Just upload some child porn to your blog & git repo and everybody who scrapes it, is in possession of illegal materials!

(kidding, don’t do that)

Yeah, that is so crazy. You’ll see some random picture with some idiotic story pasted to it. No sources. Two sentences. And people believe what they are seeing and will totally be enranged about the picture.

Thanks, but I’ll just stick to Firefox

That’s the neat thing about this: If you license out your name, your name is on the device. Those licensees profit from your name, from your brand. If you license out your name to some shit company, you totally deserve that everybody does think that you are some shit company

Yeah - they’ve abandoned so many products that I really do not want another new Google product in my life that will be abandoned in the future. And their track record with banning accounts for no reason while providing no support at all doesn’t help

Check out the apps from your local public transit authority. In my region what Google offers in regard to public transit is utter trash and the “official” apps are having the correct shedule

Yeah - you really do not want to be a customer or an investor with a company doing these stunts.

Which is an interesting dilemma: Those AIs are already trained. That power and water was used. If you use them, you will not pollute anything. But you may encourage those companies to train another AI

Yeah - Development and IT might feel slow, but there is a good reason why we’ve developed all those processes, access rights, approvals over the last decades. People are trying to burn down those “cumbersome” processes because they feel slow and AI promises them exactly that, but they will learn that everything is there for a reason, even that annoying SCRUM meeting

Yeah - stuff like this really shows that computing went in the wrong direction. You shouldn’t install every crap software on your computer. You shouldn’t install every crappy app. Browsers have too much access and are therefore a security risk by themselves. So we are left without any sensible way to run small programs like the one you are using to flash some firmware or to configure your mouse or whatever. Install it on your computer and it will spy on you. Flash the firmware from your browser and you are totally fucked, because your internet-facing thingy can flash a firmware

I think that technology can really help us here. OCR on images is mostly solved. If you know what PaddleOCR can do, those people on Mastodon who are whining about others not including an image description for a screenshot seem really annoying. It is possible to do this directly on your computer without any costs, without the need for beefy hardware. So no need to try to force everyone else to include transcriptions for screenshot, no need to attack other people, just do it yourself and enjoy the text on the screenshot. Technology can really help us here.

This also does kind of apply to AI image descriptions. Try it and put an image into Gemini and ask it to describe it. You will be surprised. AI can totally give you a workable description of an image. The problem here is that those AI tools can get quite expensive when you are using them a lot and that many disabled people do not have much money. So in my opinion it totally is ok to include AI image descriptions.

I think that there are too many people in the fediverse who do not know the current state of the technology and hate AI for maybe the right reasons, but who are missing out how it could help them.

Since AI is a buzzword with no actual meaning behind it covering several technologies: What do you actually want to ban here?

• AI-generated images and memes?
• Bots posting AI-generated posts?
• Mods using machine-learning to search for posts containing slurs or racist attacks?
• Posts about AI at all?
• What about communities discussing using LocalLLMs on their devices?
• What about users using LLMs as a fancy autocorrect to correct their spelling?
• Or would non-english users using some translation engine for their posts be banned?

If you pay attention to your pet and maybe read a little bit about them, you can already guess what they want to tell you. No need for AI here.

Doctorows concept is talking about platforms and social media sites and not Netflix:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

https://doctorow.medium.com/social-quitting-1ce85b67b456

There might be a lot of Netflix clones, but YouTube is the only video platform that is relevant. And you can see how they screwed over their users and the content creators then screwed over the advertisers.

You really should read Cory Doctorows original analysis where he coined the term “enshittification”. He has written a book about this and it really is great. The point is that for companies to be able to enshittify their products, they need to be in a specific position. Esp. in regards of competition - if there is a market and other companies are able to offer non-enshittified products, you can’t. If you are a monopoly, you totally can fuck over your users. So for an industry to un-enshittify, you need to break the monopoly structures there, kill regulatory capture, try to kill network effects and bring real competition into the industry.

A huge amount of why normal office workers like using AI, in my opinion, is that they never learned how make even simple scripts which would have helped them in a lot of their tasks.

Most office workers do not have the access rights and programs to run scripts. I know how to write them, but there is no way that local IT would allow me to run python on my work machine.

My need for control/understanding stuff I create

And that is really important from a mental health perspective: People are being held responsible for their work. If something does break that they’ve built, their boss & coworkers expect that they are able to fix it and that the error will not happen again. If you understand your system, you are able to do that. If you are responsible for some kind of AI-driven house of cards that you do not understand and can’t fix, that is really bad. It’s triggering some kind of imposter syndrome

Isn’t it obvious? There is no vaccine. We’ve seen human-to-human transmission even with short contacts like a flight. It’s able to kill people. And we know that at least in the USA the government will not do anything to protect the people.

We’ll see more initiatives organized end-to-end by small groups of smart people, with virtual teams/coalitions forming to bypass “archaic” processes and deliver meaningful results. We’ll see a lot of sloppy failures along the way too, but the overall trend seems clear.

The thing is: It’s great to work in a small group of motivated smart people. But it’s really, really hard to hire a small motivated group of smart people and keep it motivated. And it’s even harder if you’re not located in one of those fancy towns where everyone wants to live or in a business that is really attractive. If your company is in a lesser known part of the country building important, but boring stuff, you will have to deal with not so smart and not so motivated people.

Stuff like this is banned in my country because it totally is not safe in traffic. Elect some not-crazy people, dear Americans, and they might give you sensible legislation.

As a german I’m always flabbergasted when people from other countries are amazed by that. It makes sense to do that - help get’s faster to the accident and therefore the road will be cleared much faster than if the emergency services are stuck somewhere in the traffic jam. Do you have this strange behavior in other parts of your daily life, too?