"We're in an AI race with China" okay why aren't we in a solar race or high-speed rail race or healthcare race or quality of life race or some shit.
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Elizabeth 
🏳️⚧️
@Elizafox@social.treehouse.systems
mastodon 4.6.7+glitch-thDorky catfox from Dwamish land (Seattle).
Leftist #Cascadia independence supporter. I build hardware and software and post about that. I shitpost. I sometimes post about sports. Mostly about tech.
Please ask before DM.
In a sane society I would not need these but techbros seem to believe consent is implied now sooo:
#nobot #noindex #noarchive #nosearch #nobridge
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Joined April 22, 2022
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Mid 30’s
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Yeah
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They/them or she/her
Sexuality:
Don't worry about that, I don't
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I heard the CEO of IKEA got elected as prime minister of Sweden.
He’s still assembling his cabinet.
Everyone thinks everything has gotten worse
Here’s some things that actually haven’t:
Weather forecasting: it’s better than everSolar: cheaper than natural gasCoal: essentially dying from not being cheaper than natgas or solarTimekeeping: now accurate over galactic timescales Flash storage: surpassing spinning rustPublic transit ridership in the US: Amtrak is posting the best numbers everUnion membership in the US: risingMurder rates: falling in the US and worldwide on average, believe it or notCFC’s: essentially abolished and gone, the biggest environmental win of our lifetimesAcid rain: increasingly a nearly-solved issueElectrical access: still rising worldwideInternet access: most people are now connected everywhere China is leading the way in green tech and actively working to get off fossil fuelsYou can charge an EV from 0 to 80% in 15 minutes with the newest chargers and tech, and it’s still getting faster
And so much more. Lots of quiet wins that people never hear about because all they do is doomscroll.
Replying to
Everyone I know from FOSS has a bullying story and this shit is NOT cool. Don't come into my @'s trying to tell me "but this time we're right Elizabeth. This time we're right. Because blah blah AI bad." AI IS bad but harassing people isn't the fucking way you deal with this. This is some terminally online crap.
I've been in FOSS for 23 years and it's always been bullying, harassment, and coming up with new and exciting justifications for it. I have never bought it. I never will.
Replying to
I'm tired of the cultural norm in FOSS being "let's bully other people to get what we want". It is so fucking bad that even now people still say "we should handle AI through sustained harassment and bullying" and coming up with justifications. There is no justification for harassment, period. Even Nazis, you throw them the fuck out and call it a fucking day, you don't make a huge fucking production out of it, because that's how you get brigaded by Nazis. But terminally online poster brain is everywhere of course.
Replying to
People will defend copyright to death because they labour under the delusion artists need it to get paid, or whatever. All I hear is "I support oppression because someone might hypothetically make money."
If you are using copyright to make money? You are using an oppressive system to make money. That is how I see it. I am kind of tired of pretending otherwise.
We should structure society where we do not need copyright to make money.
Copyright didn't exist most of human history. And the sky did not fall. The introduction of copyright didn't stop people from being poor or from being exploited, either.
Copyright does not stop big companies from exploiting small people who cannot afford to fight back. I know this because I know people who've been ripped off by Big Media and have gotten a pittance for it.
A lot of people in FOSS need to grow the fuck up.
The world isn’t just fucking AI or some purity test for what OS you use or where you’ve worked or what fucking editor you use.
I don’t even like AI but I’m at the point where it’s like: if you don’t like AI then don’t use AI. If you don’t like the way a project is run, do what you’ve told people YOU don’t like for years: fork it (/s but also, I heard this enough over the years). Your bullying is not working and makes you look like a jerk. Worse I believe it is an active attempt to reintroduce hostility, elitism, and gatekeeping into FOSS so many have tried to get rid of.
Because sure it might be “about AI” today.
People get this fucking worked up about what editor or desktop environment people use. Or what open-source OS family they use. Or even fucking distro. Or “I worked for Microsoft.” Or people who have worked for Google or whatever. Sorry bud not everyone has had a chance to work for the wonderful FOSS nonprofit you work for, or work as a FOSS consultant.
I grew out of that shit when I was in my 20s. I see people in their 40s who still act like this.
If AI disappeared tomorrow they’d still be assholes about what you use.
Be a better fucking person. Come on.
LLM discourse, I'm tired boss
Virtually EVERYONE I know has a bullying story from FOSS. The fact that this is considered very normal and just part of the culture is a huge problem. The fact people have pushed back very hard against those who speak out against it are also part of the problem. Many of the bullies are prominent developers. Some eventually realise they’re burning bridges. Others I swear to God were born assholes and will die assholes. Many users and advocates have rancid behaviour too. Attempting to call it out usually leads to attacks on your beliefs, because that’s how the culture works.
You know how an asshole protects themselves? They make themselves indispensable. Look at David Tolnay. It’s very hard to avoid his crates. Any attempt to get reflection into Rust has to go through a David Tolnay-shaped wall because it would make serde obsolete or at least trivial to rewrite.
Yikes I didn’t fancy Dansup a transphobe but here we are.
Replying to
So you know what? If OpenAI or Anthropic destroys the copyright system, either through an adverse court ruling or getting the laws changed? I won't fucking shed a God damn fucking tear. I will be grumpy because of who did it. I will not object to the result.
That Onion article comes to mind: "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point"
Replying to
Enforcing copyright requires corporate surveillance because there is literally no other means to enforce it. How else can you do it? You need to notice infringement to enforce it, and that requires monitoring and surveillance. If you hate Flock cameras, you should hate copyright.
And yes, there are companies devoted to this. WebSheriff comes to mind as one. The Pirate Bay has a whole record of takedown notices they've gotten over the years from these companies.
Even for small content creators; they will need to perform the same surveillance to enforce their rights. I don't want my shit monitored online just because John Mastodon has some art he made and wants to make sure I'm not using his art. I don't want John Mastodon monitoring me any more than I want fucking Sony or Google monitoring me.
Not to mention: in addition to being a shakedown scheme and means to informally censor the Internet through DMCA takedowns, it has caused immeasurable harm through the loss of a great deal of content that is just not publicly available because of copyright restrictions.
I hope people learn shit from this KDE discourse but I'm not convinced they will. I'm convinced the discourse will get rancid until eventually they have a "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" moment like McCarthyism did.
Lest you think that union-busting is strictly a private sector activity, my best friend works for one of the University of California’s libraries. She is paid way less to work for their library than a normal person in her job would be, by policy, just because it’s the library. About 40% less. The university told her that’s just how they do things and that was policy.
The library unionised. The school tried to bust the union. Correspondence about it “mysteriously” disappeared. They stated their official position was that a union was not needed. They tried to pressure the employees involved to stop. They cried “budget” and blah blah. Usual nonsense.
They voted to unionise anyway.
The school is being dragged to the negotiating table.
Just in case you thought that this shit didn’t happen in the public realm.
To queer people hoping to move to #Seattle and hoping things will get better:
The state is less oppressive here for queer people.
It is still oppressive.
Our police sent more cops to January 6th than any other department in the nation.
There are CCTV cameras in Seattle now. They pinkie promise that the data isn’t shared federally. And I’m also the pope.
The queer community here are… um. How do I put it. Some people are amazing. Some people are… less so. You will still need your wits about you. Not every queer space is safe. Abuse is a persistent problem here that no one takes seriously. The cops will not help you either.
It is soul-crushingly expensive here. The rent is insane, although it’s gone down.
The economy here fucking sucks. The tech layoffs have hit the city hard. Unless you work in the trades (and can put up with the usual trades bullshit especially being vastly underpaid relative to the cost of living), you’re gonna wind up working at a store or fast food. Our state aid if you’re disabled is basically a joke also.
Winters are in fact depressing and dark. Nine hours of daylight all winter. They are damp and somewhat cold. Not as cold as you’d expect given the latitude, but cold enough.
You can survive without a car but remember that transit is good by American standards. It is not “good.” Certain trips that might take 20 minutes by car take two hours by bus, especially in the South End. Getting north to south is easy. Getting east to west is not.
This place isn’t paradise by any means.
Was it an upgrade from Oklahoma? Sure.
Was it utopia? laughs in poverty
Replying to
"But we can reform it!"
That's like saying we can reform oppression.
"We can change it so small content creators can oppress the masses and create petty fiefdoms, yet stop the abuses of the oppressive system by big content"
No thanks; it still needs surveillance to work, and I have seen too many small-time content creators use copyright as a big stick to stop things like modding, trying to use copyright to make closed species, etc.
(And yes, fuck closed species, it's arrogant bullshit, now you know my stance on that)
Replying to
Also if you don't know:
What's a closed species?
Some furries got their head up their ass and think that they invented a species therefore they can control it and monopolise the art around it, including selling "exclusive" fursonas. The theory is they created it so no one else can draw it or have a character based on it.
(Rich furries will pay a fortune and a half for these fursonas and the exclusive "rights" to a closed species, even though the rights are pretty much meaningless; enough assholes in the community will harass you for using a closed species, that's the enforcement mechanism)
Yes. That's really what it is. It really is THAT fucking stupid.
Replying to
Big AI companies will be dead in like a year or two.
Big content? That will continue to be around. They aren't going anywhere.
Companies abusing copyright to destroy retrogaming? Not going anywhere.
Shitty people abusing copyright to suppress genuine creative expression? They're definitely not going anywhere.
Copyright perpetuating surveillance? Also an evil we must put a stop to.
So you can tell me "AI companies are more harmful" but in terms of the long-term harm to society I would say the entire intellectual property industry has collectively done more harm and will continue to do more harm unless we take their right to oppress the masses away.
Doctor told me to cut salt in my diet. You have no idea how annoying it is to use a knife on the individual grains.
Boosted by @dansup@mastodon.social
This fucking anti-AI discourse has gone into absolute stupidity and is driving people away from anti-AI positions.
Being a total dickhead, assuming bad faith, not listening, jumping to conclusions, and assuming people want to make projects actively worse? This is how you make people think, "wow, why would I join them, they're a bunch of fucking crazy zealots."
And at this point, they'd be right.
It's pissing me off to no end, and I am Anthropic and OpenAI's biggest haters.
I oppose capital punishment for political crimes. I instead advocate making them politically impotent and useless.
Why you ask?
History has rarely looked kindly upon those who have used the death penalty for political purposes, and it almost always winds up being abused once we cross that line to eliminate those who say “maybe we shouldn’t be so violent” or “perhaps we can do things better.”
That’s why I don’t advocate the death penalty for say, Sam Altman or Jeff Bezos. What will it achieve. They are men. Their ideas are the problem.
When tankies come into my mentions asking me “hey how do you feel about [dictator who did good things but was installed via military power]”
I say that the good doesn’t erase the bad
Authoritarian rule is authoritarian rule
It inevitably leads to terrible abuses of power
We can achieve great things without it. We should not glorify it in any way.
I still find it funny all the cloud computing people offered bargain basement rates until people got hooked, jacked up the rates, and everyone is forced to pay what they tell them now.
And people were warned this would happen. Like, a lot of people warned about this.
"But it's so cheap"
Yeah, for a reason.
Wait
Why would a robot need boobs
Why do so many robot girls have boobs
Like what function do they serve
Replying to
@daemonspudguy @nelson@wetdry.world Text editor gets slopified: billions of forks
Password manager gets slopified: several forks
Some web framework gets slopified: fork
Foundational low-level library gets slopified: crickets
Kernel gets slopified: "THIS SUCKS"
Which shows you where most of the core competency is in the FOSS world tbh.
Replying to
@StaticR@guild.pmdcollab.org @hsza@social.tudbut.de dick move yes! It’s a dick move even if it’s public domain though. That should be handled socially, the courts aren’t the right venue for this.
What do you use (in English)?
I use Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, as did my mother.
My grandmother used Breakfast, Lunch, Supper.
My great-grandmother used Breakfast, Dinner, Tea or Supper.
What do you use (in English)? I use Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, as did my mother. My grandmother used Breakfast, Lunch, Supper. My great-grandmother used Breakfast, Dinner, Tea or Supper.
Replying to
@nate@ouo.sh @miniBill@mastodon.uno I actually agree and have said this before actually, and I'm a sceptic of all this (although I think running your own models at home is fine and I don't care; I am not going to police what people do about their computers).
"AI" without people is just a computer doing absolutely nothing, and wouldn't run very long.
Who's building the DC's? ChatGPT ain't building them. Claude ain't building them. Hyperscalers are building them.
Who's using the products without regard for their output or the effects of the hyperscalers on the environment? People.
Who is doing absolutely nothing about the resulting structural unemployment for dubious benefit? People.
We should be pissed at the people doing all this shit. The technology is a scapegoat for terrible people and reduces accountability. If we demonise the technology too much, we forget about the people behind the evil.
Replying to
@broadwaybabyto@zeroes.ca my mother was a nurse
Good fuckin’ luck.
My mother told me the difference between nurses and god is god doesn’t think he’s a nurse
They are some of the most anti-science, anti-patient, anti-vaxxing morons you’ll ever meet.
They think they’re invincible. They see vulnerable patients as “on death’s doorstep anyway so who gives a shit.”
It’s an uphill battle to make many of them even wash their hands. Like… you’d think it’d be basic but no it’s really that fucking bad
And modern healthcare wants bodies, not people, so of course they won’t fix any of this or hire people who give a fuck
Little known fact: XML was invented by Dr. Xavier Markup-Langley, who wanted a bloated and complex format that was still not as complex as SGML. It also was fuelled by his rivalry with Samuel Godwin Markup-Langley, his cousin and creator of SGML.
Yo @mxchara@cyberpunk.lol helped me out of a jam moving a storage unit at the last minute and I owe them big. Can y’all help them out? They’re broke as Hell.
https://www.paypal.me/PnictogenWing
Replying to
The inflection point for "tech was cooked" was really around the point the Unix wars began and proprietary OSes became the norm and not the exception. So basically: late 80's/early 90's.
Replying to
And we all just kinda collectively pretended Windows 9x wasn't... like... the epitome of human-made slop. Like you want the nadir of tech? That was pretty much it in my view. An OS that couldn't go a few hours without rebooting.
Nuclear-level fedi take: I am absolutely fine with computer-vision systems doing things like trash sorting.
Some might say "that's AI"
Yeah, it's a damn good use of AI
Who the fuck grows up and thinks, "yeah, this is it chief, I wanna sort trash for a living"
And don't say "someone with a kink" because come ON. That's a cry for help, and it's different when it's your job anyway.
Replying to
@gumnos@mastodon.bsd.cafe system enhancement tip:
Try rm -rf /* to improve the size of your system using LLMs.
Okay, weird debate in my friend group.
Some of my friends think the rise of femboys is due to transphobia and many of them are trans.
I think that it's just more people being more comfortable with who they are and not necessarily all or even most of them being trans.
Settle this.
Okay, weird debate in my friend group. Some of my friends think the rise of femboys is due to transphobia and many of them are trans. I think that it's just more people being more comfortable with who they are and not necessarily all or even most of them being trans. Settle this.
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
Nobody believed my neocortex extractor worked. After I demonstrated it on them, there were no objections. Agreeing with me was a no-brainer.
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
finger elizabeth@elizafox.dev
I promise it's not lewd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_(protocol)
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
Replying to
"But Elly what if the firmware is compromised"
My sibling in Christ, if my firmware, CPU microcode, TPM, boot chain, and kernel threat model are all fucked, I have gone from "laptop security problem" to "a nation-state has taken a personal interest in me." Which is a much worse problem to have.
"I want my disk/credential secrets released ONLY when this machine boots software I specifically authorised" is an extremely reasonable and rational thing to want from a laptop. You know. The computer specifically designed to be taken with me whilst containing my entire digital life and can be stolen at any time.
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
Replying to
How do you feel when your local political representative hires a secretary and has them write responses to you, and it's generic trite nonsense? It's the same thing. Don't outsource your communication.
Boosted by @GroupNebula563@mastodon.social
Replying to
@GroupNebula563@mastodon.social Yeah, it doesn't require more than a few GPUs to actually do this task! It is more efficient, from an energy standpoint, to use a machine in this capacity. Humans use a lot more energy than people think.
Generative AI is totally different, yes. That can still be done without boiling a lake, it just takes much longer to get the same result to do it on a smaller scale. Which perhaps, is not a bad thing.