Jensen Huang, the NVIDIA CEO and wearer of the most midlife crisis looking leather jackets in the world, was on Ezra Klein’s podcast. Now I don’t really want you do go through all of what was being said in that recording/writeup. It’s painful. You feel your mental capabilities decaying with every minute of listening … kinda like using a Chatbot. But worse.
Huang says many outrageous things in the podcast. Like when Klein asks about how kids don’t learn skills when using LLMs, Huang responds:
I completely agree. Try to get a kid to do long division right now. The multiplication table is starting to be forgotten. Doing square roots, my goodness. Basic math is being forgotten. Does it matter?
[…]
Yeah. I don’t think it does. I don’t think it does.
Jensen – I don’t think it matters that I build the technology that blocks kids from learning – Huang
Outrageous. But he needs to go on and top this statement with an even worse one:
There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address. […] It’s completely true. Janine will tell you and Lori will tell you.One day I had to pump gas — it was a few years ago. They needed my ZIP code, and I panicked. I didn’t know my ZIP code. I don’t know my telephone number. I forget these things. I can live with it.
Jensen – I have literally nothing in common with human beings – Huang
So Huang is not the only person making these kinds of strange statements. Marc Andreessen proudly declaring not to have any introspection. Sam Altman talking about how how ChatGPT (and probably a bunch of nannies) basically raises his kid. Satya Nadella “staying informed” about the world by listening to – and talking to – podcasts that Microsoft Copilot generates for him.
These are not how actual people live. These are – for actual human beings – very embarrassing things to admit. Why would techbros do that? Constantly.
It of course brings to mind the famous quote from William Gibson’s Count Zero:
“And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.”
And that is true to a degree: That level of access to money does shift how you see, how you interact with the world. It starts with you having a driver so you never have to park a car or go to the gas/charging station and only increases the more money you have. I would honestly not be surprised if those rich people wouldn’t even know where the washing machine is in their mansion. That’s what the help takes care of.
Money – like software – creates abstraction. Distance to the friction of the world. The ability to never be touched and to never have to touch anyone or anything. To have nobody else’s life, their existence as a person with needs and rights and hopes and feelings, matter. That probably is why rich folks – and those how aspire to that lifestyle – love “AI” so much.
But I think there is another aspect to those statements. They are a test.
Donald Trump (I think more subconsciously than intentionally) is a master of this kind of test. It goes like this: You state something outrageous for example “Lake Ontario is now called Lake America”. People should laugh at you because that is absurd. But some people will instantly call it Lake America (like Google changing what Google Maps says). Those are the people who have passed the test. They have debased themselves in public by following something completely off the rails marking themselves as obedient to the person who started the whole thing.
This is a typical kind of behavior you see in cults or for example right wing extremist groups: If you get people to tattoo a visible swastika on themselves they have not only declared their submission to the group but marked themselves as no longer part of the rest of society.
Everything we say has multiple functions and effects. I am not saying that Jensen Huang intentionally plants these weird-ass statements to test the people around him. I am saying that they do serve as a test though. Because in that interview, Klein could have pushed back on Huang. Really dug into how “I don’t know my address” is not about “some skills are no longer required” but about “I am rich and pay a bunch of women to run my life like my mother used to“. Could have challenged that completely disconnected statement to kinda force Huang to step down from abstraction land down to the real world.
But he didn’t. Because he knows the consequences. If you do challenge those things you will not get those kinds of high-profile interviews. If you don’t take whatever those weird men say seriously you have failed the test. And that has consequences.
It is imperative for us to push back on that. Now we don’t get to talk to Jensen Huang – which might be good for our intellectual and psychological well-being – but we talk to people who might accept those statements and argue based on that. “Jensen Huang said that we don’t need those skills”, “Sam Altman said that Intelligence is something that we can just rent from OpenAI”, “Dario Amodei said AI might kill is all”. Weird and dumb shit that needs to be challenged.
We can’t save those broken men from themselves. We have way bigger tasks in front of us. One of those tasks is pushing back on those claims, pointing out how fucking weird those statements are, how they do not make any lick of sense.
Pointing that out, making that explicit, choosing to fail the test is powerful. It does give others the opportunity to step out of the often dominant “quirky tech bro is so visionary” narrative to realize how fucking weird those guys are. How little they know about life. About how to be a human. And that is power. That is connection. That is what allows us to push back on our lives, our social fabric being steamrolled by a bunch of unpleasant dudes.
The only way to actually win at that test is to fail it. Fail it as hard as you can.
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Draken BlackKnight
in reply to F-Droid • • •CryptGoat
in reply to Draken BlackKnight • • •Draken BlackKnight
in reply to CryptGoat • • •That's not an answer to my question.
CryptGoat
in reply to Draken BlackKnight • • •@draken
Your question is not even a full sentence.
There is no option in the app for the old UI. Either you maintain a fork with the old UI or never update (which is hard to recommend).
@fdroidorg
Clay Tribune
in reply to F-Droid • • •Un Bourguignon
in reply to F-Droid • • •Seems to be good on my side 😉.
'dan
in reply to F-Droid • • •But that's a personal thing, I can always navigate each subcategory separately.
Anyway, great update, everything looks and works better.
Great work.
pawty
in reply to F-Droid • • •imagine my sursprise when the app I wanted to install (e1547) was banned by f-droid and is only available on the playstore and github (because it could potentially browse sites with adult content?!) meanwhile you have nitter apps that can browse X (twitter) which has an AI bot for undressing people
f-droid is not an alternative, it's even more restricted than the fucking play store and if anyone has a real alternative I'd love to hear about it
F-Droid
in reply to pawty • • •A user
in reply to pawty • • •although with those restrictions, you can instead migrate to another repository and still receive updates as you wish. bummer that f-droid did remove e1547 for not-so-clear reasons (and i do ask @fdroidorg@floss.social for clarifications) but you can just, not have to use f-droid and instead use another repository, and still have the same experience. f-droid's repository has a pretty low tolerance when it comes to the applications that are published (which gives me confidence that i wont be installing malware, unlike google malware store), but you can pick any option with higher tolerances or different policies for app publishing!
even if you consider f-droid an not alternative to (what i presume is) google play, you still can take its fruits and appreciate that you still have options
GNU/Alex
in reply to F-Droid • • •The UX look like Fdroid Basic on my CalyxOS.
I love it ^^
Tuxicoman
in reply to F-Droid • • •"Talkback" app update proposed by Fdroid?
I'm using grapheneos
Torsten Grote
in reply to Tuxicoman • • •You most likely have talkback installed at a lower (but incompatible?) version. It doesn't propose an update or where do you see that?
@fdroidorg
𝙻𝚎𝚟𝚒 𝙵𝚘𝚛 𝙻𝚒𝚋𝚎𝚛𝚝𝚢
in reply to F-Droid • • •Kurpaph
in reply to F-Droid • • •The new UI seems amazing! I love it!
But I do wonder why even on the new version I still get this message on F-Droid app itself 🤔
Torsten Grote
in reply to Kurpaph • • •Just because 2.0 didn't roll out for it yet. Once it does, the message will go away. Alternatively, enable beta updates in top right corner.
@fdroidorg
locked_in_compiler
in reply to Torsten Grote • • •Hana Aianhanma
in reply to F-Droid • • •Is there an option to hide the repositories list behind an extra password?
As someone who manages the software for several family members, I am not really comfortable having the option to add repositories available to them *that* conveniently.
Néuro
in reply to F-Droid • • •why does it say auto update is not available? It was like this for version 1.2x and my current 2.0.
I managed to update from 1.2 to 2.0 by allowing beta update. Turning beta update off, makes this message appear.
Achim M
in reply to F-Droid • • •Christoph Schmees
in reply to F-Droid • • •Sylvia
in reply to F-Droid • • •Torsten Grote
in reply to Sylvia • • •It is just a JSON array shipping with the client. Data comes from grote.gitlab.io/fdroid-metrics-distilled/
@fdroidorg
F-Droid Top Downloads
grote.gitlab.ioSylvia
in reply to Torsten Grote • • •@grote Ouch, so it's incompatible with the IzzyOnDroid standard and it'll be outdated in the F-Droid client all the time because you can only update it with new releases :(
Well, at least it's *something* for discoverability.
Anyway, thanks for the link :)
Torsten Grote
in reply to Sylvia • • •@SylvieLorxu
Yes it was a hard political compromise. The minimal thing we could do really. I had explored more options in
gitlab.com/fdroid/wiki/-/wikis/Featured-Apps
The list of apps is based on download numbers of the past year, so it doesn't change all that quickly.
Having numbers that include mirrors would be great to have.
@fdroidorg
Featured Apps · Wiki · F-Droid / wiki · GitLab
GitLabIzzy
in reply to Torsten Grote • • •TacoPlant
in reply to F-Droid • • •@fdroidorg,
I have updated to the latest version. It looks very nice.
I am missing the "Permissions" section of an app's page. Is it really removed, or will it be added back gradually in a future release?
Thanks for the great work 🙂
Phillip Plays
in reply to F-Droid • • •marcusxms
in reply to F-Droid • • •1. GenAI ban in apps
2. GenAI filtering (anti feature) in apps, default enabled
3. GenAI filtering (anti feature) in apps, prompt for setting on first launch/update
ĞÖKÜ👻👻™
in reply to F-Droid • • •