FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 24 days ago

And once again, we see the real mechanism by which terrorism "wins". Israel has hurt itself in its confusion.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

I find a ton of uses for quick Python scripts hammered out with Bing Chat to get random stuff done.

It's also super useful when brainstorming and fleshing out stuff for the tabletop roleplaying games I run. Just bounce ideas off it, have it write monologues, etc.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

That's a stopgap measure. The root problem is the electorate and I'm really not sure how to fix that.

Perhaps the best way to "Trump proof" the transatlantic relationship is to accept that the transatlantic relationship is not an immutable fact of nature and be ready for it to maybe fall apart someday.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Indeed. Firefox already has "sponsored links" and such in the built-in homepage, I simply disable those when I first install it and get on with life.

Big projects like Firefox need big money to support it. If you don't want it to be beholden to Google it needs to find ways to earn some on its own.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

It says "opt-out" in the title.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

This site never worked without a hitch.

That is not a ringing endorsement.

I was very enthusiastic about kbin when it launched, I donated a fair bit to Ernest in those early heady days. But if he's refusing to accept help from other devs and admins I don't think it's sustainable, something like this just can't work as a one-man show. I wish him all the best but if that doesn't change I don't see this working in the long run.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

It has been getting worse for me. In addition to the sporadic outages, the spam, and the slow federation, I've had to develop the habit of refreshing the page before I try to respond to or vote on any comments. If I open the page and let it sit for a few minutes before trying I invariably get an error. It definitely didn't used to be that way.

If it was that bad for you from the outset I'm surprised you stuck around. I wouldn't've. I've only held on because I started to feel "settled".

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Boycott your votes for Biden until he stops this Genocide.

Because Trump will be so much better for the Palestinians.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Indeed. I frequently use LLMs as brainstorming buddies while working on creative things, like RPG adventure planning and character creation. I want the AI to come up with new and unexpected things that never existed before.

If I have need of the AI to account for "ground truths" then I use things like retrieval-augmented generation or database plugins that inject that stuff into the context.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Have you not experimented with LLMs? They come up with new things all the time.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

They're giving you services in exchange for your contents.

Does nobody even think about TOS any more? You don't have to read any specific one, just realize the basic universal truth that no website is going to accept your contents without some kind of legal protection that allows them to use that content.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Are you serious? We're speaking in the Fediverse right now. It's notable in its difference. Though instances have their own TOSes, so it'd be pretty trivial to set one up to harvest content for AI training as well.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Hardly. They earn money by being paid by their users, but they can earn more money by being paid by their users and also selling their users' data. The goal is more money, so it makes sense for them to do that. It's not crazy.

From the WordPress Terms of Service:

License. By uploading or sharing Content, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, and non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, adapt, publicly display, and publish the Content solely for the purpose of providing and improving our products and Services and promoting your website. This license also allows us to make any publicly-posted Content available to select third parties (through Firehose, for example) so that these third parties can analyze and distribute (but not publicly display) the Content through their services.

Emphasis added. They told you what they could do with the content you gave them, you just didn't listen.

I'm sorry if I'm coming across harsh here, but I'm seeing this same error being made over and over again. It's being made frequently right now thanks to the big shakeups happening in social media and the sudden rise of AI, but I've seen it sporadically over the decades that I've been online. So it bears driving home:

• If you are about to give your content to a website, check their terms of service before you do to see if you're willing to agree to their terms, and if you don't agree to their terms then don't give your content to a website. It's true that some ToS clauses may not be legally enforceable, but are you willing to fight that in court? If you didn't consider your content valuable enough to spend the time checking the ToS when you posted it, that's not WordPress's fault.
• If you give someone something and they later find a way to make the thing you gave them valuable, it's too late. You gave it to them. They don't owe you a "cut." Check the terms of service.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

I wouldn't really trust that promise, frankly. I just checked their terms of service and it has the usual clause:

You must own all rights, title, and interest, including all intellectual property rights, in and to, the User Content you make available on the Services. ASSC requires licenses from you for that User Content to operate the Services. By posting User Content on the Services, you grant ASSC a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, sublicensable, worldwide license to use, reproduce, distribute, perform, publicly display or prepare derivative works of your User Content.

Which isn't really surprising, it's standard boilerplate for a reason. They don't want to be caught in a situation where they can't function legally any more. They say they won't sell the company or your data, and they might even believe that right now, but who knows what the future might bring? They have the ability to do so if the circumstances arise.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Well, a large part of my frustration stems from the "I've seen this for decades" part - longer than many of the people who are now raising a ruckus have been alive. So IMO it's always been this way and the "social contract we've adapted to" is "the social contract that we imagined existed despite there being ample evidence there was no such thing." I'm so tired of the surprised-pikachu reactions.

Combined with the selfish "wait a minute, the stuff I gave away for fun is worth money to someone else now? I want money too! Or I'm going to destroy my stuff so that nobody gets any value out of it!" Reactions, I find myself bizarrely ambivalent and not exactly on the side of the common man vs. the big evil corporations this time.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

I'm just venting, really. I know it's not going to make a real difference.

I suppose if you go waaaay back it was different, true. Back in the days of Usenet (as a discussion forum rather than as the piracy filesharing system it's mostly used for nowadays) there weren't these sorts of ToS on it and everything got freely archived in numerous different places because that's just how it was. It was the first Fediverse, I suppose.

The ironic thing is that kbin.social's ToS has no "ownership" stuff in it either. For now, at least, the new ActivityPub-based Fediverse is in the same position that Usenet was - I assume a lot of the other instances also don't bother with much of a ToS and the posts get shared around beyond any one instance's control anyway. So maybe this grumpy old-timer may get to see a bit of the good old days return, for a little while. That'll be nice.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

If it makes you feel better, the thing that annoys me most is not so much that this is happening but more how everybody is suddenly surprised by it and complaining about it. The data-harvesting itself doesn't really harm anyone.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

A user's data still belongs to the user when they post it on sites like Reddit and such, too. The ToS doesn't take ownership away from them, at least not in any case that I've seen. It just gives the site the license to use it as well.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

You could ask a lawyer, I suppose. But the basic gist of this is "we don't know what we might need to do with this data in the future, so we put 'we can do anything with this data' into the ToS so that we know that if the need arises we won't find ourselves unable to do what we need to do with it." Any website that doesn't do this could find itself unable to implement new features or comply with new laws they didn't think of when crafting the original ToS.

At the very minimum a ToS needs to have some way to update and apply retroactively to old data, which ends up being "we can do anything with this data" with extra steps.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

No problem. I'm not a lawyer myself, mind you, but I've encountered issues like these enough times over the years that I feel I've got a pretty good layman's grasp. Plus I've actually read some of these ToSes and considered them from the perspective of the company running the site, which I suspect most people arguing about this stuff haven't actually done.

I wish the Fediverse sites running without rigorous ToSes well, of course, but I suspect failing to establish clear rights to use the content people post on them is likely to end up biting them in the long run. At least the bigger ones. Hobby-level websites get away with a lot because they don't have significant money on the line.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

It's true, go ahead and read the ToS. It only grants a license to Reddit to use your content. It explicitly says:

You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

And then goes on to enumerate what you're licensing them to do with it. There's also a section titled "Changes to these Terms" about how they can change the ToS going forward.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

If all Russia has to do to get people to back off is cry "escalation!" Then might as well just surrender to them now.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Where do I go to buy Lemmy Gold?

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Frankly, these NATO expansions and its general re-invigoration are a larger loss for Russia than anything they could possibly gain in Ukraine. Their Baltic fleet is now useless. Kaliningrad is useless.

Combined with all the other damage Ukraine has inflicted on Russia, they're basically spiralling the drain and I see no possible way Russia could rise in prominence in the future. Even if goodness forbid they were to "win" the current war they're fighting with Ukraine, that won't help them, it'll only hurt Ukraine.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

I use quotation marks there because what is often referred to as AI today is not whatsoever what the term once described.

The field of AI has been around for decades and covers a wide range of technologies, many of them much "simpler" than the current crop of generative AI. What is often referred to as AI today is absolutely what the term once described, and still does describe.

What people seem to be conflating is the general term "AI" and the more specific "AGI", or Artificial General Intelligence. AGI is the stuff you see on Star Trek. Nobody is claiming that current LLMs are AGI, though they may be a significant step along the way to that.

I may be sounding nitpicky here, but this is the fundamental issue that the article is complaining about. People are not well educated about what AI actually is and what it's good at. It's good at a huge amount of stuff, it's really revolutionary, but it's not good at everything. It's not the fault of AI when people fail to grasp that, no more than it's the fault of the car when someone gets into it and then is annoyed it won't take them to the Moon.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

I didn't say that everything in Star Trek was AGI, just that you can find examples there.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Somewhere in between, sure. But don't interpret that to mean that the most likely real number is exactly in the middle. I consider Russian numbers to be way less credible.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

I think that's too convenient and loaded an explanation. I suspect a better one can be found in social identity theory, with positions like these being social markers that they use to establish firm boundaries around their in-group. Every group tends to develop social markers, things you're expected to believe or otherwise exhibit to show that you're "on their side." There may be some particular reason why any given marker first shows up, but once it gets adopted it becomes essentially self-perpetuating.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Social markers are usually not a conscious thing. Once it becomes part of the "this is the way a proper person behaves" ruleset it gets internalized.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Nice to hear some solidly good news like this.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

If Hamas didn't exist then I'm sure that Israel would find some way to invent them.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Seems like it might be a bit more nuanced than that. From the article:

There is a federal law, C-3, which deems it an offence for anyone who “intentionally obstructs or interferes with another person’s lawful access to a place at which health services are provided by a health professional.” As far as I saw while I was passing the hospital, the entranceway was clear and no one was stopped from entering or exiting the building. Other than vague mentions, I found no specific evidence that people were prevented from entering or exiting the building.

Update, Feb. 15, 11:06 a.m.: It has come to our attention that the University Ave. entrance to Mount Sinai Hospital closes at 6 p.m. daily. The protest passed by the hospital around 8 p.m., two hours after that entrance had closed. See the bottom of the map below for the University Ave. entrance hours, accessed today from the Mount Sinai Hospital website.

So this may not have broken those laws. There was apparently an incident where the crowd blocked the car of a doctor that was trying to drive home, so perhaps some more care needed to be taken, but I think everyone's just really on edge right now and looking for things to get angry about.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

It was made clear to you, immediately and concisely. You should have accepted that clarification and moved on with your life. Instead you continued poking and prodding after that in search of some way to misconstrue what was being said.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Ah, that might apply, then. Though that appears to be specifically about abortion clinics, and my googling suggests Mount Sinai might not provide abortions, so it might still be fiddly if it actually went to court.

Even if not, they should probably have still routed around it if only in recognition of the "on edge"ness.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

It's a bit of a catch-22, unfortunately. Homeless camps are not exactly safe places to live. Fire codes and zoning laws are not arbitrary things, they exist for reasons.

I would find it reasonable to require that the government has to have someplace for those homeless people to go before dismantling their camps, though.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

Maybe something like these "tinyshelters" would be a good compromise - they're safer and more comfortable than ramshackle tent-and-cardboard encampments, but they're still far short of what I'd call a "free apartment."

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

That's a false dichotomy.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

It's also got a substantial helping of "here's how things are getting better, and will continue to get better in the future."

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

I'd say it's not even really their place to be "examining the whole economic system." Each individual is just a regular Joe who put in their time at a job over their life and would now like to reap the rewards of their effort in retirement. It bothers me when people insult other people simply for being caught up in a systemic issue that's beyond their control.

The solutions for systemic problems need to be systemic as well. If we as a society don't want to see housing move over to an exclusively rent-based system then we'll need to address it through things like zoning changes and other legal reforms. When people oppose those things by voting against them, then we can start to apportion blame around.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

I mean, ultimately we're going to want to spend energy doing stuff. Everything we do has "emissions problems" because everything we do consumes energy. Even if the energy it's consuming is entirely "green" you still need to build the power plants and that energy still costs something.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

Unhealthy things should be forbidden? Even if they were, this is drifting off of the subject of AI art.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

Things that are bad for society should be suppressed and things which are good for society should be promoted. That would seem to be the point of a society.

Great, now we just need to establish whether AI art is "bad for society", and if it is then whether the effects of attempting to ban it would be worse for society.

Further, I notice a pastern in your replies of bringing up metaphor then rejecting the very metaphor as off topic or irrelevant when it is engaged to it's logical conclusion.

What metaphors did I bring up? You're the one who brought fast food into this. I don't see any other metaphors in play.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

That seems fairly evident

Hardly. There wouldn't be much debate about it if it was, would there?

You were fine engaging fastfood until I pointed out it, like AI " art " was terrible. Only then did you deride the metaphor as off topic.

Alright, in future I will try to remember to immediately reject any metaphors you bring into play rather than attempt to engage with them.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

Ethereum switched to proof-of-stake a year and a half ago, it no longer has a significant environmental impact.

Oh wait, this is an analogy, isn't it?

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

No, just pointing out who's in the "loud but wrong" camp on that one. If ecological concerns are why you think crypto is bad, well, that's not clear cut any more.

You want to keep going with this analogy you brought up, then?

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

Is AI art literally violent, or is this another analogy?

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

All analogies eventually fail when you dig into them far enough, by nature of what an analogy is. That is, an analogy is not exactly identical to the thing being analogized. If you want to be able to use analogies but refuse to acknowledge that they eventually lose relevance when you stretch them too far then you're simply not amenable to reason.

And then you go and explicitly beg the very question under debate with an "of course I'm right." No, AI art isn't a "scam," whatever you mean by that.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

You realize how a word like that can have ambiguous meanings, yes?