I've been threading the needle between my AI loving techbro indiehacker friends and my AI hating artist and FOSS geek lefty friends for the last year now and the dogmatism has been interesting. The extreme of it for AI lovers I don't really get in my friend group since I think it manifests mostly in AI psychosis meltdowns by tech CEOs like with the Proton Mail guy, or religious worship by the anyone with one degree of separation or less from anyone on the the AI doom cult temple sex priestess gang bang Sankey diagram.
To them, even a small use of LLMs is a moral endorsement and material contribution to the pillaging of natural resources by data centers, the racial profiling and inherent biases baked into LLM output by their training corpus and prejudices of corporate leaders, the theft of artists, writers, and FOSS contributors for training data, and even could cause irreparable brain damage (they inevitably have studies to link to, on LLM usage reducing problem solving abilities or creativity). Also LLMs still can't write good code, to these people.
I'm having a hard time demonstrating the enormous activist potential these tools present, especially in their current token-subsidized form (Claude max still is a hilariously obviously unprofitable endeavor). IMO turning these tokens into liberationist software (OP project and similar) is basically a form of wealth redistribution. Moving beyond clean room software implementation, once you get to the possibly or frankly illegal things you can do with LLMs, their activist potentials seem pretty obvious to me. Cracking and reverse engineering proprietary software, developing hacks against The System (what if we leveraged LLMs to take out Russian datacenters that flood the internet with ultra right wing propaganda? Or... Industrial sabotage <.<), automating social media content in the same way the far right is doing (or the opposite - responding instantly to all far right fake news, solving the "it's easier to create it than debunk it" problem), creating agitprop, or hell creating floods of disinformation. I mean depending on someone's value system in terms of ideologically valid strategy, there's a lot of possibilities unlocked by LLMs!
Personally I'm interested in anything that simply takes the winds of profit out of the sails of as many things as possible, which is why I like projects like this one and why I spun up a similar one a few weeks back: https://github.com/508-dev/genairosity Though I'm looking at smaller niche things like, milk collection software or whatever.
> I'm having a hard time demonstrating the enormous activist potential these tools present
The problem isn't that they don't have potential, but that the downside isn't worth it.
You're trying to convince people that asbestos has great potential as a building material. You're saying it does an amazing job of fireproofing, and don't worry your pretty little head about cancer.
Asbestos is everywhere in older buildings because it was excellent fireproofing. We're still dealing with the consequences.
This is also my argument against militarization and armed revolution as a strategy of establishing anarchist or communist society. The downsides are illustrated and argued against in "The Anarchist Cookbook," a rewrite of the original by Keith McHenry. So, I'm interested in what you think the downsides may be here, since I'm not immediately able to think of any - at least not any caused by me as an individual activist.
It does seem that AI was used effectively recently in the defeat of Bolsanaro's son in Brazil, which I use as evidence for. I'm at this moment looking more into that when I really should be working, heh. Thanks to user solyin, sibling to you.
Well, we can start by pointing out that every widely available model is either directly funds or bolsters authoritarians of the worst kind.
Then we can move to the damage it does to your mental abilities.
We can continue to the ongoing effect on society, the damage to the environment, and so on.
And we can finish with extrapolating on the abilities of the models, and the dystopia that having full AGI would be. Especially if that AGI is built by the current leaders.
I think you're aware of the downsides, but you don't want to put down your precious.
Hah, glad I wasn't the only one that had this idea. Been chewing on it ever since malus.sh or whatever that joke clean room reimplementation of FOSS software project was.
I noticed that others are taking a shot at the big boys like Photoshop, but I don't think that makes sense since 1. Jesus Christ imagine trying to rewrite Photoshop, with or without Astra and reverse engineering, let's be real! And 2. GIMP already exists and people don't use it for various reasons an ultra nerd that doesn't have osx or windows on any device in his house (me) could understand. Instead I'm looking for small niche markets that are locked in by the software equivalent of a petty village despot. Decent examples so far include quilting software and funeral home SASS. I'm also looking for anyone stuck on old dead software with no migration path because of no export functionality or nothing supporting whatever given file format anymore. Apparently QuickBooks desktop falls into this category, but the space feels full enough, with e.g. GnuCash, that I don't think I would be much help there.
Basically leveraging subsidized tokens to liberate proprietary software. A bit of a petulant table flip maybe, but it kinda feels like the only thing left to us. Either we can kill ourselves scrambling around doing 996 for startups to try to avoid being a permanent underclass... Or we can light it all on fire.
Also inspired by open weight models tanking possible profit margins on frontier LLMs. One form of anti capitalist activism could be to just make it impossible to monetize something. The Manfred Macx form of activism.
Many other people in this thread with similar projects seem to be following the same workflow:
1. LLM agents sent out to find locked in proprietary software without a FOSS alternative
2. Targets selected by a human for deeper research on feasibility and alternatives
3. Clean room plan established
4. Human uses the software and takes notes
5. Feed notes into a token subsidized frontier model for orchestration. Architecture and plan written, beginning normal agentic development flow.
I'm slowed down significantly by step 4. Perhaps I will look into contributing my efforts to a larger project such as the one linked instead.
PhotoCraft is already better than GIMP3 in every aspect.
Usability is much better, binaries are 4 times smaller, and it's way faster. GIMP takes 5+ seconds to start, vibe-coded Rust Photoshop starts instantly.
I think the "old" open source community has very low standards for user experience when it comes to GUI software. It's one of the main reasons I could never get myself to use desktop Linux.
With AI, there are no excuses for open source software to be worse in any aspect at all.
I agree with you on UX. In terms of contributing to these projects, most maintainers are still opposed to LLM contributions, perhaps not for bad reasons considering they're interested in the long term maintainability not only of the software, but of a community of contributors knowledgeable enough to maintain it.
Regarding Photocraft, I've been following it with interest. My impression is that it comes off initially as an incredible accomplishment, 1:1 with Photoshop, however extended usage reveals more and more flaws until it's determined the software isn't really usable yet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGShygDux9o
This is my general impression as well with overall excitement around LLM assisted reverse engineering: very easy to get something that looks like a slam dunk, until you actually try to use it. Then begins the long, long, long slog of the work needed to make the software usability and parity, which apparently can't be done by LLM agent swarms yet.
Moxie as far as I know is still involved in the project and is the source of decisions such as requiring a phone number. My understanding is he is leaning hard on "encryption for anyone and everyone" over all other considerations such as decentralization.
A common criticism is "huh, not very anarchist of him!" Which, maybe? If decisions like that can get Signal into as many hands as possible, and if Signal can continue to operate in such a way as to have basically nothing to offer governments that demand data other than account join date, I think that's an improvement in material conditions.
Your bio has a pretty frank indication of the maximally decentralized, encrypted alternative, and how user hostile that still is:
> If you want to DM, I am generally open to chat. Generate a https://SimpleX.chat invite and paste it into a file simplex-invite.txt, then run the commands below and include pasted contents of DM.txt in one of your comments in any thread we're both participating in.
> Now, in fairness to X and Elon and its hard-working employees, the Adolf Hitler fandom does seem to have greatly wound down in the one and a half years since then. I suspect part of this is because such movements inevitably burn out once people realize how immoral and stupid they are. But another part is undoubtedly genuine improvements in how The Algorithm™ works.
> Click on the tweet and look around its quotes and responses, the same way that someone would morbidly stare at a car accident.
Twitter gets money from ads. They can sell more ads for more money when they can demonstrate eyeballs and eyeball time. Therefore, they're incentivized to keep your eyeballs on the app for as long as possible. If that means putting car accidents in front of you, that's what it'll do!
I strongly believe that social media is basically a lost cause for this and a few other reasons. I tried out Mastodon and Bluesky, but people there don't seem to actually be interested in conversation, and there's physical limitations that prevent meaningful conversation anyway in the form of character limits. ~200 characters is simply not enough space for anything meaningful to be conveyed, so the platform selects for snippy clapbacks and pithy virtue signalling.
I'm also unconvinced there's anything of value to be had from these platforms, maybe including HN. I seem to be hearing about the new hotness in the AI space for example by just regularly attending coworking events. I guess if everyone stopped using Twitter, that would stop being the case. Or maybe we'd go back to RSS...
Bluesky inherited Twitter's toxic culture and most of its users switched over for political reasons. That creates an echo chamber full of the worst "2020 cancel culture liberal" types who think they're radical but are really just annoying.
There are parts of the community where it's a lot better (atmosphere and open source devs, some digital artists who are not vocally pro/anti AI) but most people will see the front page that's almost exclusively US politics and get turned off.
I don't know how to fix this. Maybe create a new site that starts out focused on a specific large, politically mixed group like gaming or football fans and then expands to a general audience. Or use a personalized algorithm by default and initialize it randomly so new users see more diverse content.
> some digital artists who are not vocally pro/anti AI
I finally unsubscribed from the RSS feed of a web comic creator who has for over a year now (I think) not posted a single comic that is not about AI.
I mean there is not a single plot point beside "AI is bad" in those dozens of newer strips. I‘m not exaggerating as a rhetorical device, I mean this literally.
I‘m actually sympathetic to his view, but I came for the wonderful world and drawings. I‘m sad about the effect AI had on this artist, because yes, he‘s objectively endangered and right to protest it, but it has already taken away his oeuvre in a way.
1. Small social like Discord, WhatsApp / facebook groups, Bandcamp (I was recently invited to a topical group there).
I have some designs for something like ATProto by fully permissioned and focused on small social modalities. I'm not interested in platforms with globalness, reposts/quotes, or blocking (fence sitting this one tbh)
2. Spending more time offline, with people in real life, then taking those social dynamics and interaction patterns back to online ones. We are currently doing the opposite as a society.
Even if the platform weren't originally a microblogging one, longform text is basically over at a societal level because the majority of internet users now are on phones, and that medium discourages longform text. You can see this from Reddit, where comments a decade ago where often much longer, a couple of solid paragraphs, and now they tend to be microblogging-length inane quips.
It depends on which subreddit you're on. Reddit has this strange dynamic where it's simultaneously a series of web forums, and a single feed scrolling app. Some subs have more of a community feel and they can encourage longer form posts depending on the subject matter.
What's really notable is how the tone of a small subreddit post changes completely if a post gets boosted to everyone's front page. There's a small cycling sub I read with good posts about routes, tips, and advice. When something reaches the front page, it becomes a shitshow of car v bike culture war bullshit.
Until I gave up on Reddit this year, I was solely on small hobby subs. I hadn't even seen the big general subs since sometime before Covid. And yet all of those small subs I was on had degenerated into insubstantial comments and image posts. Posting substantial comments, the kind that used to be normal, started making one look like an autistic-infobombing weirdo.
Substantial discussion of some hobbies has moved from Reddit to invite-only WhatsApp groups, precisely because Reddit went downhill. (This is true for long-haul bicycle travel, for example.) Unfortunately, on WA, too, everyone is on their phone, so messages are on average too short for comfort, and also there is no FAQ culture so people just ask the same questions again and again.
I would recommend Pleroma over Mastodon. Character limits are configurable and I've often seen ones 10k or higher. While Mastodon can see and reply to the fedi posts that long, it may not be able to make them.
I reply to people on fedi quite a bit, personally. I think people are conversing.
People on Twitter really overblow it's importance, but the vast majority of humans do not use it. Things posted there really only matter to other Twitter users, and are inconsequential in the real world.
I haven't seen this effect documented but if it isn't being documented it really needs to be. We need to get -very- mad about the soft wars being waged right now and the first step is to understand the extent of what is going on and by who. We all know that bots are driving a massive amount of engagement right now. It is rare though to see such direct causal proof of where it is coming from.
It's hard to document on the major platforms because neither X nor Meta provide easy access to streaming APIs that researchers might use to verify such claims. Last time I looked X was about $60k/year, for example.
Would you mind posting at least one link? If it's actually documented across the internet, this should take you no time. A bunch of anecdotes does not count, though.
Curious where it’s being documented - this is a fascinating study (who knows how long time period to measure its impact will last) - do you have links?
You made an account 4 minutes ago just to post this? Of course, it is obvious what they meant. The AfD voters are real voters, but they can still be driven by hate stirred up by (among other things) Russian bots.
By the way, the 40% was in one particular Bundesland (Saksen-Anhalt). In the polling for the national elections they are around 28%:
The Dutch government could protect its sovereign interests apart from the USA - for example by legalizing decompilation and antagonistic interrop with American software, or reverse engineering of American hardware, or suspension of copyright and trademark protections for American businesses. Dutch Mickey mouse cartoons for everyone!
There'd be short term economic repercussions when America throws a tantrum, but whose fault is it that this could significantly harm the Dutch economy? Better to rip off the band-aid.
> Psychologically they'll believe they earned that 20% raise through hard work.
Well, it's not just that. They've been telling us for decades that wages are alternatively a direct reflection of the value of our labor to the company, or, a price set by the market, depending on which is cheaper for the corporations.
Kind of like when people say that UBI would simply instantly raise the price of all rent to match. Oh, really? The supply of rentable units will suddenly have decreased? The demand will suddenly have gone up? No? Odd that the "market set price" responded then.
The only reason it would go up by the same amount is greed of "the market" profits are unevenly distributed so it would make sense to even things out a bit (at least undo the gains made over COVID and the last few years by those profiting the most from inequality).
Because people have more money, making more expensive things more affordable. Demand isn't a single number "I need one apartment." It's a curve: at $0/month I will live with my parents. At $800/month I will live with a roommate. At $1200/month, I will rent a 1 br. At $1500/mo, I will rent a 2br. At $2000/month I will not rent anything because I do not have $2000/month. etc. And actually, it's a curve representing how many people are willing to pay for a thing (or how many things they want) at a given level, not how many apartments do you, one person, need. Now give everyone $2000/month, and their ability/willingness to pay will increase. Maybe you figure now you can move out of that dodgy neighborhood into something nicer. Except the person who could already afford the nicer apartment pre-UBI isn't going to downgrade to the dodgy one, and they get UBI too, so they'll just pay more to outbid you (they would move upmarket themselves to make room, but it's turtles all the way down). Of course every sector of the economy knows this, not just landlords, so in reality prices of everything will rise rather than rent capturing it all.
This still doesn't make sense to me because people will often stay in the same place that they may not like that much specifically because the landlord hasn't raised rent that much, even if they can afford to move. They can't justify it. Or California landowners that don't sell because of whatever that rule they have is that figures property tax against original price or whatever.
It doesn't seem liquid enough to justify an increase in cost of rent the instant minimum wage goes up or UBI is implemented. My point is that a lot of these "markets" are really just price controllers setting price as they please, and landlords particularly feeling like they're special and get to lay claim to some arbitrary percentage of people's income. Which, for structural reasons, they can do.
The point is they can't set the price as they please; they can't set it higher than demand supports. If right now landlords all just agreed at raise prices by $2000, many units would go unfilled as people don't have an extra $2000, so under no circumstances could they possibly pay that (they may find alternative arrangements like roommates or parents or living on the street).
If you give everyone $2000, then landlords can successfully raise prices because now people can pay that much, and as mad as they'd be about their UBI going straight into the hands of businesses, they're unlikely to go homeless or stop buying food to protest it, so they'll pay it. That ability and willingness to pay is called demand.
Your argument is oversimplified. Landlords may be able to extract more money from people who net benefit from UBI, yes, but they will be able to extract less money from those who take a net loss from the policy. (I’m skeptical that landlords will actually be able to extract more because I believe most low income people who can afford rent now are likely unable to afford the means of subsistence in total, but this aside doesn’t affect the argument I’m making here.)
So the inflationary effect will probably be limited to low-income housing, which is already heavily subsidized by taxpayer dollars in the US, arguably even more inefficiently than the situation under a hypothetical UBI. It will probably be coupled with a deflationary effect at middle-to-upper income housing, depending on the nature of the benefit and the structure of the taxes used to fund UBI. If the policy is structured competently, there’s no reason that it is necessarily inflationary as a whole.
Well, sure, if you put enough tax pressure on the middle/upper-middle class, then that might have a counterbalancing effect of some sort, but generally speaking, the upper class aren't spending their money on things that people are worried about when they talk about inflation, so to the extent that it's "inflation-neutral," it'd be exactly the phenomenon people claim happens with inflation reporting today: "No, no, inflation didn't happen! See, rent and food and healthcare and education became more expensive, but luxury vehicles and McMansions are cheaper! For the overall basket of goods there was actually deflation!"
Anyway, my point was rather to address the fact that the other commenter didn't seem to understand what "demand" means.
> because there are not enough geniuses who are capable of convincing the masses to send the responsible politicians to hell
I could talk about this for hours, and was last night actually.
What do vanguardist communism, feudalism, liberal democracy, and fascism have in common? A shared belief that the general population is composed of a bunch of dumb dumbs that need super smart (read: politically educated) people to "lead" them.
Seems subjective. When is the smartness, big smart enough to allow someone to enter the hallowed ranks of "actually a real human allowed to speak for the masses?"
There does seem to be a clear delineation between the people you hear about (the vanguard in our example), and the people you don't hear about (the masses): willingness to create confrontation. Most people want to just go with the flow, live in peace. In a dichotomy I've been calling "choose peace or violence," they choose peace. They choose to see bad things in the world or their life and focus on managing their happiness around it.
I think that this is the default human mode of existence, and that this mode lacks defenses against people willing to violate the default peace. Imagine a bagel line, and someone cutting that line, and when tapped on the shoulder, the cutter breaking into a huge tantrum, and people in line backing down with a "Jesus! It's not worth it, fine." Thus some people learn that they can be much more selfish in life if they're willing to create confrontation and disturb the peace.
When I talk to people about agitation, civil disobedience, or even just unionizing, the most common thing I hear is anxiety. What if the situation gets worse, what if there's reprisals, what if I lose this little bit of comfort that I've managed to be happy with? That slice could get smaller and smaller but people aren't willing to take the step to say "enough is enough" because I think it fundamentally goes against human nature, we have to sacrifice our own happiness on some level to put our foot down and demand or make change. At minimum we have to acknowledge the discomfort or injustice, which is a diversion from our constructed internal peace.
Personally I think people should be allowed to live in peace. Maybe the liberal democrats and vanguardist communists are right, maybe most people shouldn't need to trouble themselves with the greater direction of their society. However I think the stability this promises is false; in fact I think all stability is false. I think this constructed peace that people are afraid to disrupt clearly can be torn apart at any moment, not just by people willing to create conflict, but by a literal earthquake, or fire, or plague. Therefore I think there's a couple societies in history that got it right: ones who distributed the responsibility of society across all individuals in the society; namely the brief period of syndicalized Spain, and the several hundred thousand years of certain tribes of native Americans on the eastern portion of the continent. There may be other societies in history, these are just the cases I've been able to read about so far.
It seems to me that it's possible and necessary for all people to be ready to wake out of their constructed peace long enough to make adjustments together to maintain it. I don't think this is the same thing as them being "led out of it," I think this is each individual being on some level alert to the need to spontaneously say "no, here we wait in line for our bagels. No, screaming about it won't help you, get to the back of the line. Look around: everyone is laughing at how silly you look."
> What do vanguardist communism, feudalism, liberal democracy, and fascism have in common? A shared belief that the general population is composed of a bunch of dumb dumbs that need super smart (read: politically educated) people to "lead" them.
That was not premise of fascism. Certainly not Hitlers one, he himself was self-taught and did not framed himself as highly educated. He considered himself better then educated people. The origin of his superiority was not "smart" it was "strong will and power itself".
It was not the original premise of feudalism either. That was was about military might, basically.
And origins of liberal democracy are not "smart based" either.
For the AI haters the dogmatism turns AI usage basically into a moral contagion. I saw similar with the cancellation of Framework: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/moral-contagion/#where-i-pus...
To them, even a small use of LLMs is a moral endorsement and material contribution to the pillaging of natural resources by data centers, the racial profiling and inherent biases baked into LLM output by their training corpus and prejudices of corporate leaders, the theft of artists, writers, and FOSS contributors for training data, and even could cause irreparable brain damage (they inevitably have studies to link to, on LLM usage reducing problem solving abilities or creativity). Also LLMs still can't write good code, to these people.
I'm having a hard time demonstrating the enormous activist potential these tools present, especially in their current token-subsidized form (Claude max still is a hilariously obviously unprofitable endeavor). IMO turning these tokens into liberationist software (OP project and similar) is basically a form of wealth redistribution. Moving beyond clean room software implementation, once you get to the possibly or frankly illegal things you can do with LLMs, their activist potentials seem pretty obvious to me. Cracking and reverse engineering proprietary software, developing hacks against The System (what if we leveraged LLMs to take out Russian datacenters that flood the internet with ultra right wing propaganda? Or... Industrial sabotage <.<), automating social media content in the same way the far right is doing (or the opposite - responding instantly to all far right fake news, solving the "it's easier to create it than debunk it" problem), creating agitprop, or hell creating floods of disinformation. I mean depending on someone's value system in terms of ideologically valid strategy, there's a lot of possibilities unlocked by LLMs!
Personally I'm interested in anything that simply takes the winds of profit out of the sails of as many things as possible, which is why I like projects like this one and why I spun up a similar one a few weeks back: https://github.com/508-dev/genairosity Though I'm looking at smaller niche things like, milk collection software or whatever.
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