loup-vaillant

Well, I could be wrong, and it wouldn't be the first time. Besides, some of those "tells" are actually good tricks, when used sparingly enough. And we humans are picking up on them, making us sound a bit more like a chat bot than we used to.

In the end we can't even tell what's what, it's exhausting.

The whole structure had a faint smell to it. It's hard to put into word, there was no obvious "it's not the quiet part. It's the load bearing bedrock", but the way the thing flowed made me strongly suspect LLM involvement.

> these AI models not only lend themselves to generation of Child Sexual Abuse Material

Err, how exactly does the generation of questionnable material abuses a child? Assuming there's no actual CSAM in the training corpus, the causal link between that and children being actually exploited seems tenuous at best, similar to drawings of Japanese middle schoolers, fictions about underage people...

Those are nothing like purchasing or seeking out pictures, movies, drawings, or depictions of actual abuse of actual children. As disgusting as it may be, not all child porn is CSAM.

Of course, if there is CSAM in the training data set, that's a different story.

And let me be clear: I don't whether, nor how much, the consumption of purely fictional child porn by adults ends up hurting (or helping) actual children. For all I know it normalises associated behaviours and is responsible for a significant portion of incest cases around the world. Or it acts as a safety valve for paedophiles so they don't turn criminal. Or both, or none, I don't know. My guess though is that it's similar to how action flicks and FPS games influence gun violence.

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That was about the worst I could say about this post. Most of the rest resonated with me. I'm especially scared of the dependence and deskilling.

> exposing a stable instruction set would kill their ability to quickly iterate

I believe the need to quickly iterate dropped significantly since we got shaders. I would bet in fact there was few such iterations in the last 10 years. Crazy increases in computing power of course, but big breaking changes in the actual ISA? I'd be surprised.

> to release silicon with bugs that can be papered over with software fixes

Yeah that's actually one of my goals. Only ship stuff that works on pain of embarrassment and prohibitive recall costs. It's crazy hard. It's how CPUs are shipped.

> and undoubtedly to charge more for what looks like a hardware feature but actually is a software feature.

Again, that's good. Such pricing tactics are scummy, I want to end them.

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Now of course, those reasons you cited are reasons for the vendor not to do what I'm pretty sure is very good for the consumer. I propose we force them. We could start small. Mice and keyboards first. Then printers. Then webcams, wifi modules... until we get to GPUs themselves.

Or we could regulate. One hammer I'm tempted to use is to simply forbid sales and importation of hardware made by companies that also distribute software. That way the only way to sell you hardware is to make sure its interfaces are both simple and thoroughly documented.

We could possibly make an exception for open source software, or only forbid the distribution of the relevant drivers, or limit the applicability of that law to specific hardware: hard drives, mice, printers, web cams... or GPUs.

Anyway, that should be disruption enough.

> GPUs will never be general purpose

Well in that sense, neither will CPUs. Just like GPUs, some workloads are better left to other kinds of hardware.

> The way they work under the hood has changed fundamentally maybe 4 times in that span.

How many times since we got shaders? And when exactly? I bet each change takes longer to come than the last. I mean, GPUs are increasingly general purpose nowadays. Sure they're optimised to specific kinds of embarrassingly parallel problems, but as more and more of their capabilities move out of the fixed pipeline to shaders, the need to change lessens.

Okay, so, GPUs are taking one more step towards being general purpose massively parallel machines. That's cool.

What would be even cooler though would be for GPU vendors to start giving us the user manual. An I mean the real user manual, that explains how to use their piece of metal when all you have is that piece of metal. That means a precise description of the wire protocols, the data format of the buffers we send to & get from the GPU, the ISA of the cores we have access to, the relevant performance characteristics…

In other words, enough information to write a state-of-the-art driver for any OS. That would be cool.

I love the self contradiction in this one.

Then just outlaw big corps. Put a hard cap on company size or capital, possibly on a per-domain basis. Or just put what has to be big infrastructure under direct state control. Worked wonders in practice in France.

Oh, and also put a hard cap on individual wealth while we're at it. No one, no matter how hard working, deserves a billion dollars. And no one should be trusted with that much power, it's too goddamn dangerous.

(The caps should be indexed to stuff like median income or wealth. Wanna get richer? There's a way: help everyone get richer. That way we're actually in this together.)

If I recall correctly most software work goes to custom software. Note that in many, possibly most, cases, the (sole) customer retains the exclusive rights to the source code, making the software effectively Free per the FSF definition (because the user is free).

Almost my entire career was spent on such custom software. The rest was internal software. And even that one I was doing as a contractor, so in a way we could argue it was custom software even there.

Or have a universal income. Capitalism isn't inevitable. And it will end anyway, at it hits planetary limits. Better start thinking of alternatives before one of the worst ones gets imposed on us.

My fear exactly.