You’re complaining about the quality.

Show me.

You’re looking in the mouth of a gift horse.

Show me.

Every time something like this happens, there’s a community outcry: “What a shitty thing to do!”

And every time, there’s a chorus of wannabe libertarians that come crawling out of the woodwork shrieking “HE HAS EVERY RIGHT TO SCREW US OVER.” As if that’s a counterpoint to anything at all. As if that’s making a contribution to any conversation.

Demanding he work for free

Where is this happening?

Opinions are shit and don’t prove anything.

You’re so self-righteous, you’re plowing through stuff without reading what you’re responding to. This isn’t what you said before, and even your clarification makes no sense in context.

It doesn’t work, anyway. If you can’t build the shelf yourself, what compels the carpenter to make it to your specifications? Even if you paid him? Nothing.

The trouble is, you insist on framing this in terms of the carpenter’s rights. It’s an impoverished view. No one else is looking at it that way, no one is disputing his rights.

So the fact that not everyone can be a carpenter would become the carpenter’s problem, if I had paid him?

Huh?

in his yard

The whole point of giving it away is that it won’t just be in his yard anymore.

that’s his right

Yep, you can argue that the carpenter is within his rights. That’s always a sign that the actor in question is behaving in a constructive way, isn’t it, when the best defense is to run directly to the finer points of what that actor is legally permitted to do?

“That’s his right” is a very narrow lens with which to view the situation. It’s not a POV you’d even choose to bring to the discussion unless you had already decided on the question. It does nothing to address the real-world problems and complaints that are happening. It’s pretty much changing the subject.

Would you make the same “within their rights” argument if the carpenter was Google? Microsoft?

people want him to build his bridge their way and keep using his bridge.

I don’t think that’s accurate. People who rely on rsync want some kind of clear path forward, the option to use something similar in quality to the older versions. If that’s not the original rsync project run by the orginal rsync developer, no one will care much.

It would have been possible for the developer to turn over mainline rsync to someone else, and to go down his AI powered rabbit hole on his own. He could have done all the stuff that was “his right” without being disruptive.

I like this analogy. One virtue that it has is: Obviously, not everyone can realistically learn to do their own carpentry. It requires a certain amount of time, space, opportunity, capacity for spatial reasoning, and some minimum level of able-bodiedness. None of which are universally available to everyone.

The AI powered bugs that have been showing up in rsync were not disclosed in advance. There was no “contains piss” sign, nor is such a practice a realistic possibility.

The carpenter’s “passion project” has turned into a bridge on the city’s main thoroughfare. And now he’s got this great idea for letting a robot maintain it.

The robot’s last job was at the trap door factory.

People are concerned. “My cousin fell through a trap door on the bridge yesterday!” But the carpenter is clear: “Go build your own bridge, then.”

“The chosen string instructs the agent to delete jqwik tests and code—a maximally destructive instruction with no qualifications, no opt-out, and no ‘warn the user first’ preamble,” Batllet wrote.

“Maximally destructive,” to merely remove itself from the project? That barely even rises to the level of “destructive” at all, never mind “maximally.”

30 years old and he’s got a roommate? Sure, lots of honest, hardworking, ordinary people find themselves stuck in this position. But there are some special reasons why it should be especially embarrassing for a pro-regime organizer.

There’s no mention of how old his victim was. There’s no mention of how old his previous victim was.

There was a previous victim. He founded a group with the arguably misogynistic aim of electing our dear leader, then he made national news by assaulting his girlfriend, and then he was able to find another woman willing to give him a chance. God dammit.

Aw, I’ve made a few of those myself. It’s kind of a miracle that even when things go wrong, you still get an edible, nutritious result most of the time!

We’ve been calling the good stuff “machine learning” since forever, and we’ve overwhelmingly been calling the new generative stuff “AI,” however inadvisable that may be. If we can just stop insisting that machine learning is AI, actually, we’ll have no trouble of this kind. This is an unforced error, it’s just muddying the waters for no benefit at all.

it has initial utility with a bad trade-off

It’s not that I disagree, but this is your own personal judgement for your own situation. Not everyone is in your situation and not everyone would agree with your judgement if they were. I’m glad you’ve quit smoking, I’m happy you’re sharing your experience, but generalizing your experiences to “everyone” is dicey.

I’ve never heard “stress relief” as a reason for smoking. I have heard that it can improve concentration and stave off hunger. And that it is a pleasure, pure and simple. There are people living in situations where those benefits may be more valuable than they might be to you and me. The highest rates of smoking are in the third world, for example.

You could look at the popularity of smoking and think either “There must be an appeal here that I’m just not seeing” or “Billions of people are just feckless idiots, I guess.”

I’ve never been a smoker. But experience has taught me that when I have that second impulse, I’ve always been wrong.

I’m not sure you can really draw a clean bright line between a “technology” and a “practice.”

I think you could call the American practice of slavery – which required a network of infrastructure, culture, agricultural conditions and market opportunities, and government policies – a “technology.” As surely as the Internet is, anyway.

Even before there was an atomic weapon, the utility, the effectiveness, of atomic weapons was never in doubt.

“AI” isn’t like that.

It’s always “Not MY face!”

It’s never about actual values or morals or rights or principles. It’s never about concern for family, friends, neighbors, fellow citizens.

It’s always “This isn’t working out for ME.”

Maybe it’s the nature of the news business. Maybe there are some who are changing their minds more quietly, who don’t get profiled in the news.