677: I Accept the Battery Costhttps://atp.fm/677
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@mpbarlow I think I made all the points you mentioned regarding the industrial revolution on the show. Presumably you also use electricity, manufactured products, etc., despite climate change and other ongoing negative externalities. There's no ethical consumption under capitalism.
@siracusa I do, but I was born a hundred+ years after those things became an essential part of life.
AI’s not there yet, and I don’t fancy helping it along the way when the people pushing it have neither a plan nor a care to address the problems they openly talk about causing.
I realise I’m being hopelessly naive. I’m just sick of the rich getting richer and the rest of us always having to deal with the fallout.
Anyway, I’ll stop now. Thanks for continuing to make my favourite podcast.
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@jamesnvc @mpbarlow It's barely a choice now, and will be less so as time goes on. (Do you know how many LLMs are active and doing work for you when you use software products and services today? How could you?)
Also, "LLMs" are not inherently immoral or evil. Using, say, image generation in Photoshop using an Adobe model trained exclusively on licensed data is very different than, say, creating nonconsensual sexual abuse material with Grok.
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@avakining @atpfm I never knew the golden ratio was exactly 1.5 🤯 you learn something new every day
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677: I Accept the Battery Cost
https://atp.fm/677If you really don’t like AI, we have some bad news for you.
@atpfm Always her for team fahrenheit.
️It's good to use the browser that works best for you so not shame there. I'm forced to use Chrome at work and I use Safari at home. I would say my experience is largely the opposite.
However, I’m using content blockers. Is it a slight cheat removing the problem? Maybe, but I wouldn't call the Chrome experience on an ad heavy website great but even if was, so much of the web is ugly and hard to read with the ads. I just would choose to avoid the web tbh
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@jamesnvc @mpbarlow It's barely a choice now, and will be less so as time goes on. (Do you know how many LLMs are active and doing work for you when you use software products and services today? How could you?)
Also, "LLMs" are not inherently immoral or evil. Using, say, image generation in Photoshop using an Adobe model trained exclusively on licensed data is very different than, say, creating nonconsensual sexual abuse material with Grok.
@siracusa @mpbarlow I respectfully disagree, both that it is “barely a choice now”, as well as that believing the choice will decline in the future is a reason to “comply in advance”.
I am also not claiming that they are “inherently” immoral, but I’m talking about all the specific instances that are really being used now, which I’d argue largely are.
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@mpbarlow I think I made all the points you mentioned regarding the industrial revolution on the show. Presumably you also use electricity, manufactured products, etc., despite climate change and other ongoing negative externalities. There's no ethical consumption under capitalism.
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@jamesnvc @mpbarlow It's barely a choice now, and will be less so as time goes on. (Do you know how many LLMs are active and doing work for you when you use software products and services today? How could you?)
Also, "LLMs" are not inherently immoral or evil. Using, say, image generation in Photoshop using an Adobe model trained exclusively on licensed data is very different than, say, creating nonconsensual sexual abuse material with Grok.
@siracusa @jamesnvc @mpbarlow
I think for most of us here, when we say we're opposed to “AI” we're not referring to its use where appropriate and useful (e.g. computational photography, etc.) but to the way it's being hyped up to maintain the stock market valuation bubble and to destroy countless jobs that it can't effectively replace—not to mention how it will lead to AI slop destroying the web.As with industrialization, the main issue is not the tech, but how its benefits are distributed.
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@siracusa @jamesnvc @mpbarlow
I think for most of us here, when we say we're opposed to “AI” we're not referring to its use where appropriate and useful (e.g. computational photography, etc.) but to the way it's being hyped up to maintain the stock market valuation bubble and to destroy countless jobs that it can't effectively replace—not to mention how it will lead to AI slop destroying the web.As with industrialization, the main issue is not the tech, but how its benefits are distributed.
@freediverx I wouldn’t be so sure you have your finger on the pulse of “most” of anyone. A lot of people object to a lot more than that when it comes to AI!
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@siracusa @mpbarlow I respectfully disagree, both that it is “barely a choice now”, as well as that believing the choice will decline in the future is a reason to “comply in advance”.
I am also not claiming that they are “inherently” immoral, but I’m talking about all the specific instances that are really being used now, which I’d argue largely are.
@jamesnvc The only “compliance” required will be your continued use of technology products and services. Even today, there are few tech products and services that are not using ethically dubious LLMs without your knowledge or consent. That’s why I say “barely a choice” today.
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@freediverx I wouldn’t be so sure you have your finger on the pulse of “most” of anyone. A lot of people object to a lot more than that when it comes to AI!
@siracusa
Fair enough. Wouldn't be the first time I had mistaken assumptions about how “most" people think, lol.I can't find it now but I recently saw the perfect meme showing robots inside an apartment building creating music and art while the humans outside were collecting garbage and performing other less desirable jobs.
We were promised The Jetsons but capital had something else in mind.

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677: I Accept the Battery Cost
https://atp.fm/677If you really don’t like AI, we have some bad news for you.
@atpfm could Marco please list all jobs where an expertise in using LLM’s will be a prerequisite? Also, if he could list these jobs where LLM’s have made a ‘huge’ impact on staff numbers? Thanks in advance…
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677: I Accept the Battery Cost
https://atp.fm/677If you really don’t like AI, we have some bad news for you.
@atpfm Cloudflare access need not be scary!
i set it up for me and my brothers plex media server,
you can think of it simply as a gate from any random accessing your service vs who you allow.
in conjunction with cloudflare tunnels, it could be a very convenient solution to auth gating private services.
(if you want to go hard manual server route, i have also set up caddy (web server like nginx/traefik/pache) forwarding auth to 'authentik' (which allowed me to do passkey auth)
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this is just about the only pro-Celsius argument I’ve heard that wasn’t utter bullshit
@caseyliss @jon I've wondered about this one. It occurred to me that I did not know where Fahrenheit got his scale. It is, in fact, based on human perception of our body temperature (huh! Casey has a point)
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@caseyliss @jon I've wondered about this one. It occurred to me that I did not know where Fahrenheit got his scale. It is, in fact, based on human perception of our body temperature (huh! Casey has a point)
@caseyliss @jon also, for @marcoarment's year-of-basic, we had one of these guys outside the window above the kitchen sink. Nailed to the window frame. So you'd just look at it when getting coffee/cereal/oatmeal etc in the morning. Didn't even watch weather on TV, let alone check an app. No scale conflict, either.

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677: I Accept the Battery Cost
https://atp.fm/677If you really don’t like AI, we have some bad news for you.
@atpfm Recommend reading this blog by Mitchell Hashimoto (founder of Hashicorp which makes terraform etc.) on how to get better at using AI agents for coding: https://mitchellh.com/writing/my-ai-adoption-journey. He currently makes Ghostty which is a highly performant Mac native (using SwiftUI) terminal which can run these CLI agents very well. cc @marcoarment @siracusa @caseyliss
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677: I Accept the Battery Cost
https://atp.fm/677If you really don’t like AI, we have some bad news for you.
@atpfm The bad news about so-called AI (and LLMs aren’t really AI) is already known. From the real bad things like pollution of people’s air, and loss of water, through job loses, stolen data, right down to pure greed causing the RAM apocalypse.
It can write some code or can hallucinate some plausible answers doesn’t counter the damage done.
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677: I Accept the Battery Cost
https://atp.fm/677If you really don’t like AI, we have some bad news for you.
@atpfm @caseyliss You have to admit that Fahrenheit kind of sucks. Yes, every programmer can understand that water freezes at 2^5 °F but the boiling point? 212 °F 🤯 Come on, that is nowhere near 2^7 or 2^8

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@Colman So will you, and everyone else, eventually—for better AND for worse. (See also: electricity, automobiles, modern agriculture, manufactured goods of all kinds, etc.)
@siracusa radioactive nostrums, cocaine* in your soft drinks, nfts …
(* I’d look up the correct details but I’d have to wade through too much slop.)
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677: I Accept the Battery Cost
https://atp.fm/677If you really don’t like AI, we have some bad news for you.
@atpfm I've lived in England all my life, and I agree with Casey about temperature units. Growing up in the '70s, Fahrenheit was still in common use. My parents had a new heating system fitted in 1977, and the thermostat used Fahrenheit. It has taken me years to get used to Celsius, and I still think in Fahrenheit.

