BlueMonday1984

Not a sneer, but another cool piece from Baldur Bjarnason: The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus.

Gonna skip straight to near the end, where Baldur lays out a potential apocalypse scenario for FOSS as we know it:

Best case scenario, seems to me, is that Free and Open Source Software enters a period of decline. After all, that’s generally what happens to complex systems with less investment. Worst case scenario is a vicious cycle leading to a collapse:

1. Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.

2. Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.

3. OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable.

4. That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back.

Linking this to a related sneer, another major problem that I can see befalling FOSS is earning a reputation as a Nazi bar. How high that risk is I'm not sure, but between the AI bubble shredding tech's public image and our very good friends increasingly catching the public's attention, I suspect those chances are pretty high.

Police officers are starting to use AI chatbots to write crime reports. Will they hold up in court?

Lying to people is the only thing AI is good for, so its no shock that cops want to use it

Update on the creative.ai situation: Ed-Newton Rex just bought the domain.

In other news, AI can now falsify cancer tumours, because even the slight sliver of hope that it could help with cancer treatment had to come with a massive downside

Personal opinion:

(I know I'm probably going too harsh on AI but my patience has completely ran out with this bubble and touching grass can no longer quell he ass-blasting fury it unleashes within me)

Continuing a line of thought I had previously, part of me suspects that SB 1047's existence is a consequence of the "AI safety" criti-hype turning out to be a double-edged sword.

The industry's sold these things as potentially capable of unleashing Terminator-style doomsday scenarios orders of magnitude worse than the various ways they're already hurting everyone, its no shock that it might spur some regulation to try and keep it in check.

Opposing the bill also does a good job of making e/acc bros look bad to everyone around them, since it paints them as actively opposing attempts to prevent a potential AI apocalypse - an apocalypse that, by their own myths, they will be complicit in causing.

Got an extended edit of 'meet the grahams' that hits even damn harder than the original

Conservatives in particular have, for culture war reasons, recently recommended Telegram—an “encrypted messaging” app that has many parts that are not encrypted and which does not have a clear governance structure—over Signal, an app that is open source and by all accounts uses one of the strongest encryption protocols ever created, on every chat that happens on the platform.

Refusing to keep your shit secret to own the libs

I mean, he probably is safer in France than in Russia. Sure, he's gonna have the gendarmes crawling up his ass and Telegram's privacy credentials are likely in jeopardy, but its still better than a visit from the FSB any day.

Not a sneer, but a link for Baldur Bjarnason for the week:

Why Halide’s Process Zero is an important tool for iPhone photography enthusiasts

Recommend checking it out for his high praise of the AI-free iPhone camera app, but to make it relevant to this community, I'll pull out the opening section:

Knowing how much work Lux Optics puts into their apps, Halide and Kino, I don’t think their recent Process Zero was implemented as a reaction to the ongoing backlash against “AI”. After all, now that people are increasingly negative about generative models, releasing a new photography mode that bypasses “AI” processing feels like a clever marketing stunt.

Personally, I suspect it was at least partially done for marketing purposes - beyond the wide open "AI-free" market niche, the ability to disable Apple's built-in image processing gives users plenty of control over how they can develop photos.

I don’t know anything about French internet law.

Same here, I'll admit

Granted. I was mainly thinking from the angle of "how to I keep the prosecution from having a slam-dunk case against Durov" here.

Also, it seems my expectations from privacy nuts were a bit higher than I expected.

Died 1987, Born 2024

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