I remember some of the early phases of home computing. The whole point of owning a home computer was that in addition to using other people's software, you could write your own and put the machine to whatever use you could think of. And it was a machine you owned, not time on some big company's machine which, ultimately, was controlled, and uses approved, by that company. The whole point of the home computing market was to create an environment where people managed the machines, not the other way around. (Wozniak has said that this was one of his motivations for creating the Apple I and II.)
Now we have people like this guy who say we finally have autonomy in computing—by purchasing time on some big company's machine doing numberwang to write the software for you. Ultimately the big company, not you, controls the machine and the uses to which it may be put. What's worse is these companies are buying up all the manufacturing capacity, starving the consumer market and making it more difficult to acquire computing hardware! No, this is not the autonomy envisioned by Wozniak, Jobs, or even a young shithead Bill Gates.
Hear, hear. The key word I feel, is autonomy. It's like that article says, the coming war on general-purpose computing. We must seize the means of computation. We've already lost control of mobile phones, whose major operating systems barely allow you to see files, or run software of your own choice. That corporate colonization is coming for the rest of the personal computing stack.
Large language models, the resources and the exploitative means it took to create them, are not "free", they have serious social costs and loss of personal freedom. I still use them, particularly local models, but even that is questionable. At least when the AI bubble bursts and the inevitable enshittification begins, I will be able to continue running them without further vendor lock-in or erosion of privacy.
In terms of bootstrappability and supply chain risk, LLMs fail because we the people are not able to re-create them from scratch.
I remember some of the early phases of home computing. The whole point of owning a home computer was that in addition to using other people's software, you could write your own and put the machine to whatever use you could think of. And it was a machine you owned, not time on some big company's machine which, ultimately, was controlled, and uses approved, by that company. The whole point of the home computing market was to create an environment where people managed the machines, not the other way around. (Wozniak has said that this was one of his motivations for creating the Apple I and II.)
Now we have people like this guy who say we finally have autonomy in computing—by purchasing time on some big company's machine doing numberwang to write the software for you. Ultimately the big company, not you, controls the machine and the uses to which it may be put. What's worse is these companies are buying up all the manufacturing capacity, starving the consumer market and making it more difficult to acquire computing hardware! No, this is not the autonomy envisioned by Wozniak, Jobs, or even a young shithead Bill Gates.