rossy

I think you'll always have a bit of cognitive dissonance unless you take this feeling to its logical conclusion. Almost all advertised use-cases of AI are designed to replace a relationship to a human being with a relationship to a multi-national mega-corporation.

Maybe replacing the relationship between a parent and child has more emotional significance, but all your human relationships are valuable. Even AI for coding wants you to spend more money on tokens and less on hiring and training junior developers in your local area. You can say goodbye to your local tech scene, and eventually your local university's engineering department, and all the social benefits they brought to your local area. Even walking over to your colleague's desk to ask them how their code works is something that is gone now.

> I use both of these as a tool to ensure that engineers on my team are using AI.

So you could definitely be the first to explain to me why AI is the only "tool" that gets forced on developers from the top down with threats like this.

In my experience, developers have to beg management to get productivity enhancing tools like linters, version control systems, editors and IDEs approved for use. AI is the rare reversal where the decision to use it is often made by non-technical C-suite members and pushed downwards, often with the implicit or explicit threat of job loss, like you are making now. But if the productivity gains are so obvious it turns 10x engineers into 50x, why is that necessary, and why do you need to look at anything other than the quantity of a developer's output to know if they're using it?

I'll never have to worry about that.

It's disappointing to see Linus pull out the tired "compiler" metaphor. AI agents are obviously not compilers, or we'd be committing prompts to Git. I think anyone could think of a dozen ways they're unlike any other tool a programmer has access to, so if he wants to convince anyone who doesn't already agree with him, he needs to make an argument for why they're like the other tools, not start from the conclusion that they're like them and ridicule people for treating them like they're not.

But Linus stands to financially benefit from his stance on AI. The current AI boom runs on Linux servers. The Linux Foundation is in deep with AI projects and its current platinum members are some of the biggest AI promoters. It would be very surprising and insanely self-destructive for him to take a principled negative stance on AI like we see from some other free software projects, but that also means you can't read a lot into his position. If you think money and power can influence beliefs at all, there's so much of it at stake right now (or at least there's the perception that there is) that you can't really trust people like "the guy who wrote the operating system that everyone uses for inference."

Some of the Linux-adjacent projects I've really come to respect in the years before this all became so serious are the ones bringing Linux to new unusual platforms, like Asahi and Nura (nee postmarketOS,) both of which have strong public anti-AI stances. My IdeaPad Duet Chromebooks running Nura are some of the most enjoyable Linux devices I've used, so as much as I let any talented developers influence my position on AI, I'd listen to them before I listen to Linus.

Linus has motive behind his position on AI. It's his operating system that's at the center of the AI revolution. The Linux Foundation is involved with several AI projects and has a lot of members that are all-in with AI.

"Humans have the same reactions whenever a new world-changing technology appears" is one way to see it. The other way to see it is that the current AI boom is part of the same computer revolution that writers in the 70s and 80s were afraid of, and some things happening today really do retroactively justify their fear.

Yeah, it seems absurd to be afraid of computer-assisted writing in the WordStar era, but the Turing test was proposed in the 50s. Everyone knew that human fields of endeavor would only become "more computer" as time went on. Only, if a time traveller could tell a 70s-era sci-fi writer that artists and designers were some of the first to have their livelihoods threatened by 20s-era AI, they'd probably think it was too on the nose to incorporate into their fiction.

video-sync=display-resample in jellyfin-mpv-shim's mpv.conf should fix frame pacing

Maybe you've been filter-bubbled on other websites, but HN is the only place where I see completely trusting and uncritical takes on what a corporation that has literal trillions of dollars on the line says in their press releases about their trillion dollar product and its competitors.

As others have pointed out, there's some surprisingly evocative language in Anthropic's original press release about this, comparing a self-replicating open weights model to "a slime mold or a swarm of fruit flies." Their communication with the public about issues that affect their valuation is probably not pure scientific objectivity.

Seems like they select for people as dependent on their product as their customers. Maybe it helps them more to have true-believers rather than intelligent people.

Actually, the rate of AI usage among the free and open source projects I most respect is quite low.

Spend long enough (or not even that long) in corporate software development and you'd believe such unsubstantiated hype is possible. The only difference here is even stronger incentives to pretend the emperor has clothes: insane overinvestment, threats of job loss for non-believers, fear of missing out on massive alleged productivity gains.

Good to see them adapt to the times. Using maintainers as free labour via PR abuse was such a 2023 way of being a parasite to the free software community. The new, cool way of doing it is to endorse the technology that can wash free software of those pesky copyleft licenses and unevenly distribute the expertise it encodes to the corporations who can pay for the most tokens.

As I understand the process is very relevant to the law: why things like clean-room reverse engineering can be necessary.

> What I’m arguing is that existing legal doctrine on copyright law very clearly does not protect mere ideas or styles.

Like it or not, it is anthropomorphizing to claim that an algorithm can have ideas or use styles, rather than just saying that the apparent "ideas" and "styles" in its output are a mathematical derivation of the human ideas and styles in the copyrighted material in its training set.

Isn't that completely terrifying? Some of the last tiny shreds of human connection in the digital landscape (shared experiences and the human creator/viewer relationship) replaced by a relationship with a corporation.

If you think people are wasting their time scrolling reels now, the one social benefit is that you might have seen one of the same ones as your (human) friends. Imagine if that was gone. Truly horrifying.

> Artists do that all the time

This is exactly the sort of anthropomorphism I'm talking about.

Yes, human artists reproduce styles all the time, but implying this equivalence between what a human does when they recreate a style, and what an AI model has done when its output is suspiciously similar to a single artist's "contributions" to the training set is reductive since the mechanism is obviously completely different. It doesn't say anything about whether one ought to be allowed, just because the other is, but the assumption that it should is doing the legwork for those who benefit from AI as a copyright washing machine.