Punk, or why I don't stream anymore

23 days ago

Hacker culture was destroyed by spectacle and signaling value, turning it into consumption without participation.
AI exacerbates the loss of authenticity, making people feel like they're steering when they're not.
Modern dating profiles and online streams reflect a sanitized, marketable identity with no rough edges.
Isolation is impossible as the internet is uniform and pervasive, outcompeting the old world.
Cultural movements get co-opted and sold back in a diluted form, losing their original essence.
AI and the information war demand inner reality, not just physical participation.
Revolutions often make things worse, and the current revolution involves AI as a tool in this war.

Programmers have a moral responsibility to the entire world, not any single nation, to uphold the Internet as a universal, uncensored knowledge-sharing system.
Mass surveillance systems, initially built for advertising, are now used by companies like Palantir to enable technofascism through state-corporate fusion.
Surveillance justified by national security inevitably targets a nation's own citizens, expanding to encompass entire populations under paranoid control.

AI advancements, such as Claude disproving the Jacobian conjecture, trigger an existential crisis.
The author feels their economic value is diminishing as AI outperforms humans in coding and math.
Most people remain unaffected by these technological changes, focusing on daily life.

Historically, potatoes were believed to cause leprosy due to their unusual appearance and growth method.
AI can now generate full academic papers from spurious correlations, potentially making some academic fields redundant.
2025 is projected to have the fewest US murders since reliable data began in 1960.

The essay compares AI development to the philosopher's stone in Fullmetal Alchemist, pouring human souls into a flawed solution.
AI creates homunculi (chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, GLM) from a puree of souls, demoralizing without being better than humans.
The problem is not hype but the AI itself, which induces despair because the next version will be even better.

The 'bitter lesson' states that raw computation always outperforms human cleverness.
Those with the most compute—individuals, companies, or governments—will dominate.
The race to hoard compute is likened to an AI Manhattan Project, making related resources irrationally valuable.

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