- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- programmer_humor@programming.dev
This is not new for compagies to make money on the internet using the work and information others made without compensation for the community
Google search or stackoverfow did it long before LLMs, it’s just that the price is different, you pay with your attention spans instead of money
I’m pretty sure that we’ll have freely accessible LLMs with ads baked in a way you can’t even see them at first glance (if they aren’t doing it already)What’s new with LLMs is that the information source is hidden, no credit is attributed for people that contribute to the community anymore
Google search or stackoverfow did it long before LLMs
These examples had very obvious attribution and were an easy path to you. AI on the other hand serves as the source of truth in almost all scenarios. I consider myself a savvy user and even then I find myself never actually clicking on the cited sites - just looking at their titles, most people don’t even bother with that.
deleted by creator
Not under capital. No.
Just further enshittification. Companies don’t make new things or new technologies anymore. They just find new ways to rent squat and extract fees. They’ve stolen everyone’s work, manufactured a way to give it to you first without you seeing the author’s material, and told everyone to use this method to access information so they can charge for it.
on Reddit it would be something like r/AccidentalAlienation
I mean, they’re saying you’re replaceable, but that’s just a front for layoffs. Executive leadership doesn’t care about having a functioning organization. They can easily find a job somewhere else once they demonstrate short term profits, even if it’s at the expense of the company’s long-term health
nobody wants to work these days!
Its not weird, but its wrong and should be illegal
Finally someone said it. I honestly was wondering why no one was complaining about this… I’ve worked on some open source myself, licensed it GPL, and never intended for it to be used as training data.
Doesn’t the GPL cover shit like this? There should be mass lawsuits hitting any AI that used open source software and didn’t just specifically use BSD projects or something.
If you train an LLM on GPL code, it should be illegal to sell that LLM and use it commercially without revealing ALL THE SOURCE you used and the source to regenerate that model.
Yeah I mean they train ai on commercially copyrighted stuff like books that they straight up pirate so if that doesn’t stop them the open source community certainly won’t
Doesn’t the GPL cover shit like this? There should be mass lawsuits
I hope it’ll happen eventually.
Currently the USA (and that’s where most of this shit comes from) is aggressively pro AI to the point of breaking the law with government support.
BTW what OP says has happened to Linux (at large) through Google/Android, too. The GPL hasn’t stopped them but surely put some limits on their exploitation of FOSS
If you train an LLM on GPL code, it should be illegal to sell that LLM and use it commercially without revealing ALL THE SOURCE you used and the source to regenerate that model.
Also if that LLM is used to generate code - that code must also be GPL.
I’d love to see lawsuits force Microsoft and Nvidia and OpenAI to open source everything they had AI touch 😁
never intended for it to be used as training data.
You could have chosen a different license than the GPL.
Doesn’t the GPL cover shit like this?
No. Didn’t you read the license you used?
GPL absolutely should cover shit like this. Training an LLM on your code makes it definitionally a derivative work, therefore it must be licensed under GPL too (with limited fair use exceptions which shouldn’t apply here). The problem is that the US government is not willing to enforce this at all, because it is owned by the same billionaires as the AI companies.
Training an LLM on your code makes it definitionally a derivative work
If so, then every painter who studied Picasso is making Picasso-derived works. That’s not how copyright works.
I think this is the story of humanity. It ain’t getting better until we massacre the inhumanly rich, eat Thier families while the world watches, and force evil socialism on shared intellectual property
Follow me for more bad advice
Dibs on ribs
See, here’s the thing. Everybody loves to point at the guilitine, and the French Revolution. They love to say “Lets do what they did!”
Here’s the problem. Nobody talks about what came next.
Because what happened was, you had one group of rich assholes who controlled everything, and treated everybody else like shit. So the French chopped off their heads, and got rid of these rich assholes.
And what happened next? Well, a lot of infighting, but the end result was instead of having a group of rich assholes controlling everyone, you instead had a different group of not rich assholes controlling everyone, who thengot rich from it. And nothing changed.
I think, before we go around killing everyone, we need a plan. We need to figure out why humans are so quick to all clump up as one submissive blob, who follows the will of whoever claims to have power.
Instead of 1 president, or 1 dictator, I think we should instead have a panel of 1 million people. Tens of thousands of people from every state. Anyone can apply, and if need be, your individual county can run sn election if you’re not running unopposed.
This I think would cut down tremendously on corruption in our government. Because a company couldn’t just bribe 1 president. They’d need to bribe 1 million people.
And the comittee would always represent the people, because they ARE the people. Most people would know at least 1 committee member in their neighborhood.
THEN you can kill all the rich assholes.
Wealth cap or bust. No one should ever be able to make 1 billion. I think there should be forced divestments after 1 bil and you’re barred from the stock market for 5 years. Plus☝🏻, if you use any money to build anything whether it be a building or a business, said billionaire is not allowed to earn more than a total of 1 million/yr.
What do you mean by forced divestments?
Oh and are you going to hard code these numbers into the law? Because rich people would respond by deflating the currency to the point where the average person makes 10 cents a day and a millionaire is inflation-equivalent to a billionaire today.
Or they’ll split a 10 billion dollar company between 20 of their closest friends and family, 500 million each, to stay under the cap.
Or a thousand other loopholes people will use. Take a company private and just declare it at worth only a million.
forced divestments
Selling off half their stocks or ¼ of their their majority share to lower their stake in their own businesses so their wealth is stifled.
Selling it to who though? And who gets the money from the sale? Taxes? But rich people already control the government…
That sounds like a cat and mouse game. You make a rule that person A can’t be on the stock market for 5 years. This does two things. First, it causes rich people to find some loophole or exploit.
And second, it just disincentivizes them from using the stock market at all, in favor of some unregulated form of making money. Like crypto.
Now you could say “Well then we’ll place caps on how much you can trsnsfer crypto over to american currency”.
And now you’re in a cat and mouse game. Because now they just need to convert it to some foreign currency. Then convert the foreign currency to American currency.
See? Cat and mouse.
See, this idea thread is putting up fences to seperate the corrupt from illicit gains. You build a fence, they bring a ladder. You build a bigger fence, they bring a bigger ladder. You build a wall, they install a window. The incentive is always there to overcome the barrier.
Instead, we should be finding ways to make bringing a bigger ladder cost more than the gains. Rewrite the whole system so that all people benefit before the greedy have a chance to hoard it all.
Regulate every system. Regulate every persons finances. If they cheat the system, make them pay twice the gains they got. Then distribute those fines to fund education and poor neighborhoods.
Suddenly you don’t need to worry about how big their ladder is, because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.
This only sounds good to people who are ignorant of both economics and history. Wealth caps, rent control, fixed prices, etc all sound nice until you take a minute to learn about the side effects. These sorts of policies aren’t knew, but they don’t work which is why they haven’t stuck around.
At this point in time just blow out everyone’s bank accounts and start over again.
Humanity actually successfully implemented a decentralized egalitarian socialist society without dictatorships in 1936 Spain, which bore out that Anarchist political theory is the most viable long-term solution we have to achieving freedom for all while also ensuring everyone is able to live a fulfilling life by providing free housing, food, transportation and healthcare.
The French Revolution was succesful. What the king & nobles did before that was much, much worse.
It just wasn’t a socialist revolution. The bourgeoisie won.
It also didn’t happen just like that, it took 10 years - Wikipedia calls it “a period of political and societal change”. I think it’s fair to say it wasn’t completely unplanned.
It led directly to Napoleon conquering Europe and crowning himself Emperor of France…
Yeah, so?
If you’re saying “not good enough”, I repeat: much better than the Ancien régime was.
No, my point was the French revolution wasn’t exactly a success because it was followed by two other revolutions in 1830 and 1848 that also aimed at overthrowing the monarchy.
There needs to be a little killing first, to set the tone. I like your ideas, but there is no way in this world or any other that the rich assholes would allow you to assemble a committee like that. They would literally carpet bomb it before allowing it.
The majority of people don’t like to lead. It’s simply easier and more comfortable to follow. Less conflict. Less confrontation. Less stress.
Leading requires initiative, the capacity to be confrontational, to step outside the box. It’s rather opposite of what is known as the bandwagon effect. Most people cannot do any of that without feeling extremely self conscious or anxious. Or, without being obnoxious and off-putting. You not only have to be able to function separate, you have to do it without annoying the fuck out of those around you.
Effective leadership also requires the capacity for some degree of speed. Some problems cannot wait for debate due to safety.
The bandwagon effect is a fun bit of study. What’s even better is the majority of people believe it doesn’t hold sway over them when the data shows that it absolutely does, something like 70-80%. It’s why, in part, so much money is thrown at AI and bots on social media, especially pre elections.
This appears to be a long but solid definition of it, with some easy bullet points: https://www.researchprospect.com/what-is-the-bandwagon-effect/
There’s also a reverse bandwagon effect, for, you know, the cool people.
Nobody talks about what came next.
Most of the monarchies and aristocrats in Europe fell / lost all real power / reformed themselves to avoid losing their heads?
I don’t know the difference between bad advice and good advice anymore
Styrofoam and diesel are great for toppling governments. Douse the rich!
Don’t use diesel. It’s hard to ignite with just a lighter. Use gasoline and styrofoam for your homemade bonfire starter. It’ll ignite much easier and stick to all those logs that tend to hoard…leaves.
Good advice. We are basically giving them their plastics and petrochemicals back at no cost.
… To the logs
Don’t actually eat anyone, cannabalism is likely to lead to prion folding diseases. Which is a terrible way to die.
I don’t care at this point. I’m getting my bite.
Turns out distilling all the world’s information into a friendly interface is worth something
Search engines did that decades ago. AI presents it’s results as fact without the ability to provide a source, it’s an aggressively unfriendly interface.
Oh, they provide sources. At least, some of them do. It’s just that the sources don’t always back them up. It’s going to gin up sources whether it’s correct or not, because that’s what it’s programmed to do.
I haven’t used the latest models, I am really fucking over it, but yeah when I would ask for sources on why the model provided the answer it did every time they would jist hallucinate a web address.
It’s presented as friendly but yeah it’s actually incredibly hostile and predatory
The interface is friendly. Agreed.
It’s not the same. The ability to converse about a topic is pretty dope. Compared to ring to find relevant information about a very unique case for instance.
Oh yea 25 years ago search engines were amazing
And it only makes sense that they’d get worse over time because technology has gotten worse.
Errr, wait…
Then how come none of the AI companies are actually profitable?
So only profitable things have value?
To capitalists? Yeah
Not to mention those same companies obsessed with AI are the ones who run the search engines. They made finding all those tutorials and other good resources harder. They ruin search results with ads and easily gamed algorithms that they stopped trying to improve. All that made people more willing to let the AI find the answer.
I have indeed noticed Google (and Google-based search engines like Startpage) has got worse in the past months. Even DuckDuckGo is better now (which as a long time ddg user is wild)
I started noticing ddg search with the “” operator is wonky. Also ecosia seems to have a lot of sponsored results?
Honestly ddg has also gotten worse (as it’s bing in a condom), it’s just that Google has shit itself even harder
Kagi is a paid service and feels weird to pay for a search engine, but things have felt so much better since I tried them out months ago.
I don’t know if you use their Assistant, but you can limit it to specific sources. The first option after the entire web is the fediverse. They also have the small web, which just shows you things made by actual humans, not something trying to sell you something.
I pay for Metager and i do really recommend it. You pay a pittance per search while being free of the crap that infests the net. Kagi comes with it’s own set of issues.
I’ll look into Metager as this is the first I’ve heard of it.
What set of issues do you see with Kagi? It’s the best I’ve encountered as of late, but if there’s more I should consider; I’d like to learn.
I mainly find their CEO problematic, and their focus on AI does not bode well for the future.
Thank you for sharing. I do now recall a couple of the items you addressed, and I’ll have to keep others in mind.
We can’t have anything nice… google, digg, Reddit, github, Kagi, proton mail. —at one point in time these were good. The rot or trajectory of rot seems inevitable.
I’m not anti AI, but it doesn’t need to be in everything all the time. It shouldn’t obfuscate data sources. It shouldn’t be allowed to consume and gather everything breaking laws that would apply to any individual and ought to be enforced for any corporate entity.
Pointing an AI at a larger company’s documentation or feeding a local one a largish manual and using it to figure out how or why 2, 3, or 4 parts work together has been useful for me in the past. Again where I can then get to the data to learn for myself.
Letting the pattern recognization machine (AI) assess a logfile or 3 that are intertwined to help find issues has been helpful.
Injecting it into every internet search where I never asked is wasteful and stupid.
It all makes sense when you realize that AI isn’t the product, control is.
When everyone depends on cloud services, especially storage, because they can’t afford hard drives or RAM anymore. Do you think the average normie is going to “stand up for principles of privacy and freedom of computing” or are they gonna say “it is what it is” and buy a tablet with 8GB of RAM and an office suite in the cloud?
Do you think these companies are above scanning everyone’s stuff to find out who is against them? Who is developing some great new idea? Who dissents the government?
Do you think these companies are above editing all saved copies of a news article and replacing it with something AI generated that looks real enough to memory hole something? (Copies of things in the cloud are already de-duplicated)
They don’t want us to be able to point out their flaws anymore. They want us to be submissive to them.
deleted by creator
Where have you been the last 20 years?
They’ve already broadcast their intentions to push cloud compute for home use. These data centers train AI - but chips are improving rapidly. Amazon and others have already stated they plan to use these for cloud compute services as they become obsolete for bleeding edge AI. Microsoft has a low local resource client to cloud version of Windows they are releasing. They want all compute to be subscription based and it will definitely lack any real privacy protections as long as they can keep corporate capture of congress.
To be fair, Google has been fighting a war against SEO and spam basically since it was started.
I don’t think they intentionally degraded their search engine. I think they just diverted resources away from fighting spam and SEO and instead dedicated those resources to AI stuff. Intentionally degrading their search results would require work. They’d have to convince their high-paid employees that for some reason they should make the results worse. But, just letting the stuff rot naturally as SEOs kept up their attacks, that’s free.
I’m at a point where I gladly pay for my search engine just to get good results.
One could argue we were always paying, with our data. But now we get less in return.
And the people charging admission are also hemorrhaging money.
Weird fucking timeline.
I think their hope is if they pull it off they won’t need money anymore, because they’ll have destroyed the last lever of power the working class still have: the ability to withhold their labour. LLMs are trying to turn labour into just another tool (that you rent).
Are those people so detached that they think industry is people writing emails to each other?
I’m just waiting for some RTO’d workers to be told they’re being mass laid off, and instead they just beat the manager to death. The irony of it only being possible because they were forced back into the office will be delicious.
Have them kill the CEOs and Boards of Directors, and I will bring the popcorn.
it’s called a walled garden for a reason.
The same people who abuse community resources (bulldoze public green spaces, kill rivers, pollute oceans, despoil lands, toxify the air, extinct animals etc.), do the exact same to information and the sources of it. They take for themselves and give nothing back. They cannot coexist with community or communal anything (which is why they hate community and socialism). They cannot give and will compulsively take. Their lives are why greed is considered a sin, insatiable and cruel, and it was wise to believe so.
Never share anything of value with the world. Do not allow them to know value exists or they will come for it. Giving freely and openly has empowered those who advantage themselves, by stealing every idea that is shared. They are the enemy, they are the threat, their psychology is a hazard to the community.
Share only with your communities and close those communities to these thieves. The only solution to private power is community power. We need to build back our communities and abandon everything possible that they control.
It’s crazy that the tragedy of the commons is only a problem because the commons are also free for people to close up and start charging for.
It’s just normal capitalism.
















