i've heard a few times that "waymos will make streets safer" so i went and looked up sf's traffic fatality statistics and they're pretty much identical
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@tef maybe, and I want to stress it's just an idea of mine, of which I'm not sure, they are killing the open web to give us AI also in order to control us more. Let me explain: you can't easily run an "AI" on you own pc unless you can spend a lot in hardware (and electricity of course). So you need to rely on their data centers , and so no more private stuff in your pc... everything flows in their hands. The open web is maybe more freedom than they are willing to allow us ? Should this idea be true then this requires us to fight back, unless we want to give up our freedom. Which I don't personally.
@andre123 @tef Well, running local takes a lot less than people have been lead to believe. You can run quite a decent bit on even just CPU alone, albeit slowly. And the power usage isn't that bad. Companies use a lot of cheats and shortcuts for the sake of making it faster, bigger context, etc. It adds up almost exponentially.
Besides, I would argue they started killing the open Web *before* the fake "pretend LLMs are general AI" scam started. (Though this idea may have occurred to them.)
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@andre123 @tef Well, running local takes a lot less than people have been lead to believe. You can run quite a decent bit on even just CPU alone, albeit slowly. And the power usage isn't that bad. Companies use a lot of cheats and shortcuts for the sake of making it faster, bigger context, etc. It adds up almost exponentially.
Besides, I would argue they started killing the open Web *before* the fake "pretend LLMs are general AI" scam started. (Though this idea may have occurred to them.)
@andre123 @tef As a side note, I will admit here that local can also disappear overnight though. There is no such thing as an actual open model, just "freely" available ones. They do not share the training data or methods in any form. Why they get away with calling them "open" I do not know. There is no community effort to make an actually open model that I know of. If corporations decide to control everything they can stop providing models for local... This hasn't occurred to them. Yet.
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we're destroying the open web
we're burning down the closest thing i've ever seen in my life to the library of alexandria
and people are explaining to me how warm it keeps their hands, and maybe, in the future, the ashes will contain the secrets of the universe
My website is getting _hammered_ by AI scraper bot networks. I had to upgrade my hosting plan twice last year, just to keep outages at a semi-acceptable level.
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sure enough machine translation has reasonably proven itself as a mostly public good, albeit at the expense of the translation industry
so i am aware that good things can come with bad prices, but i haven't really seen much good and i am seeing a lot of bad things
it literally breaks my heart that the public web now sits behind a proof of work system, forcing strangers to mine coins to buy access to webpages
because a bunch of tech companies are desperate for an poison-free training set
@tef mhh I'm afraid it currently looks like a net public good because the detrimental effects will just take a generation or two to materialize.
You know, once the first generation that never had to learn a foreign language in order to communicate or consume media will become adults I suspect there will be measurable effects, cause language shapes reality
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we're destroying the open web
we're burning down the closest thing i've ever seen in my life to the library of alexandria
and people are explaining to me how warm it keeps their hands, and maybe, in the future, the ashes will contain the secrets of the universe
@tef It breaks my heart.
There are many, many things in this world that break my heart, but this is one of them.
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we're destroying the open web
we're burning down the closest thing i've ever seen in my life to the library of alexandria
and people are explaining to me how warm it keeps their hands, and maybe, in the future, the ashes will contain the secrets of the universe
@tef I am working for the opposite. And I think this will be successful.
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@tef I think it gives people more options than just a bus or drive or bike and any safety improvements, however small, are welcomed. Imagine when Uber just started until flash ahead and waymo basically replaced human drivers. It will be half the time to get to buses with 15-30 people.
I wonder if the bus drivers have a union
@MeaningfulBits @tef All that does is increase traffic/sprawl and make transport less efficient and dense. Car centrism is a disease, and waymo is only spreading more of it.
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My website is getting _hammered_ by AI scraper bot networks. I had to upgrade my hosting plan twice last year, just to keep outages at a semi-acceptable level.
@juergen_hubert @tef You need a tarpit then. An endless generator of noise, rate limited, to keep the bots busy.
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@tef I'm interested in these stats. Can you point me at your sources?
@tef So this is *a* source: https://www.nhtsa.gov/file-downloads?p=nhtsa/downloads/FARS/
I don't know if it's what you are referencing.
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@juergen_hubert @tef You need a tarpit then. An endless generator of noise, rate limited, to keep the bots busy.
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@tef unfortunately, the original Big Web Dream began to die with the advent of mobile-first and social media. Now its death is only accelerating. Read @timbl's book about that.
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i've heard a few times that "waymos will make streets safer" so i went and looked up sf's traffic fatality statistics and they're pretty much identical
i mean, there is a slight increase over the last two years but there's sufficient variance to avoid suggesting a trend
as i understand it, waymos tend to take people off busses and other forms of transit, rather than out of their own cars
so i'm doubtful it will lower deaths on the road, just the number of busses
@tef I find it easy to imagine driverless taxis circling the city at random if someone works out that low-speed driving costs less per hour than paying for parking.
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we're destroying the open web
we're burning down the closest thing i've ever seen in my life to the library of alexandria
and people are explaining to me how warm it keeps their hands, and maybe, in the future, the ashes will contain the secrets of the universe
Same issue back then and today. In Alexandria, they collected the books and didn’t read them or learned anything. (Source: Seneca)
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"yes your problem is capitalism" yes
arguing about the technology in a vacuum is a debate club tactic, a way of denying the real consequences and moving the focus to imaginary benefits
i am not capable of putting on the pom poms and cheering for supply-side economic arguments that paper over the real world harms
i don't care if tests pass or if it works on your machine, i care how it acts in production
@tef there's a slippage between "technology" and "product" that is load-bearing for the AI companies.
LLM *technology* may be somewhat neutral, but LLM chatbot *products* are trained on unvetted and stolen data, with exploited labor, and crafted to protect the interests of their highly political owners.
I think they're intentionally obfuscating this distinction, and we shouldn't let them get away with it.
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@EndlessMason @tef "The origin point for nearly all of those 'you work harder than a medieval peasant' memes and articles is Juliet Schor’s The Overworked American (1993). The argument has been debunked quite a few times…" — https://acoup.blog/2025/09/05/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ivb-working-days/
@vfig bootsuck cop bitch mentality, get dogfucked
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it feels like a lot of the arguments i hear boil down to "what if none of the bad things were happening right now, and instead, good things happened instead"
and sure, if that were true, things would be good
but, well, all of the bad things are happening already and none of the good things are any closer to appearing
and i'm just not confident "wait and see if everything reverses course" is a sensible way to evaluate the impact of new technologies
@tef what if all the good things happen and the billionaires just don't exercise their unprecedented power over all the people earth and just let us have all the good things, thus reducing power! 🥺
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it feels like a lot of the arguments i hear boil down to "what if none of the bad things were happening right now, and instead, good things happened instead"
and sure, if that were true, things would be good
but, well, all of the bad things are happening already and none of the good things are any closer to appearing
and i'm just not confident "wait and see if everything reverses course" is a sensible way to evaluate the impact of new technologies
@tef it’s as if entire generations have been raised to be absolute rubes.
Sarah Vowell talked about sending her kids to sunday school, something about memetic inoculation IIRC.
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