Wilder7977

Using GenAI on things that you couldn't approach is also extremely scary and dangerous in my opinion. For example, I would never in a million years use generated code I don't understand (fully) to interface and possibly interact with a physical object that can fail, catch fire, break etc. in case of a bug or misuse, like OP mentioned.

Apparently yes, judging from the fact that ChatGPT did that with a number of people.

My question though it's another: is it malware a software that does a stdout print, or is it malware a software that takes untrusted instructions and executes commands it decides based on it?

I think this is an interesting (although philosophical debate). The library doesn't take destructive actions, it prints a string that says "go do something". This is quite common in logs (e.g., wrong configuration, ensure this value is [...]).

It is the agent that takes the destructive action, following an instruction that was not given by the operator of the agent.

If following instructions outside of the operator can cause malicious or damaging actions, publishing software that does so (I.e., most agents) is publishing malware?

Anyone physically near your house can just see you leaving the house and know you are not at home, besides all the other signs.

There is no control against this, and it shouldn't be something you rely on to prevent break-ins or burglaries (if you were thinking of such threats).

Yes, correct.

Is the distinction between human labor/actions and a program executing hard to grasp?

Moral is a human thing, not an absolute thing, so of course it's different if there is a single human involved and a tool, and a human with a relationship to other humans.

So no external libraries for anything? Billions of lines of code that duplicate the same thing n-times across an organization?

And the benefit is the obscurity of "no one will know how to exploit them"?

No, thanks.

It's not though. It's still just a piece of code, much closer to IDEs or any other program than to a human assistant in any way that matters (morals, responsibility).

Aerospace makes my Mac usable, but it is a looooong way from what i3 offers in my experience. i3 is way snappier, super stable, with good features out-of-the-box (including a status bar) - you forget it exists. Aerospace is slow, has to use that "windows in the corner" hack, it constantly resets whenever I resume the mac from sleep, needs additional tool for a status bar and more.

Much of it is not a fault of Aerospace, it's just what you get using Apple products in a non-sactioned way.

This seems completely detached from reality.

For example it ignores the gazillion medium(-like) "articles" that are not much more than the output of a prompt. Here AI is not about style, is about content too. If you open such a post, maybe with the intent of learning anything, and you realize is AI slop, you might close it. Making it harder to recognize is poisoning the well in such cases.

Democratizing? A handful of companies harvesting data and building products on top of it is democratizing?

Open research papers, that everyone can access is democratizing knowledge. Accessibile worldwide courses, maybe (like open universities).

But LLMs are not quite the sane. This is taking knowledge from everyone and, in the best case, paywalling it.

I agree in spirit that the original comment was classist, but in this context your statements are also out of place, in my opinion.

I am on e/OS since 2021 with a FP3 and, for what is worth, I never had to reinstall, wipe or anything. My phone just had it's 5th birthday and it has been a single continuous set of updates.

I know the versions differ by model, so perhaps your model was not as well supported.

My wife works for a competitor of the company mentioned. They are in EU. Still run everything on AWS. The data collected is usually even more than what stated, full video recording of the session with audio etc.

AWS EU region is not doing much, and I suspect most companies run on US providers. EU needs independent platform for this to matter.

77.500 channels which make any money. Now plenty of those make a handful of dollars per month. Also, 77k worldwide.

I am not going to deny that YouTube (and all social media) created new markets. But how is this not an argument that shows that when N people suddenly do some activity, only a tiny minority is successful and gains some market share?

If tomorrow a product that is made by 3 companies will see competitors by 10000 1-man operations, maybe you will have 30 different successful products, or 100. 9900 of those 10000 will still be out of luck. I

YouTube is not an example of a market that being exposed to a flood of players gets shares somewhat equally between those players or that allows a significant number of the to survive with it. Nor is twitch or any of the other platforms.

There are no such detailed numbers as far as I know. No platform (twitch, YouTube etc.) generally provides this information. Thinking bad one could assume it's because most people would realize it's one in a million who makes it.

Channels that make money consistently also have teams behind. Sure, probably they are smaller then TV studios, but TV studios do also other jobs compared to youtubers.

Anyway, these are the only numbers available. If there are numbers that show that masses of individuals can make a living in a market with so many competitors like YouTube I am happy to look at them. Until then, I will observe what is known for almost everything: a small % takes the vast majority of resources.

The journalism one is really a great example I did not think about.

I understand there is an argument to be made about what is the "value" of things, but for me it's quite clear that journalism has the inherent value of providing information, similar to how many other activities have values beyond "generating money for their owners". AI allows to "mock" many activities resulting in the social value of that activity being lost, while possibly maintaining the economic value. A trajectory that is not new but also not good to accelerate on.

https://alanspicer.com/what-percentage-of-youtubers-make-mon...

Claims 0.25% of channels makes any money at all. The amount that make a decent living is realistically even smaller, possibly < 0.1%.

To me the YouTube example seems to be the exact demonstration that markets saturate and market distribution is still a winner-takes-all kind of deal.

And if it's so cheap and bespoke, why buying it and not making it in house? What about access to people with know-how of that product? You use a product that only 4 other companies use, you can be sure you won't find any new hire that knows how to use it.

To me it seems the reality works in the opposite way. Among the many products built, some will be successful and will swallow the whole market, like now with basically any software or SaaS product.

YouTube is a platform, it's not a product. And in this case, created a new market. A market in which, by the way, still very few people (relative to those who try) are successful. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if the percentage would be much smaller than 10%.

A quick search leads to different answer, but https://alanspicer.com/what-percentage-of-youtubers-make-mon... suggests that 0.25% of all YouTube channels makes any money (not good money, any money). Which means 99.75% earns 0$.

Basically I would flip the question and ask: if you could produce videos now very simply with AI and so could other 10000 people, how many of the new channels do you think will be successful? If anything, the YouTube example shows you exactly that it doesn't matter than 1000000 people now can produce content with low overhead, just a handful of them will be successful, because the market of companies available to spend money to sponsor through channels and the men hours of eyeballs on videos are both limited.

Talking about companies that just produce products, either you come up with something new (and create a new market), or you come up with something better (you take shares of an existing market). Having 10000 companies producing - say - digital editing software won't make suddenly increase by 10000x the number of people in need of digital editing software. Which means that among those 10000 there will be a few very good products which will eat all the market (like it is now), with the usual Paretian distribution.

The idea that many companies with smaller overhead can split the market evenly and survive might (and it's a big hopeful might) work on physical companies selling local and physical products (I.e., splitting the market geographically), but for software products I cannot even imagine it happening.

New markets are created all the time, and it's great if maybe smaller companies (or co-ops) could take over those markets rather than big corporations, but the way the market distribution happens I don't think will be affected. I don't see any reason why this should change with many more companies in the same market. I also don't think that 10000 new companies will create 10000 new markets, because that depends on ideas (and luck, and context, and regulation, etc.), not necessarily on resources available,

And those companies will do what? Produce products in uber-saturated markets?

Or magically 9900 more products or markets will be created, all of them successful?

Plus, a core part of what qualifies as a bullshit job is that the person doing it feels that it's a bullshit job. The book is a half-serious anthropological essay, not an economic treaty.

This assumes every decision-maker is a rational actor. Just today an executive was rambling about "quantum-empowered AI". These are the people who take decisions about firing workers. It is entirely possible that AI will replace many jobs while being useless (at achieving what those workers do). At least in the short-medium period.

We would live in a post-scarcity utopia if big economic decisions were taken based on long-term optimal effects.

"In aggregate" means few individuals on the planet, unfortunately, not the whole collectivity. This makes your statement almost almost surreal in my eyes.

I get the same issue on Mac, if it's any comfort. I had to close and reopen the app 7-8 times to have my microphone recognized, despite it worked reliably on every single tool I ever used, both on Linux and later on Mac. Teams couldn't do that either with the native client or with the web client.

Despite me not being particularly interested in the AI hype and not seeking out discussions etc., I can tell you have seen many instances of people (comments, headlines, articles etc.) actually saying exactly that: "in the future" doesn't matter if the code is good or if I can maintain it etc., it just needs to work once and then gets thrown away or AI will do additions for something else that is needed.

I wanted to come and express this thought, but you did that already very well, thanks for that.

I am saddened too by the fact that the system is designed so that people like him can waste a large amount of economic and human capital.

You are confusing being political with carrying out political discourse. They are not the same thing.

Being political for software means for example making some specific choices while designing it and advertising them as such. Means choosing a license over another. Means announcing political positions and possibly aligning the software to them (depending on what it is).

It doesn't mean going in forums related to that software to discuss random political topics.

In 2026 hoping that software could be (more) apolitical is a very brave stance. I look at the software world and I can see core political statements in almost every popular software. From privacy invasion, supporting shady industries (e.g., marketing) even at the expense of people (a reverse-welfare, in a sense), environmental destruction (e.g., complete lack of care for resource usage) and many more.

If anything, we need much more politics in software, ideally exercised by those who write that software instead of "apolitical" software writers who end up executing the political software of those who pay them.

If you meant to scope your statement only to FOSS, then this still applies (in fact, FOSS is inherently political), plus I suppose some people who invest their time to write software want to also use the same effort for political activism and there is nothing wrong with that. This can be expressing their political views via that software (e.g., vim and the support to children in Uganda) or can be using a license that only allows co-ops to run their software, or many other ways.

The idea that software even could be apolitical stems from the idea that technology can be neutral, which again, in 2026 is really a tough idea to support.

What a bad take. Not every political statement is morally equivalent nor worthy of the same respect. Supporting self-determination of people is not the same as supporting oppression of people - for example.

So the free expression is considered by everyone according to their own ethical and moral values.

You mention free will, but it would be an interesting conversation to discuss how much free will there is when people fight, without knowing it, against psychological manipulation, addition creation, all crafted with plenty of money and research. Especially when this people are young ones. Can the behavior still be called free will when you get hooked to mechanisms specifically designed to exploit humans in this way?

Nothing personal, but without receipts I am going to take this story as made up propaganda. I simply can't believe that visiting 4 health professionals, giving context about using a computer all day, nobody diagnosed a very common issue nor suggested it as a possibility.

I simply can't imagine this happening based on my experience with healthcare in two (European) countries.