LIke with almost everything “big-tech” has done, it’s not the tech you should not trust, but the companies themselves. For example, accessing and using the models (because let’s face it, they have clusters of much larger and more powerful GPU clusters than we could ever afford to build and own ourselves, at least for now) is fine, but trusting their end-user products/services, not so much.

@bender@twtxt.net Now that’s an interesting philosophical viewpoint right there. But this assumes that the “AI” we seemingly have available to us today is actually telligent, understands and has cognitive reasoning. It does not. All of these LLM models from big-tech companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta and Alibaba are all just very powerful, very large multidimensional neural networks with attention that are very good at statistical probabilities of ‘what comes next”. I think we get really upset over the wrong things sometimes. We need to continue to be upset that these 🤬 companies have basically destroyed any meaningful value of the concept of Copyright and Intellectual Property and Works of art. The so-called “AI” we have today is just a tool. Can you say for certain that the typewriter and the computer ruined our ability to write? Perhaps yes, but we still learn how to do so, likewise, I still think that learning to write code, research, read and write are all valuable skills to learn. Later on once you have the basics, you can defer some of the “tedious” work to these models, because frankly, they’re far better at inferencing and pattern matching than you or i will ever be, not because they’re better at pattern-matching per se, but because they have been trained on a very large corpus and they are much much faster at doing the same basic things we are far superior at.

Is it the fact that “big tech” companies have basically stolen all of human knowledge to their benefit to build these AI(s) that’s the problem? Or is it that these AI(s) can write code better than you can (some of the time)? Or is it that because of all of the above, there’s no joy left in writing code anymore? 🤔

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’m very curious…

What I like about this whole computer stuff is that you can explore how
things work. You can dig through problems and solve them. Nothing is
more satisfying than finally understanding something after you scratched
your head for some hours.

Surely you could do the same with AI? Tinker with how it works, study it, understand it, build your own and realize what it really is (without all the big tech hype)?

Many people started to become distrustful of big tech in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. I began feeling pessimistic back in 2016, when AlphaGo beat master Go player Lee Sedol four games to one. Something about that event has soured me on the future of technology ever since.

i am trying to escape from big tech, as much as i can. spotify is just bad for artists, pays miserably plus they show ads for ICE recruitment in the US, netflix is just not interesting anymore and i don’t really wathch movies that much. the next one is paypal i think

Another AI rant:

One of the “key features” of LLMs is that you can use “natural language”, because that is supposed to be easier than having to learn a programming language. So, when someone says to me, “I automated this process using AI!”, what they mean is: They have written a very, very large Markdown document. In this document, they list what the AI is supposed to do.

In prose.

This is a complete disaster.

Programming and programming languages have one crucial property: They follow a well-defined structure and every word has a well-defined meaning. That is absolutely brilliant, because I can read this and I can follow the program in my head. I can build a mental model. I can debug this, down to the precise instructions that the CPU executes. This all follows well-defined patterns that you can reason about.

But with these Markdown files, I am completely lost. We lose all these important properties! No debugging, no reasoning about program flow, nothing. It’s all gone. It’s a magic black box now, literally randomized, that may or may not do what you wanted, in some order.

People now throw these Markdown files at me … and … am I supposed to read this? Why? It’s completely random and fuzzy.

Sadly, these AI tools are good enough to be able to mostly grasp the authors intentions. Hence people don’t see the harm they cause, because “it works”.

We already have a ton of automations like this at work: Tickets get piped through an LLM and these Markdown files / prompts determine what will happen with the ticket, and maybe they trigger additional actions as well, like account creation or granting permissions. All based on fuzzy natural language – that no two humans will ever properly agree on.

Jesus Christ, we’re now INTENTIONALLY bringing the ambiguity of legal texts and lawyers into programming.

Using natural language is NOT easier than using a programming language. It is HARDER. Have you people never read a legal contract? And that stuff can STILL be debated in a court room.

I can’t begin to comprehend why we, tech folks, push this so hard. What is wrong with you? Or me?

(And, once again, we’re ignoring other factors here. LLMs use a ton of energy and ressources, that we don’t have to spare. It’s expensive as fuck. It doesn’t even run locally on our servers, meaning we give all these credentials and permissions to some US company. It’s insane.)

The Positive Case for Good Tech ?~L~X https://thenewleafjournal.com/b/DtP

@prologic@twtxt.net Here you go:

(LTT = “Linus Tech Tips”, that’s the host.)

LTT: There was a recent thing from a major tech company, where developers were asked to say how many lines of code they wrote – and if it wasn’t enough, they were terminated. And there was someone here that was extremely upset about that approach to measuring productivity, because–

Torvalds: Oh yeah, no, you shouldn’t even be upset. At that point, that’s just incompetence. Anybody who thinks that’s a valid metric is too stupid to work at a tech company.

LTT: You do know who you just said that about, right?

Torvalds: No.

LTT: Oh. Uh, he was a prominent figure in the, uh, improved efficiency of the US government recently.

Torvalds: Oh. Apparently I was spot on.

I’m gonna ask here again because I’m really frustrated and literally no one else is responding anywhere can u guys please help me find a good video camera the biggest think I want is long battery life but I also want it to be cheap like under $200, if you yourself don’t know please ask a friend because I am not a tech nerd and looking for stuff like this is very hard for me

I have a question! I’m looking for a small personal camera(specifically good for videos because that’s what I’ll use it for) that’s cheap enough for a teen to afford but also actually good. Do any of you tech people have any good recs?

Thank you for the encouragement and love and kind words, @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org @movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net @doesnm@doesnm.p.psf.lt and others along the way I’m not sure of their feed uris 💕 I’ll keep at it, but for the time being I will keep my distance, mostly off IRC, because I don’t have the energy to spare in that kind of engagement (what//if the worst happens, it’s so draining). I need to remember what I ever did any of this for, it was back in ~2020 and I wanted really to build small interconnected communities that any non “tech savvy” person (more or less) could also benefit from ane enjoy. Even if there are aspects of the specs we’ve built/extended over time that aren’t “perfect”™, they’re “good enough”™ that they’ve last 5+ years (I believe this is 6 years running now). I want to spend a bit of time going back to why I did any of this in the the first place, and get a little micro-SaaS offering going (barely covering running costs) so encourage more folks to run pods, and thus twtxt feeds and grow the community ever so slightly. Other than that, I plan to get the specs “in order” to a point (with @movq@www.uninformativ.de and @lyse@lyse.isobeef.org’s help) where I hope they’ll stand the test of time – like SMTP.

Thank you all ! 🙏

hi I haven’t been on here in years how are you random old men who like tech

Nuevos Proyectos, Nueva imagen, nuevo todo! #BCN #logo #Tech #Dev

@prologic@twtxt.net

Are we some of the only people in the world that realize how fucking dumb all this Internet-connect shit™ really is?

Yeah, but don’t ask me why that is. I’ve never gotten a satisfying answer when I talk to people who hype this kind of stuff. (I mean just normal tech people, not CEOs or something.) They just shrug it off and/or think that my concerns are paranoid. 🤔

🤔 💭 🧐 What if, What if we built our own self-hosted / small-web / community-built/run Internet on top of the Internet using Wireguard as the underlying tech? What if we ran our own Root DNS servers? What if we set a zero tolerance policy on bots, spammers and other kind of abuse that should never have existed in the first place. Hmmmm

@movq@www.uninformativ.de No doubt, some things are just so much better the low-tech way. Waste paper, like an opened envelope, suits a shopping list perfectly fine. You’ve got a nice handwriting, I like it.

@prologic@twtxt.net I too, self-host various services on a VPS (and considering buying a mini PC to keep at home instead).

I use most of it as a hosting platform for personal use only and as a remote development environment (I do share a couple of tools with a friend though).

But given the costant risks of DDoS, hacking, bots, etc. I keep any of my public facing resources purely static and on separate hosting providers (without lock-ins of course).

Lately, I began using homebrew PWAs with CouchDB as a sync database, this way I get a fantastic local-first experience and also have total control of my data, that also sync in a locally hosted backup instance in real-time.

Also, I was already aware of Salty.im, but what I’m thinking is a more feature complete solution that even my family can use quickly, Delta.chat with the new chatmail provider (self-hostable) might be the solution for my needs.

But I’m still thinking if it’s worth the trouble. I might just drop everything and only use safe channels to speak with them (free 24/7 family tech-support is easy to manage 😆).

Also, I’ll be waiting for the day you’ll share with us your story, I’m pretty curious about it!

@prologic@twtxt.net, the very first sentence addresses something that needed to be addressed. Maybe tech savvy people will not have these issues, but many non-tech savvy people (and old people) I know has had, and has, cyclically, a myriad of malware, pestware, etc., issues on their Android based phones. It is a wild-west.

This is why I love tech from that era.

Write bytes to a parallel port and stuff happens. If it’s just ASCII bytes, then it will print ASCII text. Even the simplest programs can use a printer this way.

With a little bit of ESC/P, you can print images and other fancy stuff. That’s what I did this morning – never worked with ESC/P before, now I can print images. It’s not that hard.

Hayes-compatible modems are similar: Write some AT commands to the serial port and the modem does things. This isn’t even arcane knowledge, it’s explained in the printed manual.

Maybe I’m wearing rose-tinted glasses here, but I think with all this old stuff, you get useful results very quickly and the manuals are usually actually helpful. It’s so much easier to get started and to use this hardware to the full extent. Much less complexity than what we have today, not a ton of libraries and dependencies and SDKs and cloud services and what not.

https://movq.de/v/4bd16cb3c7/tux1.jpg

https://movq.de/v/4bd16cb3c7/tux2.jpg

@movq@www.uninformativ.de having to go to a gopher proxy to see a text document better served on readily available web servers… 🤭, but I digress. Verbatim text:

What's Missing from "Retro"
~softwarepagan
------------------------------------------------------------------
You know, often, when I say I miss older ways of computing or
connecting online, people tell me "there's nothing stopping you
from doing that now!" and they are technicay correct in most cases
(though I can't, for example, chat with friends on MSN ever
again...) However, let me explain that while this type of thing can
*sort of* fill that hole in my heart, it isn't *the same.*

Say, for example, I wanted to connect with others over a BBS. This
wouldn't offer the same types of connections it used to. While
there are BBSes around with active users, they're no longer there
to discuss movies, Star Trek, D&D, games, etc. They're there to
discuss *BBSes.* The same can be said for Gopher, old-school forums
and all sorts of revival projects (such as Escargot, Spacehey,
etc.) Retrocomputing enthusiasts, while they have a variety of
interests, are often in these spaces to discuss the medium itself
and not other topics. This exists at a stark contrast from how
things were in the past, where a non-tech-inclined person may learn
the tech to connect with likeminded others (as I did as a
Zelda-obsessed kid.)

The same can be said of old media. People will say "well, nobody is
stopping you from watching old shows/movies now!" Again, they are
technically correct. I can go home right now and watch *Star Trek:
The Next Generation* to my heart's content. It will never again,
however, be current, or new. When something is new, it serves as a
shared cultural experience. Remember how "Game of Thrones* felt in
the mid-to-late 2010s? Yeah, that.

It's sad. I sustain myself on a mixed diet of old things, new
things, and new things intended for old millenials like me who like
old things. It can be bittersweet. 

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz On the one hand, all these programs have a very long history and the technology behind manpages is actually very powerful – you can use it to write books:

https://www.troff.org/pubs.html

I have two books from that list, for example “The UNIX programming environment”:

https://movq.de/v/c3dab75c97/upe.jpg

It’s a bit older, of course, but it looks and feels like a normal book, and it uses the same tech as manpages – which I think is really cool. 😎

It’s comparable to LaTeX (just harder/different to use) but much faster than LaTeX. You can also do stuff like render manpages as a PDF (man -Tpdf cp >cp.pdf) or as an HTML file (man -Thtml cp >cp.html). I think I once made slides for a talk this way.

On the other hand, traditional manpages (i.e., ones that are not written in mandoc) do not use semantic markup. They literally say, “this text is bold, that text over here is italics”, and so on.

So when you run man foo, it has no other choice but to show it in black, white, bold, underline – showing it in color would be wrong, because that’s not what the source code of that manpage says.

Colorizing them is a hack, to be honest. You’re not meant to do this. (The devs actually broke this by accident recently. They themselves aren’t really aware that people use colors.)

If mandoc and semantic markup was more commonly used, I think it would be easier to convince the devs to add proper customizable colors.

AI this, AI that.

Tech is no longer interesting. I need to find a new field.

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club This was an interesting read for sure! 👍 I don’t think it had anything I hadn’t already considered in terms of the ethical/moral points of view. I’m not sure where I stand myself either to be honest. I’ve forced myself to get familiar with the ecosystem and tooling, because in my line of work as a tech lead (staff engineer in sre) you don’t want to be that one guy that ya know 😉 Ethically/Morally though, I’m definitely with the sentiment of this post 😅 Much like the whole Crypto hype yaers back (if y’all remember?!) this is also one of the most energy hungry pieces of “tech” (if you can call it that?) in a while. Then there’s these other issues “stealing people’s work”, “reliance is causing humans to become cognitively weak and neural connections to shrink”, to name a few…

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Only 10% of the German population had Internet access in 1998: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Deutschland#/media/Datei:Diagramm_Internetnutzer_in_Deutschland.svg I guess I was lucky in that regard.

(If today’s tech wasn’t constantly trying to track and scam you, I might still be an early adopter.)

me liked the tech me using at the moment. pretty decent for production & daily use.

My vision with this newsletter is to have a slower medium for communicating about my art as well as ideas and projects I’m working on regarding how we can use digital technology to our own benefits instead of being exploited by big tech.

Twtxt not sloe enough for you? 🤣

@movq@www.uninformativ.de this is so real… i think we need to bring back topic focused groups but like with a little off topic side of things just in case people wanna go off topic. so the option’s there but the intent is the topic! microblogging isn’t best for this yeah. i think this is part of why IRC still goes strong for many tech people

One-sixth of the planet’s cropland has toxic levels of one or more metals
Comments ⌘ Read more

Show HN: Memex is a Claude Code alternative built on Rust+Tauri for vibe coding
Comments ⌘ Read more

Garmin Pay: yes, you can do NFC tap-to-pay in stores without big tech
Late last year, I went on a long journey to rid myself of as much of my remaining ties to the big technology giants as I could. This journey is still ongoing, with only a few thin ties remaining, but there’s one big one I can scratch off the list: mobile in-store payments with NFC tap-to-pay. I used Google Pay and a WearOS smartwatch for this, but neither of those work on de-Googled Android – I … ⌘ Read more

Restoring a Sinclair C5
Comments ⌘ Read more

Meta’s ‘Digital Companions’ Will Talk Sex with Users–Even Children
Comments ⌘ Read more

‘Tech entrepreneur took our money but failed to deliver our startup dreams’
Comments ⌘ Read more

A tuition-free school created by Zuckerberg and Chan will shutter next year
Comments ⌘ Read more

Norway’s $1.7T Wealth Fund Reports $40B Tech-Driven Loss
Comments ⌘ Read more

AI used to talk to dolphins? Thanks for all the fish!

https://www.thedailystar.net/tech-startup/news/google-building-ai-model-talk-dolphins-3875626

Why on Earth is OpenAI buying Windsurf?
Comments ⌘ Read more

Democrats: Doge building a ‘master database’ of Americans’ sensitive information
Comments ⌘ Read more

Google is a monopolist in online advertising tech, judge says
Google acted illegally to maintain a monopoly in some online advertising technology, a federal judge ruled on Thursday, adding to legal troubles that could reshape the $1.86 trillion company and alter its power over the internet. Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia said in a 115-page ruling that Google had broken the law to build its dominance over the largely … ⌘ Read more

Google Is a Monopolist in Online Advertising Tech, Judge Says
Comments ⌘ Read more

Building an AI That Watches Rugby
Comments ⌘ Read more

A threat model for opposing authoritarianism
A decade ago, I published a book on privacy “Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance.” In the book, and since then, in articles and speeches, I have been dispensing advice to people on how to protect their privacy. But my advice did not envision the moment we are in – where the government would collaborate with a tech CEO to strip-mine all of our data from government databases and use i … ⌘ Read more

Man who built ISP instead of paying Comcast $50K expands to hundreds of homes
Comments ⌘ Read more

The captchas have become sentient: we’re working on fixing the captcha issue
As some of you may have noticed, we’ve been having some issues with captchas. The powers that be – which isn’t me, I don’t know anything about web development – are looking into it, and once we’ve pinpointed the problem we’ll get it fixed. It’s annoying us too, so we want this resolved as quickly as possible. OSNews readers just trying to visit the site to read some tech stuff shou … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Is a Systemic Risk to the Tech Industry
Comments ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Prepares for New Round of Layoffs in May 2025
Comments ⌘ Read more

US tech tariff exemption may only be temporary, says Lutnick
Comments ⌘ Read more

Dear Big Tech, Stop Shoving AI into Operating Systems
Comments ⌘ Read more

We quit our Big Tech jobs after hitting #1 on HN and Product Hunt
Comments ⌘ Read more