There's no "apolitical" projects. Claiming the contrary is just trying to hide your agenda. While our engineer culture keeps falling for it, really bad actors are benefiting from it...
Don't be fooled by the click-bait title. It's a good piece looking at history and game theory. It gives some lessons about how civilizations collapse... or not.
Clearly there's a political project behind the design of those tools. Clearly our industry is lacking enough class consciousness to push back against the "AI overlords" agenda.
Or a reminder that no system can be made to be completely safe and secure. When the political pressure or violence gets in the equation it's hard to not simply falter and satisfy the demands.
Very important opinion piece from Cory Doctorow again. The trend was clear of an epistemic crisis brewing and generative AI basically put it on steroids. This is a real blow to our civilisation.
Excellent piece. I'm feeling unease at this widespread confusion between european ownership and digital freedom. What we collectively need is the latter. There's no sovereignty to be had in a proprietary ecosystem, be it owned by an European company or not.
No the technology we use isn't neutral... In that case it directly fund fascists. Whatever the technical merits from the Mullvad VPN it disqualify them to be used.
If you still don't think data centres have a water consumption problem, especially since the LLM weapon race... Think again.
An illustration of the political and ethical acumen being low in our profession in general and in some (most?) Open Source projects in particular...
Some of it is probably a bit too cynical (often the case with this author), and yet it has good advice on how software engineers influence the organisation around them.
Not what I signed up for years ago, but it's the political and social landscape we inherited... Surveillance is being on steroids now, so definitely need to fight it at every turn.
Excellent piece, where are the netizens who should be fighting back those bills? Looks like we became very complacent and passivity reigns this time around. Didn't think it was related to the pervasive centralisation already in place... but indeed that might be a strong contributing factor.
Definitely this, we can't trust this kind of mechanism for what they open the door to.
I wish people will stay clear of this newer social media... It already smells really bad in its practice.
Remind me how your built your models in the first place? Yeah right...
Very sobering opinion piece. For all the talks about a China / USA race, it feels more like two flavors of the same dystopia. The race is just here to justify acting against their own population interest. The result is then the increase in illiberal fixations and nihilistic world views. This can't end well.
The latest move by the US government treating LLMs like dangerous weapons tells something about the geopolitical moment. Can we collectively raise to the challenge and build on cooperation instead? It'd be a much better position than assuming governments or big companies will make the right choices for everyone else in isolation.
People excited by accumulating so much wealth (on paper) are clearly showing sociopathic traits...
Long, rich, and sourced piece. Or why the current gold rush aims at accelerating wealth accumulation of a few to the expense of everyone else. If the plans work as intended, the outcome won't look good.
Very nice piece, timely and needed. Indeed, let's hope people stick to those principles.