/cc @kabel42 insbesondere das "wenn die Trefferrate reicht" hat mich noch nie überzeugt, und hier ist besser in Worte gegossen, warum.

Der verlinkte Artikel zu Tools werden Bestandteil Deiner Selbst ist auch mindfucking und ziemlich interessant.

@fionafokus I'm fascinated by the take about the resource usage being an advantage to the AI bros.

They've created software that cannot (practically) be replicated as open source software / free software, because there is no community of people with sufficient hardware / data sets. It will inherently always be a centralized technology.

Fascinating and scary.

@fionafokus There was a series of sci-fi books I read when I was a teenager, I think Will Macarthay's Collapsium series. In it, there's two big things, the first of which is a super-dense material called collapsium which is incredibly useful for many things, and the second being that we figured out how to fax in 3D well enough to send living beings over the wire.

You absolutely die when you fax yourself somewhere. 100%, you are murdered. And some data is transmitted, and then someone who is indistinguishable from the original you comes out the other side somewhere.

This was a society that took information security very seriously.

Not seriously enough in the end. But that's inevitability for you.

Anyway, literally everybody used the faxes to get around casually, because why fly when you can just walk? And I think that's so goddamn true, and we're absolutely seeing it here with AI. Folk will always take the easy path en masse. 🤦

@fionafokus
I agree, but I think this can be said more to-the-point:

Don't outsource your thinking to a SaaS, because that gives the company behind the SaaS the power to control how you think and when you're allowed to think.

@fionafokus

I worked ~5 years with a language that has a built in Read/Eval/Print Loop.

Having a REPL is an astonishing boost to productivity; you can interactively stay in the Curious And Productive zone for hours at a time, without the interruptions inherent to compile/unit test cycle.

Vibe Coding feels like trying to achieve the same thing, but in a much more clumsy and error prone way.

Just give the people REPLs and watch AI 'assistance' wither away

@fionafokus This post is really cool. As hackers and techies we might remember that our professions are primary means of control. Code has become law, and one side of the AI craze is about its creation.

One thing that we might do, is to demonstrate that power; it's how we reached the masses about online control.

@fionafokus thank you!
"I find it particularly disillusioning to realize how deep the LLM brainworm is able to eat itself even into progressive hacker circles."

This is the part I struggle with. How people who are smart enough to know how these things are built and all the problems therein but are still enthusiastic about using it.

@fionafokus I tend to link this directly to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dictator%27s_Handbook, which is the popular science version of a 600-something pages academic work. It very clearly explains the mechanics by which tyrannies and democracies form, and it comes down to resources.

If you have natural resources, you need a small percentage of the population more or less directly involved in extracting them to stay in power. If you don't, then you need to run a service economy.

A service economy depends on a...

1/2

@fionafokus

"I personally don’t touch LLMs with a stick. I don’t let them near my brain."

I am constantly baffled how people around me always claim "It's just a tool" without recognizing what it does to their brains.

Thanks for the great text.

@fionafokus At least in business contexts, 'AI' seems to be dangerously well suited to exacerbating existing dysfunctions.

If you make pretending to write something that isn't worth writing faster; and pretending to read something not worth reading faster, you cut the incentive to ask why you are doing this.

If you create the impression that actual writing or reading is now faster, the stuff that actually is worth doing ends up handled by the tools you use for not-doing. Rot from both ends.

@fionafokus Fucking YEAH. Great article. I'm glad I'm not the only one going "I don't /care/ if it's any good, it's fundamentally wrong".

Hard disagree on your footnote about "spend less time on social media" though. Here is where we live, here is where our friends are. (Corporate social media though, I get staying off of that.)

@fionafokus James Burke also made this thesis, tools shape who we are, with The AxeMaker's Gift.

I look forward to reading this.

Genai is definitely shaping us in ways we can't expect and in ways I think we don't want.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/349717/the-axemakers-gift-by-james-burke/

@fionafokus

Good stuff

AI systems exist to reinforce and strengthen existing structures of power and violence. They are the wet dream of capitalists and fascists. Enormous physical infrastructure designed to convert capital into power, and back into capital. Those who control the infrastructure, control the people subject to it.
AI systems being egregiously resource intensive is not a side effect — it’s the point.
Craft, expression and skilled labor is what produces value, and that gives us control over ourselves. In order to further centralize power, craft and expression need to be destroyed. And they sure are trying.

@fionafokus Thanks for writing this!

On one hand it's sad to see so many skilled developers and hackers who cave in to peer pressure. On the other hand, my impression is they often seem to have been forced by their bosses at work, which then spills over into private life too.

Let's make worker owned #tech #cooperatives more common and it will be easier to keep control of the tools.