I am not cosigning the particular points made against Rust, because I don't have context, but the particular language is not irrelevant, because the post is calling out social and cultural practices, and Programming languages are largely social and cultural institutions. Part of Rust's success is due to how intentional the initial core users and developers where about this dimension of the PL.

I'm not an expert in AI systems, but here is my current thinkging:

Insofar as 'GenAI' is defined as

AI systems that can generate new content, including text, images, audio, and video, in response to prompts or inputs

I think this is genuinely bad tech. In my analysis, there are no good use cases for automating this kind of creative activity in the way that the current technology works. I do not mean that all machine assisted generation of content is bad, but just the current tech we are calling GenAI, which is of the nature of "stochastic parrots".

I do not think every application of ML is trash. E.g., AI systems like AlphaFold are clearly valuable and important, and in general the application of deep learning to solve particular problems in limited domains is valuable

Also, if we first have a genuinely sapient AI, then it's creation would be of a different kind, and I think it would not be inherently degenerative. But that is not the technology under discussion. Applications of symbolic AI to assist in exploring problem spaces, or ML to solve classification problems also seems genuinely useful.

But, indeed, all the current tech that falls under GenAI is genuinely bad, IMO.

Those are not valuable use cases. “Devouring text” and generating images is not something that benefits from automation. Nor is summarization of text. These do not add value to human life and they don’t improve productivity. They are a complete red herring.

GenAI is a bad tool that does bad things in bad ways.

This is great. Thanks for sharing and taking the time to try for form more connections in the community!

“Persecution” — lol.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pre-Columbian_inventions_and_innovations_of_Indigenous_Americans?wprov=sfti1

That looks very much like a false dichotomy to me. You left out:

• advertising (which does not require selling data, this is just an invasive additive)
• donation and volunteer based (Wikipedia does this quite successfully)
• funded from tax income (as are online government services, crown corporations etc.)
• companies that sell something thru the internet l, and website is an advertising or pm selling platform. This accounts for most sites, tbh, from brands to retailers, to marketplaces like Amazon, Etsy, and Craigslist.

These are just off the top of my head. But the point being is that your major premise of obviously false.

Most companies that are harvesting our data are also requiring or pushing for subscriptions now, so the dichotomy is also false in that respect.

Finally, it is clear that millions of people are quite happy to pay reasonable fees for valuable services, which is why so many fee based companies are doing fine.

= (- 2)

Afaiu,

• a real “Free market” is a myth.
• A fully gov. Controlled market is not a free market by definition.
• The problem with the Canadian housing market is not government regulation, it is excessive marketization (and not enough of the right kinds of regulation).

This is a case of “don’t let the bad make bad stuff worse”.

Removing taxes on tips is a stupid, pandering policy that, at best is just a distraction, and at worse a government subsidy to the restaurant industry.

If we want more progressive taxation that benefits low income earners, we can just do that. Why should a barista make tax-free income but not a janitor? I’m fine with reducing taxes for lower income earners and increasing it for higher income earners. But why should it have anything to do with tips?