Are we both thinking about the same military? The one which is currently losing a war with Iran for the third time this year?

Yeah, let them try to bomb Chinese data centers honestly. Would probably be pretty funny (if no nukes are involved).

You won’t get to AGI by pumping more money into LLMs or hardware to run LLMs, it’s just not going to get you there.

To achieve true AGI there needs to be years (more likely decades) of research by a diverse variety of teams, but

1. Capitalism doesn’t think in terms of decades, it needs the big shiny toy next quarter or else the bubble pops
2. Research requires higher education and academia, and that’s woke
3. Diversity is banned

So, what you will get is overinvestment in LLMs and threats of military action to prevent competition. Good luck world!

“Democratic Socialists of America” condemning communism is like a “Healthy Puppy Society” condemning adult dogs. What the fuck is the end goal of your project then?

If you just pipe an LLM straight into a feedback loop with a console, it is going to destroy things rather soon, depending on the context window and other factors. All the agentic fluff is basically the workaround for LLMs going off the rails.

Pipe it into root on your laptop for a couple days and see how it fares.

Nah, LLMs are pretty useful for a wide range of tasks. I would grant them the status of “locally intelligent for text manipulation”. They can find patterns, transform, compress, and even generate text pretty well if you formulate the prompt correctly.

The problem with them is two-fold:

1. There is no actual grounded intelligence involved and yet they are used for all sorts of tasks where it is required, like research or decision-making or software architecture or creative writing.
2. They also captured human emotional states really well, which makes them scarily addictive for people looking for human connection (see all the “companion” chatbots) and terrifyingly useful for pushing propaganda, misinfo, and scams. This also multiplies the first problem tenfold because LLMs are trained to come off as confident which means they will “pretend” to be good at things they really are not, and if you don’t know how the underlying tech works you can be lulled into believing its confidently incorrect research results or execute a totally insane decision it makes.

Wars in the Middle East start sounding more and more like statistics that no one really wants to hear about

Has this not been the case for the past 25 years already? No real need for “AI” when you already have an obedient and trigger-happy military with plenty of remote-controlled toys and your populace is brainwashed to believe “brown person = terrorist”.

way less soldiers to choose to disregard unlawful orders

What is the last known case of a US soldier disregarding an unlawful order? If anything, the military is full of assholes who are happy to kill for fun. See: Graham Platner

Will AI make it easier and/or cheaper? Probably, sadly. But it won’t be a qualitative change.

five minutes earlier: “hey dude, marketing here. if you quit and post this dramatic text about the inevitability of AGI on your X account you’ll get a huge golden parachute”.

Seriously, how can competent people look at the current state of LLMs and think that it’s anywhere near AGI material?

Sure, it is already making civilizational changes for the worse. Not because it’s good, rather because it makes us lazy and dumb, has decimated creative jobs, and is used relentlessly for propaganda and misinformation and scams. And it’s much better at using the scaffolding of existing structure to make chaos, than it is at making new structure, making it a weapon more easily yielded by the evil than by the good. A few more software vulnerabilities discovered along the way will not be such a big deal in comparison.

“Piracy” (in a sense of unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials) was a thing ever since copyright became a thing. Otherwise you wouldn’t need copyright to be a law.

Movie/video piracy existed since the 80s, before TPB there were bootleg DVDs, before then there was bootleg VHS. For music it goes back even further, reel-to-reel machines which could copy entire albums at good-enough quality existed back in the 1950s, and compact cassettes got good-enough for music in the 70s.

They’d have to effectively close down the Czech branch of the company.

Yeah, I think that’s basically what they’re going to do.

Sadly they can, there is no law stopping a company from shutting down offices. They’ll have to pay people who are laid off a few months’ salary with no work performed but it might be a better deal to MS compared to paying higher wages forever.

IIUC this has more to do with LLMs discovering issues than with actually introducing more new issues:

What “deserved” are you talking about?

You are the one repeatedly saying all over the thread that she deserved to be raped. You try to be edgy and sarcastic about it but that doesn’t change the message.

I didn’t say you should go and rape the woman. I said she received what she signed up to do to others.

If you repeatedly say that someone deserves something you are literally implying that we should go do something to people. It is what “deserves” fucking means.

You are once again completely ignoring the material reality and instead focusing on whether or not that woman “deserved” to be raped (that phrase has terrible connotations btw, this whole thread needs a large CW on it).

Whether or not someone deserves something is basically emotional and thus idealist, but its material roots are in the total social advantage of giving out a benefit or punishment to a given person. Therefore this is the angle we should take.

If we examine the material outcomes resulting from an active US military member being raped by a colleague, there is very little positive results there. For the victim, trauma does not prevent one from being violent and aggressive, if anything it exacerbates it. The perpetrator meanwhile will be enabled and mentally prepared for even more atrocities against their other victims. For everyone else, it normalizes a horrible behavior that has no place in society.

Then again, even form an idealist angle, I don’t think anyone deserves to be raped. Unlike killing, it is never a valid method of defense, because it requires that the target is already overpowered by the perpetrator. It does not serve any possible function other than satisfying the sexual/sadistic/controlling desires of the perpetrator at the expense of the victim.

Killing active-duty US military members to prevent them from engaging in their usual war crimes is OK because it serves a clear goal (incapacitate the soldier, deter other soldiers from joining).

Raping active-duty US military members is not OK because it does not serve any goal, she has PTSD now but that won’t stop her from doing more work for the military, and it does nothing to deter men from joining the military (if anything it may be a more enticing proposition for the target audience)

The question is not whether or not someone “deserved” something, it is “which material outcome do we want to achieve”.

Because you are refusing to answer my simple question of what you are advocating for, I will assume my initial assumption is correct. It seems the material outcome you want to achieve is terrible suffering for women in US military, not the prevention of war crimes by US military. While understandable that you want to hurt “bad people” like that, it’s not helpful at all.

I’m not defending the crimes this woman helped perpetrate, I’m asking what material actions you are advocating for.

For example, I believe that the rapist should be punished, this woman needs help with the resulting PTSD, and the entire military needs to be dismantled with appropriate punishments for all involved. Requiring them to do labor rebuilding countries they destroyed would be a good start, with harsher punishment for people doing actual war crimes themselves. Being physically violated by a man who’s also an accessory to war crimes is not a valid punishment, it does not advance any of the societal goals of punishment (deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, retribution), to speak nothing of how inhumane and cruel it is.

What about you?

What the fuck are you trying to advocate for here, materially speaking? That men can and/or should rape women on US navy ships? I don’t want to put words in your mouth but that is what it sounds like.

Popularity is increasingly necessary to be able to actually use the OS. Hardware is constantly evolving, you need to keep up with everything from the new CPU architectures to the boot environment to drivers. Software is constantly evolving (worsening) too, if you want to interact with the web you need to be able to run a modern browser. Without popularity, there will be neither volunteers nor coprorate donors to do all this monumental work.

If corporate involvement is a bigger issue for you than usability, GNU Guix/Hurd is always there for you. I have it set up on an old laptop, it is kinda fun in a way but not really usable for anything.

The sad truth is that Linux would be as popular as Hurd if not for corporate money and resources.

The question is that of control. Linux is still mostly controlled by Linus and his officers whom I mostly trust. Omarchy is controlled by a right-winger idiot, so I wouldn’t trust it regardless of money.

Honestly yeah, that’s the best solution if you want to do something like this.