Despite having been one of those Linux weenies back in the day I have a lot of respect for the amount of work MS puts into backwards compatibility, dev tool upkeep, etc. And now they're actually Open Source! Hell hath frozen over (or they realized no universities wanted to pay Visual Studio licenses and lost a couple of generations of coders to Linux)
gerikson
joined 1 year ago
Thank you Ed for validating my off-the-cuff comment I made on the train this morning:
https://lobste.rs/s/92qcme/insatiable_hunger_open_ai#c_vgiyrk
ask an AI generated podcast bro
Oh wait, you're actually serious.
I am neutral on MSFT - to me it's a bog standard transnational company with better than most working conditions because it's not making stuff you can make in sweatshops. But it's really impressive how they've gone from the beige-box tyranny of Apple's 1984 ad, via the "Halloween Papers" era where they were every Linux weenie's biggest boogeyman, to today's bland backer of OpenAI. Note that they're not really advertising it. How many people who are horrified by Copilot's Recall feature also know they're the biggest investor in the company that makes ChatGPT?
From a corporate governance perspective, being so central to the tech industry for so long is kinda impressive.
Carmack has always struck me as the kind of cishet white GenX dude that gets more and more pissed that everything's "political", I just wanna code, man, why is everyone mad at me that he more or less inevitably falls into fascism. Sure games can be coded as "countercultural" but the genres that Doom and Quake represent are quasi-fascist already.
Stephen King is busy working him in as a villain in a new novel.
before you further impugne my sneer-hunting the quote I posted was literally the first one on top in the thread. I thought it was gonna be easy pickings before I realized a lot of people were making sense and I got bored.
Your position seems to be that art is whatever the US Copyright Office deems worthy of copyright.
snrk
https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/113228461302575676
I’m going to start replying to everything like I’m on Hacker News. Unhappy with Congress? Why don’t you just start a new country and write a constitution and secede? It’s not that hard once you know how. Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.
The best thing about the lobste.rs thread is to identify prompt fondlers among the brethren.
Here's something I've never heard of before:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox
Moravec wrote in 1988: "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers[...]"
Apparently he had GPT back then!
Anyway is this anything anyone takes seriously? Steven Pinker makes an appearance in the wiki page, which is a bit of a red flag.
As previously mentioned, the "Behind the Bastards" podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. I'm just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It's like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.
This is something I've noticed too (I got on the internet just before). There's a nostalgia for the "old" internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And I've always thought that's dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.
This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.