Thanks for those links.

Honestly, I think this is one of the big questions of our moment.

How can distinct societies with different technological eco systems co-exist on this planet?

We’ve got extreme examples like monks in monasteries, the Amish, Orthodox Jews etc. But at some point, maybe now, there may be many who’d really like and even at a psychological level “need” to live in a different ecosystem quite different from the wants of “the global market”.

You can try to get a dumb phone or not use AI or whatever. But thinking in terms of hard exclusions and ecosystem health seems to me necessary.

I was lucky enough to speak to a friend in the environmental space about 10 years ago. I was never a super fan of Musk but I casually muttered something about Teslas being good as electrics.

They interrupted the conversation and made it clear to the group that Musk was more of a bullshit artist than the public were aware and that we was unclear to do any good for the environment at least not reliably.

Then I spoke to someone in tech that clued me into the same perspective. I’d never realised how much of a cult of personality had been built around him until then. Seeing him unfold in this way since then has certainly been “interesting”.

Apart from the particulars of Musk, I think the lesson is to never get involved in a cult of personality.

If you’re talking about the company I think you are, that acquisition by AMD is interesting news.

The company was the one with a demo AI in their page that was super quick??

I always figured that was the future of AI when I saw it. Where you’d buy processors with n number of “AI cores” that’d have work/prompts scheduled as needed in the same way we now CPUs and RAM.

It’s interesting to see Torvalds emerge as a kind of based tech hero. I’m thinking here also of his rant not long ago on social.kernel.org (a kernel devs microblog instance) that was essentially a pretty good anti-anti-leftism tirade in true Torvalds fashion.

EDIT:

Torvalds’s anti-anti-left post (I was curious to read it again):

I think you might want to make sure you don’t follow me.

Because your “woke communist propaganda” comment makes me think you’re a moron of the first order.

I strongly suspect I am one of those “woke communists” you worry about. But you probably couldn’t actually explain what either of those words actually mean, could you?

I’m a card-carrying atheist, I think a woman’s right to choose is very important, I think that “well regulated militia” means that guns should be carefully licensed and not just randomly given to any moron with a pulse, and I couldn’t care less if you decided to dress up in the “wrong” clothes or decided you’d rather live your life without feeling tied to whatever plumbing you were born with.

And dammit, if that all makes me “woke”, then I think anybody who uses that word as a pejorative is a f*cking disgrace to the human race. So please just unfollow me right now.