Along a similar line, guy makes a global surveillance company and calls it Palantir, apparently oblivious to how much of a comic book villain he looks like. Thiel looks at Sauron like "that's so meee".
this post was submitted on 08 Feb 2026
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Fuck AI
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AI, in this case, refers to LLMs, GPT technology, and anything listed as "AI" meant to increase market valuations.
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What about the AI that I run on my local GPU that is using a model trained on open source and public works?
Sounds like the rings of the Elves to me
That is slightly less unethical than Claude or whatever, but it is still unethical.
This is very cool. Any advice a simple software engineer (me) could follow to practice the same?
Flawed rhetoric. Tech bros read Lord of the Rings and think "Sure, those guys got corrupted by the ring, but I could handle it."
We knows how to handle the precioussssss!
There's more parallels when you consider Tolkien was writing a critique of industrialization. Evil wasn't just represented by the One Ring, but also mining too greedily and too deep, cutting down all the trees, poisoning all the water, etc etc.
There's smoke rising from Isengard these days because they fired the coal plants back up.
Tolkien predicted the failure of marketed AI? I'm not surprised, it's a product of human industry and progress, something he was critical about.
I say marketed AI as it's not really AGI, even though it's sold that way. The good/bad news is that actual progress in AGI will have worse results, and current AI is just demonstrating the issues that will crop up without the faster pace and worse destruction AGI could possibly bring. (See the AI alignment problem for details)
But hey... we learn lessons from history, right?
Right??
I say marketed AI as it’s not really AGI
"it" - being machine learning - is not even AI. Only dumbfucks believe that garbage marketing BS.
It objectively is, same as OCR and fuzzy logic.
It's just that when people hear "artificial intelligence", they think of Lt. Cmdr. Data and not the actual field of research that machine learning is a legitimate part of.
