Our News Team @ 11 with host Snot Flickerman


Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango!

  • 23 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • It always horrifies me a little bit how much open source has been exploited by large corporations for profit while much of the open source tech they rely on they do not invest in. Meaning by and large it often feels like open source has been unintentionally the largest transfer of the wealth created by labor to the corporate class in human history because labor had lofty ideals and capitalists are happy to exploit that.

    Linux has the majority share of corporate servers and has for a long time, and yet is barely cracking 3% of the desktop (consumer, laborer) market. Corporations profit wildly from open source while the general public has not.


  • I mean really they despise anyone with skills because the reality is they have hardly any themselves as they’ve spent their lives paying for everyone else to do everything for them. They can’t make a meal, they can’t drive a car, they can’t do basic appliance repair, they don’t know how to actually use a computer other than social media, they can’t wash their own clothes, they can’t do anything for themselves. They despise every skilled person because it betrays their egotistical view that they are simply born better than everyone else and deserve to never have to know how to do anything at all. It reveals they know nothing and are useless to society at large, just a drain on the rest of us.

    Secondly, I did say “knowledge workers” and I personally think authors and artists are a type of “knowledge work” as they require knowledge coupled with skill to do the work, just as people managing servers and databases also require a combination of knowledge and skill. Poetaetoe pohtahtoh.

    Thus it’s also why they are all pushing hard for humanoid robots because they want to automate the human body after they have automated the human mind.


  • I mean… it seems painfully obvious and doesn’t need much of a thesis behind it.

    The wealthy want their slaves back, but they want slaves that don’t push back, never ask for more, never need a day off, don’t need sleep, don’t need breaks, and are needlessly sycophantic to stroke the egos of the wealthy. It’s no more complex than that: the promise of LLMs was that they could have deeply exploitable knowledge workers without any of the fuss or mess of humans who want a life outside of their fucking jobs.

    Like what else has this ever been? It’s been transparent since day one that this is why every business pushes AI adoption so hard, for them it has to work, they’re willing to bet the future on it because they think their sheer belief in it and throwing money at it will eventually “make it work.”

    On the plus side, anyone who understands LLMs understands their limitations and the problems that are baked in to how they work and how those issues can’t be “fixed.” So this dipshit ass all-in plan that the wealthy have is doomed to crumble because it’s never going to work the way they want it to. So we’ve got that going for us.

    Anyway I hate tools being described as “tools of the ruling class” because it often misses the point of how such tools can be useful to the proletariat as well. Class solidarity is a tool of the ruling class, but class solidarity would be golden in the hands of the proletariat, who vastly outnumber the wealthy class and ruling class. All tools are useful, what makes a tool dangerous is who wields it and what they choose to use it for. A hammer can be used to build and it can also be used to smash in someone’s skull. Tools aren’t the problem: specific dangerous humans are. I don’t actually have huge problems with AI LLMs providing they are open source and rolled out small scale on home PCs, I just have an issue with their industrial applications at scale and the attempt to use them to consolidate power and control. They don’t have to be used that way.