1dom

Local LLMs are pretty powerful and useful for me personally, and the best compute I have locally is a an RTX2060. I certainly have no paid AI subscriptions.

Obviously depends what you're doing, and not suitable for everyone, but it's an unhelpful generalisation to say AI in its current form is purely a paid product subscription.

That's not was I was asking for at all. I just said that a non-paywalled link should be posted.

I think the leap you've made here makes you look like a lunatic.

This is public news. There should be free resources available. They should be the resources published here.

Nobody's saying journalists shouldn't be paid. But that doesn't mean all public access to public news should be paywalled.

Exceptionally succinct and thought provoking. Well done.

Sorry, I can't think of a single plaintext editors, even going back to things like vi and ed, which don't support find and replace.

Markdown was designed for plaintext editors. Plaintext editors are - by the definition of markdown - a right tool for the job of markdown.

I don't have anything else to add here.

I agree. I feel if github was owned/run by people passionate about code and open source software, no code repos be banned, if not just because it's consuming resources contrary to the mission.

It is owned/run by Microsoft. The mission is the big tech mission: usage of any kind regardless of the impact on anything else, and profit.

Markdown was explicitly designed to be a lightweight markup language for formatting text in a plaintext editor.

You will not get any joy reading/editing non-primitive things in a markdown language not designed for reading/editing non-primitive things.

You will get joy from using the right tool for the right task.

Exactly, you just confirmed how complicated, complex and varied markdown rendering is, which is exactly why it should be left to markdown applications.

The OS should be able to natively open plaintext. The joy of markdown is it still largely works in plaintext.

Markdown is a plaintext format, that's what makes it great and got it adoption, it works without formatting! Rendering markdown is a nice to have, a luxury that gets very complex very quickly when done properly. If you want it, install a an application that does markdown rendering, I use Obsidian.

The fact that a file can't be opened as plaintext in a plaintext editor is not a problem with Markdown, it's an OS problem that effects any file you'd want to open as plaintext.

The algorithm is cheap and simple. A human brain requires decades of experience and information to train it to be generally useful. An AI model requires a similar equivalent scale of information and time to train it to be generally useful, and that isn't cheap to gather or implement.

Sure, once trained, every usage technically lowers the cost per usage. Once trained...

They weren't out-competed by the guys at the frontier labs, they were out-competed by massive piles of cash and compute that were only available to unscrupulous businesses.

> I don't think a system maximizing enjoyment would be any better.

That's why I mentioned autonomy too. People like working and being valuable and choosing to add value. The issue is the current economic system doesn't consider things valuable if they don't directly generate a lot of money or profit for a business. An individual developer gets a lot of value from having a job they enjoy where they produce useful code that solves problems. AI removes some of that value for the individual developer whilst promising more profit and value for the business.

> Why would anyone choose to work with sewage? Or why would most developers choose to align with rest of the team or with user needs, when programming is most enjoyable?

Why do people choose to work with sewage now? They're not paid a lot. Programming is most enjoyable when it's useful. Writing code which is going to get thrown out because it doesn't align with your team is not valuable or fun, so why you or any other individual developer choose to do that given the choice?

I disagree that what you're describing isn't just another angle of "broken economic system".

The broken economic system is the lack of perceived individual choice, and the priority of business decisions and business profit over individual satisfaction or autonomy.

If we lived in an economic system where maximising individual enjoyment and autonomy was priority, we could give AI to individuals to do with what they want. No sensible human/border collie would choose to give away the fun sheep herding part of their job if there weren't other forces and incentives at work.

But instead, AI is sold to businesses to profit, rather than given to individuals to do the right thing for everyone.

Sorry, I meant general-lone-focus-on-a-screen-during-school-time, in contrast to engaging with what's going on in real life in the classroom (e.g. listening to teacher teach, or interacting with other students etc.)

> As a software engineer this is part of my life, and always has been. I may have been working on a software product for the last 3 years, and suddenly one morning I find out that another company has released a similar product, and selling it cheaper, now the value of my work is slashed by 90%. I may even have to drop my project and find something else to work on. This is a normal part of life.

The cause of what you're describing here, and the cause of the problems with AI are the same: it's capitalism, closed competition and businesses deciding what happens.

In an alternate society built around providing the best solutions for everyone, instead of being built around businesses making as much money for themselves as possible, your organisation would have been working alongside the other company to share insights into solving the same problem for everyone.

Same goes for AI: all the existential downsides of AI pretty much all depend on businesses being the main driver of who uses AI and when. If we only let individuals choose when to use AI, then they're not going to choose to automate themselves out of a job they need, or give up something they actually get personal value and joy from.