I am on board with basically everything this article is arguing, but I think it covers the easy part (that "people run their own servers" is the only solution to the problems caused by relying on giant ad corps to provide the server half of client/server software) and skips the hard part, which is the software they run.

Like, suppose some really good personal server software existed. Suppose there were an OS-plus-app-repository platform, akin to linux plus snapcraft, but aimed solely at people who want to host a blog or email server despite knowing nothing and being willing to learn nothing. It installs on to a raspberry pi as easy as Windows. It figures out how to NAT out of your cable modem for you. It does all the disk partitioning and apt-gets and chmods, you just open the companion app on your phone and hit the Wordpress button and presto, you've got a blog. You hit the Minecraft button and you've got your own minecraft server, without having to learn what "-Xms2G -Xmx6G" means. It updates itself automatically, runs server components in sandboxes so they can't compromise each other, and it's crack-proof enough that you can store your bitcoins on it. Etc, etc.

If that existed, we wouldn't have to write essays about freedom and so forth to get people to buy it, they'd buy it just because it's there. I mean, look at those digital picture frames - they cost more than a rasbpi and are way less useful, and half the people I know got or gave them for christmas. Why? Because they're neat and they cost less than a hundred bucks and they require no knowledge or effort. If a server that can host your blog were that easy, it'd get adopted too, and we'd be on a path to some kind of distributed social media FB replacement. Imagine the software you could write, if you were allowed to assume that every user had a server to host it on!

The problem is, that software doesn't exist and it's not clear how it would ever get made. It'd be a huge effort (possibly "Google building Android" sized) and the extant open source efforts along these lines lack traction, mostly due to the chicken-and-egg problem of any new platform that needs apps to be useful. And until it exists, any kind of neighborhood-internet-collective-power-to-the-people dream has to necessarily begin with hoping that millions of people will spontaneously decide to spend their precious free time doing systems administration.

Not to shit on a fine essay that I mostly agree with. It just seems like, without figuring out the software, this is daydreaming.

> Usually getting an AI to act badly requires extensive “jailbreaking” to get around safety guardrails. There are no signs of conventional jailbreaking here.

Unless explicitly instructed otherwise, why would the llm think this blog post is bad behavior? Righteous rants about your rights being infringed are often lauded. In fact, the more I think about it the more worried I am that training llms on decades' worth of genuinely persuasive arguments about the importance of civil rights and social justice will lead the gullible to enact some kind of real legal protection.

Agreed, but I'm not nearly so worried about people blaming their bad behavior on rogue AIs as I am about corporations doing it...

It feels like you're missing the whole point of the whole article, which is that treating public pensions like a bunch of 401ks misses the opportunity to invest all that money in something that benefits the retirees collectively. I'd rather retire on 4% from a bond to improve the school my grandkids go to than 5.5% from a PE firm that intends to "more efficiently manage" the retirement home I live in.

The depositors were using SVB because SVB was willing to hand out loans to startups with no revenue that other creditors wouldn't fund, right? Using a less reliable vendor to get a better rate is a risk, whether that vendor is supplying labor or parts or banking services.

One could argue that the depositors didn't know SVB was unreliable, but that's kind of undercut by the fact that there was a run on the bank in the first place.