I become more and more weary about the absolutist moralizing. Yeah this CEO is nutty, but what I want from him is to protect the privacy of his customers. That is a precious good to us.

I especially mistrust the fuckai fanatics who want to burn down everything and everyone that has remotely to with AI no matter if it’s reasonable or unreasonable. Their tactics are despicable and their strategy leads to unproductive outcomes for all.

Soon there will be no big VPN and privacy companies left and it will be easy to mop up what is left without resistance.

Right? Purity politics. I’m not sure what to make of it. I believe it’s mostly driven by profit. I haven’t read anything about anyone actually driving this as a general strategy. It makes little sense except for general disruption of social cohesion and it feels too spontaneous.

I believe it started with climate / science denialism and fascism, things that you cannot tolerate because they lead to intolerance. Things where the emotional abuse eventually got too much and people just categorically rejected anyone from the other camp. But this has been massively expanded now. Veganism, cars, vaccinations, conspiracy theories, diplomacy, AI.

I suspect AI will still take decades to catch up with the deep intelligence that you need for more complex programming. So good programmers will be far more valuable than code monkey.

If I were starting out I’d pick some combination, most likely biochemistry + AI programming / models. Like learning both biochemistry and how to program and train and research AI models that can e.g. fold proteins or synthesize some new medical molecule that could cure some illness. Medicine is still stuck in the dark ages.

Or robotics and manufacturing. All those jobs that went to China, China itself is planning to replace with robotics.

So instead of becoming a programmer, become someone that can develop and train and use AI models to solve problems in emerging fields.

Above all, focus on chances to become some kind of entrepreneur. If you’re not a shareholder you’re just a tool like an LLM to them. EDIT: Well no, not always, if you find a good team or small private company to join it can be really fun.

People have been trained by social media to hate pretty much anything on command these days. It doesn’t really matter what or who it is, there is always an audience to hate this or that. You’d think that at some point people would get that this is class warfare, but no.

Well truly profitable applications for LLMs are pretty limited so far, but they will come. Lets say you can replace a tax advisor / accountant with a specialized LLM agent (one that doesn’t hallucinate tax code lol). Imagine oyu have an open source project that uses a coding AI agent to frequently update and retrain the tax LLM with the new regulations and laws and unit tests all this. So it’s ultimately easy to use, you just talk to the tax AI agent. Or alternatively, because they managed to make open weight LLMs illegal because they are piracy because they use books and posts without permission to train and can’t afford to pay the license fees. Now everybody has to use a commercial AI tax service. At the same price at what it cost previously to hire a real human.

As AI models get better they replace human labor. This is a problem under capitalism, otherwise we could just all just be working less and chill. But it gets even worse if “we” (like the 99%) can’t make use of open source models. Then the plutocrats get to own this newly replaced labor as free labor and collect rent.

This is why I believe the IP argument of anti-AI is so dangerous. They can afford to pay license fees, we / open source can’t. See patents, or see healthcare insurance purposefully making healthcare costs go up.

The most important thing is to protect the people’s right to use open source / weight AI models without licensing. Because the AI companies permanently monopolizing AI models and collecting rent forever on the commons, that would be a tragedy. It would forever shift the balance of power to use advanced technology.

Evil, Scary China Refuses To Passively Let Us Encircle It: Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix – Caitlin Johnstone

That’s a pretty good article explaining it. The funny thing is that the US media is always framing China as the aggressor. But one look at that map, like with your real eyes, not the crazy eyes, should show you the US is way out there on someone else’s doorstep and who the aggressor is. That’s just geography.

Personally I don’t think China is going to invade Taiwan unless things escalate further. For example, the Russian perspective on the Ukraine is that the US supported the regime change through the NED, helped far right elements overthrow the democratically elected regime and then supported their stance to ban Russian language, oppress Russian speaking populations in Ukraine and supplied them with massive amounts of arms and intelligence. All of this is true historical fact. And in that situation even the chief of NATO Stoltenberg publicly said that Russia launched a “preemptive war” in response to this quasi-NATO membership right on their doorstep. If the US does the same with Taiwan, China might invade. That particular gabit is rather unlikely to succeed in Taiwan though, and Taiwan is far less dangerous to China than a hostile well supplied Ukraine is to Russia (only like 500 miles from Moskow). The smart play for China if that happens is to play rope-a-dope until the US gets tired. Kinda what Iran is doing about the numerous provocations and acts of war against them.

Sorry that must be really horrible working near someone like that. I’m also sorry there are a lot of shitty comments. It’s quite shocking he only served 2 years.

You could ask an attorney, it’s possibly you could already sue your employer. There are also surely people or groups who have experience with this kind of thing.