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points by idontknowmann 11 hours ago | 0 comments
It’s funny how disconnected we all are from each other. This is exactly how LLMs felt a year or so to many programmers.

Useless toys, sometimes useful toys, ok good toys, ok.. we might have to look at this more carefully, oh god.

This loop however is quite tiring to watch happen over and over again. Is there really nothing we can do but just watch from the sidelines and watch our fellow men engage in their particular grief and copium filled mourning cycle?

[–] hackinthebochs 8 hours ago
It's not too late to do something about it. Acknowledging that we are not powerless to determine what our future looks like is the first step to taking control. We all seem resigned to the impending disempowerment and crisis of meaning for humanity as a whole. But this is just playing into their hands. We should collectively exercise our power of self-determination while we still have it.
[–] noduerme 2 hours ago
How, specifically? If I derive meaning in my life, economic prosperity, and social appreciation from creating games out of my imagination and bringing them to life for people, and they can now be reverse engineered and slop-copied instantly with no credit of any sort, what am I going to do about it? Make games and never show them to anyone? Stop doing what I love? Spend the rest of my life in pointless and wasteful battles over it?

No, I'm probably just going to say fuck 'em all, I feel sorry for everyone. Go to a bar and drink while the world burns.

There's nothing to do about it.

[–] hackinthebochs 2 hours ago
There's nothing any of us can do about it individually. But collectively, we still have power. It's a matter of organizing into collective action. This is a political issue just like any other. When the vast majority of people don't want something to happen, we have the power to stop it if we act. I'm not the one to make that happen; there are much better people for that. What I'm saying is how we speak about the issue should be one of agency, not of resignation. Agentic attitudes are contagious, just as defeatist attitudes are. Perhaps collective action on a small scale can spontaneously organize out of it. Or the right people might see enough people poised to act to be the organizing force. None of this happens if we admit defeat before shots are even fired.
[–] noduerme 1 hour ago
I don't see how. It's not an electoral matter; it's not a political system. It's not ICE coming for my neighbors, or a broken healthcare system. It's the epistemological apocalypse. It's the supernova where meaning collapses and the howling noise of madness overwhelms the signal of reason. Perhaps you could shut it down in one country, by law, but Pandora's box has been opened. The Tower of Babel. Open models will soon be good enough to create a phoney version of anything, anywhere, close enough to seeming true that by the time you discover it's not, a million more clones will be out there. Lies have always spread faster than truth, but never with such a force multiplier. The truth ain't dying in darkness, it's dying in blasting white noise, diffusion, ironic that turned out to be the approach. Or maybe not. What's this land rush to claim latent space but the attempt to expropriate, forever, the human ability to discover it?

The Leonard Cohen line keeps coming back to me: The blizzard, the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it's overturned the order of the soul.

Sorry, but... I scoff at the idea that collective action can do a damn thing about it. There isn't even a collective idea of what to do instead of it. Collective action also has heavy connotations of communism, under which, people like me were also not permitted to write games and reap the economic and social benefits of doing what we enjoy. But at least one could say that, for the communist bloc, the collective action finally came against communism. So there's that, and maybe there's some sort of small-creative-capitalist-producer collective action that could be taken here...

but who are we kidding! I just had dinner with a friend who's a VP at [major motion picture studio] who described the situation in the movie business as "apocalyptic", and they have the ability to organize and a history of organizing far more than whichever random cross-section of white collar knowledge workers and engineers loses their livelihood in the next six months, or the six months after that.

No, my friend, I think this is a war where no shots needed to be fired, because we were all so dazzled by the bright lights that no one realized we were being steamrolled until it was too late. It's already over.

[–] latentsea 6 hours ago
The future is not set.