To be clear, I’m talking about people saying things like “those people are lesser than me”, not things like “those people should be eradicated”. Inciting violence, or any crime, is not an exercise of free speech, that’s a crime.

I guess I just don’t see any ethical difference between wielding the power of legislation to silence speech, and an angry mob of vigilantes gathering and silencing them in person. Either way, it’s the society saying “we don’t like your words, and we’re gonna punish you for that.”

I just know that throughout history, people have used “I’m confident in my beliefs” to justify limiting speech they thought would be harmful to their society, only for us to look back in shame at their intolerance.

I can say I’m confident that intolerance harms our society, I just don’t think it’s possible to legislate away hate. We can physically intimidate people into hiding their hate, but making hate illegal will never get rid of it. But maybe that’s the best we can ever do, I don’t know.

Looking at history, i just don’t have any reason to believe that any sociological hurdle can be solved by moving strictly in a “positive” direction. I understand local maxima, and understand that society always has to regress before it can progress. For the same reason we can’t legislate away hate, we can’t legislate in “progress”. We might try, and it might seem like it’s working for a little while, until it doesn’t. And that’s when humanity learns a new lesson.

Have hard lines like this ever worked throughout history, though? It’s not like the people who originally came up with the concept of free speech didn’t think of this exact case. But they believed it was more important for the people to deal with speech they don’t like themselves (within the bounds of the law, of course) than for a government to silence speech.

I see a problem with inauthentic behaviour online, using bots to artificially amplify hate speech to make it seem more prominent than it actually is. But I think having 100 people tolerate 1 hateful asshat’s speech is the definition of democracy. That doesn’t mean harassment is legal. That doesn’t mean assault or murder or jim crow laws should be tolerated. The worst case is the hate catches on and spreads democratically, and that sucks, but if it happens I guess that’s the society we live in for now, and hopefully it’s just a phase. But if a government artificially silences hate speech, you’re just asking for that to come back and bite you later. Now all those people who would have simply been hateful now also distrust the system they live in, and will seek to dismantle it and replace it with a hateful one.

IMO this is exactly why Churchill said democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Thinking that we can live in a society that is systematically devoid of hate is attractive, but it’s a Nirvana Fallacy and is destined to fail. This isn’t new ground we’re treading.

I agree that you can’t know if the AI has been deliberately trained to act nefarious given the right circumstances. But I maintain that it’s (currently) impossible to know if any AI had been inadvertently trained to do the same. So the security implications are no different. If you’ve given an AI the ability to exfiltrating data without any oversight, you’ve already messed up, no matter whether you’re using a single AI you trained yourself, a black box full of experts, or deepseek directly.

But all this is about whether merely sharing weights is “open source”, and you’ve convinced me that it’s not. There needs to be a classification, similar to “source available”; this would be like “weights available”.

Both are good. Each behaviour is a response to a different problem. Refer again to my footrace analogy.

shouldn’t the selectivity be based on income and net worth instead of skin color?

We should already be taxing proportional to income, and in the 60s when Affirmative Action was implemented, we were.

But the problem isn’t just that there is a lower class at all, the problem is that the lower class is disproportionately filled with black people and minorities as a direct result of racism.

If you think of it like a footrace, we ran the first half of the race giving black people a straight up disadvantage for no other reason than the color of their skin. Now most of the people in the back of the pack are black. We should already be helping all people in back to catch up to the rest of the pack, but this still means black people are disproportionately in the back as a direct result of that initial disadvantage. We could ignore it, and say that after another 300-400 years of equality, maybe things will even out on their own, but in the meantime you have a bunch of people who are living in poverty and dying, and we can scientifically say for an absolute fact that it’s a direct result of historical disadvantages targeting their ancestors based on race.

It’s inhumane to look those people in the eye and say, “tough luck, we’d help, but we decided we don’t do racism anymore.”

This is a remedial question, but that doesn’t make it a bad question. It is a hard problem to solve, and calling an advantage based on race somehow not racist does sound paradoxical at first glance. It’s important to be able to entertain the explanation without outright assuming you’re being attacked by a bunch of obtuse racists.

Hopefully we agree that:

• black americans are at a statistically significant socioeconomic disadvantage compared to white americans, both historically and to this day, and
• this is a direct result of a history of systematic disadvantages specifically targeting them based on their race

Let’s pretend the second bullet point has been solved, that systemic racism is over and done, and we’ve established a perfectly equal union. Even if that’s the case, we are left with the first bullet point as an ongoing problem. The challenge is now, how do you undo the very apparent damage that our history of racism caused, without specifically giving advantages to that group based on their race? And the short answer to a very complex question is: you can’t.

So the US government instituted “Affirmative Action” the goal of which was to deliberately give a targeted advantage to people who have had a history of targeted disadvantages in this country. This catches you up to roughly the 1960s.

But in the last 40 years or so, we continue to see lower class areas of the US disproportionately filled with black americans, and we also see widening wealth inequality affecting virtually everyone. So naturally we also see an increase of non-black people asking the same question as you: “I’m having a hard time too, why are they getting an advantage based on their race? That’s racism!”

The solution was to tax the rich, reduce wealth inequality, and continue to normalize disproportionate demographics. Instead, the wealthy used populism to hijack the republican party, and convince white americans that the minorities recieving these benefits were their enemy. And after 40ish years of pushing this narrative, they succeeded.

With the republican takeover of the federal govt, we can be virtually assured that any ongoing attempts to normalize these unfair demographics will be abandoned, at least at the federal level.

But it’s still a problem, just now one for the people and the states to solve. If you want to support black-owned farmers in an attempt to help pull historically disadvantaged groups out of poverty, you can. If not, that’s fine, just at least please vote for legislation that intends to reduce wealth inequality. (Note that history has exactly two ways of reducing wealth inequality: high taxes on the rich, or war. The question isn’t whether wealth will get redistributed, it’s how).

Tl; dr Yeah, it’s an advantage based on race to solve a problem caused by a history of disadvantages based on race.

Those security concerns seem completely unrelated to the model, though. You can have a completely open source model that fits all those requirements, and still give it too much unfettered access to important resources with no way of actually knowing what it will do until it tries.

Did you know NASA uses Linux on all its spaceships? That’s why there’s no sound in space.

Is there any good LLM that fits this definition of open source, then? I thought the “training data” for good AI was always just: the entire internet, and they were all ethically dubious that way.

What is the concern with only having weights? It’s not abritrary code exectution, so there’s no security risk or lack of computing control that are the usual goals of open source in the first place.

To me the weights are less of a “blob” and more like an approximate solution to an NP-hard problem. Training is traversing the search space, and sharing a model is just saying “hey, this point looks useful, others should check it out”. But maybe that is a blob, since I don’t know how they got there.

It’s also the free market for those corporations to buy a government and use it to outlaw competition.

Yeah, I agree that in the long term those two sentiments are inconsistent, but in the short term we have to deal with allegedly misguided layoffs, and worse user experiences, which I think makes both fair to criticise. Maybe firing everyone and using slop AI will make your company go bankrupt in a few years, and that’s great; in the meantime, employees everywhere can rightfully complain about the slop and the jobs.

But yeah, I don’t think it’s fair to complain about how “inefficient” an early technology is and also call it “magic beans”.

I have made only factual statements. You can believe I’m arrogant for doing so, you can believe the preference of hundreds of millions of people is “niche” or “few” in number. Those are called opinions.

Which statements have I made that you believe to be my opinion?

Yeah, I understand that you personally choose to disagree with reality, maybe you don’t like what reality has become, but unfortunately that doesn’t make it less real.

Twitter wasn’t profitable for its entire existence, it’s often a cesspool of ragebaiters, but clearly it has value because the second it was taken over, everyone insisted on continuing to use it, even choosing to migrate to various clones.

Uber and Lyft have been struggling to be profitable by effectively stealing from their drivers, but millions of people get off a plane and immediately use the services every day. It clearly has value.

Same for doordash and uber eats.

Your personal distaste for the business practices are valid, but they’re not relevant when discussing what the current state of the technology is. For many millions of people, chatgpt has (for better and worse) replaced traditional search engines. Something like 80% of students now regularly use AI for their homework. When Deepseek released, it immediately jumped to #1 on the Apple Store.

None of that is because they’re “magic beans” from which no value sprouts. Like it or not, people use AI all. the. time. for everything they can imagine. It objectively, undeniably has value. You can staunchly say pretend it doesn’t, but only if you are willingly blind to the voluntary usage patterns of hundreds of millions (possibly billions) of people every hour of every day.

And for the record, I am not in that group. I do not use any LLMs for anything currently, and if anything makes me use AI against my will, I will promptly uninstall it (pun intended).

No opinions whatsoever. I believe I made that clear in my list of things to disregard when considering the objective reality of current AI tech.

A Linux user time traveling from the 90s/00s would be elated to know that one day someone could possibly have this opinion.

Lol this article is very relevant to a lot of scam industries (essential oils, Earthing, 5G protection crystals, etc), but AI is objectively not one of them.

Regardless of how much of a bubble we’re in, regardless of how many bad ideas are being pushed to get VC funding or pump a stock, regardless of how unethical or distopian the tech is, AI objectively has value. It’s proving to be the most disruptive tech since the world wide web (which famously had a very similar bubble of bad ideas), so to call it “magic beans” is just wishful thinking at best.

To the wealthy, volatility is opportunity. Yeah, the market will go down for a while, and later it’ll go back up. Billionaires will cash in both ways.

Are we concerned about changing the timeline or something? Why is the goal to not stop Hitler?

Gotcha.

Yeah, it sounds like it’s not “open source” according to a specific definition set by the OSI. But the term “open source” has grown beyond what they believe it to mean, and the FUTO license seems more than reasonable to me.

I think the freedom to commercialize worked in the past, but we now live in a time of weaponized commercialization, especially in the mobile world. It seems reasonable to me for them to want to ensure their code is not commercialized in ways that are antithetical to the purpose of the project.

For reference, here is the license. I’m curious which part makes it “not fully open source”.