.

Is Qwen really Open Source, or do they just let you download weights? (Like LLaMa.)

They just don’t do anything useful, and the hype-ers are acting like they’re AGI. Hallucinations make them too unreliable to be trusted with “real work”, which makes them useless for anything beyond a passing gimmick. Vibe coded software is invariably shit. Doing any serious task with “AI assistance” ends up either taking more work than doing it without LLMs or sacrificing quality or correctness in huge ways. Any time you point this out to hype-ers, they start talking about “as AI advances” as if it’s a foregone conclusion that they will. People talked the same way about blockchain, and the only “advancements” that have been made in that sphere are more grifts, and meanwhile it still takes anywhere between 10 minutes and an hour to buy a hamburger with Bitcoin, and it gets worse with greater adoption. Just like you can’t make a distributed blockchain cryptocurrency that resolves discrepancies automatically without relying on humans fast at scale (and even if you could make it fast, it’d introduce at least as many problems as it purports to “solve”), you can’t make LLMs not hallucinate. The only way to solve hallucinations is by abandoning LLMs in favor of a whole different algorithm.

If anything LLMs have blocked us from making progress toward AGI by distracting us with gimmicky bullshit and taking resources from other efforts which may otherwise have pushed us in the right direction.

Mind you, “AI” is a very old term that can mean a lot of different things. I took a class in college called “Introduction to Artificial Intelligence” in… maybe 2006 or 2007. And in that class, I learned about the A* algorithm. Every time you played an escort mission in Skyrim and had an NPC following you, it was the A* algorithm or some slight variation on it that was used to make sure that NPC could traverse terrain to keep roughly in toe with you despite obstacles of various sorts. It’s absolutely nothing like LLMs. It doesn’t need to be trained. The algorithm fully works the moment it’s implemented. If you want to know why it made a particular decision, you can trace the logic and determine exactly why it did what it did, unlike LLMs. It’s for a few very niche purposes rather than trying to be general purpose like an LLM. It requires no massive data centers and doesn’t consume massive amounts of memory. And it doesn’t hallucinate. The AI hype-ers (and the media who have mostly fallen for their grift hook, line, and sinker) love to conflate completely unrelated technologies to give the impression that LLMs are getting better because such-and-such article mentions an “AI” that discovered a groundbreaking new drug. But the kind of AI they use to find drugs is very special purpose and has nothing to do with how LLMs work.

LLMs can’t do your job, but the grifters are doing a damned good job of convincing your boss that LLMs can in fact do your job. As Cory Doctorow says, the current AI craze “is the asbestos that we’re shoveling into our walls”. We’re causing huge problems with it and if/when the bubble properly pops, we’re going to spend a long time painstakingly extracting it from our systems, replacing it with… you know… stuff that actually works, and repairing the damage it’s done in the meantime.

Meanwhile, it’s Nvidia and OpenAI and so on who are boosting the LLM bubble. And they’ve made a shit ton of money off of their grift at the expense of everyone else. How anyone can look at all this and not think “scam” is beyond me.

They’re a straight up scam.

Trump posting “good, I’m glad he’s dead” about Mueller changed my view on this. Before, I would have said celebrating Trump’s death would be encouraging some very problematic tendencies. That “the adult in the room” shouldn’t be driven by spite. Now, I suppose my position is that I don’t really think it’s “wrong” to celebrate his death. By doing so, especially by doing so in his own words, we highlight just how toxic a force he was on the U.S. and on the rest of the world. Celebrating his death may well be one of the better acts of defiance against fascism and authoritarianism one can make. If celebrating Hitler’s death isn’t wrong, perhaps so isn’t celebrating Trump’s.

And yet, would a stabbing victim celebrate the moment the knife is removed from the wound? Surely that time is better spent staunching the bleeding and dressing the wound than rebuking the knife or the stabber.

So, I suppose my answer “I hope with discretion.” I hope to be smart enough to be able to discern when and how to celebrate constructively and when and how is less helpful.

It does appear that Ladybird has a grant from FUTO. (At least if their website can be trusted. They have a history of boosting their own image by implying relationships with projects/organizations/etc without the other organization knowing anything about it. But I think (probably?) the “Grants” section is more reliable than the “Microgrants” section on that score.)

But Tor and Signal and MicroG and Creative Commons have similarly received grants from FUTO and I wouldn’t think of them as projects that FUTO has undue influence on. (I’m pretty certain most of them preexisted FUTO, for one thing. Could be wrong on some of them. But I’m pretty certain none of those were “built by” FUTO the way, say, Grayjay was.)

But I’m still nervous about it. This might just be FUTO trying to bolster its own image by making it seem like they’re more responsible for Ladybird than they really are. (Mind you, I haven’t even watched the video because, like you, I think FUTO’s all absolute shitbags that I don’t want anything to do with.) But this post seem to be implying FUTO is more involved with Ladybird than I’d hope, if of course it can be trusted.

Just how associated with Ladybird is FUTO?

Jesus. I guess we’re going to have to start figuring out how to reverse engineer our keyboards so we can install QMK on random built-in laptop keyboards and cheap Logitech membrane keyboards to repair the damage Microsoft has done to them.

Which is why you should always write your shell scripts in portable POSIX style rather than Bash syntax.

Nobody else immediately thought of this?

What’s wrong with the Fediverse exactly?

Can you name one other personality with a large following that comes even close to Louis Rossmann in bringing stuff to light and fighting back against enshittification?

Well, there’s Corey Doctorow, of course. He literally wrote the book on Enshittification.

There are definitely more “behind the scenes” folks doing a lot for that particular cause who don’t so much have a following of anywhere near the same size, but nonetheless do fight enshittification in big ways. Bradley Kuhn comes to mind.