cyd

I think it’s the other way round. AI writes, the human editor touches things up a little, and together they poop out hundreds of low effort articles a week.

Yeah, I tried for a long time to use DuckDuckGo, but honestly the results are worse than Google, even given the present day enshittified state of Google search. And it eventually just became too annoying.

The regulation not only puts obligations on users. Providers (which can include FOSS developers?) would have to seek approval for AI systems that touch on certain areas (e.g. vocational training), and providers of generative AI are liable to “design the model to prevent it from generating illegal content” and “publishing summaries of copyrighted data used for training”. The devil is in the details, and I’m not so sanguine about it being FOSS-friendly.

Well, here’s my worry. From my understanding, the EU wants (say) foundation model builders to certify that their models meet certain criteria. That’s a nice idea in itself, but there’s a risk of this certification process being too burdensome for FOSS developers of foundation models. Worse still, would the FOSS projects end up being legally liable for downstream uses of their models? Don’t forget that, unlike proprietary software with their EULAs taking liability off developers, FOSS places no restrictions on how end users use the software (in fact, any such restrictions generally make it non-FOSS).

One major issue that concerns me about these regulations is whether free and open source AI projects will be left alone, or whether they’ll be liable to jumping through procedural hoops that individuals, or small volunteer teams, can’t possibly deal with. I have seen contradictory statements coming from different parties.

Regulations of this sort always bring the risk of entrenching big, deep-pocketed companies that can just shrug and deal with the rules, while smaller players get locked out. We have seen that happening in some of the previous EU tech regulations.

In the AI space, I think the major risk is not AI helping create disinformation, invading privacy, etc. Frankly, the genie is already out of the bottle on many of these fronts. The major worry, going forward, is AI models becoming monopolized by big companies, with FOSS alternatives being kept in a permanently inferior position by lack of resources plus ill-targeted regulations.

I run a self-hosted copy of Commafeed, which is a seamless and fast replacement (both workalike and lookalike) for the late Google Reader. The main issue, really, is the long term decline of the blogosphere, which has severely decreased the number of interesting RSS feeds for me.

Public companies have a duty to protect value for their shareholders, among other obligations. This is actually not an unreasonable rule of thumb, because public companies have a multitude of owners (the shareholders) who can’t always be polled on what the company should do, but one thing they have in common is that they want their investment to make money.

Private companies can do whatever the owner wants. In Twitter’s case, the only other party with standing to sue Musk for destruction of shareholder value is the Saudi sovereign wealth fund (Kingdom Holdings), which declined to relinquish its stake when Musk took Twitter private. The Saudis probably don’t want to raise a public stink (i) it’s a loss of face, and (ii) they have more money than they know what to do with, anyway.

That’s very true. That’s why Musk was talking up his plans to turn Twitter into some kind of super-profitable super-app (a la WeChat)… but that’s definitely not materializing, because how many people would trust Musk’s Twitter enough to use it as a super-app?

I think Twitter will have to end up defaulting on those loans. The banks will be pissed off, but they’ll have to work out some kind of face-saving deal with Musk to write off the loans, because at that point only a masochist would want to run/own it. But who knows.

A lot of stories like this have been coming out, but it’s not clear that they foretell the doom of Twitter as so many people are assuming (or anticipating).

Donald Trump’s various businesses showed long ago that large companies aren’t necessarily harmed by shitty practices like not paying bills. And mid-2010s Reddit showed that a social media platform, once established, can survive terrible technical deficiencies (remember when Reddit was crashing daily?), simply because people tend to be too lazy to move.

Most likely outcome is that Twitter continues to chug along, maybe with outages here and there, not losing much traction. Maybe it ekes out a small profit, which Musk can use to salve his ego.

I would like remakes of some 90s PC games whose various design quirks make them hard to get into these days.

Two RPGs from that era stand out to me: Dark Sun: Shattered Lands and Ultima VII. Both have world-building and immersive sim elements that still feel very modern, but have dated graphics and bad interfaces (and, for Ultima VII, a truly terrible battle system).