Another day, another speculative execution vulnerability.

I don’t believe the common refrain that AI is only a problem because of capitalism. People already disinform, make mistakes, take irresponsible shortcuts, and spam even when there is no monetary incentive to do so.

I also don’t believe that AI is “just a tool”, fundamentally neutral and void of any political predisposition. This has been discussed at length academically. But it’s also something we know well in our idiom: “When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” When you have AI, genuine communication looks like raw material. And the ability to place generated output alongside the original… looks like a goal.

Culture — the ability to have a very long-term ongoing conversation that continues across many generations, about how we ought to live — is by far the defining feature of our species. It’s not only the source of our abilities, but also the source of our morality.

Despite a very long series of authors warning us, we have allowed a pocket of our society to adopt the belief that ability is morality. “The fact that we can, means we should.”

We’re witnessing the early stages of the information equivalent of Kessler Syndrome. It’s not that some bad actors who were always present will be using a new tool. It’s that any public conversation broad enough to be culturally significant will be so full of AI debris that it will be almost impossible for humans to find each other.

The worst part is that this will be (or is) largely invisible. We won’t know that we’re wasting hours of our lives reading and replying to bots, tugging on a steering wheel, trying to guide humanity’s future, not realizing the autopilot is discarding our inputs. It’s not a dead internet that worries me, but an undead internet. A shambling corpse that moves in vain, unaware of its own demise.

For a glorious second, the entire world was able to communicate as one.

Then we catalogued every accessible reservoir of culture and knowledge, mined them bare, and refilled them with slop.

A global collective consciousness, hollowed out, replaced with static. No signal. Only noise.

1. Fuck AI
2. This judge’s point is absolutely true:

“You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products,” Chhabria said. “You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person’s work, and you’re saying that you don’t even have to pay a license to that person.”

3. AI apologists’ response to that will invariably be “but it’s sampling from millions of people at once, not just that one person”, which always sounds like the fractions-of-a-penny scene
4. Fuck copyright
5. A ruling against fair use for AI will almost certainly deal collateral damage to perfectly innocuous scraping projects like linguistic analysis. Even despite their acknowledgement of the issue:

To prevent both harms, the Copyright Office expects that some AI training will be deemed fair use, such as training viewed as transformative, because resulting models don’t compete with creative works. Those uses threaten no market harm but rather solve a societal need, such as language models translating texts, moderating content, or correcting grammar. Or in the case of audio models, technology that helps producers clean up unwanted distortion might be fair use, where models that generate songs in the style of popular artists might not, the office opined.

6. We really need to regulate against AI — right now — but doing it through copyright might be worse than not doing it at all

No but you don’t understand.

Capitalism works because it pits everyone against each other and so even though every single person is greedy and unethical, they begrudgingly improve society overall because of reasons.

All we have to do is make sure we teach every child that all humans are fundamentally greedy and evil and the only ethical response is to out-greedy and out-evil them.

And then we’ll have a prosperous society!

• Adam Smith basically

getting all the relevant equipment and personnel

Yeah, doesn’t sound like the kind of coding I’m familiar with.

Always a Bigger Fish

I’m out here trying to answer reasonable questions techie folks might have about the most promising possibility I’ve seen so far for getting our normie families off of Google.

What are you here for? Calling people naive pseudo-scammers? Get out of here.

There’s a link in the second paragraph to the technical details, including source code for the implementation and documentation for the required infrastructure.

But the tl;dr is that the tokens aren’t associated to your account. Unless you were able to snoop on the original request that generated the tokens (in which case, you’ve got bigger issues!), there’s no way to prove that a token is related to a specific account. A token only proves that an authorization server once granted access to some account.

Edit: Wikipedia has a good intro:

Non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs are cryptographic primitives, where information between a prover and a verifier can be authenticated by the prover, without revealing any of the specific information beyond the validity of the statement itself.

Edit 2: You should not be catching downvotes. You had a reasonable question.

Fine for you. I’m just glad there’s an option besides “sell your soul” and “invest hundreds of hours and dollars into self-hosting”.

Kagi Privacy Pass

• tab completion works in more places than you might expect
• ctrl-a/ctrl-e for start/end of line
• ctrl-u to clear the command you’ve typed so far but store it into a temporary pastebuffer
• ctrl-y to paste the ctrl-u’d command
• ctrl-w to delete by word (I prefer binding to alt-backspace though)
• ctrl-r to search your command history
• alt-b/alt-f to move cursor back/forwards by word
• !! is shorthand for the previous run command; handy for sudo !!
• !$ is the last argument of the previous command; useful more often than you’d think
• which foo tells you where the foo program is located
• ls -la
• cd without any args takes you to your home dir
• cd - takes you to your previous dir
• ~ is a shorthand for your home dir

Mind–body problem

Well, Nix is a programming language, so there’s no getting around having to learn basic principles of coding.

That said, I feel like coming into Nix with a lot of programming experience actually worked against me at first, because I made a lot of assumptions that weren’t true and basically had to “unlearn” certain things.

The main things being:

• Lazy evaluation is trippy as hell sometimes
• The language truly does not allow for side-effects. Everything you might think is a side-effect is really executed from outside the language runtime itself
• It might be more accurate to think of Nix as a database, where the keys are the parameters of what to build and the values are directories full of the built artifacts

What really made it click for me was seeing how a derivation object is basically equivalent to a path. So if I do ”${pkgs.foo}/bar”, that’s the exact absolute path (plus /bar) where Nix will end up storing the output of the pkgs.foo derivation. Even without actually building the derivation, you can know where it will end up.

Anyway, the documentation is pretty shitty, so you basically have to scour every community resource you can find and read way more of it than it seems like you should have to. Discord/Matrix servers help a lot too. And learning to navigate the source code for nixpkgs.

Also: Don’t start with NixOS, imo. Start with dumb throwaway stuff where you make a derivation that downloads a file and unzips it and runs a single command. Once you understand that, do something that requires understanding a bit of nixpkgs, like using overlays. Then you can use NixOS. Otherwise, there’s too much going on all at once.

Edit:

• Nix pills is good
• Vimjoyer is amazing

I look at it like tipping a street musician.

The point isn’t to purchase access to the experience. You can get that for free if you want.

The point is to keep their creative outlet going, so I (and everyone around me) get to experience the next cool thing they do.

My toddler insisted on putting pepper on her strawberries the other day.

I laughed and said she was welcome to try, but “start on just a couple slices so you don’t ruin all of them”.

She said it was great, but I didn’t believe her, so I tried it. And then we put pepper on all of them.

Oh boy. If you really wanna understand this, there are like 80 episodes of the podcast You Are Not So Smart that look at this from different angles.

There’s not really a single reason. It’s a lot of inter-related ones.

But just saying “which he named” would be less characters and make more sense

“Which himself named it”

Words good authoring there