Absolutely. Reposting from a year ago:

There is a certain strain of open source development that is nearly anti-marketing, as far as I can tell. They choose names like “gimp”, “git”, “frotz”, “borg”, “pooch”, “butt”, “slurm”, “mutt”, “snort”, and “floorp”.

I note this sentiment has a lot in common with Christian millennialist theology and anticipation of end-times.

If only we could add sanctioned Russian propaganda to the sanctions list… (Also: English is weird).

How you judge others is how you judge yourself. Practice being kind in your judgment of others, and you will find it becomes natural to be kind in how you judge yourself.

What you value, praise, attend to in others’ lives is what you value, praise, and eventually attend to in your own life. Be curious about others lives, don’t assume they have it figured out. This will lead to natural curiosity of your own life, and you will find there are many kinds of achievement and each leads to a way to value yourself. (Achievement is not one-dimensional–money & career is only one kind of achievement).

News and discussion, but you start from a chosen community and work towards global connection. Also, no ads, no making you the product, and volunteer-based development and moderation.

“less toxic” can be interpreted in different ways. For example, I don’t always find people on Lemmy to be more open-minded across tribal boundaries. But you can perhaps find your tribe and experience less toxicity that way?

I love your insights, thanks for commenting. I’d just note that in some cases the word “nerd” has grown to mean just about anyone with competence or expertise due to their intrinsic interest & enthusiasm for the subject area. So maybe becoming an “equestrian nerd” or a “construction nerd” makes you immune to overbroad marketing claims in those areas!

I wonder what social media does.

This advice seems off-base to me. There is value in LinkedIn connections. But you have to make the connections outside of LinkedIn. Then it amplifies the value of those connections–you can discover that so-and-so knows so-and-so and then ask for introductions.

It also may be industry specific. I’m a software engineer, and I’ve had several employment opportunities come from these connections.

I don’t think I have intrusive thoughts. I’m happy, generally pretty creative (hobbies, coding, etc.). Sometimes politics and world affairs get me down, but I don’t feel like they are “intrusive”, more like affecting my mood. I like how /u/0x01@lemmy.ml put it–I kind of let my mind do whatever it does, and I try to be an observer of what unfolds. I think meditation practice has helped with this practice (Vipassana or Insight meditation specifically).

Look for escape hatches. I run a self-hosted Cloudron server. The software I host on my home server is FOSS via Cloudron, but Cloudron itself is a service that keeps each of the FOSS apps up to date with security upgrades and data migrations when necessary. It’s a huge boon to running a self-hosted server.

But when it comes down to it, they could potentially close up somehow (new leadership, get bought out, shut down etc.) They’ve left an escape hatch though–you can bundle and build your own apps, with a CloudronManifest.json etc. This would allow me to continue to run and update software if I absolutely needed to, without their support.

theinternet.com

It’s tricky. There is code involved, and the code is open source. There is a neural net involved, and it is released as open weights. The part that is not available is the “input” that went into the training. This seems to be a common way in which models are released as both “open source” and “open weights”, but you wouldn’t necessarily be able to replicate the outcome with $5M or whatever it takes to train the foundation model, since you’d have to guess about what they used as their input training corpus.

Reminds me of Three Felonies a Day

I recall seeing this video a few months ago–possibly last winter.

I see. Yeah, I agree with you there.

I think you’re right circa a few years ago. However, as someone working in AI, I don’t think it is true any longer. I’m not saying the substack article is legit, btw, just that the fulcrum has shifted–fewer people can now do much more, aided by algorithms and boosted by AI system prompts. Especially if it’s a group internal to a company that has database access etc.

I do work with LLMs, and I respect your opinion. I suspect if we could meet and chat for an hour, we’d understand each other better.

But despite the bad, I also see a great deal of good that can come from LLMs, and AI in general. I appreciated what Sal Khan (Khan Academy) had to say about the big picture view:

There’s folks who take a more pessimistic view of AI, they say this is scary, there’s all these dystopian scenarios, we maybe want to slow down, we want to pause. On the other side, there are the more optimistic folks that say, well, we’ve gone through inflection points before, we’ve gone through the Industrial Revolution. It was scary, but it all kind of worked out.

And what I’d argue right now is I don’t think this is like a flip of a coin or this is something where we’ll just have to, like, wait and see which way it turns out. I think everyone here and beyond, we are active participants in this decision. I’m pretty convinced that the first line of reasoning is actually almost a self-fulfilling prophecy, that if we act with fear and if we say, “Hey, we’ve just got to stop doing this stuff,” what’s really going to happen is the rule followers might pause, might slow down, but the rule breakers–as Alexander [Wang] mentioned–the totalitarian governments, the criminal organizations, they’re only going to accelerate. And that leads to what I am pretty convinced is the dystopian state, which is the good actors have worse AIs than the bad actors.

https://www.ted.com/talks/sal_khan_how_ai_could_save_not_destroy_education?subtitle=en

My daughter (15f) is an artist and I work at an AI company as a software engineer. We’ve had a lot of interesting debates. Most recently, she defined Art this way:

“Art is protest against automation.”

We thought of some examples:

• when cave artists made paintings in caves, perhaps they were in a sense protesting the automatic forces of nature that would have washed or eroded away their paintings if they had not sought out caves. By painting something that could outlast themselves, perhaps they wished to express, “I am here!”
• when manufacturing and economic factors made kitsch art possible (cheap figurines, mass reprints, etc.), although more people had access to “art” there was also a sense of loss and blandness, like maybe now that we can afford art, this isn’t art, actually?
• when computers can produce images that look beautiful in some way or another, maybe this pushes the artist within each of us to find new ground where economic reproducibility can’t reach, and where we can continue the story of protest where originality can stake a claim on the ever-unfolding nature of what it means to be human.

I defined Economics this way:

“Economics is the automation of what nature does not provide.”

An example:

• long ago, nature automated the creation of apples. People picked free apples, and there was no credit card machine. But humans wanted more apples, and more varieties of apples, and tastier varieties that nature wouldn’t make soon enough. So humans created jobs–someone to make apple varieties faster than nature, and someone to plant more apple trees than nature, and someone to pick all of the apples that nature was happy to let rot on the ground as part of its slow orchard re-planting process.

Jobs are created in one of two ways: either by destroying the ability to automatically create things (destroying looms, maybe), or by making people want new things (e.g. the creation of jobs around farming Eve Online Interstellar Kredits). Whenever an artist creates something new that has value, an investor will want to automate its creation.

Where Art and Economics fight is over automation: Art wants to find territory that cannot be automated. Economics wants to discover ways to efficiently automate anything desirable. As long as humans live in groups, I suppose this cycle does not have an end.

Thanks for posting this. I am 4th gen since my family (i.e. great grandfather) served in a war.

I think generations that have not gone through war have a hard time recognizing war-induced inter-generational trauma, since it’s often the case that men who went through that hell didn’t want to bring it home and talk about it, for various reasons (e.g. PTSD, shame, thoughtfulness).

Their behaviors might have caused kids and grand-kids to suffer (e.g. physical abuse, emotional abuse), but those kids might not understand why their dad, grandpa, etc. behaved the way he did, so maybe the source of the problem gets buried and forgotten.