open source software, you are expected to contribute.

No, not in a million years.

No, emphatically not. We are surrounded by them and people behave as if they are without acknowledging it. Saying it isn’t so doesn’t change the fact that we give more attention to people who [give] us free shit. It’s baked into our little monkey brains.

Perhaps we are talking about two different concepts called "gift economy".

The gift economy concept I'm familiar with has been used to describe various non-state polities, where people exchange gifts to maintain relationships and establish social standing. Gifts between peers are expected to be of similar value, while patrons are expected to give their clients more valuable gifts than they receive.

Well you’ve got less of a capitalist filter on that than I feared but I think you’ve got the cart before the horse.

The parts that relate to open source are this: when you have riches, you share them. People making a genuine effort to reciprocate when they are able (which may be months or years from now) makes the social structure function (if you like, by the rule of large numbers - someone always has more than they need when others do not).

If you do share in kind, your social status is unaffected by this aspect of your culture. If you are consistently more generous, your status increases. Call it Bayesian if you like. He helped us in the past, he will help us again in the future, so let’s keep him safe.

If you’ve ever been nominated as a maintainer on someone else’s project, this is usually why. You’re one of the top contributors not already on the core team, and they either like you a lot, or the contributions from others have fallen off and even they know this is not sustainable, and you’re the next best option.

There is an element of gifts given to strangers, which I’m claiming should also show up in how you receive “visitors” to your project, but I think outside of fiction this is typically set at a best effort level. It’s acceptable to set it at the “decency” level discussed elsewhere in this thread. But a lot of people don’t and then yell back when people scold them for it.