To be honest I'm fine with it in isolation, copyright is bullshit and the internet is a quasi-socialist utopia where information (an infinitely-copyable resource which thus has infinite supply and 0 value under capitalist economics) is free and humanity can collaborate as a species. The problem becomes that companies like Google are parasites that take and don't give back, or even make life actively worse for everyone else. The demand for compensation isn't so much because people deserve compensation for IP per se, it's an implicit understanding of the inherent unfairness of Google claiming ownership of other people's information while hoarding it and the wealth it generates with no compensation for the people who actually made that wealth. "If you're going to steal from us, at least pay us a fraction of the wealth like a normal capitalist".

If they made the models open source then it'd at least be debatable, though still suss since there's a huge push for companies to replace all cognitive labor with AI whether or not it's even ready for that (which itself is only a problem insofar as people need to work to live, professionally created media is art insofar as humans make it for a purpose but corporations only care about it as media/content so AI fits the bill perfectly). Corporations are artificial metaintelligences with misaligned terminal goals so this is a match made in superhell. There's a nonzero chance corporations might actually replace all human employees and even shareholders and just become their own version of skynet.

Really what I'm saying is we should eat the rich, burn down the googleplex, and take back the means of production.

The hype cycle around AI right now is misleading. It isn't revolutionary because of these niche one-off use-cases, it's revolutionary because it's one AI that can do anything. Problem with that is what it's most useful for is boring for non-technical people.

Take the library I wrote to create "semantic functions" from natural language tasks - one of the examples I keep going to in order to demonstrate the usefulness is

@semantic
def list_people(text) -> list[str]:
    '''List the people mentioned in the given text.'''

8 months ago, this would've been literally impossible. I could approximate it with thousands of lines of code using SpaCy and other NLP libraries to do NER, maybe a dictionary of known names with fuzzy matching, some heuristics to rule out city names or more advanced sentence structure parsing for false positives, but the result would be guaranteed to be worse for significantly more effort. Here, I just tell the AI to do it and it... does. Just like that. But you can't hype up an algorithm that does boring stuff like NLP, so people focus on the danger of AI (which is real, but laymen and news focus on the wrong things), how it's going to take everyone's jobs (it will, but that's a problem with our system which equates having a job to being allowed to live), how it's super-intelligent, etc. It's all the business logic and doing things that are hard to program but easy to describe that will really show off its power.

I guess "checks and balances" means nothing, then. What happens when congress passes laws to regulate them and they just say "nuh uh that's unconstitutional" when it's obviously and demonstrably not?

Daily reminder that Firefox is customizable to the point of removing Mozilla's telemetry and making it look and feel almost like Chromium. And no, de-Googled Chromium probably isn't enough because preliminary code for implementing WEI has been pushed upstream (basically they added the code which makes it possible for WEI to be implemented, strongly suggesting they're intending to actually implement it upstream and not in Chrome)

Huh, is this the start of a new post-platform era where we see such business models the way we now see cigarettes?

Now I want to see his reaction when people start breaking out the guillotines because his ilk have made peaceful resolution impossible.

Is it time to DDoS fax gay porn to Mississippi offices?

Can't be a billionaire if you pass a certain threshold of self-awareness, it's the rules.

It sounds simple but data conditioning like that is how you get scunthorpe being blacklisted, and the effects on the model even if perfectly executed are unpredictable. It could get into issues of "race blindness", where the model has no idea these words are bad and as a result is incapable of accommodating humans when the topic comes up. Suppose in 5 years there's a therapist AI (not ideal but mental health is horribly understaffed and most people can't afford a PhD therapist) that gets a client who is upset because they were called a f**got at school, it would have none of the cultural context that would be required to help.

Techniques like "constitutional AI" and RLHF developed after the foundation models really are the best approach for these, as they allow you to get an unbiased view of a very biased culture, then shape the model's attitudes towards that afterwards.

People arguing he shouldn't be prosecuted is wild, like we've been so cowed into submission by this dumpster fire of an electoral system that we're afraid to prosecute high treason because otherwise the treasonist might win

This gives him way too much credit lol. He isn't playing 5D chess, he impulse-bought a $44B company and is too much of a narcissistic control freak to stop touching it. Harming marginalized people is a natural consequence of essentially any action a billionaire takes by virtue of their existence.

The EU giveth (removable batteries, mandated USB-C) and it taketh away

Doesn't this just make Trump's case worse? He was under strict limits of what he could say on social media lest he "accidentally" intimidate witnesses, but he's still culpable if his cronies do it for him.

Cop ticketing him even though he "likes feeding the homeless" is exactly why "ACAB". It doesn't matter how good a person you are, as a cop if you do your job perfectly and follow the rules of the system, you're still harming people.

I went from trans-tolerant ("do what you want it's none of my business") to trans-supportive largely because of parasocial relationships with trans creators: PhilophyTube, ContraPoints, JessieGender, Jimquisition, Chipflake, Jammidodger, and NOAHFINCE. Then there's nonbinary and trans-adjacent creators like Thought Slime (some kind of nonbinary?), CJ the X (nonbinary presentation?), Mother's Basement (gf is Yazzie, trans woman), and Shaun (has entire hour long campaign videos about the BBC's transphobia). Point being, knowing a trans person IRL is much less of barrier than you'd think since parasociality seems to cover it, and trans and trans-supportive creators have gotten a lot more open about being on the internet.

(yes NB is considered trans but 1. people don't generally think of it that way and 2. I'm an AMAB demiboy and feel like that me being "trans" would appropriate the struggles of "real" trans people when my own identity is a "rounding error", and to a large degree feel like gender nonconformity is less stigmatized than out-and-out binary trans people. I'm not transmedicalist, NB are still valid and may or may not want their own gender confirmation stuff, but feel like "trans" as a label is too broad an umbrella, since it basically covers all gender nonconformity)

Reading the article makes my blood run cold and starting to think about moving to Europe, and I'm not even that marginalized. White, male, gay, mostly cis. But then, if the US withdraws from NATO won't Russia run amok in Europe? Is this WWIII?

Social and conversational engines (think Stardew Valley or Animal Crossing) tend to make me feel a lot lonelier than straight NPC dialogue. I think it's because NPCs are shallow enough that I don't see them as people, just people-shaped quest dispensers, but when you add social systems on top they're inevitably going to fall short and that friend-shape turns into an NPC and my brain realizes I was playing alone the whole time. I'm really looking forward to the integration of language models into games so I can actually socialize with these characters, even when they're more shallow than real people.

What's funny about the "metaverse" is that by the definition from Snow Crash, the internet as we know it is already a metaverse: a bunch of distinct digital spaces which users are free to "travel" between, and the system as a whole isn't owned by any one group. Conversely, Meta's idea of the metaverse is, by definition, not a metaverse because it'd be owned by them as a platform.

For what it's worth I don't think they're proposing it will "solve" climate change - no single thing can. It's millions of tiny (alleged) improvements like this which eventually add up to taking pressure off of the environment. I see this kind of attitude a lot with stuff like paper straws or biodegradable packaging, as if the idea of a small but meaningful step in the right direction is laughable. It's fine to criticize them for the "improvement" actually being no better than the alternative, but I worry sometimes it comes across like any sort of improvement short of "solving" climate change isn't worthwhile.

It feels kind of hopeless now that we'd ever get something that feels so "radical", but I'd like to remind people that 80+ hour work weeks without overtime used to be the norm before unions got us the 40 hour work week. It feels inevitable and hopeless until the moment we get that breakthrough, then it becomes the new norm.

For my two cents, though this is bit off topic: AI doesn't create art, it creates media, which is why corpos love it so much. Art, as I'm defining it now, is "media created with the purpose to communicate a potentially ineffable idea to others". Current AI has no personhood, and in particular has no intentionality, so it's fundamentally incapable of creating art in the same way a hand-painted painting is inherently different from a factory-painted painting. It's not so much that the factory painting is inherently of lower quality or lesser value, but there's a kind of "non-fungible" quality to "genuine" art which isn't a simple reproduction.

Artists in a capitalist society make their living off of producing media on behalf of corporations, who only care about the media. As humans creating media, it's basically automatically art. What I see as the real problem people are grappling with is that people's right to survive is directly tied to their economic utility. If basic amenities were universal and work was something you did for extra compensation (as a simple alternative example), no one would care that AI can now produce "art" (ie media) any more than Chess stopped being a sport when Deep Blue was built because art would be something they created out of passion and compensation not tied to survival. In an ideal world, artistic pursuits would be subsidized somehow so even an artist who can't find a buyer can be compensated for their contribution to Culture.

But I recognize we don't live in an ideal world, and "it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism". I'm not really sure what solutions we end up with (because there will be more than one), but I think broadening copyright law is the worst possible timeline. Copyright in large part doesn't protect artists, but rather large corporations who own the fruits of other people's labor who can afford to sue for their copyright. I see copyright, patent, and to some extent trademarks as legally-sanctioned monopolies over information which fundamentally halts cultural progress and have had profoundly harmful effects on our society as-is. It made sense when it was created, but became a liability with the advent of the internet.

As an example of how corpos would abuse extended copyright: Disney sues stable diffusion models with any trace of copyrighted material into oblivion, then creates their own much more powerful model using the hundred years of art they have exclusive rights to in their vaults. Artists are now out of work because Disney doesn't need them anymore, and they're the only ones legally allowed to use this incredibly powerful technology. Any attempt to make a competing model is shut down because someone claims there's copyrighted material in their training corpus - it doesn't even matter if there is, the threat of lawsuit can shut down the project before it starts.

Good to note that this isn't even hypothetical, it literally happened with cable. First it was ad-funded, then you paid to get rid of ads, then you paid exorbitant prices to get fed ads, and the final evolution was being required to pay $100+ for bundles including channels you'd never use to get at the one you would. It's already happening to streaming services too, which have started to bundle.

This, the intent would be a lot more clear if they eg did it to politicians who supported anti-climate bills. That sends a much more powerful message, whereas targeting random SUVs isn't likely to get anyone talking or caring about the issues.

Recently found this gem: https://adnauseam.io/

It's an ad blocker that only hides ads and clicks them for you in the background, which means you waste advertiser's money, support creators, can't get flagged for ad blocking as easily, and they can't build a proper profile against your ad activity since it's all noise. Haven't installed it yet, but this might be the push I needed.

Chat GPT can already be a pretty good tool for self-reflection. The way its model works, it tends to reflect you more than anything else, so it can be used as a reasonably effective "rubber duck" that can actually talk back. I wouldn't recommend it as a general therapeutic tool though, it's extremely difficult to get it to take initiative so the entire process has to be driven by you and your own motivation.

Also.... Have you ever watched Black Mirror? This is pretty much the episode Be Right Back, it doesn't end well.

Efficiency and performance are valuable, not entertaining. My point is that "boring" is a category error for these things, they aren't game mechanics and they have no entertainment value.

I wouldn't go so far as to say there's no viable use-case, but every example I've seen has been a terrible misappropriation. This is largely because they make the mistake of inclusion of an algorithm to somehow be featureful or entertaining. As I see it, this discussion is a bit like ransomware becoming very prolific and people are saying there are no viable use-cases for encryption because it's been used to scam so many people.

To be clear, literally all NFTs are is a key: value mapping on a blockchain. That has nothing to do with finance, art, games, or anything else associated with them at present - the value of a tool is in how it's used. They've been used extensively by shitty people, so now people only know of the shitty ways to use them.

LLMs are not created to chat, they're literally what the name says - language models. They are very complex statistical models of the joint causal probability of all possible words given the previous words in the context window. There's a common misconception that they're "made for chat" by the wider public because ChatGPT was the first "killer application", but they are much more general than that. What's so profound about LLMs to AI and NLP engineers is that they're general purpose. That is, given the right framework they can be used to complete any task expressible in natural language. It's hard to convey to people just how powerful that is, and I haven't seen software engineers really figure this out yet either. As an example I keep going back to, I made a library to create "semantic functions" in Python which look like this:

@semantic
def list_people(text) -> list[str]:
    '''List the people mentioned in the given text.'''

That is the entire function, expressed in the docstring. 10 months ago, this would’ve been literally impossible. I could approximate it with thousands of lines of code using SpaCy and other NLP libraries to do NER, maybe a dictionary of known names with fuzzy matching, some heuristics to rule out city names or more advanced sentence structure parsing for false positives, but the result would be guaranteed to be worse for significantly more effort. Here, I just tell the AI to do it and it… does. Just like that. But you can’t hype up an algorithm that does boring stuff like NLP, so people focus on the danger of AI (which is real, but laymen and news focus on the wrong things), how it’s going to take everyone’s jobs (it will, but that’s a problem with our system which equates having a job to being allowed to live), how it’s super-intelligent, etc. It’s all the business logic and doing things that are hard to program but easy to describe that will really show off its power.

To be honest I suspect any estimates of queer demographics are going to be dramatically lower than the actuality in part because things like gender and sexuality are fluid and heavily influenced by culture and upbringing. There may be several orders of magnitude more people who might otherwise identify as bi or some kind of genderqueer but not enough to justify investing in the self reflection, identity crisis, and social capital it would cost.

Why discs instead of cartridges, which are currently the superior physical option? I personally try to buy physical whenever possible, because I don't trust companies to not ban my account and flush hundreds of dollars of games down the toilet, and it generally feels better to have just that little extra bit more ownership over my own property.

I'm not sure where I saw this life hack, but I've heard people suggest responding with something like "I'll pray for you, seeing as the devil has entered your heart and made you hateful" to short-circuit conservatives.

That is single-handedly causing the downfall of Western Civilization (TM) /s

(imagine queers being that powerful lmao)

What worries me is who defines what the truth is? Reality itself became political decades ago, probably starting with the existence of global warming and now such basic foundational facts as who won an election. If the government can punish "falsehood", what do you do if the GOP is in charge and they determine that "Biden won 2020" is such a falsehood?

I legitimately thought it was Bernie for a second and my heart stopped, like "oh no he's finally gone senile"

Isn't a large part of their trouble that NATO is supplying Ukraine?

Genuine question, because my liberal dad didn't understand what I meant when I asked - isn't a deductible basically just another tactic for the insurance company to further weasel out of its responsibilities? I'm pretty sure the deductible of the insurance I get through my job is higher than I already pay them yearly. If my expenses are lower than that, I've basically given them ~$1500 for doing literally nothing. I may as well just pay out of pocket, but I can't since insurance fucked the system for the uninsured.

It always seems to be projection with conservatives, it's very strange

I'm an AI nerd and yes, nowhere close. AI can write code snippets pretty well, and that'll get better with time, but a huge part of software development is translating client demands into something sane and actionable. If a CEO of a 1-man billion dollar company asks his super-AI to "build the next Twitter", that leaves so many questions on the table that the result will be completely unpredictable. Humans have preferences and experiences which can inform and fill in those implicit questions. They're generally much better suited as tools and copilots than autonomous entities.

Now, there was a paper that instantiated a couple dozen LLMs and had them run a virtual software dev company together which got pretty good results, but I wouldn't trust that without a lot more research. I've found individual LLMs with a given task tend to get tunnel vision, so they could easily get stuck in a loop trying the same wrong code or design repeatedly.

(I think this was the paper, reminiscent of the generative agent simulacra paper, but I also found this)

I wouldn't say stupid, just narcissistic control freak who can't stop touching it. That way it doesn't dismiss him outright. It's a matter of essentializing language - "someone is stupid" isn't so dangerous vs "someone does something stupid" lets you recognize the emperor has no clothes but can still be dangerous. Reality is more complex than "xyz is stupid/evil", and falling into those patterns of thought does a disservice to yourself.

When did the Onion become less absurd than reality..? I'm pretty sure I've heard conservatives literally say some of these, and worse.

Cults of personality tie your identity to the target, such that at some point they could literally shoot someone in the streets and it'll still be excused. To do otherwise would break your ego which most people aren't willing or prepared to do.