Louis Posteur

@Lafargue@mastodon.social One thing that does frustrate me though is this kind of vulgarized rehabilitation of the Luddites on the left. I get that there's a common parlance meaning of the term and people are reacting against that, but Marx covered this exact thing in explicit terms!

@Lafargue@mastodon.social I see a lot of confusion on all sides tbh - my own included!

@Lafargue@mastodon.social That is what one would expect, but I think we're well into that part of the cycle tbh, and if any of them were making money purely on inference, they'd be crowing about it. It would be so nice to have any idea at all what the fundamentals of this business are supposed to be lol. All we can really do atm is enjoy the free lunch while it lasts and see what happens 🤷

@Lafargue@mastodon.social wrt the "actually existing" solutions, again it's so hard to have a meaningful conversation about any of this because so much vital data is secret atm. How much do these things really cost to run? Would it even be worth it to run them as utilities? Knowing our luck we'll end up with a situation where AI companies own the models, the state pays for inference, and workers are made to pay subscription fees as the cost of entry to the labor market lol

@Lafargue@mastodon.social wrt 2) I think I agree with this more. In a way the internet/personal computing has been an aberration, owing to its decentralized nature. Ofc the cable itself is directly comparable to other utilities, but the fact that anyone could make stuff available to anyone else on the network really threw a spanner in the works for traditional rentierism. LLMs feel like a return to a more traditional 'factory owner' model, or an attempt at that. And that gives me the heeby jeebies -- perhaps wrongly

@Lafargue@mastodon.social my thoughts on this are a complete mess tbh lol, but: wrt 1) I'm not sure the huge, continuous growth in personal computing power will hold? Ofc there could be a huge breakthrough tomorrow, but we're hitting the physicial limits of what can be done with the current tech e.g. single core cpu performance has been flatlining for years now. Tech capitalists certainly seem to be betting the farm that personal computers won't be able to run actually useful general purpose LLMs. That said (and to hammer home how messy my thoughts are on this lol) I think that investors could well be monumentally wrong about this once Chinese chip manufacturing catches up. There are just so many unknowns atm 🤷‍♂️

@celesteh@hachyderm.io intriguing ​​ Though I do like a sturdy hat because then it doubles up as a fan

@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social straining not to correct this

Look, I use Neovim (btw) -- I am perfectly cool with having to do a bit of a config rewrite every 18 months or so -- but hyprland takes things beyond even my limits

Rick Beato would 100% do this

What we need is more 'hubs', and not to understand what they are for

As they should be tbc. Just another thing to add to the "a lot to pay, not a lot to get paid" pile.

Yes, I wear a panama in the summer. No, I do not care what statement you think I'm trying to make.

I'd also be interested to know who exactly #Omarchy is for. Ricers who don't like ricing? What exactly is the angle here?

@Andrzej3K@eggplant.place or it's time to do a fight scene and Nolan is like "fuck it, just jiggle a hand camera about to express the chaos of war or something idgaf"

Tbc I do actually think LLMs can be very useful for information retrieval (please don't cancel me), and in a world where our resources were marshalled sensibly, that's what they'd be used for. They'd be a way to interface with the web, not a replacement for it.

If social media represented the enclosure of the digital commons, LLMs are strip mining.

To summarize Starmer's speech: please let me keep my job, please please pleeeeeeaaaaase

Mixed feelings about Obsession ngl. And not just because of the dodgy labour relations underpinning its production.

"People say Ann Widdecombe is a 'character'. She's only a character in the sense that it would be better if she were fictitious." The late, great Jeremy Hardy Better late than never, eh 🦀🦀🦀

OK so now we know what the Ceuta crisis was about at least https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/06/trump-gaza-board-of-peace-first-building-contract-military-base

Got myself one of those M1 Macbooks with that Asahi Linux on it, lads. Seems pretty great so far!

Ngl I thought the whole thing of e.g. renaming 'master' to 'main' as if that were a meaningful progressive act was a little silly, but... changing it back is even sillier

@Andrzej3K@eggplant.place Christopher Nolan is so meticulous in so many ways, but then it's time to do an archery stunt and he's like "fuck it we'll just put a massive sheet of chipboard in center frame, it's not like anyone is actually going to watch this in IMAX"

@celesteh@hachyderm.io when you're bald/ing it really is the best thing in this heat. Keeps the sun off you, but it breathes

@Lafargue@mastodon.social I think LLMs are an attempt to change that state of affairs though? The whole appeal for capitalists is that you need a data center to run them — they make information retrieval materially expensive/scarce

@Lafargue@mastodon.social well I guess the centralization was always there to an extent in the manufacturing side of things — and we're only really feeling that now as regular consumers are being out-competed for chips — but I do think there's a difference between software/hardware that can be run locally/independently from the internet and LLMs which necessitate more compute than even a small-to-medium business can reasonably afford the machinery for.

@Lafargue@mastodon.so@plasmatrap.com yeah I find a lot of the discourse around this kind of stupid because while being stochastic parrots, these things do actually perform something a lot like reasoning — it's just clearly observable — and that has interesting implications!