This whole "OpenClaw" thing has made me very angry and I wrote a bit about the why.

@tante https://mastodon.social/@JamesWidman/116032953161658413

@tante

"There is zero artificial intelligence today. There could have been, but 50 years ago the decision was made by most scientists and companies to go with machine learning, which was quick and easy, instead of the difficult task of actually reverse engineering and then replicating the human brain.

So instead what we have today is machine learning combined with mass plagiarism which we call ‘generative AI’, essentially performing what is akin to a magic trick so that it appears, at times, to be intelligent.

While the topic of machine learning is complex in detail, it is simple in concept, which is all we have room for here. Essentially machine learning is simply presenting many thousands or millions of samples to a computer until the associative components ‘learn’ what it is, for example pictures of a daisy from all angles and incarnations.

Then companies scoured the internet in the greatest crime of mass plagiarism in history, and used the basic ability of machine learning to recognize nouns, verbs, etc. to chop up and recombine actual human writings and thoughts into ‘generative AI’.

So by recognizing basic grammar and hopefully deducing the basic ideas of a query, and then recombining human writings which appear to match that query, we get a very faulty appearance of intelligence - generative AI.

But the problem is, as I said in the beginning, there is no actual intelligence involved at all. These programs have no idea what a daisy, or love, or hate, or compassion, or a truck, or horse, or wagon, or anything else, actually is. They just have the ability to do a very faulty combinatorial trick to appear as if they do.

And while the human brain consumes around 20 watts, these massive pattern matching computers consume ever increasing billions.

However there is hope that actual general intelligence can be created because, thankfully, a handful of scientists rejected machine learning and instead have been working on recreating the connectome of the human brain for 50 years, and they are within a few decades of achieving that goal and truly replicating the human brain, creating true general intelligence.

In the meantime it's important for our species to recognize the danger of relying on generative AI for anything, as it's akin to relying on a magician to conjure up a real, physical, living, bunny rabbit.

So relying on it to drive cars, or control any critical systems, will always result in massive errors, often leading to real destruction and death."
SearingTruth

@tante but yeah, the fact the people aren't going to be able to trust FLOSS for the foreseeable future is... unimaginably bad.

it's like if scam health-food influencers took control of the CDC.

@tante @huwr there are a lot of good points and criticisms here, but Peter is not the “tech bro wannabe Elon” you say he is. He’s actually a caring thoughtful human who will probably be really hurt by these words.

@tante @mttaggart @stefan_hessbrueggen here’s the blog from Scott https://theshamblog.com/an-ai-agent-published-a-hit-piece-on-me/ mind blowing.

@rotnroll666 The Kessler syndrome of the Internet.

@tante @mttaggart

@tante "but at least as secure as commercial offerings now slowing going down the drain."

Shouldn't it be "slowly going down"?

@tante
Someone called vibe coded software the "fast fashion of software development" and that is kinda a good summary to get the point across to people unfamiliar with the FOSS ecosystem.

What do you think?

@agowa338 that might actually have been me
https://tante.cc/2026/01/15/software-as-fast-fashion/

@JamesWidman
We need to read Dune's works about the Butlerian Jihad.

@tante

@tante
Oh, ok kinda liked that summary a bit more

Also regarding rejection of responsibility and care, I wonder how much longer that'll still be possible.
Esp. when things like the person asking in the company chat about the fire alarm being real got told by the chatbot it wasn't and that she doesn't have to leave get more widespread. Did you see that one?

https://mastodon.online/@tagir_valeev/116057271527521893

The sad thing is that "open-source" has always been that: a libertarian "do what you want I'm not responsible" ecosystem. Libre software at least tried to make it so that you must make it a collective thing, but still with very little needed coordination. Not surprising seeing where those 2, and computing in general comes from (white rich cishet men who never had any real issues in their life)

What we need is to uproot this foundation. Start from a collective mindset, build from communities where we all listen and take care of each other. Taken to the extreme open licenses are useless: it is better to have a closed-source system that your community controls (ie the community has full control over what the thing does, but outsider don't necessarily) than an open-source system that everyone must understand on their own, leading to in practice control only by those who build it.

@tante very well said. His thirst for nazi-bar fame is apparent.

You didn’t even touch on the uselessness of the project: none of these incel-adjacent techbros need a (digital or not) assistant in their lives; they just want to feel important. Message “something” in their WhatsApp/telegram (not irc, jabber or matrix) instead of just opening their calendar app

@tante "handing out running chainsaws to kids" that's exactly their way of responsibility.

@tante

fyi - typo/german in “on the other faschist social network”. should be “fascist”

@Nfoonf @tante
the bots could rent some humans to go to the dev meeting
https://rentahuman.ai/

@piyuv @tante Since they can't have a sexy female secretary doing these things for them, an AI will have to do.

@tante Somewhat. Though I do believe that people could actually be held legally responsible for what the agents they operate do.

@larsmb from what I see mostly the * with the tiny "you have to check everything" note in tiny font hidden somewhere in invisible ink is considered enough even by law. Which is a mistake.

@demiguise thanks fixed