Someone has been creating open source clones of the most popular industry standard programs that have been enshitified to oblivion like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office. They’re free and open source. I don’t think they’re nearly as bad as what the meme suggest. They do work from what I can tell although some features appear to be missing. And since they’re open source if anything needs fixed it will be fixed in the future.
It doesn’t have to be only symbolic, the capabilities of the current models have the potential to blow a lot of locked-down hardware and software wide open. Proprietary firmware can be decompiled and reverse engineered by an LLM, sometimes in literally minutes.
I’ve been deeply sceptical about AI for a long time, but the stuff it’s doing now can’t be ignored and isn’t going away. Personally, my stance is now that we should crack open everything we can and gain back control of our stuff while tokens are still relatively cheap and the AI companies are still solvent. Or they succeed in regulating open weight models and start locking down their own models’ capabilities.
Like, wouldn’t it be fantastic if all those proprietary vendor blobs in Android got decompiled and suddenly we get drivers that allow Linux to run with full functionality on any phone? What about jailbreaking our cars and nuking all the spyware? What about turning every cloud-dependent smart device into a local-only one? There’s so much we could do.
The ArtCraft suite.
Someone has been creating open source clones of the most popular industry standard programs that have been enshitified to oblivion like Adobe Photoshop and Microsoft Office. They’re free and open source. I don’t think they’re nearly as bad as what the meme suggest. They do work from what I can tell although some features appear to be missing. And since they’re open source if anything needs fixed it will be fixed in the future.
Except Claude shat them out in record time which means they’re likely virtually unmaintainable.
And probably burned half of the Amazon forrest to do so. What the hell.
I mean, I’m kind of for it not as a surface level practical solution, but as a symbolic fighting back against the big guys.
Like, if AI is going to make the worker valueless why not use it to make the products of rent-seeking software giants useless as well?
It doesn’t have to be only symbolic, the capabilities of the current models have the potential to blow a lot of locked-down hardware and software wide open. Proprietary firmware can be decompiled and reverse engineered by an LLM, sometimes in literally minutes.
I’ve been deeply sceptical about AI for a long time, but the stuff it’s doing now can’t be ignored and isn’t going away. Personally, my stance is now that we should crack open everything we can and gain back control of our stuff while tokens are still relatively cheap and the AI companies are still solvent. Or they succeed in regulating open weight models and start locking down their own models’ capabilities.
Like, wouldn’t it be fantastic if all those proprietary vendor blobs in Android got decompiled and suddenly we get drivers that allow Linux to run with full functionality on any phone? What about jailbreaking our cars and nuking all the spyware? What about turning every cloud-dependent smart device into a local-only one? There’s so much we could do.