And yes, this is a US centric comment. The EFF is a US based organization and the center of gravity of the tech world they deal with is in the US.

With the latter no longer a thing, and with so many other people building on Github's innovations, I'm starting to seriously consider alternatives. Not something I would have said in the past, but when Github's outages start to seriously affect my ability to do my own work, I can no longer justify continuing to use them.

Github needs to get its shit together. You can draw a pretty clear line between Microsoft deciding it was all in on AI and the decline in Github's service quality. So I would argue that for Github to gets its shit back together, it needs to ditch the AI and focus on high quality engineering.

Right now it's an LLC. If we can hit basic financial stability, then we'll convert the LLC to a nonprofit and start with an appointed board with a two year term who's job is to draft the permanent bylaws and define the electoral system. Basically, I'm bootstrapping it and we need to raise the money to pay the legal fees and fund the legal research needed to get the cooperative structure right. And part of that is going to be designing the electoral systems.

It's definitely going to be hard and it may end up coming down to "ID verification required to vote". Not to use the platform, just to vote in board elections. I'd love to find a way to avoid that, but we can always do it if we have to.

The plan is to moderate the platform pretty heavily using a two layered moderation system: community moderation as the first layer and official moderation as a second layer that moderates the community moderation. That moderation will be very much aimed at keeping the platform as free of bots, spammers, and propagandists as possible.

So if we're successful in that, we may be able to avoid the intrusive verification by saying "It's an honor system and all active users in good standing are trusted to be honorable." But it remains to be seen whether we're successful enough in the moderation to even attempt that.

Or we may be able to come up with some other system to ensure it.

The other piece is that it's a multi-stakeholder cooperative. Users elect half the board, but the workers elect the other half. And with workers, it will be easy to restrict it to one worker one vote. So the workers can and will provide a safety backstop against user elections that go off the rails in one way or another.

Right now experimenting with a "demote" button that people are encouraged to use on: disinformation, misinformation, propaganda, spam, and slop.

Communities' default feed is just chronological, but it also has "Most Active" and "Most Recent Activity". Right now, Demote knocks things down the "Most Active" feed.

Eventually, a high enough percentage of demotes would result in posts being removed from public feeds. A second, higher threshold, would result in it being removed from all feeds.

Demote usage would be moderated, and removal thresholds could be appealed to the official moderation team. Users who abuse or misuse demote would lose the privilege.

It's an experiment and we'll see if it works. It's also really early. But the thing that Communities is doing differently is that the users will ultimately be in control through democratic elections of the board. And I expect moderation to be a frequent and recurring issue in elections. (You know, if the whole thing gets off the ground at all.)

I'm working on this right now. I'm building a Facebook alternative that will be a nonprofit, multistakeholder cooperative if I can get it off the ground. It won't be owned by anyone, instead it will be governed by its workers and users in collaboration.

It's called Communities (https://communities.social) and it's in open beta now. We got the apps in the app stores last month.

One request, it would be nice to not have to add Goodreads, since I don't use it. I've love to be able to enter a couple of book titles or an author and just get recommendations!

Because we insist on trying to privatize everything, refuse to provide a safe floor for people, and make poverty and mental health challenges moral issues (meaning we degrade people who experience them and leave them to fend for themselves) we create an environment where true community is impossible.

Unless, of course, we apply authoritarian and abusive policing controls against those we've left behind, rounding them up and sending them somewhere else. Which of course achieves a temporary "peace" at the cost of a deep insecurity and fear, because we all know the moment we slip or step out of line, we're gone.

It really is toxic and has led directly to society breaking down to the point where we're now falling into full scale fascism.

Plus, remote teams would really benefit from a shared whiteboard device. A device with infinite scroll in both directions and shared editing. I mean, really adding infinite scroll and collaborative editing to existing remarkable devices would cover that use case.

In reality, if you have $10 million, you put it in the S&P500 and make an average of 10% ($1 million) per year. Far more than inflation and more than enough to cover those things you're talking about unless you have a pretty extreme medical condition or very expensive hobbies.

People are reasonably worried that the same will happen to AI.

It is a valid possible answer that should be included in the possibilities as we try to figure out what caused the acceleration. Right now, lots of things are being proposed. And many of them are seemingly being ruled out. It remains to be seen what the answer will be.

The physics and history of science books I read when I got my degree did not seem to include sneering contempt for those who thought pulsars could be alien in origin. I rather recall a tone of disappointment as they described how we figured out that they weren't alien. The Fermi paradox remains one of the great mysteries of astronomy and cosmology and a lot of people, both professional and amateur are still fascinated by it.

Extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence, but academics who sneeringly dismiss extraordinary claims as even a possibility are every bit as toxic to the rational advancement of science as those who advance those claims without enough evidence.

It's not just "New object, must be aliens!" It's "This thing doesn't fit our understanding of orbital motion for natural objects, aliens is actually a rational, if still unlikely, possible explanation."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1I/%CA%BBOumuamua#Non-gravitat...

If that's the case, then I have a bad feeling for the state of our industry. My experience with LLMs is that their code does _not_ cut it. The hallucinations are still a serious issue, and even when they aren't hallucinating they do not generate quality code. Their code is riddled with bugs, bad architectures, and poor decisions.

Writing good code with an LLM isn't any faster than writing good code without it, since the vast majority of an engineer's time isn't spent writing -- it's spent reading and thinking. You have to spend more or less the same amount of time with the LLM understanding the code, thinking about the problems, and verifying its work (and then reprompting or redoing its work) as you would just writing it yourself from the beginning (most of the time).

Which means that all these companies that are firing workers and demanding their remaining employees use LLMs to increase their productivity and throughput are going to find themselves in a few years with spaghettified, bug-riddled codebases that no one understands. And competitors who _didn't_ jump on the AI bandwagon, but instead kept grinding with a strong focus on quality will eat their lunches.

Of course, there could be an unforeseen new order of magnitude jump. There's always the chance of that and then my prediction would be invalid. But so far, what I see is a fast approaching plateau.

The modern Trump controlled Republican party is not a party that cares about personal liberties. It is a fascist, authoritarian project that is toying with straight up Nazism. They are explicitly pulling from the Nazi playbook in their language and strategy of attack on the rule of law. Someone who supports that party is supporting a completely different set of values from someone who opposes it.

That said, that party is also backed by a powerful and effective propaganda machine that has successfully pulled the wool over many people's eyes such that they don't fully realize what it is they are supporting.

They are not respecting `robots.txt` and it's costing maintainers of open sites an enormous amount of time and money: time trying to keep their sites up and money for server bandwidth and compute.

We need someone to begin a class action lawsuit against the AI companies to try to force them to respect `robots.txt` and to pay damages to compensate organizations and developers for all the time, bandwidth, and compute they are stealing.

Honestly, `robots.txt` should be enough to hold them accountable, but if it's not legally enough, then adding an item to Terms of Service explicitly denying usage for AI crawling ought to hold up in court.

Logging the IP of every request and tracking additional bandwidth and compute because of them should provide all the evidence needed.

We shouldn't _have_ to do this. But here we are. Are there any orgs that have been harmed who have the resources to form a coalition and take this on?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43506318

Points: 6

# Comments: 2

If it's owned by a few, as it is right now, it's an existential threat to the life, liberty, and pursuit of a happiness of everyone else on the planet.

We should be seriously considering what we're going to do in response to that threat if something doesn't change soon.

> Various examples of damage caused by microplastics have been reported, such as microplastic accumulation in the bodies of marine and aquatic organisms (leading to malnutrition), inflammation, reduced fertility, and mortality. The threats that microplastics present to the human body have not yet been clearly identified. However, previous reports have shown that ultrafine microplastic absorption resulted in complex toxicity in zebrafish,2 and that microplastics under 100 nm in size can reach almost all organs after entering the human body.3 Therefore, concerns exist regarding the negative effects of continuous microplastic accumulation in the human body.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10151227/

> Microplastics have been found in a variety of organisms and multiple parts of the human body. We emphasize the potential impact of microplastics on the early exposure of infants and the early development of embryos. At present, the toxicity research on microplastics show that the exposure will cause intestinal injury, liver infection, flora imbalance, lipid accumulation, and then lead to metabolic disorder. In addition, the microplastic exposure increases the expression of inflammatory factors, inhibits the activity of acetylcholinesterase, reduces the quality of germ cells, and affects embryo development. At last, we speculate that the exposure of microplastics may be related to the formation of various chronic diseases.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/envhealth.3c00052