Look, Musk is one of the most despicable people on this planet, and I get why everyone here loves to hate on him: I do too.

But ... am I really the only one here who is concerned about the fact that Open AI was created to be a non-profit that advanced humanity ... and it clearly transformed into an engine of advancing its shareholders interests?

Slowly becoming? They've been this way for more than a decade: remember the whole Unity debacle?

Way back in 2010, LInux had two (major) UIs: KDE and GNOME. Canonical (specifically, Mark Shuttleworth) tried to force everyone to adopt a brand new system, Unity, despite the fact that no one asked for it. It was a straight up Bill Gates "We have the most market share, we can do whatever the fuck we want" power play.

It didn't work: the larger Linux community revolted. But it took Shuttleworth SEVEN YEARS to give up and finally appreciate that he wasn't a god who got to dictate what the Linux community ... and clearly he never really learned that lesson.

This is very, very true. If you ask anyone who actually knows anything about robotics, they'll point out that you almost never see a human standing near a humanoid robot (and when you do, it's under extremely controlled "demo" conditions only).

There's a reason for that: HUMANOID ROBOTS ARE FREAKING DANGEROUS! One mistaken action by these things can literally kill a person, and we don't (yet) have the tech to safeguard that (and still have a useful robot).

To be clear, humanoid robots are coming someday ... it's just that that day is likely 10+ years away. Ask a real robotics expert (eg. the guy that founded Roomba has some great explanatory talks on Youtube). In the meantime, all sorts of practical real-world use cases for robots exist ... just not humanoid ones.

So you know what tools an ophthalmologist should use ... better than the ophthalmologist himself?

To me that feels like ... if I were writing software for an ophthalmologist ... and that ophthalmologist was like "You use VS Code? I won't hire someone who uses such garbage tech".

Don't kid yourself: they're ALL "criminal ones".

Dogs are felines

No, dogs are canines

I am irritated that you completely ignored the substance of my post. Way to attack a strawman.

Possibly, but would you trust anything cooked up by a Tesla robot?

Based on Musk's track record, I'm sure 95% of the time the popcorn would be perfectly edible, and perhaps even extra tasty ... but you DO NOT want to eat popcorn from one of those 5% batches.

Fuck TurboTax and Intuit: they are effectively a tax on America, with all the proceeds going into their pockets.

The government could have provided free tax prep software to most Americans. THE ONLY REASON THEY DIDN'T was because of lobbying from Intuit. (Look it up if you don't believe me).

Fuck those selfish, greedy, un-American bastards!

Yes, but not at first: it took awhile before the whole Ford factory line thing even started.

Meanwhile, companies using AI employ lots of people too. It's very possible AI will open entire categories of employment we can't dream of yet (just like 1920's Americans couldn't have dreamed of working at a Ford plant).

Again, it's just how technology works ... but it's not our real problem. Our real problem is all the wealth concentrated in a handful of individuals. It would be a problem whether we had amazing new technology, or not.

You can say it like that, and make it sound super evil ... but none of us our crying over the 99.9% of horse shit sweepers who lost their jobs when automobiles were invented.

ELIMINATING JOBS IS NOT INHERENTLY A BAD THING! When technology improves things, jobs disappear ... and we all want technology to improve our society.

What is inherently bad is wealth concentration. AI is just a drop in the bucket of helping "the rich getting richer". Long before AI existed, the wealthy had already made systemic changes to exacerbate that (very real) problem in our society.

All of this "AI is stealing our jerbs!" stuff is a distraction (like similar arguments about illegal immigrants). It keeps people from noticing and addressing the real problem: wealth concentration.

Right, but presumably most of Meta's employees have skill sets that would let them acquire all three at another (less awful) company. This isn't about the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs pyramid, it's about the top.

Meta employees either have no morals, or they believe Meta offers more money and/or status than a job elsewhere ... but they're certainly not there because they otherwise can't afford food or medicine!

... except for all the ones that don't (and don't support your thesis).

Script kiddies are the *least* of our worries. National governments (most notably North Korea, but many others also) are launching major, sophisticated attacks on companies and other infrastructure ... on a daily basis!

Script kiddies are a cute thing to remember, and of course they still exist ... but the stakes of cyber espionage (or "cyber terrorism", or "state-sponsored hacking") are much, much higher than they ever used to be.

Backstory: I started out with Gentoo and Mandrake Linux in '99. They were exciting, but ... messy and difficult.

Then, I started using Ubuntu on the job, and it was amazing. It felt like "Linux has finally arrived as a real OS!" It was incredible, and I thought the distro wars were all but over: Ubuntu won.

But then Shuttleworth (the maniac founder of Canonical/Ubuntu) thought the same thing, and started acting like the Bill Gates of the Linux community. Linux is supposed to be a community project, but he kept trying to force bad technical decisions on the rest of the community (eg. Unity).

Ultimately I switched to Linux Mint, which leveraged Ubuntu to offer great Linux ... without being constrained by Shuttleworth (eg. I run MATE or Cinnamon, not Unity).

TLDR; But what I care about, and I think what most people care about, is "Linux that works well". Few people give a damn about Ubuntu and Shuttleworth: if Linux Mint can deliver a great experience without them, it will be a *better* distro for it!

I recently joined a robotics company, and quickly learned that there's a giant divide between the "aspirational" robotics companies, which promise humanoid (or canine) robots, and the practical real-world companies. The humanoids get all the press, while the practical robots rarely make the news at all.

But if you notice, you will almost never see a humanoid robot demo next to an actual human ... because those things are freaking dangerous! Humanoids are still a decade or more away from being able to safely interact with human beings. But, just from all the overhyped robot demo videos you see, you'd think they're all but ready for production.

Meanwhile, practical robots all look nothing like a living creature: they look like your Roomba! In other words, they have a boring/practical form factor, which almost certainly involves wheels to move around. There's some incredibly cool stuff happening with those kinds of robots, and some are being used in the workplace today ... but they don't make for sexy robot demo videos, so few people outside the industry even know they exist.