[throwaway13337]

I see this happening, too.

We know that a lack of control over their environment makes animals, including humans, depressed.

The software we use has so much of this lack of control. It's their way, their branding, their ads, their app. You're the guest on your own device.

It's no wonder everyone hates technology.

A world with software that is malleable, personal, and cheap - this could do a lot of good. Real ownership.

The nerds could always make a home with their linux desktop. Now everyone can. It'll change the equation.

I'm quite optimistic for this future.

[h14h]

I'm presently in the process of building (read: directing claude/codex to build) my own AI agent from the ground up, and it's been an absolute blast.

Building it exactly to my design specs, giving it only the tool calls I need, owning all the data it stores about me for RAG, integrating it to the exact services/pipelines I care about... It's nothing short of invigorating to have this degree of control over something so powerful.

In a couple of days work, I have a discord bot that's about as useful as chatgpt, using open models, running on a VPS I manage, for less than $20/mo (including inference). And I have full control over what capabilities I add to it in the future. Truly wild.

[discreteevent]

> It's nothing short of invigorating to have this degree of control over something so powerful

Is this really that different to programming? (Maybe you haven't programmed before?)

[afro88]

What models and inference provider?

[GTP]

> The nerds could always make a home with their linux desktop. Now everyone can. It'll change the equation.

Probelm is, to be able to do what you're describing, you still need the source code and the permission to modify it. So you will need to switch to the FOSS tools the nerds are using.

[throwaway13337]

That's a feature, not a bug.

It means normies will finally see value in open source beyond just being free. They'll choose it over closed source alternatives.

This, too, makes a brighter future.

[cedws]

We’re off to a great start then with Anthropic banning users who use alternative clients with their Claude subscription.

[yowlingcat]

I'm actually relieved they're doing it now because it's going to be a forcing function for the local LLM ecosystem. Same thing with their "distillation attack" smear piece -- the more of a spotlight people get on true alternatives + competition to the 900 lb gorillas, the better for all users of LLMs.

[hdjrudni]

That's just because corporations got greedy and made their apps suck.

Strip away the ads, the data harvesting, add back the power features, and we'll be happy again. I'm more willing than ever to pay a one-time fee good software. I've started donating to all the free apps I use on a regular basis.

I don't want to own my own slop. That doesn't help me. Use your AI tools to build out the software if you want, but make sure it does a good job. Don't make me fiddle with indeterministic flavor-of-the-month AI gents.

[moring]

> That's just because corporations got greedy and made their apps suck.

It is true for me with Linux. I code for a living and I can't change anything because I can't even build most software -- the usual configure/make/make install runs into tons of compiler errors most of the time.

Loss of control is an issue. I'm curious if AI tools will change that though.

[safety1st]

I think there's room for both visions. Big Tech is generating more toxic sludge than ever, and yeah sure this is because they're greedy, but more precisely the root cause is how they lobbied Washington and our elected officials agreed to all kinds of pro-corporate, anti-human legislation. Like destroying our right to repair, like criminalizing "circumvention" measures in devices we own, like insane life-destroying penalties for copyright infringement, like looking the other way when Big Tech broke anti-trust laws, etc.

The Big Tech slop can only be fixed in one way, and actually it's really predictable and will work - we need to fix the laws so that they put the rights and flourishing of human beings first, not the rights and flourishing of Big Tech. We need to fix enforcement because there are so many times that these companies just break the law and they get convicted but they get off with a slap on the wrist. We need to legislate a dismantling of barriers to new entrants in the sectors they dominate. Competition for the consumer dollar is the only thing that can force them to be more honest. They need to see that their customers are leaving for something better, otherwise they'll never improve.

But our elected officials have crafted laws and an enforcement system which make 'something better' impossible (or at least highly uneconomical).

Parallel to this if open source projects can develop software which is easier for the user to change via a PR, they totally should. We can and should have the best of both worlds. We should have the big companies producing better "boxed" software. Plus we should have more flexibility to build, tweak and run whatever we want.

[peepee1982]

What you're describing is the expected and correct outcome inside a profit-oriented, capitalist system. So the only way I see out of this situation would be changing policy to a more socialist one, which doesn't seem to be so popular among the tech elite, who often think they deserve their financial status because of the 'value' they provide, without specifying what that value is (or its second-order consequences). Whether that's abusing a monopolistic market position they lucked into, making apps as addictive as possible, or building drones that throw bombs on newborns in hospitals.