nickwitha_k (he/him)

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  • 106 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Oh it’s the same shit as feudalism, but with technology… Thanks for letting me know that’s what Techno-Feudalism means.

    Understanding the meaning and context of terms is very important.

    … I guess we could add “global” to the front of it so you know it’s not just happening in a castle in 14th century Europe, but all across the planet.

    I find “neo-feudalism” more appropriate. The previous incarnation already spanned the known world at the time.

    Like, how many castles were in Europe? Okay, compare that to how many Amazon’s there are? It’s not the same thing at all

    That’s really a comparison that makes me think that, perhaps, learning more about feudal history would do us all good. A more apt comparison would be “how many Vaticans were there?” (depending on the time period, two).

    Rome was the seat of power through much of feudalism in the Common Era in Europe. Castles were extensions of the theocratic empire centered there, providing physical and visual/psychological enforcement of that power. Despite all of the war and megalomaniacal bickering, the feudal lords and kings all had the same boss.

    There’s less difference than you apparently think.

    Sorry, I don’t have time for this mind dulling discussion.

    I’m sorry that you don’t know enough about history to understand how nearly identical the two are and didn’t mean to cause distress, not knowing how attached to the term you were.

    G’luck.



  • I’ve read Varifakous and don’t find his claim that it’s anything new beyond the technologies used to be at all compelling.

    So no, the use of fuedalism isn’t to indicate something about old school mechanisms of war, weaponry, brutality, or repression. It’s a reference to the role of economic serfdom and the economic aspects of fuedalism.

    Teotihuacan was the center on an empire but it had no military.

    What I’m saying is that they even go with divine mandate at this point. Just because their not jousting and are using abstractions that are enabled by modern technology instead of castles doesn’t make it fundamentally a different, new thing. Commerce and who could engage in it was heavily regulated by feudal lords and organizations that they ran or allowed to run.

    It’s literally just the same shit with better technology. The far-right isn’t that creative.




  • I am not exactly defending this particular scheme but the source code is available under a free software license. It’s only the binaries that are under a proprietary EULA.

    I’ll believe it after review and approval by the OSI. It still is philosophically in direct conflict with the Open-Source Movement by making software less accessible to end users and especially non-technical users than it is to corpos.


  • It sounds to me like you’re more strict about what you’d consider to be “the LLM” than I am; I tend to think of the whole system as the LLM.

    My apologies if it seems “nit-picky”. Not my intent. Just that, to my brain, the difference in semantic meaning is very important.

    I feel like drawing lines around a specific part of the system is sort of like asking whether a particular piece of someone’s brain is sentient.

    In my thinking, that’s exactly what asking “can an LLM achieve sentience?” is, so, I can see the confusion. Because I am strict in classification, it is, to me, literally line asking “can the parahippocampal gyrus achieve sentience?” (probably not by itself - though our meat-computers show extraordinary plasticity… so, maybe?).

    For now, at least, it just seems that the LLMs are not sufficiently complex to pass scrutiny compared to a person.

    Precisely. And I suspect that it is very much related to the constrained context available to any language model. The world, and thought as we know it, is mostly not language. Not everyone has an internal monologue that is verbal/linguistic (some don’t even have one and mine tends to be more abstract when not in the context of verbal things) so, it follows that more than linguistic analysis is necessary.


  • It’s not free and open source. And it’s contrary to the F(L)OSS movement philosophy (cost should never be a barrier for one to use technology). Conceptually, it’s nice to try to get corpos to compensate devs but that’s not what this would do. Small businesses and individuals would be impacted while corpos can work around it.

    Additionally, it seems a bit ethically questionable to try to forcibly extract fees from end users when, increasingly, they’re feeling economic strain from the continued wealth hoarding and impending recession/depression.