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This is very true, and my complaints aren't about open source or even AI written software!

Before the 2010s ruined software, you generally:

- Purchased or downloaded a software package.

- Installed it onto your local machine.

After that you were free to do what you liked with the software.

Now software generally:

- Runs on someone else's computer, or is at least locked behind a login.

- Is served to you through a web browser.

- May be revoked or changed without notice at any time.

For this reason, regardless of reliability or capability, software was generally better in the past.

This is very true, and is the (perhaps not obvious) subtext of my post as well. I'm not arguing that self driving cars are never going to happen or that AI won't eventually change the nature of a lot of work. There is a big leap between AI changing how programming is done and AI changing every other job too. The other poster arguing that "programming is harder than most other jobs, and therefore AI will eat them too", is taking a very stereotypically myopic and arrogant "computer person" posture.

Prices can't rise while salaries fall in a functioning economy. Humans will continue to be cheaper for many physical applications. Your suggestions of the inevitable exponential curve for the improvement and application of these technologies is wildly misguided.

Automated harvesting machines for fruits is not an accomplishment of AI. Companies have been building machines to do that long before the advent of AI. Robotic manufacturing is nothing new.

Back in 2012 I genuinely thought the self-driving car was going to put truck drivers out of work and reshape the economy on a timescale of less than a decade. This turned out to be a technofantasy. I think AI is going to play out the same way.

AI is not a panacea for work, and the economic bubble forming around it is going to collapse with devastating consequences before we begin to see adoption of the underlying technologies for real ROI spread widely beyond the software industry.

Huge environmental win if considering a fixed supply & demand, but Jevons Paradox kicks in with tokens in the cloud

The quantity and quality of communications that have been externalized and become effectively searchable and retrievable has increased by many orders of magnitude since paper mail was invented. I think even if you agreed that the State might have had that right then (which not everyone would), it would be good to reconsider what that means with the communications and information systems of today.

I think it is very clear that the "deal" with Gmail is that they host your email and use the platform to sell you things based on the content of the email (and your Google account profile in general). I don't think this is necessarily a good thing, but I don't think Amazon is defending my best interests by stripping information from emails so that I (and thus Google) cannot see their contents. Of the two companies at play in this scenario I dislike Amazon more. I can understand why you might dislike Google more; certainly they have been working hard on similar walled garden tactics on every service and platform they control. However, in each specific such scenario I am going to come down against the company crippling their product and punishing their users, and in this case it is Amazon.

Right now I am upset at Google for what they are pulling with Android developers and app installations; and I am perpetually mad at them and every other company for abandoning true third party APIs for using their services. RIP XMPP chat. RIP the golden iteration of any walled garden product that I happened to like that big tech then killed with an update, which is impossible to functionally recreate because APIs for services no longer exist.

But I'm using Google, which is my choice (and my own fault). Why shouldn't I be allowed to let Google have that data if I find using Gmail to be beneficial to me? Amazon should be satisfied that I am purchasing goods and services through their platform without seeking to sacrifice my experience of their platform for some nebulous gain elsewhere.

I'm still annoyed that Amazon stopped sending order details in emails so that gmail can't show me when specific items are arriving. More recently 'getsauce.com' started to do the same thing, hiding order details behind an opaque link to their website. Every player in tech wants to force you to interact with their platforms purely on their own terms, to the detriment of the users.

archive.is / archive.ph haven't loaded for me for a while, but since people are sharing fresh links it must be working somewhere. Am I experiencing a DNS block?

This is the motte and bailey fallacy. Yes, LLMs can do harm by making the wrong API calls. No, LLMs are not going to do the things implied by the comment I responded to above.

You should unplug, my friend. These words are fantasies. LLMs are token prediction engines and they aren't going to build their own data centers. They can't keep their own lights on. The real world is full of fractal details that a disembodied token prediction engine will never come to grips with. Even if they started to, you could probably defeat them with the kind of logic used to combat evil sentient computers on a Star Trek episode because they are "play pretend" machines.

This line of reasoning doesn't hold up for many harmful habits that people voluntarily partake in. It's OK for someone to believe that using an AI as an approximate therapist might be a bad idea, especially in light of the many publicly documented cases of AI feeding delusional thoughts and encouraging suicide.

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