He didn’t have any way of knowing at the time what Linux would become.

An ironic article to write given the Forbes AI voiceover and AI article summary…

Astroturfing will come, but the platform itself can’t as easily be designed to enable it with preferential algorithms and tracking. If an instance injects ads into its frontend, users can easily switch instances or use an alternative frontend or app; if a specific instance is known to host promotional posts, it can be easily defederated or otherwise blocked.

The same cannot be said for blocking ads or tracking on Reddit, particularly for mobile users.

It’s just a bit two-faced and dishonest for Reddit to be marketing itself to users as a platform for genuine discussion while in actuality being a marketing platform for brands.

If more Redditors realized what Reddit has become, they might be more willing to join a platform without the centralized control that enables manipulation.

“For communicators, Reddit’s value is in the real conversations that people are having about your brand today, not where it surfaces tomorrow,” said Adam Collins, Reddit’s chief communications officer.

Reddit defining its platform as a place for consumers to discuss brands speaks volumes about its motives.

They’re definitely more likely to be used by AI than by the average person, but I think that’s in large part because people aren’t generally taught to use them, along with their absence from keyboards.

Since keyboards have two minus sign keys, I have a script running on my computer to automatically replace one of their inputs with an em dash.

Em dashes being associated with AI is a disservice to them; in many cases they’re a far more suitable use of punctuation in interrupting a sentence than parentheses.

In this instance, however, the em dashes between the first and second parts of sentences would be better replaced with semicolons than commas, in my opinion.

The AI industry is actively telling companies that they can become ‘more efficient’ (i.e. fire workers) with AI; that’s more than a mere ‘messaging problem’.

It has a financial interest in companies firing their workers and raising prices to make room for it.

Even a 5% fee is 5% too high; letting Apple tax all sales on iOS merely because they control the operating system is monopolistic.

Dominik sees practical, non-surveillance uses for the field, like tailoring workshop laptops to age-appropriate defaults without restricting access to anything.

No one deserves death threats, but per the quote above, the existence of the setting still encourages distributions to ask for the user’s age at setup, as apps may require the setting to be enabled to know how to handle the user’s data and which experience is best suited for them.

While this may automate the parental control process for parents, many users don’t want their data used by software in ways they don’t consent to, even if it doesn’t leave the device.

Probably because of its compliance with age verification standardization.

Hopefully there comes a point when native Linux builds become more common, versus asking all Linux users to play with a performance penalty.

Their point is that Claude is now engineering its responses to specifically conform to a detectable pattern, something that can of course be easily removed via a seperate LLM.

AI agents have no agency of their own; their operators are the ones with that control. Negligence in giving an AI agent access to the internet does not absolve the operator of liability.

More OEMs should ship devices with Linux as an option, discounted by the Windows license cost.

The entire AI industry is built on IP theft; even if you don’t believe in IP ownership, companies like OpenAI and Anthropic rely on their ability to scrape the internet for content, with only largest of publishers having the resources to sue for anything in return.

So long as copyright is being enforced at the individual level for consumers, large corporations shouldn’t be allowed to get away with infringing on it for profit.

It’s one thing for individuals (particularly those without the means of paying) to pirate content that its original creators have already been compensated for and now exists to milk money for an IP holder for a century; it’s another matter entirely when AI companies with multi-billion dollar valuations scour the internet for content to include in their models to then profit from without permission from or compensation to the millions of people whose work they depend on.

Whoever you are, don’t outsource your understanding, judgement, empathy and taste to AI. Don’t abdicate your responsibility. Don’t be a meat proxy.

By expanding the ability to program to people without the knowledge of how that code works in the first place, it’s naive to expect that most uses of AI in programming will be informed uses by senior developers able to recognize errors and security flaws.

Such a pro-AI position also ignores the enormous amount of theft that these tools are built on.

AI bots cannot be and should not be licensed mental health care practitioners, so existing licensing laws should be enforced.

I’ve updated my spreadsheet with data of everything with at least 50 MAU (60 instances); pretty much have my updated defederation graph done in terms of instance placement (shared it on Matrix for feedback), just need to add more statistics to it.

Adding more instances of course increases the complexity, so while I made adjustments to hopefully make the boxes easier to differentiate, any graph at scale will be somewhat confusing without animation that allows the end user to focus on one instance at a time.

Your visualization definitely adds a degree of clarity to things, so maybe I’ll spend more time working on my design too.