Because nobody uses it except a handful of uber-nerds who can put up with wasting hours of time for "altruism".
The answer to freedom isn't another marketplace. It's legislation that requires Google and Apple to allow web installs without scare walls or deeply hidden permission toggles.
You should be able to just download an app. And Grandma should be able to do it.
There's nothing insecure about it in a world of sandboxing, permissions, scanning, blacklisting, etc. When the tech giants are more than happy to sell ads to malware, you know their "safety" stance is just economic moat protectionism.
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Edit because of rate limits:
This is not derogatory. This is making the point that the wrong battle is being fought. F-droid fans are cheering a small victory, yet losing the entire war.
F-droid does not matter in the grand scheme of things. It's not the point. The point is the app store monopoly. That there are only two platforms and that both are almost completely locked down.
F-droid users don't even see that Google is purposefully allowing this as an antitrust sponge in their calculus. Google doesn't mind because 0.0001% of their users will install this. If they had a sense that the regulators wouldn't bother them, they'd just as well close this loophole. And they probably will eventually.
This isn't beachhead, and even if it was, it isn't sound footing or a stable foundation. It can easily go away.
> Because nobody uses it except a handful of uber-nerds who can put up with wasting hours of time for "altruism".
What? I'm not sure how you would manage to waste hours installing a single app and then using it to install other apps, and I'm not using it because of "altruism" (what does that even mean?), I'm using it because it's the best way to get apps.
> You should be able to just download an app. And Grandma should be able to do it.
> There's nothing insecure about it in a world of sandboxing, permissions, scanning, blacklisting, etc. When the tech giants are more than happy to sell ads to malware, you know their "safety" stance is just economic moat protectionism.
Even if you 100% trust Android's sandboxing and permissions, which is... not a choice I would personally make, I like it when my apps don't have scams or ads internally, either. I'm not worried about Grandma downloading any app off F-Droid; I am a little concerned about what happens if she can download any app being pushed by any random website.
It's a spectrum, not a binary. We're really far from the "packing bags and leaving the country" end where you're a slave to the state. America is nothing like an Iran or China where we have no power and no rights to overturn the state.
Let's see if any of these petty games helps Trump with midterms. I highly doubt it. Kalshi is already calling it a double win for Democrats.
The economic impact of the Iran War looks like it really cost Trump everything. And it's funny because he always campaigned on not getting into wars.
China doesn't seem that bad in most respects either. Only in freedom of speech, and resulting internet censorship, but in quality of life and in productivity they seem to be thoroughly pwning the USA.
But in China, the CCP literally determines which candidates can run for office. The TN GOP does not determine whether Democratic candidates can even run.
> Kalshi is already calling it a double win for Democrats.
It's quite common for Kalshi bets to go from <1% to 100% chance in minutes when news breaks. "Prediction markets" is almost Orwellian in its inaccuracy.
> We're really far from the packing bags and leaving the country end.
Some of my American friends in Canada have taken in American friends who left so quick they didn't have a long-term place to land yet. Whether you have packed your bags and left, that depends who you are. It's not a flood, but an exodus has begun amongst those whose lives have been disrupted: academics, trans, queer, etc
When our spot instances go away and don't come back, that's a sign that there's not enough capacity.
There is more demand for compute than there is supply, and that demand is going up.
Look at all of the things that have been and are being automated and realize that we're year 6 into a hundred year journey.
Look around you at all the things that aren't automated. They will be.
The world you grew up in won't be here for much longer. We're going through a transformation even more dramatic than the industrial revolution. There were no airplanes and then we landed on the moon.
Edit: downvotes as expected, but I'm shocked that a bunch of smart people at HN aren't taking the bet where this leads to a complete upending of the status quo. The holdout crowd needs to dream bigger.
The models are solving Millennium Prize problems, finding novel biological pathways our scientists can't see, putting every single software engineer out of the job of "coding by hand", and doing the same to designers, marketers, filmmakers, and 3D artists who used to have to operate pixel by pixel / photon by photon.
There's a huge gap between what's being described in that comment and an "extinction level event" is that's what ELE means.
What's being talked about is a massive extension of human capability, into the intellectual sphere rather than the physical environment. The atom bomb had a clear way to get to extinction, a sudden chain reaction that leads to collapse of the entire biome.
The only way AI gets there is something like control of the nuclear weapons on all sides and that control becoming suicidal. Every other major event leads to at most civilization collapse, after which I assume we will have some sort of Butlerian Jihad restrictions on getting into the same situation.
But, I would love to know what I'm missing here, if ELE has clearer routes!!
> The only way AI gets there is something like control of the nuclear weapons on all sides and that control becoming suicidal.
Not the way I was thinking off; I was thinking more along the lines of brain atrophy until humans are helpless (maybe 2 complete generations of humans).
And that's a short extinction; the KT extinction took place over thousands of years. If, 1000 years from now, we are finally at the place described in "The Machine Stops", only then will an observer be able to decide that we don't have the necessary critical mass of intelligent humans anymore.
Humans got to be the apex predator simply on intelligence alone. It's possible that without thinking ability we'd go extinct.
I actually think the opposite… it takes all my skills as an engineer to steer these things effectively and I’ve learnt more than I imagined I could in a very short period of time. And I don’t even use AI as heavily these days due to other commitments. This also aligns with how heavy AI users report feeling drained after intense coding sessions.
My take is that after a period of turmoil, most humans will be doing higher level cognitive work than we’re doing now, because all the lower level work will be done by AI agents, and so progress will accelerate multifold.
> Not the way I was thinking off; I was thinking more along the lines of brain atrophy until humans are helpless (maybe 2 complete generations of humans).
That's not how humans work. We developed math, art, literature, etc., because people love the act of doing it. We will continue to do that.
We're not going to stop thinking because we don't have to. We stop thinking because we subject ourselves to political propaganda, or religious belief systems, or other group control methods that turns off critical thought. But even then, it's only a subset of the population, it won't get us all.
> That's not how humans work. We developed math, art, literature, etc., because people love the act of doing it. We will continue to do that.
Sure, for art, literature, etc. For math, physics, biosciences, etc, we pay people to do it. There are too few people who would work for free to push progress in those areas. We are most certainly not going to do that, we're going to leave it to the AIs and hope for the best.
This sort of thing (human brains atrophying over generations) is like something out of a dystopian nightmare[1], but hey, that's natural selection for you: if intelligence is not a selection criteria (and it won't be if machines do all the thinking), it's unlikely that it will be present in future generations.
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[1]. "The Machine Stops", E. M. Forster, 1907. Or "Pump 6" (can't remember the author, Italian author). Just because it's fiction does not mean it's impossible.
That's the usual bait and switch though. Very few people are saying AI the statistical software is going away. What people are dubious of is the commercialisation model of building a butt ton of data centres to serve massive general models by two heavily subsidised VC companies even as industry gets more mature and fickle as they get their heads around using it to solve problems and it goes onto Opex budgets. I think this is more like the early days of cloud which finished in "software built around clouds" rather than "everyone spins up their own fleet of servers for everything". Obviously the current investment levels need everyone to run their own fleet of Ralph looping agents on frontier models so that's what's marketed as the smart thing to do.
A lot of government appendages are still waiting for the dust to settle on this new fangled cloud computing thing in fairness. I don't think it's some deep masterplan
On HN there are a lot of people who truly believe that this whole thing is hype and the bubble will burst and things will go back to how it was before.
The real answer to “how many data centers do we need” is hard. Anyone giving confident answers to this should be suspicious.
The easy type of answer you get from those kind of people will always be “we are building too much”. They’d have said that 3 years back and have no shame in admitting it.
The thing is, you can overestimate or underestimate. Both have cons. The people sincerely believing this is all hype will always underestimate because all their epistemic muscle haven’t been used.
To be charitable to your hypothetical HN naysayers, isn't the question more like "how many more data centers do we need right now?" as well as "why is the answer a shitton for all these guys?". It doesn't really feel like this is a debate about speculation or the quantitative "too much" of it, but more of the "why at all?"
It just seems like the AI guys could easily win this debate if they could just articulate the why of it beyond just the near-parodic "everything will be AI in the future!". Like why not be a positive articulator and defender of what the extreme influx of datacenters will bring to the people? Don't you think that would be at least a stronger argument to make here? Why police the ideology or scare people with your position when you could, I don't know, win their hearts and minds?
Isn't that why you (presumably) like AI? Because it brings good things to people?
The people who say it is a bubble say "Once it pops, we will get major recession and everyone will suffer. We are already im fascist -autoritarian phase and economic hardship will make it worst."
> They’d have said that 3 years back and have no shame in admitting it.
3 years back, we had strong push for absolutely unprepared AI into areas where it sux. All the while onslaught of lies about its capabilities and hype.
In the meantime we had "artists are all obsolete suckers hahaha" and "humans are obsolete" and "AI will raise your kids so that you dont have to interact with them".
And we had "we the AI company will destroy us" as if it was a good thing.
Counterpoint, maybe you don’t die? When I step outside the bubble, I hear many of the same concerns people have always had: they just want the thing to work.
Should one not be free to invoke the visages of Einstein, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Jesus Christ (whichever version - and there are so many!), Genghis Khan, Confucius, et al.?
What about when poking fun at Hitler, such as Kung Fury and Jojo Rabbit do? Off limits?
Can one paint Bob Ross in a sci-fi setting? Is that unethical? Is it okay so long as a "real" artist does it and not an "AI artist"? Or can we seriously never depict him again because someone might get angry?
"Mr. Rogers in a blood-stained sweater"?
Come on!
And we can't animate Bruce Lee? Or put him on stickers? Or have him in new movies? (Nevermind how Quentin Tarantino did him wrong.)
When I grew up Elvis effigies were everywhere. And I mean everywhere. The people who liked this stuff are mostly dead or retired now so you don't see it as much, but it used to be a big deal. Really big deal.
So we can't do that anymore?
Abraham Lincoln hunts vampires for Christ's sake...
I'm glad you're asking. If you notice no one has said, especially Zelda, that you can't do these things. Obviously you can. You have access to a computer. The question you should be asking is should you do these things?
Also, this a good list of false equivalences. Robin Williams, when public, was empathetic, emotional, and arguably humanist. His memory isn't a caricature from people who have never known him, as you would see from Star Trek holo-deck episodes featuring Leonardo Da Vanci. His memory is something that is deeply important to people who are living. Some of those people simply appreciated his art and his behavior. One of those people is his daughter. You don't get to say what is right or wrong here. No one's going to stop you if you want to make a video of Robin Williams taking the Siegfried Oath, but you should understand why it is wrong.
Doesn’t the should part just completely ignore how we all know the world actually works which is kind of its own form of insanity. We humans can’t be trusted to follow basic rules like traffic laws. Right and wrong cease to matter much when 1) I want to be selfish and do what I please and 2) there’s technically nobody being harmed, feelings aside. But even then, from a net perspective, there’s probably many more people getting enjoyment from these AI videos than the people who are saddened by them.
It sucks for Zelda this saddens her so much, but if I were in her shoes it’s something I know I can’t control and so I’d try to embrace or ignore it.
Haven't seen the videos, but she seems to complain of videos claiming to be authentic private videos of him stating a particular political message — and of these videos being forwarded to her (possibly for verification?).
This has nothing to do with impersonating a deceases person but about rewriting (personal) history she finds shameful.
Just as freely as you use the words and language of dead people.
One day you won't even think about it. Well, your descendants won't. The aversion dies with you.
Squeamishness over thinking and speaking is pretty rare. Visual creation is just a new dimension of our conversation, and it'll be as accessible and common as writing words down.
You know the old generation called the world wide web satanic? They died and we stopped worrying about it.
> Just as freely as you use the words and language of dead people.
I think you're the only person here who really gets it.
We already have dozens of methods commonly used for preserving/impersonating/representing people who aren't in the room, and who are possibly deceased. These mediums have evolved over time, from spoken word and song and music, to scribbles and drawings and painting and sculptures, to acting and plays, to writing and printing, to audio and video, to computerized media, to AI-generated computerized media.
Of course any medium can be used tastefully or distastefully. But what the people in this comment section are overwhelmingly reacting to (and attempting to moralize) is their distaste for the medium itself. Distaste for a new medium is extremely common throughout history, and if history is any indication, this distaste tends to disappear quickly as older generations die and are replaced by newer generations for whom this "newfangled contraption" feels like a natural part of the world.
What should you not do here doesn't mean what will we stop you doing. It just means what's the wrong thing to do?
Maybe you're worrying about social pressure? I can see how general agreement that it's wrong to do XYZ can lead to forcibly preventing anybody at all from doing XYZ.
In case folks aren't aware, Disney tried to avoid an allergy-related wrongful death lawsuit from a restaurant at Disney Springs (large publicly available outdoor mall that doesn't even require tickets) because a couple had a Disney+ streaming trial:
>they clearly would have tried to use it in any situation where they had potential liability.
That's just how lawyers work. They'll try to invoke any defense that's vaguely applicable, just like any plaintiff lawyer will try to invoke any cause of action that's vaguely applicable, like the plaintiffs in this exact case.
The TOS argument was so awful it deserves some kind of bonus loss, but let's put that aside for now.
Let's say I paint a fence, and my neighbor complains I ruined a particular segment that shouldn't have been painted. Why can't I argue that this segment was on my property and that my neighbor gave permission to use that paint on all segments on their property?
Let's say there's a 15% chance the survey was wrong about the fence location, and a 15% chance the court disagrees with how I'm interpreting the agreement. If I can use both arguments I have a 2% chance of losing, which seems fair to me. Both arguments are reasonable, so why should I have to risk it on only one?
That’s not at all how lawyers or businesses work. The job of the lawyer is to represent the client. Lawyers didn’t ultimately decide to use the ToS in this way, Disney did. Disney estimated the reputational risk and calling attention to their morally (and legally) questionable ToS was worth the risk.
Stop infantilizing these people as if they have no other way to behave. It isn’t a law of nature that companies have to behave immorally. Hopefully you apply that understanding to your own job, too.
The answer to freedom isn't another marketplace. It's legislation that requires Google and Apple to allow web installs without scare walls or deeply hidden permission toggles.
You should be able to just download an app. And Grandma should be able to do it.
There's nothing insecure about it in a world of sandboxing, permissions, scanning, blacklisting, etc. When the tech giants are more than happy to sell ads to malware, you know their "safety" stance is just economic moat protectionism.
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Edit because of rate limits:
This is not derogatory. This is making the point that the wrong battle is being fought. F-droid fans are cheering a small victory, yet losing the entire war.
F-droid does not matter in the grand scheme of things. It's not the point. The point is the app store monopoly. That there are only two platforms and that both are almost completely locked down.
F-droid users don't even see that Google is purposefully allowing this as an antitrust sponge in their calculus. Google doesn't mind because 0.0001% of their users will install this. If they had a sense that the regulators wouldn't bother them, they'd just as well close this loophole. And they probably will eventually.
This isn't beachhead, and even if it was, it isn't sound footing or a stable foundation. It can easily go away.
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