Not true. Things haven’t always been like that. “Bananaware” (software that ripens after the sale) was enabled by two factors: internet connections and consumers willing to put up with this shit.

It’s “its”.

Also, thou shalt not editorialise headlines.

Every Windows 11 system I’ve used with 8GB of RAM ran like total shit.

FTFY

I’m a simple man. I see Cory, I upvote. Then I read the text.

Depending on where you are, Meta will ask the government to intervene on their behalf. They’ll be claiming your national legislation is unfairly targeting of the poor, poor American companies and make the orange moron tell your lawmakers to scrap it unless they don’t want to get tariffed. (It’s the only tool this tool of a man knows.) They’ve started to deploy this exact tactic against the EU’s DMA.

You’re forgetting that Meta has bought the U.S. government (like all the other oligarch-owned companies have), and the corrupt “officials” tell their agencies to stand down. Just look at where the antitrust cases against Google and Apple went…

Depending on if it’s noise, water, or air, the legal codes are not effective at protecting property or people.

Boy, it’s almost like those are meant to protect something and someone else… Hm… 🤔

Enough has been said about the dogshit company doing this. That’s a lost cause. At this point, you know what you’re signing up for if you’re getting in bed with Meta. In a sane world, the company should crash and burn - but yet it doesn’t. So what’s wrong with the people who still use Meta’s services? What’s wrong with the people still willing to work at this dumpster fire? They’re a part of the problem.

A true gem, both the man and the song.

Just go back to Reddit, kid.

LLMs are a type of AI. Call me back once you know what you’re talking about and willing to contribute more than polemics.

That’s 10,176 Dogecoin. No, 100,254. No, 274,778.

where’s all the small mom and pop AI that’s doing good? where’s ANY AI that’s doing good?

Stable Diffusion has been a thing for a while now. There are tons of models people have trained and uploaded to HuggingFace so you can just download and experiment with them on reasonably equipped consumer hardware. So there’s plenty of “mom and pop AI” if you know where to look for it. Whether people know/use these or rely on oligarch tech is a different discussion.

I think we need to separate our judgement of the tech from our judgement of the datacentre owners. Spelled out, that means: Altman, Nadella, Pichai and all the others do deserve the ire of the public. ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Grok do deserve the hate they’re getting. We should not, however, forget that “AI”, or machine learning, does exist outside the clutches of the Epstein class, and, if liberated, can do more than just enrich the rich.

“We’ve listened to customer feedback and started putting REAL tomatoes into our Shitburger again. People will come flocking back in DROVES!”

I get and share the criticism of double standards in the application of the law and the other ugly sides of corporate AI. The question I’m asking here is: if unshackled from its corporate contexts (i.e. proprietary models run for-profit in centralised data centres): is genAI still objectionable? Is the tech unethical as a wholez or is it only problematic because for now, it is mostly a tool of the oligarchs?

Alright, I get that. It’s pretty much what I wrote up there in the second half of my posting.

I’d still be curious as to your answer to my question there:

Which leads me to the question: would you find visual genAI more acceptable if it weren’t commercial?

Let’s not just exchange blunt claims, but reason a little.

Copyright critics have long made the somewhat compelling argument that copying isn’t stealing because the original digital item does not become scarcer in the process. So how can AI taking artists’ work be considered theft if it, too, just uses copies of the original work and maybe transforms them into a new work (which would, under U.S. law, fall under “fair use”)?

We might argue that, well, fair use does not apply because most AI companies try to monetise the models derived from other people’s work.

Which leads me to the question: would you find visual genAI more acceptable if it weren’t commercial?

Let me guess: the milllions of electricians are tasked with building the AI data centres, while the plumbers build the plumbing needed to flush all those tons of generated slop down the drain?

Same here, parents. Feel free to turn on automatic updates. It’s never broken anything, and vulnerabilities do need patching.

Thank you very much for the detailed and well-sourced write-up! I’ve saved it for later when I get to drill down on this.

It kind of proves OP’s point though: distros do come with a lot of idiosyncrasies of “how things are done around these parts”.