Sir Arthur V Quackington

How many phone numbers can you remember?

You used to be required to memorize a bare minimum number of phone numbers to survive. Now, you’re lucky if people know their spouse’s and their own.

Cognitive offloading results in an atrophy of the skill and retention. There is a similar phenomena with people who watch 1000 tutorial videos but never implement anything or do it themselves. This is not “deep learning”, and its entertainment masquerading as productivity.

GPS is undeniably the same, and it’s easily observable between generations. AI LLM search queries are already resulting in a disturbing amount of people accepting what is presented non-critically. These people are sadly atrophying whatever critical analysis skills they had to vet information and links.

Actually a disturbing amount of those have basically come true.

Every transaction you make on your card is tracked and is sold to advertisers by your credit card company.

Your phone’s GPS is not mandatory to send to the government, but once again your OS reports that back and that data is then grouped and sold and then de-anonymized through identity brokers.

Walking is not illegal, but letting your children walk places is. You, honest to God, will run into trouble with police if you allow your small child of, let’s say, four to eight years old walk two blocks down the road to the park that you live near. And notoriously, pedestrians are absolutely second class citizens in the US.

They are attempting to make ID mandatory to vote, which is one of the rights you have in the United States from birth. Many states also have stop and identify laws that require you to turn this over to officers even if they have no reason to suspect you and you’ve committed no crime. This is inconsistent across the U.S. but has been ticking up.

And as for the gays getting married, the exact argument they used to fear-monger about the gays is the same argument they are using to fear-monger against trans people very successfully right now, and there is rampant talk of undoing gay marriage as part of the next year’s objectives for the GOP. But this one is not really like the other ones. This is an obvious red herring that was made in bad faith even at the time, not really founded on any of the behavior or history of the group in question like the other statements you made.

The sad part about most of this is not that there is a slippery slope, so to speak, but that rights and privacy are eroded so omniscientally through contracts and terms of service today that you may not think you’re giving up very much when you say yes to check out using Stripe or to manage something in cashapp. But the truth is that these services are then de-anonymized by industries whose entire job is to collect these profiles together, tie them back to the identifiable user metrics and IDs, and build a profile on you that can be sold, and the buyer can be the US government, which is a legal loophole that they technically did not spy on you, but just bought a complete dossier from an information broker.

This isn’t tin foil hatchet. Cops do this regularly now. And it is insanely unethical and should be illegal. But as of this date, it is not. And famously, this also applies to the private camera systems that run the license plate reading across state lines, and officers have clearly used these systems for other tracking purposes, including stalking exs and attempting to track down people for actions that may be a crime in their state but are not a crime in the state in which they live.

“If”

They will. Once the age check at an OS level is implemented, the next level is to enforce that this check then use a verification service. And then to make this information available to sites upon access.

DNS over HTTPS could be using the Google DNS services.

FUTO Keyboard might be willing to share data. Its another open Open source keyboard. License purchase optional but encouraged.

The real ethical question here is, is there only one round of trolleys?

Because if this is a one and done question, then obviously I go for the one person.

But if it’s possible at any point somebody comes along and has to run the experiment again after me, then if I leave an infinitely expanding number on one side, all it would take is one sadistic person to wipe out a incalculable amount of life.

In which case, I take the track with two people. And again, it is a question of repetition whether or not doing it once means that it won’t happen next time or if this will continue with every cycle.

Its great until something overloads the USB bus or you just have a random driver reset cause it to reload, and you hear that disconnect/reconnect noise while something was writing to the array.

Wait, didn’t they just pay an exorbitant amount of money to get rid of the old Mozilla logo and replace it with that new stupid pixelated one that looks like something from the 90s?

And they did this before moving the primary product to a different website that will never feature that logo?

Are the people running Mozilla just taking acid and throwing darts at their keyboard?

Jesus Christ. We need regulations on corporate LLM use NOW.

Ingesting all the artwork you ever created by obtaining it illegally and feeding it into my plagarism remix machine is theft of your work, because I did not pay for it.

Separately, keeping a copy of this work so I can do this repeatedly is also stealing your work.

The judge ruled the first was okay but the second was not because the first is “transformative”, which sadly means to me that the judge despite best efforts does not understand how a weighted matrix of tokens works and that while they may have some prevention steps in place now, early models showed the tech for what it was as it regurgitated text with only minor differences in word choice here and there.

Current models have layers on top to try and prevent this user input, but escaping those safeguards is common, and it’s also only masking the fact that the entire model is built off of the theft of other’s work.

There is nothing intelligent about “AI” as we call it. It parrots based on probability. If you remove the randomness value from the model, it parrots the same thing every time based on it’s weights, and if the weights were trained on Harry Potter, it will consistently give you giant chunks of harry potter verbatim when prompted.

Most of the LLM services attempt to avoid this by adding arbitrary randomness values to churn the soup. But this is also inherently part of the cause of hallucinations, as the model cannot preserve a single correct response as always the right way to respond to a certain query.

LLMs are insanely “dumb”, they’re just lightspeed parrots. The fact that Meta and these other giant tech companies claim it’s not theft because they sprinkle in some randomness is just obscuring the reality and the fact that their models are derivative of the work of organizations like the BBC and Wikipedia, while also dependent on the works of tens of thousands of authors to develop their corpus of language.

In short, there was a ethical way to train these models. But that would have been slower. And the court just basically gave them a pass on theft. Facebook would have been entirely in the clear had it not stored the books in a dataset, which in itself is insane.

I wish I knew when I was younger that stealing is wrong, unless you steal at scale. Then it’s just clever business.

Terrible judgement.

Turn the K value down on the model and it reproduces text near verbatim.

I’m not worried about me. I can manage. But I had to intervene and make it a Project for my immediate family. Which is always unfun, because who wants to expose all their personal data that way, especially photos.

Crazy that Google just screwed over GrapheneOS like this.

Great link, and I fully agree. If it’s possible anyways.

Yes, but that shouldn’t explicitly opt in, and they shouldn’t marry that product to Gmail and Google Drive if they are going to push it to enable by default.

Again, it’s really insidious. They push it so aggressively I had to disable it on my personal device twice, and I can’t just not use Google Photos app because it’s tied to the camera itself on pixel phones.

The absolutely criminal dark patterns that they pull on people via Google photos auto backup is insane.

Just in my own orbit 2 of my friends wives, my parents, and my in-laws all wound up paying Google because they thought they had to or lose all their photos. We helped most of them disconnect the autobackup (that they didn’t even know was activated) and move it to offline safely. But that was the most downright evil shit Google has ever done and literally a fire in me for manipulating the elderly and less tech savvy so blatantly.

I responded above, but my point kind of was that it doesn’t work that way, but as we rethinking content delivery we should also rethinking hosting distribution. What I was saying is not a “well gee we should just do this…” type of suggestion, but more a extremely high level idea for server orchestration from a public private swarm that may or may not ever be feasible, but definitely doesn’t really exist today.

Imagine if it were somewhat akin to BitTorrent, only the user could voluntarily give remote control to the instance for orchestration management. The orchestration server toggles the nodes contents so that, lets say, 100% of them carry the most accessed data (hot content, <100gb), and the rest is sharded so they each carry 10% of the archived data, making each node require <1tb total. And the node client is given X number of pinned CPUs that can be used for additional server compute tasks to offload various queries.

See, I’m fully aware this doesn’t really exist on this form. But thinking of it like a Kubernetes cluster or a HA webclient it seems like it should be possible somehow to build this in a way where the client really only needs to install, and say yes to contribute. If we could cut it down to that level, then you can start serving the site like a P2P bittorrent swarm, and these power user clients can become nodes.

I realize that is not how the fediverse works. I’m not speaking about the content delivery as much as the sever orchestration.

That’s why I’m saying if somehow it could work that way, it would be one way to offset the compute and delivery burdens. But it is a very different paradigm from normal hosting. There would have to be some kind of swarmanagement layer that the main instance nodes controlled.

My point was only that, should such a proposal be feasible one day, if you lower the barriers you could have more resources.

I myself have no interest in hosting a full blown private instance of Lemmy or mastodon, but I would happily contribute 1tb of storage and a ton of idle compute to serving the content for my instance if I could. That’s where this thinking stemmed from. Many users like me could donate their “free” idle power and space. But currently it is not feasible.

Provided there is an “upper limit” on what scale we are talking, Ive often wondered, couldn’t private users also host a sharded copy of a server instance to offset load and bandwidth? Like Folding@Home, but for site support.

I realize this isn’t exactly feasible today for most infra, but if we’re trying to “solve” the problem, imagine if you were able to voluntarily, give up like 100gb HDD space and have your PC host 2-3% of an instance’s server load for a month or something. Or maybe just be a CDN node for the media and bandwidth heavy parts to ease server load, while the server code is on different machines.

This kind of distributed “load balancing” on private hardware may be a complete pipe dream today, but it think if might be the way federated services need to head. I can tell you if we could get it to be as simple as volunteers spinning up a docker, and dropping the generated wireguard key and their IP in a “federate” form to give the mini-node over to an instance, it would be a lot easier to support sites in this way.

Speaking for myself, I have enough bandwidth and space I could lend some compute and offset a small amount of traffic. But the full load of a popular instance would be more than my simple home setup is equipped for. If contributing hosting was as easy as contributing compute, it could have a chance to catch on.

No, the mistake was the complete corruption of US politics through naked graft and a FPTP voting system leading to extremist views being the only rallying opposition to reasonable stances.

The government needs to get purged of lobbyists and money.