I find a ton of uses for quick Python scripts hammered out with Bing Chat to get random stuff done.
It's also super useful when brainstorming and fleshing out stuff for the tabletop roleplaying games I run. Just bounce ideas off it, have it write monologues, etc.
I think there's a significant difference between "neutral" and "diverse".
For example, Reddit is big enough that if you find yourself holding an unpopular opinion in some particular subreddit and you're getting battered with downvotes, you can probably find some other similar subreddit that's more friendly to whatever view you've got that's drawing ire. People speak derisively of "bubbles" and "echo chambers", but really, why should I stick around and try to engage with people who just don't want you around? Communities naturally tend to segregate themselves along ideological lines like this.
Here on the Fediverse the population's too small to support quite so many diverse communities yet, unfortunately. So if you've got an unpopular minority view you can end up stuck with either routinely finding yourself serving as a punching bag or just not posting. That's no fun.
Yeah, so many people are confidently stating "LLMs can't think like humans do!" When we're actually still pretty unclear on how humans think.
Sure, an LLM on its own may not be an AGI. But they're remarkably closer than we would have predicted they could get just a few years ago, and it may well be that we just need to add a bit more "special sauce" (memory, prompting strategies, perhaps a couple of parallel LLMs that specialize in different types of reasoning) to get them over the hump. At this point a lot of the research isn't going into simply "make it bigger!", it's going into "use LLMs smarter."
Content warning: this is a rant from a teenager who has strong opinions.
Okay...
However, it holds a monopoly on software.
You don't know what a "monopoly" is.
they could just go “Boop! You’re gone!” and there’s nothing I could do about it other than move forges.
Yeah, nothing you could do about it, other than moving to one of the many other git hosts. Monopoly!
And then after listing off a whole bunch of alternative git hosts...
Centralization is not bad by itself but it’s bad when there’s no other option. There just needs to be ways to contribute to code without having to use Github.
You have plenty of ways to do that, and you know that because you just listed them. Github is not a monopoly.
Also, I don't see the concept of open source mentioned at any point in this rant.
To be fair, that description of being piled on by angry people who are looking for an excuse to be angry could easily describe a lot of threads I've been in on the Fediverse lately. Seems like there's an unfortunate mood going around right now.
Ideally, everyone would militarily disengage with everyone else. The situation is bad enough as it is without drawing more sides in. But I suppose if the US feels it must directly involve itself, then shooting down unmanned missiles is the least bloody way and the easiest to back out of.