Politically, I don't like him. He had a critical influence in the beginning of the Free Software movement, and its failure can be easily identified in the core ideas that put the freedom of the software before the freedom of the people. The fact he cared more about software than people is reflected in pretty much anything he did.

On a personal level, he seems an insufferable asshole with enough power to get away with toxic behavior. Luckily, I never had to interact with him, but his visibility for sure didn't help marginalizing toxic egomaniacs in IT communities. Being neurodivergent is not an excuse for being an asshole. He's the last remnant of an age that hopefully is over.

Larping as a tankie is definitely a thing of immature, terminally online kids, but I wouldn't throw Lenin in the bunch. While Stalin is mostly condemned as a reactionary psychopath by pretty much everybody except a few leftist basement-dwellers, Lenin is still read and taught throughout the world. Nothing edgy in reading Lenin.

Edgy kids on the internet worship other psychopaths like Pol Pot or Hoxha.

Most people in the field don't even ask themselves this question. They all have an incentive in believing it works.

There's a book about it though: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538651/subprimeattentioncrisis

My girlfriend is a professional fermenter, so I have endless amounts of fermented sauces in my immediate surroundings.

I would say the most hyped one in her network is this strawberry gochujang she's making.

dude, we should have gotten to 0 emissions yesterday to prevent global ecological collapse. Any year in which we keep emitting at this rate, it's millions of preventable deaths in the years to come.

What is happening is that any renewable development slightly lowers the price of energy and so energy consumption increases, because there are no meaningful degrowth policies in place. This is a complete failure for the ideology of transition and for humankind as a whole.

No more "alternatives" please. That formula has failed over and over again. We want software that can do what proprietary platforms do not pursue because it's not profitable. Online spaces to build meaningful connections, have interesting conversations with like-minded people, discover new things, be free from trolls and toxicity, possibly without the guilt of polluting the hell out of this planet with hardware and excessive electricity consumption.

this is all stuff that in Italy goes on inside the city. There are fab-labs, maker-spaces, communal gardens and other communal organizations that enable you to do this without living in bumblefuck nowhere or renting a giant ass house.

Commenting with no clue what people are talking about

While I'm not part of XR myself and I'm not a super fan, I still invite you to stay in the group, especially if you lack alternatives. You have a lot to learn, especially because you disagree with what you perceive is the general strategy.

XR is a movement that locally employs a diversity of tactics and it's not a homogeneous, centrally-directed organization. So when you say that "XR is demonstration oriented", you should understand it as an emergent property of the current situation in which XR is in, or at least your local chapter. It's not like that everywhere, but especially it doesn't have to be. While movements have their own DNA that is hard to alter, XR is relatively open to a diversity of tactics. Being part of a movement means also to have the ability to shape and direct its actions.

Let's be more concrete: once you forge relationships in your local chapter and you gain trust, you can start proposing different kinds of actions and bring change in the org. Learning to do that is a lot of work and it's far from trivial, but better doing it in XR than in a stale ML org full of old tankies. If XR identity is too far away from your proposals, you can gather interest for a side-project done with a different public identity: just because you meet people in XR and do stuff with them doesn't mean you have to go public as XR. You can for example create a lobbying group on your local politicians that is easier to talk to than XR, and then bring XR positions into a city council, for example.

If you feel your local chapter has become a machine to pump out demos without a broader strategy, point that out. Ask what's the long-term strategy, what's the theory of change, how do they expect to make things happen. Ask them to point you to document in which they analyze that: if they have them, your questions will remind them that they should stick to the strategy, if they don't have them push the chapter to set up sessions in which they develop their local strategy.

It's not from me but from AlgorithmWatch, one of the most famous and respected NGOs in the field of Algorithmic accountability. They published plenty of stuff on these topics and human rights threats from these companies.

Also this is an ecosystem analysis of political positioning. These companies and think tanks are going on newspapers with their names to say we should panic about AI. It's not a secret, just open Google News and you fill find a landslide of news on these topics sponsored by these companies with a simple search.

In the picture you can see organizations moving in the public sphere around AI. On the left you have right-wing and libertarian think tanks, corporations and frontline actors that fuel a sense of panic around AI, either to sabotage their business competitors or to leverage this panic to project an idea of being sellers of a very powerful tool while at the same time deflecting responsibility. If the AI is dangerous and sentient, you won't care much about the engineers behind.

On the right you have several public orgs or NGOs operating in the field of algorithmic accountability, digital rights and so on. They push the opposite of the AI panic, pointing the finger at the corporations and powers that create and govern AI

Right now the whole model of generative AI and in general LLM is built on the assumption that training a machine learning model is not a problem for licenses, copyright and whatever. Obviously this is bringing to huge legal battles and before their outcome is clear and a new legal pratice or specific regulations are established in EU and USA, there's no point discussing licenses.

Also licenses don't prevent anything, they are not magic. If small or big AI companies feel safe in violating these laws or just profit enough to pay fines, they will keep doing it. It's the same with FOSS licenses: most small companies violate licenses and unless you have whistleblowers, you never find out. Even then, the legal path is very long. Only big corporate scared of humongous lawsuits really care about it, but small startups? Small consultancies? They don't care. Licenses are just a sign that says "STOP! Or go on, I'm a license, not a cop"