I really appreciate your response. It’s incredibly helpful and deeply thoughtful. Thank you.
What comes next is not directed at you but rather provides some other color based on a few things you touched on.
I worked for the guy. He gets no slack from me. He changed my life in many ways both wonderful and not. And while it’s unlikely I’d work with or for him again he was a net positive in my life.
I don’t see product the way he sees product which is exactly as you note: it’s for him. Some of that “for him” approach has resonated deeply with the OSS community and still does. He changed Cloud Computing in the best of ways. He’s a giant. And we’re lucky he’s around.
This small ghostty issue (and some others I can’t recall now) was emblematic of our core disagreement about how we build systems for a broader user base. That’s why I said I get their PoV but disagree with it. I think it would be fair to say using the product reminded me a lot about this particular tension. Reading the GitHub issues even more so. That’s wholly on me.
I am thankful to ghostty for helping me explore many more options. I had been using iterm2 on my laptop and struggling to find something I liked on my Linux workstation. Checking out the new hotness after all the hype still resulted in a net positive.
Nevertheless I am genuinely happy it’s working for you and, again, thanks for your kind and calm response.
Yep - but seeing the thread about it in their github repo was also a turn off. I don’t have to do it with other clients.
I also believe that has to happen on each server - and we’ve got a lot of servers. I’m not particularly keen on needing to change anything to get my terminal emulator to, well, work.
While I get the ghostty team’s PoV - I don’t agree with it.
Ghostty has lots of issues ssh-ing into remote systems that aren’t on the bleeding edge.
I couldn’t get it to work reasonably well enough for me and tried a bunch of others. Currently using Alacritty on both my Linux desktop workstation and Mac Laptop.
I use Zellij anyway and it has all the tab/pane/floating window support I was looking for.
Hot take: what most people call AI (large language and diffusion models) is, in fact, part of peak capitalism:
relies on ill gotten gains (training data obtained without permission, payment or licensing)
aims to remove human workers from the workforce within a system that (for many) requires them to work because capitalism has removed the bulk of social safety netting
currently has no real route to profit at any reasonable price point
speculative at best
reinforces the concentration of power amongst a few tech firms
will likely also result in regulatory capture with the large firms getting legislation passed that only they can provide “AI” safely
I could go on but hopefully that’s adequate as a PoV.
“AI” is just one of cherries on top of late stage capitalism that embodies the worst of all it.
So I don’t disagree - but felt compelled to share.
What is success here? The few founders and VC get filthy rich as the larger population dumps their money into Discord stock while the users and teams with limited foresight, who’ve moved their communities to discord, suffer?
I mean yeah I guess that’s the success Cory Doctorow warns us about again and again.
But that’s not my definition of success.
For context I’ve been on the receiving end of an IPO and the founders and investors made out like bandits while a fair number of employees were stuck holding the bags thanks to lock-ins, dilution and over priced shares.
His recent interview on Pod Save America was so off putting, so filled with his own narcissism, that I simply couldn’t finish listening to the interview. There was little of substance there; just a very out of touch very rich guy loving the smell of his own shit.
Carney is a Center-right corporate kleptocracy bureaucrat. I have no love for the gentlemen. He’s the 1%.
His primary opponent however is owned by the far right and will likely govern even more dictatorially at a time when that’s particularly dangerous. He will sell out healthcare, social safety nets, and the environment in a way that puts Harper to shame.
As I see it, the choice is picking stability, crappy as it is, or selling out the most vulnerable among us for a chance at change.
It’s not a great choice - but it’s what we have. Wishing for something else won’t make it so. The NDP won’t rise from the ashes in the next ten days.
So my vow is to swallow a bitter pill and get involved - be the change I want to see.
In the meantime I believe we need (and have) a unified front against fascism and rampant fear/hatred.
I was incredibly put-off when they accepted to not raise the issue of electoral reform as a requirement to sign the agreement with the Liberals - who themselves ran on electoral reform (at least in part).
I’ve received a single email from the NDP this election season - announcing their new t-shirt designs.
The liberal rep - part of the crew responsible for ousting Trudeau, came to my door.
That’s a really interesting PoV. I feel as if I’ve been grappling with the same quandary but landed differently.
The NDP is broken. I say this as a lifelong supporter who strongly believes their stated values and goals represent mine.
That said, the current version of the NDP is not viable or working in my opinion. Their actions do not match their words.
I’m resolved to vote Liberal (in a riding where it matters) and then immediately begin to support the federal NDP party to be ready for the next election. Time to get my hands dirty.
If our lives are better/easier/safer/happier than the lives of those who grew out of wrongs committed by those of our own heritage / lineage, then yes, I believe we should endeavour to make their lives better.
Whether that’s financial reparations, return of property / land, sharing of resources, etc. should be up to communities to work together to decide.
Put another way, if my good fortune rests on the misfortune of others - even in the past - my personal take is that I am compelled to help where I can.
Sometimes that’s a simple as voting for the thing that benefits me less than others or me not at all because it aids those who need it most.
So yeah, we should “pay” but “pay” can mean so many things.
So maybe we’re kinda staring at two sides of the same coin. Because yeah, you’re not misrepresentin my point.
But wait there’s a deeper point I’ve been trying to make.
You’re right that I am also saying it’s all bullshit - even when it’s “right”. And the fact we’d consider artificially generated, completely made up text libellous indicates to me that we (as a larger society) have failed to understand how these tools work. If anyone takes what they say to be factual they are mistaken.
If our feelings are hurt because a “make shit up machine” makes shit up… well we’re holding the phone wrong.
My point is that we’ve been led to believe they are something more concrete, more exact, more stable, much more factual than they are — and that is worth challenging and holding these companies to account for. i hope cases like these are a forcing function for that.
That’s it. Hopefully my PoV is clearer (not saying it’s right).
Ok hear me out: the output is all made up. In that context everything is acceptable as it’s just a reflection of the whole of the inputs.
Again, I think this stems from a misunderstanding of these systems. They’re not like a search engine (though, again, the companies would like you to believe that).
We can find the output offensive, off putting, gross , etc. but there is no real right and wrong with LLMs the way they are now. There is only statistical probability that a) we’ll understand the output and b) it approximates some currently held truth.
Put another way; LLMs convincingly imitate language - and therefore also convincing imitate facts. But it’s all facsimile.
I read your reply as saying the output is (can be) libellous - which it cannot be because it is not based on a dataset which resolves to anything absolute.
Maybe we’re just missing each other - struggling to parse each others’ output. ;)
Surely you jest because it’s so clearly not if you understand how LLMs work (at the core it’s a statistic model - and therefore all approximation to a varying degree).
But great can come out of this case if it gets far enough.
Imagine the ilk of OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, XAI, etc. being forced to admit that an LLM can’t actually do anything but generate approximations of language. That these models (again LLMs in particular) produce approximations of language that are so good they’re often indistinguishable from the versions our brains approximate.
But at the core they cannot produce facts because the way they are made includes artificially injected randomness layered on-top of mathematically encoded values that merely get expressed as tiny pieces of language (tokens) - ones that happen to be close to each other in a massively multidimensional vector space.
TLDR - they’d be forced to admit the emperor has no clothes and that’s a win for everyone (except maybe this one guy).
Also it’s worth noting I use LLMs for work almost daily and have studied them quite a bit. I’m not a hater on the tech. Only the capitalists trying to force it down everyone’s throat in such a way that we blindly adopt it for everything.
The Littlest Hobo.
80s kids in Canada.
Link: https://youtu.be/0kabcD3r1Bs
Also: Today’s Special and The Polka Dot Door.