I worked at a place once with an old Win 2k server sitting in the corner of the server room. It had once been a workgroup/domain controller but was long retired from that job. As far as we could tell, nothing was talking to the box anymore and the box wasn’t hosting anything anymore. But for some reason if we shut it down, the network would have random failures to communicate between various devices. It was never especially high priority solve, so we just all knew that we couldn’t turn off that box. Never did find out what was misconfigured before I left.
A useful thought experiment is which 80 year period of history would you prefer to live in other than now, with the caveat that you wouldn’t know how things turn out when you lived in that time. It’s easy to pick a single brief moment in history that is in some important ways better than right now. But many of those time periods are bookended by their own periods of strife and struggle. If you had to pick a different time period in history in which to live your life for 80 years birth to death, would you pick any other time than right now? Would you try to thread the needle such that you weren’t eligible to be drafted into the Vietnam war, but still benefit from the economic growth of the 50s-70s? Knowing that the AIDS crisis was still around the corner? And the unrest of the civil rights movement? The impending doom of the Cold War? A world where you rent your phone from AT&T, where your ability to learn about and communicate with the rest of the world list limited largely to passive consumption of limited news sources and books that might be decades out of date if you aren’t in a major metro area? Where your whole town might be dependent on a single employer who might be closing up factories and moving over seas in the 80s, or just plain closing down and taking your pension (and your local economy) with them?
Would you go further back in time and risk the Korean War or the World Wars and the Great Depression? A time when electricity was new and you might very well be using an outhouse as your toilet? When modern sanitation and health laws were in their infancy and debilitating diseases like polio ran rampant?
Would you go back further?
I for one, despite a lot of the issues with today can’t really find a different period of time I would prefer my life to span. I can absolutely identify parts of different times I would prefer to now, but I can’t see myself giving up everything I would need to to actually live in that period of time, and deal with the strife and struggles of the period at the same time.
>with the caveat that you wouldn’t know how things turn out when you lived in that time.
The premise sort of gives it away, doesn’t it? If you don’t know how things turn out you can’t say how you’d respond. Everyone is a product of their time. Some people are miserable, some are resilient.
It's a necessary restriction. Part of what drives modern anxiety is you don't know the future, so it's necessary that while you get to pick a time period where you have perfect visibility into its future (for example, you know that the cold war doesn't lead to the nuclear apocalypse) the person who lives through that moment can't have that knowledge. If you picked the cold war period, it is necessary that you pick it knowing your cold war self would NOT know that, and would be as anxious as their time and circumstances would make them with the information they would have had then, not the perfect* information you have now.
Well if you don't know anything then it is just a numbers game. Most people pre-industrial has a high likely hood of you being a random subsidence farmer. And provided you didn't pick a standout point in history you would most of the time land on and live an uneventful life as a farmer.
And I know plenty of people that would take that kind of life. They would do it today if it didn't completely isolate themselves from society. But atlest in pre-modern times you could trade some random grain or booze for some other goods and pay your taxes with it. But today neither walmart nor the IRS will accept handspun yarn or a sack grain in lieu of money.
Is it really that bad? The hardware processing and storage is effectively a S24 which retails for $800. Add the additional displays, cameras and controllers, an extra $250 doesn’t seem that out there.
Whether it's a brutal price is separate from where it's fair for the hardware costs that went into it.
I don't want to buy that high end cell phone. First because I already have one (it would be very nice if I could have my phone handle compute from the back of my head or my pocket), second because I mostly want the headset to use with my desktop computer. $250 or $500 for a dumb headset with these features would be great.
Also charging 2-3x slower than you use the battery is very lame.
Eh, I don't think that's how the maths works, especially for products that are in completely different categories. For starters, display costs relatively much more on a VR headset compared to a 6" phone screen, the unit cost is much lower for a phone that is sold in many millions, the marketing cost is different etc. There will likely be actual breakdowns that provide some perspective into this.
Sure, it's not one to one, so the fact that the headset is so close to the retail price of a presumably much cheaper per unit flagship phone is why I don't really think the pricing is that bad for what it is.
IF you were already doing it. But LLMs also allow people who never were doing something to now do that thing as well. In the same way Excel macros enabled some people to run whole businesses on a spreadsheet without hiring a "real" programmer, LLMs will enable some people to run a whole business on "real" applications without hiring a "real" programmer. And yeah, some of those excel macros were a nightmare, one of the many jobs I've taken over the years was a contract job converting the business logic that used to be in excel macros and later vba script to a "real" language and application. But the business that hired me only had the sort of money they needed to hire me because they had a successful business running off that horrible spaghetti mess. I wonder what businesses will be hiring "real" programmers when their founders hit the wall of what they can accomplish on their own with AI.
So what? Just because you had one way to do something before, that means having a different way of doing it is useless? We have the C language, and it’s been letting people write applications for decades. Does that mean there’s no value in other programming languages?
> that means having a different way of doing it is useless?
That’s a ridiculous jump to a totally extreme conclusion that’s not supported by any message above. What does one even answer to this without getting sucked into a pointless argument?
You don't understand how a comment chain that went from:
> Cars qualitatively opened up something that humans could never do before.
> Same with the computer. What about LLMs?
> LLMs just replace what you were already doing
to:
> LLMs also allow people who never were doing something to now do that thing
> as well.
> ...
> LLMs will enable some people to run a whole business on "real" applications
> without hiring a "real" programmer.
to:
> SaaS, and before that a lot of shrink wrap software, has been allowing this
> for several decades now.
leads one to conclude you seem to feel that if something doesn't let you do something you weren't doing before, that it has no value? Because I'm otherwise unclear about what your comment was then supposed to express. The entirety of your reply was to express that the thing an LLM will enable was something that was also enabled by something else. Given the topic of conversation, it seems reasonable to conclude that expression was in the context of talking about the value of AI tools with respect to how they remove friction. If that wasn't the point, then if you could perhaps use more words to state your point directly instead of leaving it to the reader to infer that your point was tangential to the main thrust of the discussion.
> You are a bricklayer, who is proud to build brick walls that are as strong and as elegant as possible, capable of withstanding earthquakes and vehicle impacts, while using as few bricks as possible and introducing as few flaws as possible. The walls you build can stand for decades without significant maintenance.
I think we like to think of ourselves like this a lot, and perhaps with infinite money and time we could often approach these lofty goals. But we are also the same industry who loudly shouts from the rooftops how untrustworthy software is when someone suggests electronic voting systems. We are the same industry that has put such masterpieces into the world as Windows ME or GIMP. We're the same industry that consistently allows data breaches and SQL injection attacks. We're the same industry that has monthly NPM supply chain attacks. We advocate people use open source operating systems that still can't reliably use bluetooth, power saving modes or audio devices and then point to the "no warranty" sticker we slapped on the license, and shrug our shoulders.
We aspire to be the bricklayer you describe, but our industry as a whole bears a lot more resemblance to the Brick-Yeeter 9000 than it does to the aspirational bricklayer.
Yet you can look for accountability in all the data breach, Windows ME, GIMP, or unreliable bluetooth. I would take bricklayers that can reason and say "yeah, we need to delay because the nearest brick factory is currently in low supply", instead of a robot that will yeet bricks that no one can understand why. I value the human.
You can look for accountability. You probably won’t find it. But I’m also not saying there isn’t value in humans.
I am saying that we all have worked on projects where “artisanal software development” bore as much resemblance to our process as an abstract art painting does to reality. We’ve all worked with plenty of coworkers (and maybe have even been that coworker ourselves) who just punches the clock. We’ve all worked with developers who have had 1 year of experience for 30 years in a row. Everyone knows the average piece of software being produced is a buggy mess and it’s amazing it all works at all. Hell our industry coined the phrase “worse is better” and “move fast and break things”. To turn around now and pretend that we’re actually all master craftsmen, regularly constructing artifices of pure beauty and logic that will stand the tests of time is a bit silly.
Sure I would take a real human over a YOLO coded piece of software any day. But I’d also take a real application over an excel macro monstrosity any day too. That doesn’t mean excel macros don’t have their place or that they aren’t used to produce things of real value.
SaaS' moat has always been someone else worrying about the hosting/upgrades/management part for you. Stores still sell sliced bread even though bread machines make bread for you and everyone already has a knife. People often buy convenience, even when they could do something themselves.
AI is in a sense the purest form of open source. All information compiled for all to use without restriction, enabling truly anyone to modify any software to work the way they want and just by describing it in normal human terms to their computer. The outputs aren't copyrightable so all the outputs are open source. The court rulings finding AI training to be fair use are probably the biggest blows to the growing copyright regime Disney and the like built over the last few decades that we've seen in a long while. And to top it all off, our corporate overlords are shoveling their data as fast as possible into the machines. Sure they have "no training" contracts on that data, but given how many human institutions have leaked all of their source code over the years, it's only a matter of time before some training AI agent running at Anthropic or OpenAI or Google does an "oopsy" and dumps all sorts of proprietary closed source code into the AIs that everyone has access to.
If anything the biggest blow to FOSS has been the surprising and unexpected heel turn of so many FOSS advocates who have shed their "information wants to be free" hats donned their new "strong copyright and preventing people from using your code without your explicit approval of how they use it is good actually" hats.
There is a restriction - the useful models are closed source proprietary services that cost money to be used effectively, and those models require vast and expensive infrastructure for training that isn't available to the public. I can't apply the four freedoms to Claude or OpenAI or Grok. I can't fork a billion dollar data center. A bunch of weights isn't the same as source code.
What's more, because people are using these services to generate code they can't understand that code and won't be able to edit or redistribute that code without access to those services.
That's anything but "the purest form of open source." It's even more of a proprietary lock-in than we had to begin with.
And often the most useful software is closed source proprietary things that cost money to be used effectively. That hasn't stopped open source from building impressive and useable systems that are serviceable enough for most use cases. You can't fork photoshop, but GIMP (for all its warts) exists and you can use it for photo manipulation. You can't fork Solidworks, but FreeCAD and OpenSCAD exist, and you can use them to do 3d modeling. You can't fork Eagle, but KiCad exists and you can design your own PCBs with it. You can't fork Windows or MacOS but Linux and BSD exist and they probably already run most of your hardware. You can't fork Oracle, but Postgres and MariaDB exist and you can run a business on them. Unless we stupidly legally lock AI training and model creation to massive proprietary corporations, why do you think the same won't hold true for open AI models and projects? Maybe Claude will always be a better code agent than AInix or whatever, but as long as AInix is good enough, that doesn't matter any more than it matters that Solidworks is better than FreeCAD.
I see little real difference between using proprietary software and using AI to generate software in terms of the freedoms allowed to the end user. The entire point of the free software ethos is that the end user should be in control to the degree that they want to be, not merely to the degree that a proprietary service allows. If nothing else the obliteration of programming culture and education and the mass deskilling created by the normalization of AI works against that ethos. It turns programming into just another form of capitalist consumption.
Which is all well and good if you don't care about such things and just want the end product but AI shouldn't be conflated with FOSS. A tool that strips knowledge away from people is antithetical to the culture even if the end product is high quality.
AI is a tool like any other. AI doesn't inherently "strip knowledge away from people" any more than an IDE, or a GUI or a modern computer does. Yes, you can use AI to blindly do things without learning. And you can use GParted to blindly format a drive without ever learning what cylinders and sectors are. And you can use GIMP plugins to blur images without ever having to learn matrix multiplication. Or you can use drop box and never have to learn how to use rsync, samba and chron. But you can also use AI to learn things like which obscure emacs functions you can string together to customize your emacs config in a way that suits you better. Or how to programmatically invoke disabled junit tests from within another test so that you can test that an annotation that decorates a unit test does the things around that test execution that you expect. That last by the way is a real thing I did, and something that is difficult if not impossible to search for with normal search tools because the terms that you need to use are much more likely to get you results for generally enabling and disabling unit tests.
If a user chooses to use AI in a way that strips knowledge away from them, and doesn't contribute to their learning, that is a choice they are making but there is nothing inherent in AI that requires it anymore than choosing to code in a higher level language inherently prevents you from learning assembly language.
The problem with your argument is that there is a cost to using AI so it's not really free. There's an environmental and a social cost that restricts the freedom of others, which is technically still open source but not in the spirit of it.
There are costs to using all technology, including open source software. We can start with the obvious point that open source was never about "Free as in beer" and even the FSF says as much. Of course, the nature of open source makes not having "free as in beer" open source software difficult, RedHat Enterprise linux is clearly open source and yet it imposes a cost on its users.
As for environmental costs, electronics manufacturing is dirty business. Some pretty nasty chemicals go into the process of making every single piece of hardware you buy to run Linux. Never mind the sheer waste of electricity and energy that our modern "always on, always connected" world incurs all the time. Every single person running HomeAssistant while flashing ESPHome on all of their IOT devices is burning all sorts of electricity making their home "smart". Everyone running their 24/7 media server hosting a Jellyfin instance and a RAID array of spinning disks is burning away environmental resources all day long to allow them to have on demand access to videos we previously would have stored on unpowered storage media. How many raspberry pis, flipper zeros and other pieces of cheap tech have been produced with limited environmental resources and now languish in a drawer somewhere? How many gigabytes of data are needlessly shipped around the world, burning more energy, so that developers can have "cattle, not pets" for their servers and rebuild the whole docker stack from scratch every time? How many CI build pipelines pull all of their dependencies every single time from across hundreds of open source repositories? What about the environmental costs of the maker movement? Sure repairing your stuff is nice, but open sourcing 3d printing has almost certainly generated far more waste plastic than it has saved by allowing people to repair things.
And as for social costs, that just depends on you point of view. How many crimes are enabled by open source software like GPG and GrapheneOS? How about Bit Torrent, Tor and I2P? Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? What is the social cost that the open source spirit that inspires VPNs like wireguard and proxy servers impose on countries and societies that would rather not have pornography or "dissident" material available? For that matter, what is the social cost imposed on the world by all the open source software that underlies every social media network and feed out there? Facebook and their algorithm might be proprietary, but open source software enables their scale and reach. How about the social costs of modern expectations for "free as in beer" software, that open source has very much contributed to? We talk about the mental health burden that is maintaining an open source project, and yet every time someone offers a piece of software for sale, HN threads are full of people griping about the price. RedHat tries to close the "free as in beer" holes in their business model, and people in the "spirit" of open source do everything they can to circumvent that. Prusa open sources their 3d printer designs and software, and the community shamelessly responds by undercutting them with cheap clones and knockoffs. And let's not even get started on the lionizing and hero worship of some of open source's less than stellar big names. Lots of people are or have been very famous and wield quite a bit of power and influence in the open source world and have shaped it for better or for ill and have advanced all sorts of causes some look askance at. Or they've set terrible examples of behavior and tone for the entire OSS community.
And then of course there's the ever present debate of whether the GPL or the BDS licenses are the ones that restrict or enable restricting the freedom of others. Never mind that the open source community is eternally wrestling with the question of whether or not you can or should impose limits on HOW open source software is used. Should an open source software project knowingly allow themselves to be used by a military organization? Does it matter if that organization is the IDF or the Ukrainian military? Does an OSS maintainer have the right to inject code into their project that they know is widely used as a dependency by other systems that prevents the software from working if it detects it's running in Russia and thereby restrict the freedom of those people to use the software?
Yes, AI has a cost. And you might decide that said costs are not ones you're comfortable with, or that they are higher than you want them to be. But no one should delude themselves into thinking that open source software in particular, or software and IT in general isn't FULL of these same costs and we've been waging battles over them for decades before now, and will continue to wage them for decades to come. AI is just another in a long list of controversial technologies which will change world for better or worse, just like every one that came before.
I see that it applies styles to markdown documents, but keeps all formatting characters visible (e.g. # for titles). I guess I wasn't happy with that and looked for another solution.
“Always listening” in the way people have been conspiratorially claiming your phone is listening to show you ads is silly.
Always listening in that the owner could run an application that could be recording them and you on the other hand has been a possibility since pretty much day one.
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