Posts by Claude Yeller 315 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jan 2025
"No, if they were truly good, they would still be employed."
The worst employees are those that are indispensable because you have to pay them what they are worth and listen to their opinion.
Companies prevent this dire straight by firing everyone every five years. That way, they can siphon all value to the Masters of the Universe.
In this world view, quality is wasted money anyway, so bad products are "good" value.
Enshitification is everywhere.
The UK started the industrial revolution. Up to the WWars, they were the beacon of Science & Technology. Big Tech was British Tech.
But sometimes during the mid 20th century, the British started to cut back on skill development. Their workforce were losing the skills needed to keep up their economy.
And hence started the continuous decline of the UK as an economic power house. Until the position they have now where they have to go on their knees and beg the US and India for trade deals.
It's so strange to see the USA chosing to go the exact same route to oblivion, one company at a time. Dumping qualified personnel because they simply hate good people earning money.
"It is just unaccountable to me how anyone can be deranged enough to think this is a desirable outcome. "
Since slavery was abolished in the US, companies have dreamt about ways to get rid of employees again.
A Dark Factory where no human soul has ever to enter is the holy grail of investors and shareholders alike. No more employees, sick days, health or pension plans.
The current mass delusion of AI is all about the possibility of the holy grail getting within reach and they can finally get rid of all employees.
When you ask "who is going to buy their stuff when nobody has a job?", you haven't understood.
If they can produce everything they want without people, they also don't need poor people anymore. They can run the economy without people.
Think about what happened in agriculture after mechanization. They shed much of the farm hands and slaughtered all of the horses and ox's.
The horses of ye old farm are the "workforce" of today.
The rally Cry of the Conspiracy Theory Peddlers is Trust No One
They use it as a badge of honor that they reject all sources of information as all information is corrupted by the Big Conspiracy.
But if you trust no one, you end up like Descartes with only one certainty: I think, therefore I am
There is not much to build upon that.
So every Conspiracy peddler who says he doesn't trust the MSM has to get his "information" from somewhere. That "somewhere" is invariably some talking point from some random podcast or Xitter handle which never leads to falsifiable sources, ie, something you can actually verify.
So trusting no one invariably leads to trusting the wrong ones. Which is Mission Accomplished for the conspiracy peddlers.
"Funny how the countries that rank highest on these indices also happen to be the ones whose financial systems enable the most sophisticated tax avoidance structures on earth."
Indeed, but they also collect the most taxes as a percentage of GDP and have pretty low Gini coefficients.
So their tax avoidance and bribery didn't work out like they normally do in eg, the USA.
"It's shaped by whoever is sharing wine and steak with freshly minted ministers the week after an election."
Sorry, but in global democracy and transparency rankings, the USA has over 2 dozen countries ranked above it.
Not every country is as corrupt as the US.
"If however you announce an attack on Agrabah with accompanying AI generated footage of your glorious missliles defintiley not hitting playschools, milk factories and your own side."
Fox News claims the Iranians are already doing that
Here again, the Iranians outwitted the US. Or this is just another case of accusing others of what you are doing yourself.
"The "copyleft" ideology keeps many commercial application and hardware (because of drivers) away."
Copyleft is only half of open source. As more people use Android than Windows neither the license nor the UI seem to be a problem (AOSP is Open Source and includes everything except the applications).
"The fact that with Android Google removed that issue, since only the kernel is used"
Linux == the Kernel. The UI etc is not part of Linux.
How "Copyleft" is worse than the Windows license is a mystery to me.
"and [MS] are lucky the ideology behind Linux can't take it far,"
I am not sure what you mean by "ideology" and "not far"?
Linux runs everything that doesn't have a "desktop" UI, including MS cloud and MS AI. Even Windows itself has a WSL that is just Linux.
So, what "ideology" makes people "choose" smartphones and IoT's running Linux but rejecting Lap/Desktop computers running Linux?
MS makes >90% of their money from other products than the Windows OS. Windows is just a loss leader needed to sell all the profitable parasites/products that make their stockholders happy.
In essence, Windows is their vending machine. And every version of Windows should increase sales of new and more profitable products.
Just like a vending machine is not meant to improve your health or productivity, Windows is not meant to improve your health and productivity. Both are designed to increase their revenue from selling other things than health and productivity.
"Remove the crapware [Recall, AI etc] and adverts"
But, but,...
What use is Windows to MS if all they care for would be your work and your convenience?
Did you think of that? Don't you think you are egotistical and self centered, not thinking of poor MS and it's shareholders?
Don't ask what MS can do for you. Ask yourself what you can do for MS!
“What came through was the voice of people who care deeply about Windows and want it to be better.”
This sounds like MS marketing telling us they increased licensing fees because customers demanded more simple and higher license fees (which they have actually done in the past).
Forcing the world to buy newer, more expensive hardware for a forced upgrade that runs worse on that newer better hardware than the old version on the obsolete hardware is expected to induce some negative responses.
But I get the impression many of the people mentioned cared deeply about Windows like prisoners care deeply about the quality of prison facilities and "services".
"The researchers are careful to point out that the findings are observational, meaning that they can spot patterns but can't prove cause and effect."
There is that lingering doubt. Dementia develops over decades. There is still that off chance that early dementia leads to a life style where people drink less coffee.
However, I don't mind drinking coffee daily, so why not? I don't have to wait for this to be validated in some future time.
But do a really have to limit myself to 3 cups a day?
"The more we learn the more it seems that basic life is the easy part, and the hard part was the transition to multicellular complex organisms. "
Multicellular life requires a highly efficient energy cycle. That required free oxygen on earth.
In other words, life had to change the chemistry of the outer layer, atmosphere and hydrosphere, from reducing CO2 + CH4 to oxydizing O2.
That did require a lot of time.
"These molecules themselves aren't "life" and the conditions inside Earth, or even just on its surface, during its formation would have dissociated them anyway."
It took over 500M years before the comet bombardement era ended. It is questionable whether there was liquid water all the time as a few 1000km comet hits shroud the earth in molten rock. When a 100km comet hits the earth, there will be little organic material left from that comet.
But a rain of smaller debris can rain organic material down. That will add up over the hundreds of millions of years.
"Being asked to show a government issued photo ID to receive a ballot to vote is not going to disenfranchise anybody than can walk about without excessive drooling!"
Except, you have to ensure everyone can and will get such an ID in time. Which is most definitely not done.
Also, an ID requirement puts a tax on voting. It is illegal to put a tax on voting.
Running OpenClaw on your own systems is starting to look like hosting Robot Wars in your own home
"We take security research seriously and continue improving safeguards to increase robustness against adversarial inputs."
It has become pretty much a matter of fact that the current generation of LLMs cannot be secured against adversarial inputs.
Prompt injection for an LLM is like playing "Simon Says" with a child. The child will trip up eventually, as will the LLM.
The LLM doctor tripping up gives the "cyber security kill chain" a very literal meaning.
Not here?
Is cancer a disease that can be cured by DNA teleportation?
I guess, the answer is no.
"can we get a microclaw or Infinitesimal-claw or maybe best of all NoClaw ?"
Sorry, but things never get uninvented. It seems several empires have tried to ban gun powder, but that didn't work either. Inventions are here to stay.
If you cannot beat them, join them.
Treat AI code generators as really "smart" compilers. You describe your code design in a markdown document and let the AI generate and test the code.
Then put your experiences in your resume and ask your employer for a raise. We are in a hype cycle, aren't we?
"Any project using Git could mirror a read-only copy of their repo to anywhere they want (e.g. GitHub, GitLab, Codeberg etc.)"
Getting automatic updates for your mirror takes "work" and/or money. Both the work and money are negligible, but someone has to account for it, which again requires sign-offs. Even a $0.02 monthly payment must be accounted for.
"How much can it cost to run their own GIT repo either on prem or in the cloud?"
The cost is not in running the GIT repo, but in the paperwork and effort needed to get the few bucks in your budget.
If you have to work for months argue with PHBs and bean counters to set it up, you rather use the "free" version.
"the price for AI will skyrocket once it's been adopted and you're addicted."
Enshitification in action!
All those CEO/CFOs should have learned in MBA that ALL the profit ends up in the most consolidated part of the chain. Just remember how the first railway companies set prices.
In the 1990s Microsoft "absorbed" 90+% of the productivity increase due to automatization of business processes. AI companies will do the same with any productivity increases.
That is exactly the expectation that drives this investment bubble.
If there are 5 AI suppliers and 200,000 customers, where will the bucks end up?
Yep, humans are not all the same.
If the NORM is size M 36-24-36, we are all size-diverse.
The point is, education, industry, and commerce need a behavioral standard human for efficiency. Over the years, standards have become more strict.
All non-standard humans are considered neurodiverse because they require adaptations, increase cost, and reduce efficiency.
Famous neurodiverse people: E Musk, P Hegseth, JD Vance, D Trump, B Gates, P Hilton, P Thiel
You do realize your bed is the most dangerous place to be?.
One million of us, then, die annually. Out of this million ten or twelve thousand are stabbed, shot, drowned, hanged, poisoned, or meet a similarly violent death in some other popular way, such as perishing by kerosene-lamp and hoop-skirt conflagrations, getting buried in coal-mines, falling off house-tops, breaking through church, or lecture-room floors, taking patent medicines, or committing suicide in other forms. The Erie railroad kills 23 to 46; the other 845 railroads kill an average of one-third of a man each; and the rest of that million, amounting in the aggregate to that appalling figure of 987,631 corpses, die naturally in their beds!
"Just reinforcing that you should not ever create an account there"
Not always possible for social and employment reasons.
However, there is a good case to make to keep your pseudonymous accounts without reference to actual places, names, dates. Or be vague and random under your pen-name, and don't brag. And never let you real identity cross the pseudonym.
For example, the number of middle aged female Bostoners that visited Lyon in France on January 15th for their birthday is worryingly small. You might give away too much identifiable information. However, the number of Americans visiting France (or Europe) this winter (or last year) makes such a fact already much less revealing. And they speak French in Belgium and Switzerland too, if that is the relevant factor.
Another solution is to invent a pseudo back-history for your pseudonym and stick to it. But I think that would be hard to keep up.
"can you LLM-figure out my ElReg non-AC pseudonym from just this one post?"
Not from one short post. It always depends on what you have written. It needs data points that link you to specific places and times.
But if you use a pseudonym and wrote comments about visiting a specific international conference or happening and the city you live in and where you got your education, an LLM might find all attendees from your city who attended your school/university.
That set of people might contain only you.
Your LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Xitter accounts generally contain all this information. If not, then the accounts of those who follow you might have it.
Look up some OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) stories to get a feeling what is all possible with just these four social media.
Then imagine what an LLM can do which scrapes them all.
The fact that some billionaires float the idea of orbital datacenters to the public gives us a good impression of how stupid they think the public is. And Gartner seems to be convinced they are right and it actually works.
But hey, the same source came up with a plan to save humanity by emigrating to Mars.
As a sizeable fraction of the population believes the earth is flat, "they" might be right about the near infinite stupidity of mankind[1].
I used to worry about strategies and policies to mend this situation until I realized that stupidity is not a defective mind, but pure laziness.
Stupid people simply don't want to spend real effort to think, especially not about other people, but rather stick to whatever feels "good".
"Good" as in "For every problem, however complicated, there is a simple solution (and it is wrong)"
[1] M/F
"Sometimes simply named different, like "Grundgesetz", but the same effect."
Indeed, and the "Grundgesetz", "Grondwet", or "La Constitution du 4 octobre 1958", etc all protect the free expression of opinions, but not "free speech" as the such.
Different formulation with a subtly different meaning.
Actually, only the US has a universal right to "Freedom of Speech" in their constitution. Other nations protect the "Freedom of Expressing an Opinion" in their official languages.
The difference is subtle, but it seems death threats are not considered an "Expression of an Opinion" by the courts.
"We can measure semantic ablation through entropy decay."
So, we can measure the AI-ness of a text by it's entropy (actually, a form of perplexity)!
A new language processing field is born.
The fact that it will mark Marketing and CEO business speak too is a feature, not a bug. These text genre's are the human business equivalent of AI speak: All form, no content.
"Because the [Mad Red Hatter] supporting idiots, even when confronted with the sheer volume of his lies, still wont question them"
Cults are like that. Cults show that Human Stupidity indeed might be infinite.[1]
Cf:
Amy Carlson was called 'Mother God' by members of 'Love Has Won'
[1] Infinite in the mathematical sense. as in, for every level of stupidity, there will be an even bigger stupidity found.
"Pure management hallucination about 'lazy workers'."
Management literature seems to be longing for their ideal company of the past: The slave labor plantation.
There, in the plantations, the perfect "employees" could be housed, fed, and organized in the most efficient and profitable way. Investors got the maximum return and pension plans nor health care were ever a liability.
And never, ever could "lazy employees" put their personal interests and personal preferences before the holy interests of the investors.
Making backups of important data, code, and services is ALWAYS a good idea.
Codeberg has already been mentioned. It is not in the USA and Free. Importing code from GitHub is easy.
But Sourceforge and GitLab also work well[1].
[1] YMMV! If you use GitHub actions etc, you will be toast, though.
You are shooting the messenger.
Many studies have found that good looks are good for your career. People just seem to prefer to be around tall, good looking people. And they project all kinds of positive traits to good looking people.
These Big 5 attributions are just another example.
Business careers and renumeration simply reflect the prejudices of the powerful. And they reward those that look like their idols, first and foremost. The study simply shows how deep this goes.
