fork the kernel

And find like at least a hundred extremely competent devs to maintain it, and a thousand devs to review the code.

Linus is well-known for edgy and controversial points. He’s undoubtedly a great programmer, but ultimately, he’s human.

I have to admit, Lemmy is so politically uniform that I kinda welcome something else.

Question: how do libertarian capitalists expect to combat corporatism? If anything, capital has a tendency to grow or die, and economies of scale along with vertical integration dictate higher survivability and profits of larger businesses vs smaller. And so, corporate structures appear again. What can be used to prevent it?

Also, if you allow me to comment on some of the key points raised…

The rich get richer, but the poor also get richer

One of the most common criticisms of late-stage capitalism is exactly that poor do not get richer anymore.

For example, here are nominal and inflation-adjusted median household incomes in the US:

Considering that inflation metrics count the whole economy, and not particularly basics like housing (which went through the roof and yet accounts for a huge share of expenses in a median and especially poor household), it’s not unreasonable to assume poor people are worse off than they were 20 years before.

Prices being allowed to move through supply and demand, rather than being set by central planners, are necessary for the efficient allocation of scarce resources to their most needed ends.

The socialist criticism is that “most profitable” and “most needed” are two different things. Suppose you made a meal, and offer it to a millionaire and a broke homeless individual. Most likely, the latter will need it more, but won’t be able to pay for it as much as the former.

We see China’s economy dramatically advance by switching to an overwhelmingly capitalist mode of production

And we see USSR economy skyrocketing after socialists came to power. And yes, extreme growth went way beyond New Economic Policy.

What we need to look for here, if we must be honest, is externalities. China switching to a more capitalist mode was net benefit because it enabled global trade as opposed to relative economic isolation. One of the main issues dragging socialist economies behind was that, being formed mostly of a few countries tilted into extreme poverty by previous regimes, they never got to access the same volume of trade and capital investment as their capitalist counterparts. When even these markets started to crumble through the Cold War, China had little other options.

USSR, on the other end, started on a low enough point that first advancements were relatively easy and investments paid off rather quickly. And, of course, there’s gulag, too.

Three big reasons:

1. Capitalism thrives on the promise of social elevation. You can become billionaire too, you know, you just have to put in the work and be smart. And many are willing to sacrifice their living standards for the hope of making it big, however unlikely the latter is.

2. Capitalism is a current economic system in the majority of places, and most people are afraid of the change. They’d rather maintain the status quo - this is why, for example, socialist countries had majority of the population supporting socialism - not because they got enlightened to its potential, but because they already lived under it.

3. Privately owned media. Most people get their information from the corporate platforms, which, being owned by wealthy individuals benefitting heavily from capitalism, obviously downplay the horrors of capitalism and exacerbate issues of socialism. It is them who propel the “hope” narrative (see point 1) and thwart any serious attempts to popularise socialism. Even if you manage to host socialist media on socialist platforms and outplaying the algorithms, good luck getting corporate funding to make quality content with high level of reach when your platform is anti-corporate.

Fair point

Such weird times…Jews supporting genocide, Russians supporting Nazi regime…

(yes, I know, neither all Jews nor all Russians support the respective things, and yes, it’s important to keep in mind to not be manipulated, if nothing else)

I too don’t get it, but some people love it, and who are we to stop them? Linux is for everyone!

Indeed. This is exactly the kind of high-risk environment for which people are typically vaccinated

This random commentor happens to be a Russian microbiologist, so you’re in pretty safe hands.

(No, I do not develop biological weapons, nor am I aware of any such facilities)

For all folks concerned of massive epidemic: -The people who contacted her after the incident are isolated, the hospital quarantined -Yes, there is a vaccine. People are not commonly vaccinated because plague is very rare nowadays, but they can be as needed. -It can be cured by antibiotics. Care needs to be prompt though, and that’s what Daria very recklessly missed. Fatal mistake for someone who oopsied in a pathogen lab.

Also, to those concerned that this is a biological weapon lab: -This would be the most stupid and inefficient biological weapon. Again, we have the vaccine AND the cure. -Disease research institutes are a normal thing throughout the world. We need them to efficiently combat outbreaks should they ever reappear.

The technology is undoubtedly good. All technologies are, if you ask me. The problem is about externalities, but they do matter and cannot be viewed separately.

Currently, as things stand, the development and, notably, use of the technology comes with a massive threat to several important areas. This is why many pieces of software that ban LLM contributions make a for now caveat.

Relying on it now, under current circumstances, is dangerous and damaging, even if sometimes it is a tremendous help. It may get better once we have truly efficient models and training, do not reinvent the wheel from scratch 20 times over, do not screw entire economy over it, put guardrails on the use of technology against people, and have a cheap, resource-efficient, and long-relevant hardware to run it. But we’re not there yet. We’re going to space with a gunpowder barrel here. Workable? I guess. Reasonable? No.

I see your point. I don’t think China-made local models are panacea by any means though, even through it’s good they try to make it more efficient instead of just throwing gazillions and watching the world burn. It is still a very massive, very problematic operation.

Running LLMs locally, especially considering the pace of development, is just going to distribute the e-waste issue and make parts availability even worse, as I doubt your average hardware would be busy around the clock as it is in data centers (and so we’ll need much more of it). It is better for some things (like privacy or reliability or screwing with incentives of those turning the economy and the world upside down for a quick grift), but it doesn’t solve the others.

As per legal aspects, time will be our judge. I’d love not to give a damn about copyright, but it still exists.

Do tankies tend to put “liberal” on anything they don’t like?

I’m sorry, comrade, but that’s not how it works. There are many valid reasons people of all political backgrounds stand against using LLMs in (open-source) coding.

Platforms and projects taking direct action on the matter is exactly what communists usually claim to support. They make change where they can, and rally for a bigger one.

Ultimately, the most performative folks are those judging others without making something better themselves.

You talk about it being “blind” right under exhaustive list of reasons why.

The fact that these arguments appeared before doesn’t make them less true. Yes, the coding quality of LLMs has increased, and, notably, it stopped producing as many bugs all over the place, and even got to review bugs made by humans.

But it doesn’t remove all other issues from the table, namely:

• Issues of licensing and stolen code, potentially causing copyright problems which most open-source projects are poorly fit to resolve and may go down because of them
• Environmental impact of model training, huge data centers threatening water supplies, producing tons of e-waste, creating noise pollution, increasing power demand, including one from unclean sources at the critical point when we should reduce it as much as possible
• Deterioration in skill level of human coders and lack of avenues for juniors to learn to code properly, which is likely to stay as an essential thing to have
• Outside coding, there are many ethical issues around companies producing LLM models, as many have ties to the military and police, and are heavily misused to fuel fascist regimes
• And more.

The technology allowed us to do such things for a while, actually. The problem was cost. What finally brought these devices to the market are insane economies of scale driving prices into an acceptable range.

A lot of the technological breakthroughs we have are not only due to science and engineering, but also economy. Humans figured how to produce very complex stuff VERY efficiently, and this allowed us to move the latest developments from the lab to enterprise, and then to consumers.

SSDs and flash storage are brilliant, pretty much textbook examples of it. So are chips, LEDs, solar panels, and much more.

On that note, would you imagine in the 70’s that we’ll have LEDs everywhere and that they’ll practically replace most other sources of light? This is, like, insane tech for the time.

Thanks!

Love the fact about RSS. Wish everyone could show up with such numbers!

What a life!

Didn’t know about WordPress automatically making RSS! Will put it to use.

Oh, I’d love to take a look at yours! But, of course, only if you’re comfortable sharing ✨