When someone says “AI is just a tool” they are actually saying it can enable people to do very good or very bad things. People might respond with “AI is just a tool” if someone says AI is evil, because machine learning is not evil, it is a technology.

Saying you can do both good and bad with any tool is misleading if the tool makes it easier to do the bad thing (and I think that is one of the points of the article). Also, it is common, and in my opinion valid, to use metonymy and refer to the practice of how LLMs are made and used rather than just the LLM itself when saying “LLMs are evil”.

I when I read reports of the downtime on mastodon I checked status.codeberg.org and saw that almost everything was a red line, except for the authenticated traffic. I guess I was lucky that I still had my cookies.

Not completely down; as a signed in user I didn’t notice a thing.

They are considered volunteers in the Netherlands as long as the compensation is way below market rates. I don’t understand why you think this is a problem.

In the Netherlands, volunteers can be paid up to €5.60 per hour and up to €2100 per year (tax-free).