I can’t give any firsthand recs at the moment, but I’ve had my eye on the ASUS Zenbook A16.

I’m a weirdo who likes ARM Linux, and this is the first non-Apple ARM SoC that has a decent memory bandwidth for LLMs. Not exactly blazing, but should be usable.

That’s cuz she’s fiiiiiine (tuned)

Same vibes as an addict going one day without their substance. “Day one was miserable, so I don’t see the point in sobriety.”

It is wild that Anthropic decided to go with “Claude”, as in “Claude Shannon”, as in the guy who formally proved that information degrades every time it passes through a channel that can’t represent it in a mathematically reversible way.

If you can’t theoretically produce the original code, given the “refactored” code… congratulations, you have lost information.

I listen to 100 percent invisible, thanks

I strongly suspect the human is there to be the fall guy when the LLM invariably does something really stupid.

This has a term, actually! “Accountability sink”.

Yes, like a heatsink in a computer, your job is to soak up all the damaging and unwanted aspects of what the “real” and “valuable” main components decide to do, so that consequences never reach any decision-makers.

Fun!

Enspiral comes to mind: https://www.enspiral.com/

I’m no luddite

You’re not a luddite. Because you’re a Luddite.

The actual Luddites weren’t opposed to technology. They were opposed to, in their words, “machinery hurtful to commonality”.

And well… You can’t spell “machinery hurtful to commonality” without AI.

?

Publish date has nothing to do with commit timestamps

Look, all I’m saying is, normal cybersecurity rules still apply. Don’t go running off to download and run code that’s hot off the press, with no track record, no established user base, developed by a rando who is visibly moving at a breakneck pace. Especially with any category of software that’s notoriously difficult to secure.

That’s not a lot of time for the developer or anyone else to review, test, or audit the code.

First commit 2 days ago

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back

Safe from AI replacement doesn’t mean safe from a recession that’s being covered up by AI circular financing and a convenient spin story for the resulting mass layoffs.

Career-wise, even the usual insider mouthpieces are starting to agree that AI won’t kill CS:

But yeah, AI has definitely scorched the FOSS landscape. We will somehow figure out a way though.

In a good way, I hope?

Niri should join that list since this recent commit: https://github.com/niri-wm/niri/commit/7256ccf6274a1f953c6987ade34ea1c0e4944c27

I’m not sure they can be compared fairly. Slavery and AI scraping do both have “unpaid labor” in common. But “unpaid labor” is hardly the most horrific feature of either of them. And to reduce them down to that metric so they can be compared ends up downplaying the unique horrors of each.

I think the important part to take from the quote is that: he knew it was wrong, he knew the degree to which it was wrong was extreme, and he knew it was wrong in a particular way that the world hasn’t seen before.

The shit machine SCARES US EVERY DAY and we are 90% certain it will END THE WORLD but we continue to BUILD IT ANYWAY.

IMO, the concern over ASI is overblown/premature, but since the AI bros insist on having that conversation instead of the very real harms that already exist… I’m in favor of just documenting the prohibition of ASI so we can move the fuck on already and hopefully make them less able to what-about their way out of genuine grievances that deserve careful attention.

You are correct. Which has made the tension between the corpo side and the community side that much greater.