pcthrowaway

If you're defining "serious artists" as some approximation of "people who have made money with their art" then it's clear that there's a conflict of interest here.

Now I happen to be in the camp that believes that AI on its own isn't really capable of producing art (but like a human creating a collage, there can be art created by humans using AI... there is artistic merit in the arrangement).

I still despise that AI is going to be used to strip creators of their labour value, but that's more related to my objection to capitalism than it is to AI.

Are you pausing your hike to review code, check tests, and so on? Or do you just keep prompting blind until you get done with the hike and then batch review all the work?

Sorry if this is a dumb question, I haven't tried any harness-based development yet so perhaps I'm imagining a deprecated workflow in the first place

Also first letter of the Arabic alphabet (though more commonly spelled Alif)

This is something only comfortable first-world inhabitants tell themselves; as if the coffee they drink that some poor plantation worker toiled away in the heat for while some fat cat extracted the surplus value of their labour was part of a benevolent system designed to bring "meaning" to the less fortunate.

I think they're mostly right, it'll cost next to nothing to build new skyscrapers. Just a few thousand human lives which will be tokenized and easily available for 5 Muskcoin apiece on the decentralized markets.

The ratio of degenerate engineers is maybe 30% but business people is 80%

I worked for crypto companies for a while. The CEO of the latter company was a self-described fascist, and on one web-meeting our distributed engineering team was showing off their guns to one another. I was the only engineer who wasn't right-wing (and one of the only ones not based in the U.S.). Not sure which of our crypto companies was the anomaly, but I definitely got the sense from having gone to a convention or two that it was part and parcel with the whole industry.

- does anyone have actual proof that surveillance does not effectively curb terrorism or something along those lines?

Watching Andor again, I couldn't help but think that if the Empire had just included facial recognition in the intake of their labour death camps they could have prevented a lot of terrorism (Andor wouldn't have instigated the prisoner uprising, and the rebellion may not have won if he hadn't escaped).

On the other hand, if you're not one of the pro-Empire viewers, maybe you consider the rebels freedom fighters rather than terrorists.

Amazing, thanks. I've decided to try daily driving this instead of Obsidian, but I'm a bit curious how the syncing works. I copied an Obsidian vault to a new folder, and when I start the import process in OpenKnowledge it asks me if I want it "shared" or "local only". If I select "Shared", where does the git repo live that other instances of OK sync from?

edit: This seems to be "team-oriented" rather than geared towards individuals who might want to edit their notes from multiple devices?

And only seems to be able to sync with github... In addition to my privacy concerns, I'm curious if there could be issues with lots of images and other attachments since git can choke on repos that contain lots of larger files without github's git-lfs extension.

Last question I have is if any plugin system comparable to Obsidian's is planned (or already supported)? I realize this is probably a massive ask for an open-source project, and something Obsidian gets a lot of flack for as well, so I'm certainly not expecting it, but I am curious if it's on the roadmap already

Personally I just want to see more support for local LLMs. I haven't been doing much coding lately but am interested in setting up Qwen 3.6 if I can obtain the hardware

Fully local, but can't integrate with any local LLM?

I do think a fully OSS Obsidian-like that syncs natively is an impressive accomplishment, though the usefulness of this is limited with OSX being the only supported platform. If an Android app is in the works I'll definitely follow the project!

The AI Companies Are Going To Start Getting Desperate

This is the part that concerns me the most, AI companies will start bidding on increasingly contentious contracts out of desperation. In practice, this means building services that facilitate killing to anyone they're not legally prevented from doing business with... and even then, they may be able to do business with them still through intermediaries.

It's also technically incoherent: the exact same kind of "surveillance" is already applied by every single phone, because that's how the Photos app (or whatever it's called on Android) searches for cat pictures based on the text "cat". I can't recall any Signal statements about cat recognition technology leading to "reporting people to government authorities".

Are you suggesting that the automatic scanning of photos on a phone (which has led to wrongful arrests[1]) is not surveillance?

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/08/googles-scans-private-...

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but lots of 20th-century novels featured programmers. Snow Crash being the first to come to my mind.

I'm at the point where I only install extensions from source (via the dev settings) due to rampant abuse of the extension marketplace to track users, exfiltrate data, inject ads, participate in proxy networks, and so on.

Even non-malicious extensions are at risk of being sold and then auto-updating to inject malware. No offense, and I love the idea and the look of tabsampler, but the entire extension eco-system is just rife with this kind of stuff.

Looks very cool. It's free but is it closed source?

Megacorps being dishonest and human-hostile under capitalism is hardly a theory.

I'm curious, what companies are sponsoring this Hackathon (if any)? It'd be good to know if there are any tech companies that legitimately stand for good in the world in 2026.

with prescription and illicit opioids responsible for 500,000 of those deaths"

So... it's not saying 500K deaths are from prescription drugs, it's saying 500K deaths are from opioids (some of which were prescription)

Also, in the chart you mentioned, it's not clear if the opioid deaths were from legally produced prescription opioids. Certainly fentanyl is one of the biggest killers, and fentanyl is used in medical settings, but the fentanyl killing people is usually not from legal drug manufacturers.

Marx's concept of alienation isn't really about being removed from the product one toils on by abstraction, it was about being removed from the result of one's labour because the end to which that labour is performed is enrichment of the bourgeoisie, not personal or societal enrichment.

Take a look at https://reddit.com/r/n24 if you're interested in more "typical" experiences from people like this (I am one).

It tends to take a significant toll on one's mental (and physical) health, regardless of whether the sibling commenter has "considered it" or not.

Or laid of NSA, laid off Mossad, or many other possibilities.

Or not laid off at all, but otherwise disgruntled security researcher who prompted AI to concoct some personal details that seem to be in line with someone inexplicably dropping Microsoft zero-days.

and the intent has to be the eradication of the targeted ethnic, national, racial, or religious group

Your use of the word "eradication" suggests total annihilation, but genocide refers to the destruction of such a targeted group in whole or in part.

You might argue that this can be vague and would allow any ethnic cleansing to be described as a genocide; in fact this is a point of contention among genocide scholars.

Certainly we'd both agree that Israel as a whole is carrying out at least partial destruction of the Palestinian people residing in Palestine, and that many Israeli politicians are calling for total or near-total destruction, many IDF soldiers conduct themselves accordingly, and their military actions involve indiscriminate killing/maiming often enough that there is a strong case their eventual goal is total or near-total destruction.

Put another way, there is no compelling argument that Israel conducts itself, in its extensive operations in Gaza/West Bank, with any goal of Palestinians eventually living freely there.

As a result they have the most advanced intelligence apparatus in the world, far beyond US intelligence for example

I think if you're going to concoct some kind of per-capita metric of intelligence capabilities, you're likely correct. But their intelligence industry pales in size relative to that of the U.S. and couldn't exist as it does without support from the U.S. and American companies (as we've seen with Lavender and Nimbus). American companies providing services they would otherwise have to develop in-house certainly contributes to their capacity for conducting what most would consider black-hat activities, including gathering intelligence on Americans and goings-on in the U.S., sometimes even of American politicians, in order to manipulate the American political environment to their favour.

I'm not aware of U.S. big tech providing such extensive services to any other country whose behaviour is so similar to that of the officially designated American foreign adversaries

What needs to be the norm is more self-hosting your own data

I assumed self-hosted AI would fall under local AI for the purposes of this article. Does the author really need to spell it out?

I don't even care about movie theaters, I just miss drive-ins. The last drive-in within 450 km of me closed during covid

Sure that is perhaps a good way to inquire about the appropriate channels to disclose a security vulnerability, but email is not a secure communication method for sending the details about a security vulnerability

Laser is far cheaper and quicker, but not everyone can get it since it needs specific hair and skin colour combinations

Laser is also often (usually?) not permanent (I am the right combination of fair-skinned and dark-haired). And hella painful from personal experience, though I can't compare to electrolysis.

The most unrealistic thing is that the cat doesn't chase the mice around.

Then it's a streetcar

The workaround for this was to assign all the buttons to the same key before chasing the rat (I had this exact problem with zsnes, though my first few playthroughs were on the original cartridge)