We don’t have many workers rights. In Virginia my employer paying near min wage can charge ya $5 for a new name badge. Totally legal. And they do.

It is a sad thing to see. The education system especially here in the US has really failed many people. I was always super curious and excited about machine intelligence from a young age. I was born in the mid 90’s. I’ve been dreaming about automation myself out of work so I could create and do what I love and spend more time with the people I love, and just explore and learn and grow. As a kid I noticed two things that made adults miserable:

1. Overworked with too little pay and too little time off. Monetary stressors.
2. Having kids they didn’t want but lied to themselves about. (Only some obviously)

I went to school for CS and eventually had to drop because of personal life and mental health struggles, but I’m still interested in joining the field and open source. People sometimes make me feel really sad, and misunderstood, plus discourages me from even bothering because they’re so negative. I know how we got here, but it’s sad it’s this predictable a reaction.

By 2014-2015 I was watching a lot of machine learning videos on YouTube, playing with style GANs etc. The fact a computer could even “apply a style” and keep the image coherent was just endlessly fascinating and it made for a lot of cool photos etc. Watching AlphaGo beat a world champion in Go using Q-learning techniques and self-play was incredible. I just love it. I love future tech and I think we can have social and economic equity and much less wealth and income inequality with all this.

A lot of people don’t realize labor adds a lot to the cost of what they buy and there are only so many workers. Having even today’s LLMs fully implemented and realized as agents (this is very quickly coming about) things will slowly get cheaper and better, then likely more rapidly. Software development will be cheaper. Engineers, game designers and artists will bring to life incredible things that we haven’t thought up yet, and will likely use these tools/entities to enhance their workflows. Yes there will be less artist grunt work, and there will be affects on jobs. It’s just not going to stop anyone from doing what they love however they like to do it. It’s so odd to me.

Cheers and keep your head up. If we get this right I think people will change their tune, but probably not until they see economic and quality of life improvements. Though, I’d say machine learning and machine intelligence has added a great deal of value and opportunity in my life. I wish everyone a good future regardless of how your feel about this. I just hope people who aren’t in the field or weren’t enthusiastic before will at least remember there are a lot of real, kind, and extremely intelligent people working really hard on this stuff, and truly believe they can make a substantial positive impact. We should be more trusting and open. It’s really hard to do it, we can get burned, but most people want decent things for most others despite disagreement and don’t strife. We’ve made it this far. Let’s go to the stars 🤠

I keep getting shocked with Arch lately. Software is getting better fast with AI to boost productivity. Blender runs at light speed on a laptop with an i7-6700hq, 16GB DDR4 and a GTX 970. Even Wayland works super well!

Haha they’ll be scratching their heads what I could possibly say worse in private. Also, violence is only okay if it is defensive. Till then grab your routers and learn some cough ethical hacking skills.

I’ll never give up. I’ll shove my 256-bit AES encrypted USB stick so far up the glowy asses they start vomiting shit and USB drives. I still use YouTube and shit tho. I try and convert people. I’ve been successful getting quite a few people on Signal. The problem is that if there isn’t interoperability and everyone’s friends aren’t on it some forget to even check the app or don’t get notifications. If you leave message contents in notifications you’re fucked anyway. Lol I feel their pain, but I wish I could get people to care before bad things happen. I mean, bad things have happened. We just gotta keep it up.

I just have a hard time hounding people when I still use YouTube and Discord etc because that’s where the people and shit I wanna use are. So obviously that’s the same for them. I’m highly motivated, understand the tech, and realize how glowy everything is. If I go to all that work just to no longer be able to watch creators I like, and talk to a large percentage of friends, then I might as well just not use any tech. Then other people’s tech will track me. So here’s what I say publicly!

Fascists and authoritarians can eat my fat greasy shit and I’ll shove it down their ugly fascist throats until they vomit shit and blood and die.

Haha in Minecraft of course!

Eh. The only way to get everyone to switch is to literally get all the alternatives fully shut down. It kinda looks like we’re going down the apocalypse path but I’m still hoping the silver lining expands. I use desktop Linux, I try to use open source software whenever possible, I try to get friends to switch to more privacy respecting platforms and services, but ultimately if I want to talk to anybody or have any social life whatsoever on the internet, I have to go where the people are. Just like everybody else. I haven’t given up on privacy, but if it’s hard for me is someone who understands how this works at nearly every level and has been obsessed with technology and computing my entire life, and made it over halfway through a computer science degree… How would I ever expect any of my friends that aren’t so technically inclined to switch when I myself can’t even switch without just losing friends. Ideally, everyone would just agree to switch to privacy respecting free and open source platforms and software. Unfortunately, there are people who even believe that a surveillance state is a good thing. I think this is far from lost cause, but if the mass is ever adopt privacy respecting technology it will be after. Really bad things happen not before. Unfortunately, it’s hard to make someone care about what they believe to be a hypothetical. To be fair, they might end up being right to some extent. So far, I would argue that the powers that be if not been as evil as possible. If you think they already are, you might want to think about more evil stuff because it could get way more evil. Unfortunately, the way humans work are historical precedent and not theory. I’m a theorist, not a very good one and not one with any real credentials, but I understand cryptography well enough. I understand the public key cryptography infrastructure, a little bit about Signal’s double-ratching algo, post quantum etc.

It’s unfortunate but they’re only 24 hours in a day and usually I have to sleep eight of them and work an average of four to five of them at least. So even for someone like me who knows the risks and knows what could happen and has an imagination and cares still uses a lot of the services that are so bad for privacy. Ultimately, I may as well just stop using the internet and computers all together outside of what is absolutely necessary. The fight is not lost, privacy should never be given up, and freedom to modify, change an examine. Your technology should never ever be taken away and we should only fight for it. We do need to have a little empathy though for those of us who are not willing to spend hours and hours a day to learn and figure out how to use all these alternatives that also have the disadvantage of not having any of the people they’re talking to on them. The people I’ve gotten to use things like signal already cared about their privacy and or extremely receptive and have continued using it for many years. People who’d never did. Never even downloaded it. They don’t even know what encryption is though a lot of them. If I said SHA 256 they would think I was talking in some crazy alien language. They don’t know what a one-way function is. Trying to explain this stuff to people without a technical background is damn near impossible. Trying to get them to change their habits and their services that are already so entrenched and forced upon them by the capitalist establishment doesn’t seem to do any good. I will keep recommending people free and open software, I will keep fighting for privacy, I will not give up. Ultimately though, sometimes we just have to accept imperfection if we want to communicate with others through computers. Maybe we shouldn’t be, I don’t know.

Pretty soon. It’ll probably be pretty much possible to tell who is speaking online just by the pattern of the text they write. So I’d very carefully reconsider making fun or belittling people who are working 8 hours a day, got a poor education, and are force fed capitalist propaganda all day long and siloed to services that do not respect their privacy.

Ultimately I think the only thing that would change this is if the powers that be use all the data they have to be maximally evil. Unfortunately, it is hard to get someone to take an action to protect against the thing which they have not fully realized is even possible. If they knew that every message they ever sent could be searched in a database and that it would be, and that the people searching that would use it to kill maim or torture them somehow, or blackmail etc… well then sure they’d care. Unfortunately throughout history it has taken a hell of a lot of kill maim and torture to get the general population to actually take any proactive action. (Even that isn’t very durable right?)

Also with LLMs getting good the less informed user can make changes they want and learn as they do with less effort so lower barrier to entry. The Arch wiki isn’t even that hard if you have a level headed 24/7 assistant that knows enough and can reason well enough to teach you something. Only if you make sure that you never expect perfection. I don’t trust people’s work blindly so why would I blindly trust an LLM? That’s the lessen we gotta learn. Use the brain lol