Yeah, it manages to feel terse and yet overly-verbose all at once. Human language without human taste. And like most AI-generated content once you've suffered through a few of these "articles" they all start to look the same... because they are.
We're socializing the costs of everything else. I'd much rather my tax dollars go to pizza delivery (and single-payer healthcare) than lining the pockets of tech monopolists and the military-industrial complex.
Which AI company is selling access to reliable verbatim copies of websites? I don't mean "it may regurgitate a paragraph", but as a reliable service where you can repeatably get website content snapshots to a reliability level that makes such a use case viable?
Using the information for training purposes is not the same thing. Not legally the same and otherwise.
This couldn't be further from the truth. The indie web was exciting because it was the product of distinct human voices. LLMs only speak in one voice (with subtle differences between the major models but similar "tells"). This is why so many people have such an immediate and visceral negative reaction to AI slop. It is distinctly lacking the human spark and it is uncanny and off-putting in that way.
What I always find interesting is how folks like DHH love to cloak themselves in righteousness saying they're making a place away from "those people" where everyone can feel welcome "regardless of their beliefs." Beliefs like what, DHH? Why not just come out and say what you mean if it's nothing to be ashamed of?
Or maybe societies could instead make the prospect of having children less onerous? It's not an uncommon story in America that a couple will choose to stay unmarried when having children so that the mother can qualify for benefits like childcare (which, if you haven't had children yourself, is staggeringly expensive when it's available at all).
To think that the solution here is to penalize women even more is insane.
This is the extremely marketable "solution". Easy to sell to voters. The problem is that it does not work whatsoever. There is no evidence anywhere that transfers to mothers increase birth rates, or that transfers to women increase pairing rates (the upstream problem of birth rates).
AI industry profits have and will continue to be privatized while the enormous costs of job displacement (to name just one of many negative externalities) will be gleefully socialized. We've seen this film before.
It's not. Modern Android is increasingly limiting what apps can do. It's a "code issue" in the sense that you can clone the Android sources, overhaul security and power management systems, and build your app to run on that. It'll work. It's doable. Would that be a solution for this project, though?
Well, no. If the project is being shut down because its target(s) went away, then that seems unavoidable.
It would be good, IMO, if people could come together and build out an open mobile platform not subject to SV hegemony, so I think what you're saying is the way to go, actually. Because building out AOSP and or just something forked/from scratch is... actually... accessible now in my opinion. I think it doesn't make sense _not_ to be oriented in this direction anymore. There's no reason to remain cautious because, well, right now we have _nothing_ :(. We are subject to the fancies of the behemoths that exist to self perpetuate. Working around them and depending on them is demoralizing and not fun.
> It would be good, IMO, if people could come together and build out an open mobile platform not subject to SV hegemony
It would, but I would argue that it wouldn't solve Briar's problem here.
The problem on Android is not that Google doesn't want P2P to work. It's that Android optimises aggressively for the battery. You can install a mobile Linux and run a P2P service on it, that's not a problem at all. But you will have to charge it multiple times a day, and nobody wants that from a phone.
Have you ever tried running an Android-based system without the Play Services (and without migroG)? Try running e.g. Signal without FCM, and see the impact on your battery life. You want to fork the OS to solve that? You will probably end up rebuilding something as centralised as FCM.
There is a fundamental question there: does it work, without major downsides, to have a P2P system where the nodes are mobile phones? Until now it has always been a tradeoff, and people clearly choose battery life. Also you don't need P2P for privacy.
> There's no reason to remain cautious because, well, right now we have _nothing_
Android is open source. There are big alternatives like LineageOS and GrapheneOS. I don't think we have nothing. There is a lot of great technical stuff in Android/iOS. While iOS is out of bounds because proprietary, Android is open source, so we have all that great stuff. We don't have nothing.
> It would be good, IMO, if people could come together and build out an open mobile platform not subject to SV hegemony
From what I understand (based on pretty basic research into using old smartphones (which I already have a full drawer of) as home appliances), the main problem is that device manufacturers only provide binary blobs for drivers and firmware, and they are not too happy to share them with non-Google parties. And it's non-trivial to handle those blobs, even if you get them (they weren't written for your tech stack, so you need infrastructure around them to make them useful).
> Because building out AOSP and or just something forked/from scratch is... actually... accessible now in my opinion.
Starting such a project, and even getting to 0.0.1 release, is now simpler than any time in the past.
Getting from 0.0.1 to 1.0-alpha did not get any easier at all. The current AI requires both a great harness and a skilled operator to add meaningful code to a large project without going nuclear on code quality.
It'll be quite a few years until things like "make me a custom ROM with AOSP modified to do X" result in anything other than absolute tragedy.
> We are subject to the fancies of the behemoths that exist to self perpetuate. Working around them and depending on them is demoralizing and not fun.
That's true, especially the "not fun" part. However, I expect the vast majority of users don't want any fun on their devices, aside from games (and even then, only with kernel-level anti-cheat). Normally, this is solved by companies offering one product for "casuals" and another for devs or power-users. This works, but breaks down for social things: a messaging app that won't run unless you buy a Pixel and flash a custom ROM is DOA as an app (it might function as a solution in case of people who are really desperate for the features the app provides, but that's probably too small a population to keep the project afloat).
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