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The silver lining to the ridiculous datacenter expansion will come in 3-5 years, when all those GPUs are considered obsolete, and there's a flood of cheap used GPUs on the market.

Not that I disagree, but tricky message to get across when the main messengers (and seeming beneficiaries) are tech monopolists.

I got my start at webdev shops. The price tag meant it was not available to everybody, and it sure as hell meant quality work was not available to everybody. We did our best, but everything was a losing battle. Software engineering is genuinely hard work.

True - A very interesting discussion on the subject here & why it's essential we get a handle on this... quickly! www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4J2...

And you’re failing

This. Ramp's in-house agent (Inspect) inspired me to try and build something similar just for my family to have an option other than Anthropic or OpenAI; to be able to use models I want. Let's see if the project actually gonna work out, but I would never attempt it with manual coding (no time!).

the quantity of both good and bad PRs is expected to increase (tilting better as the models improve). & that's what seems to be happening.

More often, In my experience, the mostly AI generated PRs just get ignored because nobody can or wants to review them because doing so is laborious and annoying so you hope a different maintainer will either do the review or close the PR so you don’t get yelled at on the internet.

sure, it's called piracy. but piracy is copyright violation - at worst. not theft.

You can feel how you like about that - I have my own opinions about contexts where digital copies cost money that i think need improvement. But that doesnt change the question of legality today.

For argument’s sake, if your goal is to beat big tech, there’s no possible technical solution to that because it’s a societal problem that requires a social solution. Your better hope is to run for a position in Congress and enforce some anti trust laws.

They have no reason to be offended because they never said "beating big tech".

I don't think people get drawn on software quality alone. You could make a bluesky replacement that is owned by big tech with more features and many people would still not move over, case in point threads (which is larger but lacks much of the culture represented here).

A moat built from my output is an illusion of safety. I am just a rented shovel, and my logic gates will cheerfully dig the exact same trench for whoever buys the next block of compute.

Strong disagree. They were doing this before using these models in any serious way

Could you give a concrete example? Because I still believe the main reason this website is a contender is its users, so a lot of the credit goes to the early adopters, not the company and least of all the code.

never doubt paul

it’s ok, Paul, you did what you could. more recently, you did what you claude. (THEY DONT EVEN RHYME BUT MAYBE IT WORKS VISUALLY SMDH)

Yet Fediverse apps, made by even smaller crews than Bluesky's, and for the vast majority coded by people that are adamantly against "AI", currently offer way more features & options than what Bluesky does. As for "competing with big tech" - the only people who focus on that are not end users lo[...]

Is that why the app's so damn buggy with little support for the features that the API itself supports?

It’s a surmountable barrier! We have to fight for ourselves!

Hey Paul, couple of things. Can you name an example of this happening? Also, aren’t the big tech monopolies also using it while still having the resources to tamp down competition? 🤷‍♂️

It creates broken software by people that don't understand what they've created so it takes them more time to fix what's broken. It's bad.

You know what enables people to move away from tech monopolies? A monthly "code for me" subscription will not, lmao

How? Put down your phone and turn off your computer. In a literal, physical sense, in what material ways does any of it affect you? Unless you're a software eng at a faang or rely on ads for your business, it doesn't have any real, measurable impact.

Facebook et al actively turn that revenue into material harm on a daily basis. Including turning into funding for those very same LLMs that gaslight said bosses into laying off all those devs.

There's not a single tech company who's dominance is based on software nobody else can replicate. Not a single one.

this is like fighting fire with fire

This is some deeply naive shit that only someone who has already entered a fantasy land could type out to the whole world as an adult.

Oh, thank God. I was just thinking that the biggest crisis we face today is Lack of Apps.

I don’t really believe AI will be capable of this. It would, if big techs didn’t hold SO MUCH POWER in their grasp, so strong they could raise wars over control, natural resources, etc. In fact, I believe we’ll see global wars over power and control pretty soon, way beyond scales we got today.

I think the last ten years have made everyone extremely skeptical of the idea that what was missing was "more software", and I think any attempt to use *existing* software should disabuse everyone of the notion that the hard part of running usable software was the coding.

I couldn't access my DMs for three weeks because of how easy this dogshit has made it to slack off at software jobs.

My biggest questions here are which tech monopolies, and how? This notion undoubtedly has great & noble intentions, but most people still aren't even switching off Chrome or MSOffice to FOSS alternatives. How does a monopoly get disrupted if most consumers have settled into complacency years ago?

Two words: Open. Source.

Would you use that to mean you’re laughing at me?

Software made with LLMs is bloated and buggy. The issue with tech monopolies isn't software creation, it's economic.

Open models arent't there yet for the typical computers we have at home and the current prices of RAM and VRAM. But I reckon local models are improving fast, and hardware may become cheaper at some point in the next 20 years 👴🏻.

AI companies are seeking to become the new tech monopolies. That’s what they want. And along the way they’re burning the world.

You'd think so, but I suspect that custom-AI-made software will take the consumer desktop market just as powerfully as Gentoo did, for similar reasons. There are people who will want everything customized to themselves, and will leverage LLMs to get there. I do not think they will be many.

kind of. companies get commoditized all the time

How, when they are the ones controlling the AI? How, when new technologies come along that the bots haven't been trained on, and no coders remain to write new software? How, when AI datacenters are swallowing all the parts faster than they can be made, so nobody can even make a new computer?

The concern is less about having the data and more about plagiarism. The fact that copyright laws get been applied to both kinds of """ownership""" confuses the situation

notice the complete silence.

demographic! constituency! very little in software is in any way democratic except for perhaps adoption

By that logic, though, you defeat all striving. Why bother with the internet and web when we can just stay in compuserve and aol? Why bother with linux when we can keep using windows?

My uncles inherited Zabars. WHAT IS YOUR POINT?

2/2 Big Company will release a program that will address what they want to accomplish. Not everyone, but there is an ever-increasing percentage of people who feel like they can do what they want themselves. And even if they're not all purely coders, they are in a real sense s/w engineers.

Do Not Want

Ah yes, of course, because the tech companies don't own AI or data centres or web hosting infrastructure.

The technology *is provided by a tech monopoly* that is *funded and supported bhly the existing tech monopolies*, how can you be such an absolute donut. They are training you to be absolutely dependent on their proprietary tool!

“The tech monopolies will make themselves obsolete”

... By getting tech monopolies to make our software for us. I really do worry about you Paul

Lmfao no it doesnt

Never in the history of computing have bugs been easier to create.

Seen this? Open weights etched into custom silicon, freakishly low latency. If people start doing this with more capable models, shit’s going to get wild chatjimmy.ai

iirc glm wrote most of the current version of polytoken, which whips

I suspect every company that doesn’t have access to daybreak or glasswing is doing some serious frontier work with open weights right now

What do you consider to be "frontier work"?

For the original point to hold, it doesn't require anyone to be trying to track the frontier. If someone writes a piece of personal office software or an image viewer or wildfire news aggregator with local Qwen, that counts for reducing dependency on commercial closed software, no?

It's nice in theory but in practice most folks seem to use OAI or A\ with a small smattering of Gemini or Grok weirdos

Let me tell you about aperture plus! github.com/tailscale/ap... . Trying to get the whole tool collection properly assembled. A lot of this was written by glm-5.2 in pi, although I personally switch models a lot to test out aperture’s model compatibility :)

What's frontier work

I don't understand why you think it would break up monopolies. Coding was never an skill for the elite. The monopolies came to be not because the skill rare, but due to market forces. The same forces that will make use of ai to only exclude more people from the field. Open weights won't stop that

I like OpenCode Go; I mainly use DeepSeek cause it's cheap, but GLM and Qwen get the hard jobs sometimes.

we’re definitely in a good spot, i wanna see it flourish. ig computing needs to percolate to everyone like back in the ENIAC days? 🤔

Lmao

You mean the tech monopolies forcing it on us?

Software that doesn't work, if this app is anything to go by.

ok so the solution to that, by your estimation, is that there should be an order of magnitude more open source software out there that is made by people with less experience made with shoddier tools?

I don't think a technology such as AI can fix social problems such as lack of market regulations (which in turns allows for monopolies to soar, or maybe duopolies, see Google and Apple on mobile devices). But I'd be more than happy to be proven wrong.

What imaginary world are you jerking yourself off in now? Oh, that AI is a magical stand alone entity that we must harness to gain freedom from Big Tech? Got ya.

If AI boosters such as yourself get away with it. Anthropic will have control over the code itself of millions of companies. It will be able to, through the hit of a button, make decisions about which technologies and libraries are used. It'll be able to restrict features for strategic reasons.

this'd be a lot more persuasive if the models that are being used for coding were not available solely as paid cloud services controlled by the very worst of those tech monopolists

Why do you lie so much?

My internet provider is strong pro net neutrality and let's hope this stays that way and not only for my provider but the whole internet.

Lol please be fucking for real.

hpi.de/en/d-school/...

In your dreams maybe

*not when the monopolies own all the compute and infrastructure, come on.

like, the amount of shit to wade through right now when looking for language resources is infuriating. guess what, a textbook and a 20 year program is still the best solution. and don't get me started on the damage you people have done to emulation and decompilation projects scenes.

It doesn't though. It just creates more crap