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by api 123 days ago
Beat me to it. Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Google/YouTube, and TikTok have done quite a bit more damage to the Internet than AI.

The future of the net was closed gated communities long before AI came along. At worst it’s maybe the last nail in the coffin. But the coffin lid was already on and the man inside was already dead.

AI is, I think, more mixed. It is creating more spam and noise, but AI itself is also fascinating to play with. It’s a genuine innovation and playing with it sometimes makes me feel the way I did first exploring the web.
3 comments
krater23 123 days ago
The difference is that the web had no borders, AI has strong borders what it does and what it doesn't does.
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api 122 days ago
I can download uncensored models pretty easily. There’s even uncensored frontier models. My machine isn’t big enough to run those but you can rent power to run them pretty cheap if you want.
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lelanthran 123 days ago
They didn't cause bug bounty programs to be withdrawn, objectively a bad thing for projects.

The difference between AI slop and the existing large tech corps is that the large corps you list never strayed into the lane occupied by OSS.

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api 123 days ago
Are you kidding? Look at who runs and funds OSI. It's a revolving door. The main purpose of OSS for the last 20 years has been to "commoditize your compliments" and/or dump on the market to destroy competitors. Any license that attempts to restrict this behavior and prevent billion-dollar companies from simply strip mining OSS is "not OSI compliant."

The entire OSS "cloud native" ecosystem is an on-ramp to expensive managed cloud. It's intentionally designed to be complicated and arcane to sell managed services. Sure you "can" run it yourself, but wouldn't you rather Google or Amazon run it for you?

The main role of OSS in the ecosystem is as a parts yard to support SaaS. SaaS is the most closed model of software development and sales, far more closed than closed-source commercial software you run on your own system.

The OSS mindset is generally stuck in the 1990s and has not updated its understanding of the world since then.

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JKCalhoun 123 days ago
"Facebook/Meta, Twitter/X, Google/YouTube, and TikTok have done quite a bit more damage to the Internet than AI."

Sure… so far.

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