Were probably? That’s a giant understatement and you know it.

Ai will save billions of lives and improve the living standard for everyone on the planet, it’ll be just like mobile phones where the biggest benefits come to the poorest communities - tech haters often ignore this reality, millions of children in Africa, Asia, etc were only able to get access to education through mobile infrastructure.

The internet has given everyone access to huge amounts of education resources and it’s only increased as they technology matures - current LLMs are amazing for language learners and for people who need things like English articles explained in their own language, I just asked chatgpt to explain the code I’m working on in Tagalog and it did it without hesitation (I can’t speak for the accuracy personally but looks legit) it even translated variable names but not function calls.

And this before we’ve scratched the surface of it’s utility, I’ll tell you one thing if you ever say to your grandkids ‘o I was against ai when it came out’ they’ll look at up like you’d look at someone who said they didn’t think math would catch on or that iron would never be as popular as bronze.

Yeah the amount of good ai can do for the world is staggering, even just giving a speed boost and quality improvement to open source Devs will unlock a lot of new potential.

The problem is people in a certain age bracket often fear change because they feel they’ve put effort into learning how things work and if things change then all that effort will be worthless.

It doesn’t really matter though, gangs of idiots literally smashed the prototype looms when they were demonstrated because despite the cost of cloth being one of the major factors in poverty at the time a handful of people took it on themselves to fight to maintain the status quo – of course we know how it turned out, the same that it always does…

Areas that resisted technological and social growth stagnated and got displaced by those which welcomed it

Sorry, what genocide happened on Reddit?

That got delayed because elitists put all their effort into attacking things that make it easier to use for normal people rather than working to improve the experience for all

I will say it’s interesting once you notice how wild the story version of North Korea is and how many of those stories get debunked, the media has no desire to tell the truth they’re just desperate for a shock piece.

The first computers cost millions and the one I’m holding in my hand is basically worthlesss. capture and conversion are both fairly simple processes so we will see a lot of reduction in cost once engineering pathways are established especially when tied to excess power generation from renewables - instead of wasting excess capacity divert it to a nearby carbon capture plant.

If a system like this manages to make fuel cheaper than standard fuel types then we’ll see them spring up everywhere, it could be a total game changer. Worse ways there’s an expensive alternative for use cases where electric planes aren’t feasible and we learn a lot about atmospheric carbon in the process.

The air force have been doing studies and they’re really keen on it, fuel security is the main reason but it wouldn’t have got this far if it wasn’t at least somewhat economically viable.

I’m pretty sure one of the A is for aeronautic - it’s kinda what they do, the n is for naughty tho so maybe that’s why?

First point there is carbon neutral jet fuel because NASA have been working of jet fuel chemistry for decades.

Secondly flying isn’t commuting, people don’t need to go to new cities twice a day but being cheap enough to allow people on minimum wage to have a holiday a few times a year would be a great benefit to all.

There are already ways of making jet fuel from captured carbon, as the chemistry continues to evolve we absolutely will see carbon neutral flights becoming more common.

I know doom feels good and I’m very susceptible to it myself but the reality is we’re probably going to make it through this, it kinda sucks really because it means we do need to plan for the future after all.

Also NASA has created endless bits of research that benefit everyone and the economy, the fact I’m typing this from my phone is only really possible because NASA ‘wasted’ money going to space.

So there are very few countries where trains or buses are public transport?

There are technologies already starting to roll out which will make flying the least ecologically damaging means of public transport for long and medium length journeys, I wrote a comment about it already but they’re building a faculty that turns captured carbon into jet fuel it’s really clever stuff.

Good news, they’re building a really cool new facility in washing state which uses carbon captured from the air to create jet fuel, the big idea is when the wind is blowing hard and there’s spare power from turbines they ramp up sequestering carbon from their air and the process of turning it into jet fuel meaning they can make use of power that would otherwise be over capacity by creating carbon neutral jet fuel.

The air force tested it in all their engines and it works great, of course it’ll take time to build the faculty and surrounding infrastructure but it’s a huge development, especially as it’s not a hugely complex tech so we might well see it evolved into being relatively cheap to build - maybe even we’ll see airports making use of their vast amounts of surface area with solar panels and creating carbon neutral jet fuel in site - would be a huge infrastructure saving and create more of a market for carbon which could drive carbon capture projects.

One exciting possibility is an experimental faculty in Cambridgeshire, UK which burns biomas to generate power and uses a fraction of that power to capture carbon from the burnt material - it appears to be a really effective way of pulling carbon from the air so if automated construction and management allow us to get the costs down to a point where it rapidly pays for itself while also making power and collecting carbon then we could well see something like that built at every airport in the world.

This would vastly reduce the carbon footprint of air travel to make it far better than other options for long and medium journeys while also reducing cost by cutting the need for hugely expensive oil mining and refining infrastructure, plus they’d have to remove eco taxes from air trave.

Tl;Dr - they’re already working on that, if we manage to make flying carbon neutral then a faster turn around time on jets is also a good thing ecologically and costwise because we could have less of them in fleets meaning resource costs are lower.

Yeah it would be really interesting if it was possible to have a merged community across several instances, like you sub to super community and it gets the information from one of the linked instances and when they’re up they all keep synchronised.

If your instance went down you couldn’t log on but if you could switch to another account on a different instance and access the same major communities - then when that instance comes back it catches up.

Yeah maybe a share-alike clause would be best, use the data if what you’re making is properly free otherwise pay

I really am split on this, I think that modern corporate media has a big incentive to convince people that we shouldn’t participate in community projects and that working together for the betterment of all is somehow a bad thing because this is what directly affects their monopoly and control.

That said you’re right that other portions of corporate evil benefit by us thinking it has no value.

I do think we need to move away from the pushed ideal that the only benefit to work is money because that really does just benefit the rich - take Wikipedia as an example, writing pages for that isn’t going to earn me money but it allows me to live in a world where Wikipedia exists, and it’s not just me that gets to use it but everyone trying to do anything now has access to that resource which means whatever I do it’s possible that the work I put into editing articles has somehow made it a bit easier or a bit more possible.

This is even more true with open source software, it’s possible that a project I’ve done some small thing to help has grown to benefit the people making point of sale systems that allow a cafe I like to reduce costs and stay in business or maybe the veg was grown by someone that learned how from a YouTube video made using open source software…

AI is already making so many more things possible and when natural language control is better evolved it’s going to have benefits like giving every human on the planet access to world class healthcare, education and tech support, it’s going to allow anyone with an idea to make it reality and to allow open source developers to create really amazing things that we can all use.

If harvesting my throw away comments and old wiki edits can create a tool that will allow me to sit down and describe the electronics projects and coding ideas I want to make then they’re welcome to it.

Yeah exactly, and most the open source Devs I know have done some martial art or other, not knocking it as exercise or anything but it’s every bit as nerdy that electric surfboard he had - if I had his money I’d get in a crazy Chinese Kung Fu master to teach me how to snatch roast chickens and I’d buy every stupid tech gadget toy but I’d still go to bed reading tech articles and dreaming about living in a Cybertronic eco utopia

I know people will hate this but I think zuck is just a nerd with the money to do anything he likes but he’s not really very social and not really into sports or anything so like many of us he spends his focus on tech stuff and science fiction.

He obviously kinda loves the idea of the metaverse, and yeah Facebook is riddled with problems but they’ve never really done any of the really immoral and anti competitive things bill gates Microsoft did so I think it’s jumping the gun a bit to instantly jump to EEE - it’s possible he just genuinely believes the future is going to be a federation of open source protocols and he simply wants to live in that future.

That said there’s a lot of problems inherent in letting any big company gain any form of dominance over open social networks especially one as frequently socially problematic as meta

It’s not really fair to call it stealing.

This is an open source platform so you can use the code freely, the developers decided to make it open source because creating tools and sharing them for everyone to use enables us all to work together and build better technology which improves the quality of life we all enjoy.

I take the same attitude when posting here, I’m making a public statement because I believe we as a society make better choices when all voices are heard and that I have something to add to the discussion - if someone wants to take an idea that I have and build in it or incorporate it into a speech they give then I’m happy about it because that’s the point of expressing an opinion, for it to spread. If someone learns from what I’m talking about then I’m happy, I don’t feel robbed or like I lost anything.

Coming on a free and open source platform then demanding ownership of your text would make even less sense than Bob Ross getting angry that people are following along with his painting tutorials. I get the sentiment and yes ai is changing the world and people will lose their jobs but it’s also bringing endless positive advancements which will improve and extend billions of lives - if datasets are locked down by oddly selfish rules like having to track down the original poster and ask for permission then only big corporation’s will be able to train LLMs and other ai thus giving them a monopoly.

Also another interesting hypocrisy that a lot of people are missing, meta might be awfull in many regards but they’re actually pretty good with open source and wrote a lot of the tools that made things like stable diffusion possible. Taking what they give then complaining when they use content posted publicly just feels so odd to me.

Yeah I think that’s an important task for us users, communicating how we use the fediverse and which tools we find helpfull.

We also need to be making tools and filling lists, helping people discover and learn about the platform isn’t something we can leave upto a corporate advertising department, it’s upto us.