FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

Surely they could just relocate the Kaaba to a more hospitable location. It's not a large structure, should be easy to dig up and move.

Might have to update a few direction markers for Salah, though. That could be a bit of work.

FaceDeer, 3 days ago

What better way to get facial recognition data for all Muslims than with something like the Hajj.

FaceDeer, 6 days ago

Netanyahu doing scummy things to cling to power no matter what is indeed a widely expected move.

FaceDeer, 7 days ago

Fortunately, LLMs don't really need to be fully open source to get almost all of the benefits of open source. From a safety and security perspective it's fine because the model weights don't really do anything; all of the actual work is done by the framework code that's running them, and if you can trust that due to it being open source you're 99% of the way there. The LLM model just sits there transforming the input text into the output text.

From a customization standpoint it's a little worse, but we're coming up with a lot of neat tricks for retraining and fine-tuning model weights in powerful ways. The most recent bit development I've heard of is abliteration, a technique that lets you isolate a particular "feature" of an LLM and either enhance it or remove it. The first big use of it is to modify various "censored" LLMs to remove their ability to refuse to comply with instructions, so that all those "safe" and "responsible" AIs like Goody-2 can turned into something that's actually useful. A more fun example is MopeyMule, a LLaMA3 model that has had all of his hope and joy abliterated.

So I'm willing to accept open-weight models as being "nearly as good" as a full-blown open source model. I'd like to see full-blown open source models develop more, sure, but I'm not terribly concerned about having to rely on an open-weight model to make an AI system work for the immediate term.

FaceDeer, 7 days ago

That would be part of what's required for them to be "open-weight".

A plain old binary LLM model is somewhat equivalent to compiled object code, so redistributability is the main thing you can "open" about it compared to a "closed" model.

An LLM model is more malleable than compiled object code, though, as I described above there's various ways you can mutate an LLM model without needing its "source code." So it's not exactly equivalent to compiled object code.

FaceDeer, 7 days ago

Ironically, as far as I'm aware it's based off of research done by some AI decelerationists over on the alignment forum who wanted to show how "unsafe" open models were in the hopes that there'd be regulation imposed to prevent companies from distributing them. They demonstrated that the "refusals" trained into LLMs could be removed with this method, allowing it to answer questions they considered scary.

The open LLM community responded by going "coooool!" And adapting the technique as a general tool for "training" models in various other ways.

FaceDeer, 7 days ago

Even if you trained the AI yourself from scratch you still can't be confident you know what the AI is going to say under any given circumstance. LLMs have an inherent unpredictability to them. That's part of their purpose, they're not databases or search engines.

if I were to download a pre-trained model from what I thought was a reputable source, but was man-in-the middled and provided with a maliciously trained model

This is a risk for anything you download off the Internet, even source code could be MITMed to give you something with malicious stuff embedded in it. And no, I don't believe you'd read and comprehend every line of it before you compile and run it. You need to verify checksums

As I said above, the real security comes from the code that's running the LLM model. If someone wanted to "listen in" on what you say to the AI, they'd need to compromise that code to have it send your inputs to them. The model itself can't do that. If someone wanted to have the model delete data or mess with your machine, it would be the execution framework of the model that's doing that, not the model itself. And so forth.

You can probably come up with edge cases that are more difficult to secure, such as a troubleshooting AI whose literal purpose is messing with your system's settings and whatnot, but that's why I said "99% of the way there" in my original comment. There's always edge cases.

FaceDeer, 8 days ago

And thus future AIs will have a bias toward having American attitudes because that's where the data they're built on comes from. A win for Europe?

FaceDeer, 8 days ago

The term "AI" has been in use since 1956 to describe a wide variety of computer algorithms and capabilities. Neural nets and large language models fall very firmly under the term's umbrella.

What you're talking about is a specific kind of AI, artificial general intelligence (AGI). Very few people believe that an LLM on its own can become AGI and even fewer believes that current LLMs are AGI, so unfortunately you're jousting with a strawman here.

FaceDeer, 8 days ago

It's similar to my own reaction to the people getting angry about Reddit data being used to train AIs. As someone who's been commenting rather prolifically on Reddit for 13 years I'm actually quite pleased by the thought that my views and interests are being incorporated into the foundations of modern AI. The only downside is that all those people I argued with over that period are also getting in there. :)

FaceDeer, 8 days ago

They're not claiming it's AGI, though. You're missing a broad middle ground between dumb calculators and HAL 9000.

FaceDeer, 10 days ago

If you don't want to do it then don't do it. Can we stop trying to tell everyone else they have to have the same values as you?

FaceDeer, 10 days ago

I don't believe humans are "meant" to do anything. We are a result of evolution, not intentional design. So I believe humans should do whatever they personally want to do in a situation like this.

If you have a loved one who does this and you don't feel comfortable interacting with their AI version, then don't interact with their AI version. That's on you. But don't belittle them for having preferences different from your own. Different people want different things and deal with death in different ways.

FaceDeer, 9 days ago

Even with that, being absolutist about this sort of thing is wrong. People undergoing surgery have spent time on heart/lung machines that breathe for them. People sometimes fast for good reasons, or get IV fluids or nutrients provided to them. You don't see protestors outside of hospitals decrying how humans aren't meant to be kept alive with such things, though, at least not in most cases (as always there are exceptions, the Terri Schiavo case for example).

If I want to create an AI substitute for myself it is not anyone's right to tell me I can't because they don't think I was meant to do that.

FaceDeer, 9 days ago

But when you die and an AI company contacts all your grieving friends and family to offer them access to an AI based on you (for a low, low fee!)

You can stop right there, you're just imagining a scenario that suits your prejudices. Of all the applications for AI that I can imagine that would be better served by a model that is entirely under my control this would be the top of the list.

With that out of the way the rest of your rhetorical questions are moot.

FaceDeer, 12 days ago

To be fair, his campaign was already on the rocks at that point. It wasn't the scream alone that did him in.

FaceDeer, 13 days ago

It isn't necessarily racist. "Ourselves" and "others" can be simply defined by citizenship.

FaceDeer, 13 days ago

... or don't introspect, blame the voters, and lose forever.

This is what frustrates me most about a lot of the left-leaning parties and voters I've encountered over the years. They think that "well obviously we should be winning, we're the good guys and they're the bad guys. People who vote against our position are either ignorant or evil. So we shouldn't change anything about it and we should ignore the people arguing against it."

Whether that's true or not isn't the point. The point is that you're not going to gain any more voters with that strategy. A lot of the people voting against the left have very real and tangible concerns, and you're not going to get them to vote for you by either telling them they're wrong to have those concerns or that they aren't even real in the first place. The left needs to provide them with real solutions to those problems.

FaceDeer, 13 days ago

There's a difference between what the right-wing voters are wanting and what the right-wing politicians are doing. You run into the same problems with left-wing voters and politicians too. Not to say that they're "both the same", just that you can't treat them all as one big hive mind.

FaceDeer, 13 days ago

But what you are saying is not true, bacause it was tested in Sweden.

I'm saying that the voters and the politicians they vote for are not one big hive mind. You're saying that they are one big hive mind? And your example is that voters didn't switch their support when their parties changed the positions? I'm not sure you've interpreted what I said correctly.

FaceDeer, 13 days ago

Ah. The problem is that you told me "But what you are saying is not true" and then basically agreed with what I'd said.

FaceDeer, 15 days ago

I could imagine the NSA embedding an agent inside Cloudflare specifically to keep an eye out for any foreign agents also being embedded in Cloudflare, rather than to dig out its secrets for themselves.

FaceDeer, 16 days ago

It also has an expensive back end and no plans for any kind of monetization, so it's dead in the water from that side too. The moment they're successful they're broke.

FaceDeer, 16 days ago

If their goal is to prevent AI trainers from scraping their art then an open federated platform is the opposite of what they want.

FaceDeer, 16 days ago

Except it's not a threat to the future of all libraries, it's a threat to the future of "libraries" that decide to completely ignore copyright and give out an unlimited number of copies of ebooks. Basically turning themselves into book-focused piracy sites.

I'm incredibly frustrated with Internet Archive for bringing this on themselves. It is not their mandate to fight copyright, that's something better left in the hands of activist organizations like the EFF. The Internet Archive's mandate is to archive the Internet, to store and preserve knowledge. Distributing it is secondary to that goal. And picking unnecessary fights with big publishing houses like this is directly contrary to that goal, since now the Internet Archive is in danger.

It's like they're carrying around a precious baby and they decided it was a good idea to start whacking a bear with a stick. Now the bear is eating their leg and they're screaming "oh my god help me, the bear is threatening this baby!" Well yeah, but you shouldn't have brought a baby with you when you went on a bear-whacking expedition. You should have known exactly what that bear was going to do.

FaceDeer, 16 days ago

It's not even a question of being "owned by corporations". Judges don't care about petitions. They're not politicians, their job is to adjudicate the law.

FaceDeer, 16 days ago

They don't need to do anything so drastic. They just need to stop doing things that blatantly provoke legal attacks like this. Their "Emergency Covid Library" was a foolish stunt that is endangering their primary objective of information preservation, they wouldn't have been sued if they'd just kept on carrying on as they were before.

FaceDeer, 16 days ago

The thing that drives me nuts is that I really do value that baby they're carrying around. It is precious. But I don't want to give the Internet Archive money just to funnel into the pockets of their lawyers and settlement payments to big publishers due to these unrelated quixotic battles.

I was hoping that the IA would have learned a lesson from losing this court case, they should have settled as soon as they could. I'm sure the publishers don't want the bad publicity of "destroying" the Internet Archive, they just want them to stop blatantly violating their copyrights. But this appeal suggests that they haven't learned that lesson yet.

In an ideal world there'd either be some kind of leadership shakeup at the IA to get rid of whoever was behind this stunt, or some kind of alternative IA-like organization appears to pick up the archive before the IA goes broke and its collection ends up being sold off to the highest bidder. Or simply destroyed.

FaceDeer, 17 days ago

I don't know, he left it kind of ambiguous whether he was talking about Putin or Trump. There's nothing in there that;s specific to either.

FaceDeer, 17 days ago

I would expect it'd be not too hard to expand the context fed into the AI from just the pixels to including adjacent text as well. Multimodal AIs can accept both kinds of input. Might as well start with the basics though.

FaceDeer, 17 days ago

If they feel less need to add proper alt-text because peoples' browsers are doing a better job anyway, I don't see why that's a problem. The end result is better alt text.

FaceDeer, 24 days ago

I don't see humidity mentioned in the article, that's the real killer once the temperature gets up above body temperature. If humidity is high then evaporating water isn't going to effectively cool a person and the only way to survive is to get into air conditioning or other artificially low-temperature safe zones. Temperatures like this are more often seen in arid places, I dread the time something like this hits a major tropical urban area when it's humid. We could see megadeaths.

FaceDeer, 25 days ago

Israel's cries of victimhood were already starting to wear thin when it was focused on the Holocaust. Yes, it was a terrible tragedy, but it's 80 years ago at this point - very, very few people are left that were directly involved and the circumstances have changed significantly since then. But going back over five hundred years to try to find "gotchas" is just sad and counterproductive.

People are suffering right now and being persecuted right now, and it has nothing to do with the Inquisition or the Nazis.

FaceDeer, 26 days ago

This is indeed one of the things cryptocurrencies exist for, but social media denizens around these parts have long conditioned themselves to hate it.

So a rock and a hard place, it seems. Which is more hated; the big data-harvesting corporation co-founded by Elon Musk, or a big bad NFT-hosting blockchain?

For people who are concerned about data harvesting I would recommend something like Monero or Aztec over Bitcoin, though. Bitcoin's basically obsolete at this point, coasting on name recognition and inertia, and has no built-in privacy features.

FaceDeer, 26 days ago

The Fediverse doesn't have any defenses against AI impersonators though, aside from irrelevance. If it gets big the same incentives will come into play.

FaceDeer, 27 days ago

And let's not pretend that the US isn't a two-party system.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Your choices are Trump or Biden.

FaceDeer, 28 days ago

Only those who don't care about privacy and use Windows.

So most people, then.

FaceDeer, 30 days ago

The guides aren't slaves, they don't have to do it. They're probably better aware of the risks than the climbers they're guiding, for that matter.

FaceDeer, 29 days ago

According to Wikipedia there's ~600,000 Sherpas in the world. Are you seriously saying that the only thing they can do to avoid poverty is work as Everest guides (or have an extended family member doing it)?

FaceDeer, 29 days ago

So a few hundred Sherpa (profession) would be completely unable to find other jobs, like their hundreds of thousands of bretheren have somehow managed to do.

Look, I don't want people to die on Everest. But nobody is forced to go there, not even the Sherpas. They choose to go there. They know what they're getting into and what the risks are. If you're going to feel bad for them then you should also feel bad for the climbers, and vice versa.

FaceDeer, 29 days ago

Perhaps the Sherpas shouldn't be enabling them.

And actually, my point is just that you should feel equally bad for them. They're both people who chose to be there and they're both people that died. If you don't want to feel bad for them then that's fine too.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

With comments like this he likely goes through new accounts on a very rapid pace.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

You don't think LLMs are being trained off of this content too? Nobody needs to bother "announcing a deal" for it, it's being freely broadcast.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

Even this post showing it off feels like satire, how exactly does a room with cigarette smoke in it "fuck the planet?" Do people think cigarette smoke emissions are remotely relevant on a global scale? Poe's law is strong in this one.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

Sure, but having a smoking section in Tim Hortons isn't going to change that. I'd think it'd make it more likely for smokers to throw their butts out in a manner that can be properly disposed of, rather than making them smoke outside.

Note that I'm not advocating smoking or smoking sections. Smoking is awful on many levels and I'd rather see it go away entirely. I'm just pointing out that it's ridiculous to say having a smoking section in Tim Hortons is going to have a significant impact on the environment. Jumping to "this is going to fuck the planet" is crying wolf, it's going to result in people either getting sick of environmentalism or more subtly problematic it'll result in people thinking they're making a difference when they're not. The plastic straw ban, for example. Plastic straws were never a major contributor to ocean plastic waste. By far the largest contributor to ocean plastic waste is discarded fishing equipment, but I don't see any campaigning to reduce seafood consumption. People banned straws instead and then thought they'd accomplished something.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

<Sighs, peeks into the thread to see if there's even the slightest bit of actual scientific discussion, sees exactly what he expected instead, leaves.>

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

After he finishes bombing Rafah flat, of course. One must focus on priorities in a crisis.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

Given they may have done hits previous to this one, it seems like the former is more likely.

Honestly I wasn't expecting anything nearly this extreme. A foreign democracy appears to have a hit squad roaming Canada killing Canadian citizens for political reasons. Even China didn't go this far with their secret "police stations," this is Russia-level BS. If confirmed then I'd be comfortable with quite a high level of diplomatic stink-up ensuing.