I guess you’re completely right with that. It lowers the entry barrier. And it’s kind of self-reinforcing. And we have other unhealty dynamics with other technology as well, like social media, which also can radicalize people or get them in a downwards spiral…

Oh wow. In the old times, self-proclaimed messiahs used to do that without assistance from a chatbot. But why would you think the “truth” and path to enlightenment is hidden within a service of a big tech company?

Privacy would be the main concern. Every single one of your words, documents, pictures will probably end up in some large database over at OpenAI. I don’t like that at all. And as a company for example, it might be against the law to share some information about clients with third parties.

Then you don’t get any of the freedoms we got with Free Software. It’s a service you rely on with very little opportunities to customize, or look inside and tinker. There is little control for the user whatsoever. Additionally we already had companies cease service. So it might become unavailable tomorrow, which is a bad thing if you’re attached to it, invested or built things around it.

And since “the internet is for porn”… We also have a noteworthy community doing those kinds of things. And well… go ahead and ask the big services to generate a lewd story. Most of them even refuse to write a murder mystery story for me, instead they’ll lecture me on how it is not ethical to murder someone. So that would be use-cases where local AI outperforms any of the market leaders.

Personally, I’m a bit opposed to the entire concept of letting other people’s algorithms dictate my life. I don’t want to rely on them. I also don’t want them to pick the bias for my perspective on the world. The algorithms in social media are dwarfed by how dangerous it’s gonna be once people rely on AI more and more. And it gets to choose which information to show and which to drop. What kind of bias to introduce in summaries etc. Teach people how to think. And I already don’t like the way all big AI chatbots talk to me with a lot of emojis and in a “Explain like I’m 5 yo” way.

So to go back to the original question… I think the more “useful” AI is, the more reasons there are to retain some control yourself. What do you think?

I don’t think it is about that. The information collection is an added bonus they happily accept and make use of. I think it’s mainly about power and money, though. They get rid of everyone who isn’t completely in line and subservient. That’s from the playbook on how to become an autocratic regime. And they’re oviously interested in the money as well. Cut off everyone and everything they don’t like. Like weak people, poor people, your grandma and children. That money can then be funneled towards other people. Guess whom. I think the power and control aspect is the original idea though. And money has power as well. So does information and data, so it’s more a combination of things.

But the way they act, I’d say they had a look at other oligarchies and corrupt regimes and wanted in, too. Saw you need to replace all the people in any color of power and replace them with your own henchmen. Then they also hate a lot of people and always wanted to take their money. The AI and data thing looks more to me like something they discovered while at it. And I don’t believe the traditional MAGA people are smart enough to have anticipated that. But naturally, information is power. And AI can be used as a mindless slave to someone. I’d say it’s worth trying to foster it instead rely on human clerks and officials. It’ll be a new form of administration. One that does away with a lot of middle-men like the corrupt government workers other regimes have to pay.

And Musk looks like he has his own motivation, which might or might not be aligned with the “grand plan” I can’t really see there is. He is (was) free to combine the useful with what’s enjoyable to him. Currently the tactics is mostly to break a lot of stuff. Doesn’t really matter how or what. So that’s what they’re doing right now. I think the struggle and in-fighting on who gets to replace what with exactly what kind of things hasn’t really started yet. It’s already there, but not the main concern as of now. So we can’t tell the exact dynamics we’re bound to see in the near future. I’d say mass surveillance plus yet more AI is likely a formula to success, though.

If the author had looked at the quality of generative AI chatbots in 2023, it wouldn’t have come as a surprise to them that they didn’t really replace a lot of humans. Big question is: What’s going to happen today and in the near future?

Sure, that’s the basic idea of targeted advertising. And it works well. Google, Meta etc are making billions that way. I believe this can be translated into AI. And as a bonus they can exploit a few more psychological effects. Like make it sond like a recommendation from a friend (your AI companion), or have it nudge you so you’ll think buying it was your idea…

By the way, you can still run the Yunohost installer ontop of your Debian install… If you want to… It’s Debian-based anyway so it doesn’t really matter if you use its own install media or use the script on an existing Debian install. Though I feel like adding: If you’re looking for Docker… Yunohost might not be your best choice. It’s made to take control itself and it doesn’t use containers. Of course you can circumvent that and add Docker containers nonetheless… But that isn’t really the point and you’d end up dealing with the underlying Debian and just making it more complicated.

It is a very good solution if you don’t want to deal with the CLI. But it stops being useful once you want too much customization, or unpackaged apps. At least that’s my experience. But that’s kind of always the case. Simpler and more things automatically and pre-configured, means less customizability (or more effort to actually customize it).

Thanks for your perspective. Sure, AI is here to stay and flood the internet with slop and arbitrary (mis)information phrased like a factual wikipedia article, journalism, a genuine user review or whatever its master chose. And the negative sides of the internet have been there long before we had AI to the current extent. I think it is extremely unlikely that the internet is going to move away from being powered by advertisements, though. That’s the main business model as of today, and I think it is going to continue that way. Maybe dressed in some new clothes, but social media platforms, Google etc still need their income. I wonder how it’ll turn out for the AI companies, though. To my knowledge, they’re currently all powered by hype and investor money. And they’re going to have to find some way to make profit at some point. Whether that’s going to be ads or having their users pay properly, and not like today where the majority of people I know use the free tier.

Oh, wow. What’s your estimate on how it’s going to turn out? Is it a vastly different thing? I mean SEO also requires quite an amount of technical knowledge about how proprietary algoritms work. Experience… You always need to be super up to date with everything. And we have a lot of snake-oil salesmen. I believe “AIO” would be a shift and some new things to learn, but not be too different or an entirely new thing?

That sounds fun, SEO so it’s also ingested by AI… Maybe I should check my spam folder to see if all the people who send me spam to optimize my homepage already picked up on that.

Well if you use a Linux distribution, you generally get your software from some central package repository. That’s driven by maintainers who look at the software, the updates… They patch the software, make sure it runs smoothly on your system and is tied into other things… They’ll also have a look at security vulnerabilities and security in general.

Other than that, there isn’t much really “stopping” people from writing malware. We have tons of it. Fake VLC versions, copycats on the iPhone appstore… MS Windows is full of advertisements and features that send data “home”. They introduce features which border on being malware all the time… We have trojans, viruses etc. It’s all out there.

Generally, it’s a good idea to think before executing random code from the internet. Is it from a trustworthy source? Are other people using a piece of software and they’d have noticed if it deleted all files?

Usually, we have more good people than bad. And people need some motivation. It’s unlikely someone invests 10 years of their life to develop a shiny and polished office suite, just so they can run some malware somewhere. There are easier ways to accomplish that. So it generally doesn’t happen that way. It’s theoretically possible, though.

And in the old way is: Windows, Android etc are way more popular. If someone wants to do something malicious, they likely don’t target the 1-2% using a different operating system. They are going to write malware for a more popular operating system. And on the server, where Linux dominates the market, admins execute less random code. They’ll know they want MariaDB and where to get it. So it’s harder to do an attack this way.

And if I imagine being the attacker… What would be a reason to include malware in a FOSS project? Just to wreck havock and mess with people? That sounds like a 16 yo with too much time on their hands. But we have very few of those in the free software community. So that’s a bit unlikely… If someone wants a botnet, there might be easier ways to do it. And for a targeted attack, you wouldn’t hide your malware in a random project… So I generally don’t see many reasons for someone to combine malware with useful FOSS software.

:() ::& ;:

Sure. But we need to see pics, or it didn’t happen.

The abstract doesn’t mention them re-gaining their old capacity. It only says they shrink. And something about voltage. So I have my doubts. I mean it’s nice if my spicy pillow shrinks a bit. But what does that help if it continues to stay nearly dead? And an application in products would be hard to accomplish. At that temperature, all the plastic etc is going to melt. Maybe the solder as well.

I’ve always backed up my SMS to my E-Mail inbox. With something like SMS Gate or SMS Backup+. I think it’s nice to have all messages in my mail program. Of course that only does one way. To reply and get immediate notifications, I use KDEConnect (or GSConnect which is the same thing for GNOME.)

Wasn’t “error-free” one of the undecidable problems in maths / computer science? But I like how they also pay attention to semantics and didn’t choose a clickbaity title. Maybe I should read the paper, see how they did it and whether it’s more than an AI agent at the same intelligence level guessing whether it’s correct. I mean surprisingly enough, the current AI models usually do a good job generating syntactically correct code one-shot. My issues with AI coding usually start to arise once it gets a bit more complex. Then it often feels like poking at things and copy-pasting various stuff from StackOverflow without really knowing why it doesn’t deal with the real-world data or fails entirely.

I’ve also had that. And I’m not even sure whether I want to hold it against them. For some reason it’s an industry-wide effort to muddy the waters and slap open source on their products. From the largest company who chose to have “Open” in their name but oppose transparency with every fibre of their body, to Meta, the curren pioneer(?) of “open sourcing” LLMs, to the smaller underdogs who pride themselves with publishing their models that way… They’ve all homed in on the term.

And lots of the journalists and bloggers also pick up on it. I personally think, terms should be well-defined. And open-source had a well-defined meaning. I get that it’s complicated with the transformative nature of AI, copyright… But I don’t think reproducibility is a question here at all. Of course we need that, that’s core to something being open. And I don’t even understand why the OSI claims it doesn’t exist… Didn’t we have datasets available until LLaMA1 along with an extensive scientific paper that made people able to reproduce the model? And LLMs aside, we sometimes have that with other kinds of machine learning…

(And by the way, this is an old article, from end of october last year.)

Oh, wow. Should be pretty obvious that something isn’t open source, …well… unless the source is open…

See to what IP your domain points, and if that’s really the external IP of your router. Might also help to put in your IP address into the webbrowser instead of the domain, to see if port 80 / 443 really go somewhere. Another possibility, do a portscan from the internet.

Btw, how do you access Wireguard? I mean that’s also somehow able to access your network from outside…

And if we’re really talking about “open-source” and not just “open-weight”, the additional scientific papers, datasets and tooling are going to help democratize the technology and even out the playing field to a degree.

I haven’t checked, but ffmpeg is super versatile. It does a lot of stuff, even esoteric and niche things… Sometimes depends on what flags are set when compiling it, so the Linux distros don’t always include everything ffmpeg is capable of.

Some people do it. For example we have this solar-powered website: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/

You’d need an energy source like a solar panel, a battery and some computing device. Like a single board computer (Raspberry Pi) you can also run webservers on smartphones, or even a microcontroller. The server part works without an internet connection. But you obviously need some way to connect to it. A wifi (router) or a computer connected via an ethernet cable.

The tech isn’t too complicated. Just install nginx if you have a raspberry pi, open a wifi and put your website on it. If you choose a phone, try Termux and a supported webserver. Both Linux and smartphones are designed to even work without an internet connection ;-)