100%. I speak for myself.
Is there a no-AI audience?
71–79 of 79 posts
Re: Is there a no-AI audience?
#72The Luddites and their sympathizers were often shot. Some labourers displaced by the mechanical looms did find work elsewhere... if you mean workhouses. You see, history is written by the winners and the capital holders won. The modern perception of Luddites as being "anti-progress," is the myth written by the winners. The real history was that they were arguing for better working conditions, abolishing child labour,…
This article misuses the term Luddites , or at least references an erroneous use. I think the modern "you were wrong about the Luddites" meme is honestly a bit exhausting. The movement was about breaking the machines. You can find a sensible argument in there somewhere if you look at it sideways, just like you can defend rioters in a protest by taking a reductionist view that flattens everything. I mean sure, you can…
> Unless we want to rid the world of trains and automobiles to preserve the mule drawn barges of the 1800's,[^2] then we need to face the fact that creative destruction is progress, and we will destroy jobs and everyone will be wealthier for it.
not all technological advance is beneficial
generative AI reminds me of tetraethyllead
it made a couple of people fantastically rich, whilst silently causing immense damage to both the world and society
TEL is now universally banned
Re: Is there a no-AI audience?
#73The Luddites and their sympathizers were often shot. Some labourers displaced by the mechanical looms did find work elsewhere... if you mean workhouses. You see, history is written by the winners and the capital holders won. The modern perception of Luddites as being "anti-progress," is the myth written by the winners. The real history was that they were arguing for better working conditions, abolishing child labour,…
This article misuses the term Luddites , or at least references an erroneous use. I think the modern "you were wrong about the Luddites" meme is honestly a bit exhausting. The movement was about breaking the machines. You can find a sensible argument in there somewhere if you look at it sideways, just like you can defend rioters in a protest by taking a reductionist view that flattens everything. I mean sure, you can…
I'm a big fan of agriculture as a civilizational stepping stone, but apparently the diet (and height, and risk of malnutrition, etc) of the average hunter-gatherer was richer in vitamins, minerals, etc, than the diet of a the average farmer.
Since most of the world switched to farming around 5000 years ago (I think), that means that our average diet regressed for at least 3500 of those years.
So, if you think about it, assuming the much larger farming tribe next to you did not kill you and your entire tribe, agriculture was a bit of a mistake, at an individual level.
I agree with the other commenter, there's a chance the current incarnation of LLMs (and social media, etc) might be looked upon, in the future, as equivalent to the discovery of tobacco or leaded gasoline.
Re: Is there a no-AI audience?
#74The Luddites and their sympathizers were often shot. Some labourers displaced by the mechanical looms did find work elsewhere... if you mean workhouses. You see, history is written by the winners and the capital holders won. The modern perception of Luddites as being "anti-progress," is the myth written by the winners. The real history was that they were arguing for better working conditions, abolishing child labour,…
This article misuses the term Luddites , or at least references an erroneous use. I think the modern "you were wrong about the Luddites" meme is honestly a bit exhausting. The movement was about breaking the machines. You can find a sensible argument in there somewhere if you look at it sideways, just like you can defend rioters in a protest by taking a reductionist view that flattens everything. I mean sure, you can…
It's not a meme, it's history. The machine breaking was a form of collective action by violence to form solidarity among workers who were under threat of losing wages and their livelihoods by the policies and actions of capital holders, not the machines themselves.
The capital holders spun the tale in retrospect that the movement was about the machines. "They just can't see progress! How daft do you have to be to not see the value of these wonderful machines! The productivity allows these people new leisure and the chance to do meaningful work... and they want to tear it down! How backward!"
It was about rights, liberties, and solidarity of workers. Some people did care about the quality of the textiles. But that's not enough to spark violent action in order to negotiate for better... textiles? No, it was for better working conditions, abolishment of child labour, etc.
Consider also that at the time, England was fighting Napolean on the European continent as well as the War of 1812 in North America. The textile industry was not good at allocating capital to survive the ups and downs: the factory owners only allocated enough to produce the next order. Layoffs were frequent, workers were over worked, and often paid little. Children were often employed because they were cheaper and had no bargaining power.
And where did the textile workers get displaced to? The myth from the capitalists is that they'd find new productive work elsewhere! It turns out... workhouses, the legally sanctioned indentured servitude that lasted up until the 1930s.
Had the Luddites won I doubt they would have destroyed all of the looming machines and forced us back into the days of hand-crafted textiles. The idea is preposterous. But maybe the workhouses wouldn't have developed, maybe there would have been more sensible labour laws earlier on. And we'd still have a more predictable and sensible textile industry.
Machines aren't the problem, people are.
Re: Is there a no-AI audience?
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also synonymous with bad art, bad writing, climate irresponsibility, and hallucination. The problem is, people want to do the least amount of work possible and go home at 5, so they're all too happy to use the tech that their employer is forcing down their throats.
If you think AI art/writing is bad, you should have seen what the people who produced it were producing before.
[textbroker moment]
Oh, and even more aptly, do you remember "spinning"? This was a manual job, if you can imagine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_spinning
Re: Is there a no-AI audience?
#76I have been working on this idea of a curators only social media. where instead of algorithms delivering you content, you follow people whose taste you appreciate. The original idea came from having your own "tv station". If you think about what cable tv is, it's basically a 24 hour block that the station manager could decide what to put on. Station managers with good taste (and perhaps deep pockets) could put on con…
I had similar idea but applied to anything that uses some sort of “recommendation engine” internally.
The things I wanted use it for was for Netflix for TV shows and movies, and Yelp for restaurants.
With the restaurant example, the curation can become as strict as dietary requirements (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, kosher, halal, etc) that are in some cases regulated by NGOs or government bodies or as flexible as having the same spice tolerance as a friend.
Re: Is there a no-AI audience?
#77ok, I do not want AI in every product either, but the slight trouble I have with some otherwise thoughtful anti-AI takes is that they are increasingly out of touch with what is possible today (or what is the standard practice today).
(Regarding the question about code editor. My primary code editor recently is Vim -- no AI features. But larger part of the code is produced by tools like Claude Code that does not even have the feature of manual edits. Traditional IDEs only have niche roles in my process at the moment -- e.g. debugging and stepping over the code.)
Re: Is there a no-AI audience?
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's also synonymous with bad art, bad writing, climate irresponsibility, and hallucination. The problem is, people want to do the least amount of work possible and go home at 5, so they're all too happy to use the tech that their employer is forcing down their throats.
If you think AI art/writing is bad, you should have seen what the people who produced it were producing before.
Art is good or bad if it expresses what the artist wants it to express or not. It is not strictly a matter of quality / fidelity. It is terribly difficult to produce good art through the common chat interface used to create art with AI. Tools that allow iterative refinement like ComfyUI are far more capable for allowing people to create art with AI, but they are also far more capable at producing something that is low quality.
Re: Is there a no-AI audience?
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except we have a thriving open source software ecosystem where you can have the software you want if you stop making excuses how the terminal makes everything literally unusable. No such thing exists for manufacturing high-tech OLED panels without malware attached to them.
I'm wondering, is there a law stopping me from buying smart TVs wholesale, extracting the parts, recombobulating them into dumb TVs and reselling them?
Its going to be hard because many of them are GPL violating and so source code will be unavailable, so you will have to do reverse engineering instead of just recompiling Linux. Hopefully this lawsuit will go some way towards fixing that.