Comment by martin-t
18 hours ago
> Xanadu
I've heard about it in the past, never really looked into what it is. It's now in my to-read list so I'll hope to potentially read about it this century...
> I absolutely love your attention to detail
Thanks. I've been thinking about this for almost two years and my position seems like it should be the obvious position for anyone who takes time to understand what is happening with this tech, both technologically and politically. Yet, a lot of people seem to be supportive, oblivious to the both the exploitation already happening and the coming consequences.
So I try to articulate this position as best as I can in hopes that I can convince at least a few people. And if they do the same, maybe we can have some impact. TBH, I am using HN as a proving ground for how to phrase ideas. Sadly, people react to the way something is written, not what is written. So even supporting a good idea can actually harm it if phrased poorly.
I started a blog and and wanted to write about tech but this IP theft ramped up before I finished my first real article and after that I didn't feel like pouring my energy into something which will be scraped and stripped of any connection to me just to make some rich asshole richer. I figured people are gonna come to their senses but most are indifferent or have accepted the reality, with a loud minority cheering for it. Probably because finally they're not the ones with a boot on their neck, it's the pesky white collar programmers and artists who had a good life through nothing more than lucky genetics which made them smart. I mean, I am already noticing some people who used to ask me for tech advice are starting to treat me differently since I am not longer useful (unless some super obscure bug hasn't made it into the training data), therefore no longer valuable to them.
Society is built on hierarchical power structures where each upper layer maintains or further entrenches their position by making people on the lower layers fight each other, sometimes literally.
WW1 was the peak of _visible_ human stupidity and submissivity with random people killing each other by the tens of thousands a day and not a single one of them stood anything to gain from "winning". For most men, when they're given a rifle, they have the most power they will have their entire life. Yet, they chose indirect suicide over direct murder. (Murder being a legal term, is carries no judgement of the morality of the act. I used it because "murder" is what opting out of this system would have been called by the people in power. Or "treason" if it had any chance of success. Or "revolution" if enough people did it.)
Since then, the power structures have evolved, the innovation is that fighting among us "commoners" is no longer so spectacularly visible.
So I gotta do something. These comments have almost 0 reach but they allow me to organize the ideas in my head and hopefully I'll bring myself to write proper blog posts. They'll also have almost 0 reach but it'll hopefully be a bit further from 0.
I have a lot of ideas and opinions which I have never heard expressed anywhere else. Certainly, I can't be that unique and many people must have through them or even written about them before but it's nearly impossible to find anything.
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> the best in you
This is probably not the kind of reply you meant when you wrote that, I rant when I am tired.
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Anyway, I added my blog to my profile. There's nothing of value there, I spent a decade reading about tech, excited for the bright future to come, and talking about starting my own tech blog. And right as I finally did, LLMs happened and that was the event which made me realize tech is just another tool of oppression and exploitation. Not that it wasn't before but I was naive and stupid and this was the event which catalyzed a large rethinking for me, personally. So if you wanna read something from me in the future, the RSS hopefully works.
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