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The author of this article spends an inordinate amount of time humanizing an AI agent, and then literally saying that you should be terrified by what it does.

Watching fledgling AI agents get angry is funny, almost endearing. But I don’t want to downplay what’s happening here – the appropriate emotional response is terror.

No, I don't think I will, and neither should you. Nothing terrifying happened. Angry blog posts are a dime a dozen (if we take for granted the claim that an AI wrote one), and the corporate pro-AI PR the author repeats is equally unimpressive.

Rooms with a high volume of messages will appear to load faster than rooms with a high volume of joins and leaves... So maybe that's what you're seeing? 25 messages appearing at once is a whole lot more engaging than 25 hidden join events.

I'm agnostic about whether room joins or leaves should be recorded at all (I've seen discord bots report this at the server level), but the pain point is that the records are joined with the messages... I also thought redactions were weird. Federation probably requires it (maybe federation requires room events to be persisted in the room history too), but having to load extra events to explain deleted messages will probably clog up the pipeline as well.

Don't mind me, I'm just thinking aloud.

Apparently, they just took somebody else's idea and made it all about ChatGPT:

QuitGPT is in the mold of Galloway’s own recently launched campaign, Resist and Unsubscribe.

Resist and Unsubscribe encourages you to get away from Google and Amazon, as well as OpenAI. QuitGPT endorses both (Google directly, Amazon indirectly).

Resist and Unsubscribe is a holistic project; QuitGPT cuts out everything except for one product.

Resist and Unsubscribe doesn't inadvertently promote a single product; QuitGPT practically functions as a sneaky advertising campaign (kind of like how Larry David said he wouldn't invest in FTX).

It seems pretty clear which project is better, even if I don't agree with everything the guy behind it said:

Galloway argued that the best way to stop ICE was to persuade people to cancel their ChatGPT subscriptions.

I don't think voting with your dollars will make a huge difference when every ChatGPT subscription costs OpenAI money, but go off I guess

Ideally, a full log of joins and leaves wouldn't be bound directly to a chat anyway, right?

Matrix development seems to be getting pulled in a lot of different directions: the membership history seems like it's an IRC-inspired feature, while communities are inspired by Discord and Slack.

The de facto default/official one, although I have tried others in the distant past.

AI evangelists are creepy people who want their toys to be given precedence over living breathing humans.

Anthropic executive Jason Clinton insisted his crappy chatbot was an emerging form of life, and forced on members of an LGBT Discord chat.

Sora 2, the product that cost $1.6 billion and hasn't recouped even a thousandth of that yet?

Yeah it's as financially unviable as ever

Seems the site is made up of AI enthusiasts who just don't like Trump. At best, it's misguided. At worst, it's plain insincere.

They encourage you to use AI from Google and Anthropic, two companies which are evil like OpenAI.

Alternate corporate options include Gemini from Google and Claude from Anthropic.

People think ChatGPT is the only chatbot in the game... It's time to change that.

Here we were, worried that Sam Altman would jam ads into the middle of ChatGPT responses, and it turns out some innovating pioneers have already done the hard work for him.

are you using the spaces feature in element? that's the same thing as discord "servers". they are on the left, unless you have none yet.

I wrote my comment when testing with Element X. You only get one room list, and it commingles chats from spaces with chats you made yourself.

You have to go to a separate screen to see the spaces themselves. On this screen, I clicked on a group I was in, and it took six seconds to tell me there were four available chats.

You can also disable showing name change and membership change events if you don't care, but membership is good to be aware of and shouldn't be a problem with element x

Even if you disable viewing the events, they're still loaded in the background. I like to disable them, but then you see a lot more nothing and you may not be sure why the screen is empty for a longer while.

Joining a space requires you to manually join every single room in that space, which is bound to cause even more events in low traffic rooms...

Basically, Matrix isn't fast, it doesn't look like it's gonna get fast anytime soon, and it is definitely not a Discord replacement.

Two wrongs don't make a right, though. Being targeted by big actors doesn't mean you should try to DDoS someone else. And the Archive.is maintainer also has a little history with spamming Wikipedia with links to his site, so it's not as if the decision materialized out of thin air.

Some additional reading from Gyrovague, the victim of the DDoS, and other interesting context.

When asked by a commenter,

do we want archive.today taken down over this? Who would lose and who would benefit the most from this takedown?

Gyrovague responded:

As for outcomes, I'm very much a bit player/spectator in this drama, nobody's going to be "taking them down" over DDOSing an obscure nerd blog.

If they do go down, it'll be the FBI or equivalent, and it will be publicly justified as some combination of "protecting the children" (cf. WAAD) and/or copyright violations.

Based on your description, I expected the article to be worthless (and it definitely was worthless!), but I didn't expect the author to start breathlessly talking about Steve Bannon as if he's some paragon of populist "AI safety" wisdom that transcends the Republican and Democrat parties.

For anybody who's not aware, Steve Bannon is a key architect of the first and second Trump administration. And the fact that Bannon is part of the AI safety grift, which should be a red flag that it is a bad thing, this author twists it into a green flag that Bannon might be a good guy after all.