25+ yr Java/JS dev
Linux novice - running Ubuntu (no windows/mac)

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: October 14th, 2024

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  • From that guy’s twitter? The primary source of this article is that guy, who is a lobbyist and lawyer. Someone whose career is based on legalistic wordsmithing to convince people that other people are bad.

    I’ve seen papers served before, both by a cop and a regular dude (going by appearance). The fact that the server was a deputy in this case doesn’t honestly seem relevant at all. Cops are frequently hired because someone in a police uniform knocking on your door is more likely to be answered than someone who looks like a salesman. But jurisdictions are different—I’ve never heard of papers being served by registered mail, for instance.

    That’s why I’d like for the journalist to have brought in some kind of legal analyst to weigh in. They didn’t and what we have is a bunch of quotes from an expert wordsmith and a tech journalist who may not know anything more about the legalities than we do.

    I genuinely appreciate that you took another step to look into this and respond, but hearing more from the guy’s own perspective doesn’t help me feel like I know what’s really going on here.

    I think I’m done with this whole topic until I hear something about it from a better source. If this is never mentioned again, I’ll assume this is just an attempt at manipulating public opinion over a mundane matter that isn’t outrageous at all. If there is something to it, we’ll hear more about it.


  • He’s not just a random dude, though. His organization is involved in lobbying efforts around OAI. The article claims there’s no connection between the case being subpoenaed for and the stuff he did, and that’s the part that might be abnormal and dirty, but it’s nuanced and the clear bias on display demands their claims be taken with a grain of salt.

    It looks to me like this article is carrying the guy’s PR water for him. But just because the article feels manipulative doesn’t mean there’s necessarily no factual basis for it.

    So I just… don’t feel informed at all.


  • From my experience, OAI may be the public face of AI, but Anthropic is murdering them in coding capability and cost - as in my company pays more in a week for me to use Claude than I would’ve paid in a month to use the top OAI API. (Actually I paid 1/10th that because I couldn’t afford that for what was essentially just a toy for my discord users—I wasn’t using it for development.) It really puts things in perspective when I can see in Cline the running totals for each task.

    Of course, I have no idea what the operating costs are.





  • Investment is not inherently a bad thing, but this is certainly the case. When the owners of the company care about increased profit instead of the employees and customers (which would be aligned in a perfect world but they are not necessarily so in this one) enshittification is inevitable.

    As soon as it is more profitable to lobby for legal changes that make more money at the expense odds your customers or employees—or find other ways to use your money to the same ends, you’ve gone to the dark side. I wish it was illegal for organizations (other than non-profits) to be involved in politics, but as a practical matter you can either allow it or accept it will happen out of view and ability to influence, like drug use.

    These issues are why I’m happy being a worker bee than a queen—there’s no solving people’s problems when the problems almost always turn out to be the ability/drive of some of us to adapt to any system for maximum personal gain at the expense of others.


  • Agreed. I would imagine they are looking for new revenue streams because it feels like just running an LLM costs more than the derived value. Right now investors are pouring money into AI by the swimming pool full in the belief that a renaissance is right around the corner. But the view from the ground is that the value is never going to return that investment without getting creative.

    And when companies get creative rather than rely on fundamentals that drive sustainable growth, it’s generally a steep slope to enshittification.













  • Not sure who you’re used to dealing with, but I use AI all the time — damn near every day — and have done for 6 years. I’ve written a discord AI dungeon master. I’ve written hundreds perhaps over a thousand short stories often starting from a scenario I’ve written and watched them all play out time and again. I know LLMs inside and out. I’ve jailbroken them to see how far they can be pushed in terms of violence, evil, and intimacy.

    I’m no professional author to be sure, but because I lack the knack for storytelling, not because I don’t understand the craft. So I understand the tools pretty well, and I can tell when they are poorly employed.

    And I’m irritated because I 100% can tell, and I wish you were right.