nickwitha_k (he/him)

  • 5 Posts
  • 541 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • First, I would like to give you some major props. Installing Arch, in itself, is a big deal. It is not a beginner-friendly distro. It is a very power-user friendly distro and has an incredible wiki that is helpful, at least to some degree, for many distros.

    For a beginner distro, I would recommend Linux Mint for its easy transition and great focus on user experiences or Bazzite if you really want to install and get gaming.

    When taking drivers in Linux, most are provided as either kernel modules (integrated into the kernel, so you don’t have to worry about installing anything) or packaged for the distro, in which case, once installed via package manager, they’ll auto-update whenever you update system packages. They are so much easier to deal with than Windows drivers (for the end user). For example, to use a Wacom drawing tablet, all one has to do is plug it in.










  • Your take is illogical, unless you are arguing for some sort of pre industrial communism which is never going to happen because I think any sane person can agree that technology has vastly improved our lives. It has introduced pains sure, but everything is a process.

    That’s quite a leap. Not all technology is worthwhile or improves the overall human experience. Are you getting there by assuming that the world is black and white; embracing all technology or rejecting all technology? If so, I would recommend re-evaluation of such assumptions because they do not hold up to reality.

    Oh and speaking of computers did computers and automated production lines destroy the ability for people to make a living?

    Were they developed and pushed for that explicit reason? No. LLMs are. The only reason that they receive as much funding as they do is that billionaires want to keep everything for themselves, end any democratic rule, and indirectly (and sometimes directly) cause near extinction-level deaths, so that there are fewer people to resist the new feudalism that they want. It sounds insane but it is literally what a number of tech billionaires have stated.

    Maybe temporarily and then new jobs popped up.

    Not this time. As many at the Church of Accelerationism fail to see, we’re at a point where there are practically no social safety nets left (at least in the US), which has not been the case in over a century, and people are actively dying because of anthropogenic climate, which is something that has never happened in recorded history. When people lost jobs before, they could at least get training or some other path that would allow them to make a living.

    Now, we’re at record levels of homelessness too. This isn’t going to result in people magically gaining class consciousness. People are just going to die miseable, preventable deaths.

    But I want to understand exactly where you are coming from, like do you think that we should stop all technological progress and simply maintain our civilization in stasis or roll it back to some other time or what?

    Ok. Yes. It does appear that you are figuring a black and white world view where all technology is “progress” and all implements of technology are “tools” with no other classification or differentiation on their value to the species or consideration for how they are implemented. Again, I would recommend reflection as this view does not mesh well with observable reality.

    Someone else already made the apt comparison between this wave of AI tech with nuclear weapons. Another good comparison would be phosgene gas. When it was first mass produced, it was used only for mass murder (as the current LLMs’ financial supports desire them to be used) only the greater part of a century later did the gas get used for something beneficial to humanity, namely doping semiconductors however, its production and use is still very dangerous to people and the environment.

    I’m addition to all of this, it really appears that you fail to acknowledge the danger that accelerating the loss of the ability of the planet to sustain human life poses. Again, for emphasis, I’ll state: AI is not going to save us from this. The actions required are already known - it won’t help us to find them. The technology is being used, nearly exclusively to worsen human life, make genocide more efficient, and increase the rate of poverty, while accelerating global climate change. It provides no net value to humanity in the implementations that are funded. The only emancipation that it is doing is emancipating people from living.


  • It’s really not just that it is/was cheaper. There are cases where, all costs considered, it was actually measurably more expensive. The main reason for off-shoring is purely ideological. Amercan capital has nothing but disdain for workers and hatred for organized labor. Off-shoring was intended to crush unions, while giving a temporarily lower price to goods to prevent the populace from understanding how much they were getting screwed.

    Chip production is a highly specialized field, where workers could readily demand concessions from capital, were they on anything resembling stable ground. That was not too be allowed.






  • That’s…a take. And clearly not sounding like a cultist at all. /S

    Giving corpos free reign to exploit whatever they want has never resulted in positive things, generally, just bloodshed and suffering. Pretending that flagrant violation of IP when done to train models is ok doesn’t do much for big companies but it does obliterate individuals ability to support themselves. This is the only reason that this environmentally disasterous and unprofitable tech has been so heavily embraced; to be used as a tool of exploitation.

    AI is not going to save anyone. It is not going to emancipate anyone. Absolutely none of the financial benefits are being shared with the working class. And, if they were, it would have little impact on LLMs’ big picture value as they are vastly accelerating the destruction of the planet’s biosphere. When that’s gone, humanity is finished.

    Embracing the current forms of commercialized AI is only to the detriment of humanity and the likelihood of the creation of any artificial sentience.


  • So what an Ai does is the same thing as every human ever who has read/saw/listened a work and then wrote more words being influenced by that book/artwork/piece.

    Nope. This has been thoroughly debunked by both neuroscientists and AI researchers. It’s nothing but hand-waiving to claim that corporate exploitation is ok because…reasons.

    LLMs and similar models are literally statistical models of the data that they have been fed. They have no thought, consciousness, or creativity. They are fundamentally incapable of synthesizing anything not already existing in their dataset.

    These same bunk pro-corpo-AI talking points are getting pretty old and should be allowed to retire at this point.