Are they serious, like showing images of Musk doing this is unlawful?

Potentially, which I guess might have been the entire point. The ZPS is no stranger to provoking law suites, and since Musk did this in the US this might be their attempt at baiting the German jurisdiction to take a stance on it.

That said the article you linked says the police talks about having an “Anfangsverdacht” (initial suspicion), which basically means “we have heard about it and will look into it”.

Can’t speak to historic usage, but today “am” (an dem) means “on” or “near”, and “im” (in dem) means “in”.

So the literal translation would be “lick me in the arse”.

Once saw a (German) documentary about this building. They have drop-off places on the ground floor where delivery drivers leave their goods in locked boxes. Payment and and locking/unlocking of the box is done digitally through phone.

P.S.: This one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgVXPEORuA0

There is a blue van in the right lane,

*car in front of a blue road sign

at 270 km/h (168 MPH), he’s going to be right behind it in a second.

The bollards on the right side of the road are at a distance of 50m from each other, by which we can estimate that the other car is at least 250 to 300 meters away. 270km/h equals 75m/s so they are about 4 seconds behind (if the other car was stationary).

Therefore the lane is not – in fact – free.

To answer this question it is much more important to know what is on the right lane next to or behind the car, which we do not see in this image anyway.

I’ll have you know that this is famous sci-fi author Charles David George Stross posting an excerpt from his seminal novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus. The warning is right in the title, I’m sure nobody will be dumb enough to ignore it!

[…] a public institution is really not a great example of the general population […]

Which I touched upon in my disclaimer, but in some ways it is a great example. Public institutions are defined by the general population, indirectly through their representatives creating the rules that govern them, and directly through contact with the public at large. Now if all our institutions still use this very outdated technology, and you can have trouble convincing them - during a global pandemic mind you - that using email is just as safe as using fax (so not safe at all basically), then that speaks to a larger mindset in the general population.

Many in the general public are also a lot quicker, some might even say careless, with adopting new technology of course. But as a society we are rather slow, and there are surprisingly many individuals who are hesitant or entirely resistant to adopting new technology. The fediverse usage is a bubble in a bubble here.

The internet infrastructure is another good example for this on the societal level, as there were plans in the 1980ies [!] to lay out a glass fibre network between every publicly used building in the country, which would have gotten us a good part of the way towards adopting this new material at scale. But in the end it was deemed unnecessary and too expensive and the project got canned (mixed in with rumours of “close friendship” between the chancellor and a major copper producer). Instead now we have people running around thirty years later and collecting signatures at the door for last-mile fibre network projects that seldom make quorum and thus almost never materialise public funding.

2. […] But also how are Germans technologically behind regarding common personal life?

I bet you wherever in Germany you are, if you go to the website of your local city government right now they will have a still active fax number in their contact information. I guarantee it. Well if they have a website that is.

Which is a bit silly as an example but highlights the central problem, which is that adoption of new technology happens at a glacial pace, especially in public institutions. There are many reasons for that of course, some good, like the aforementioned inclination towards privacy, some bad like whatever allows fax machines to still be around.

And don’t get me started on internet infrastructure… In an international comparison we certainly aren’t leading the field regarding adoption of new technologies.

Depends on the kind of colour blindness you have I guess. I think I have the congenital red-green blindness common among men, and saturate Just Works™ for me. Plus I don’t have to fiddle with setting a rotation degree there.

PSA for my fellow colour blind people, you can use inspect element option of your browser to add a filter: saturate(100); rule to the element for this kind of image:

I sometimes forget that this picture exists, and then I happen upon it in places like here and it just smacks me in the face how perfectly it encapsulates the total and utter loss of decorum in politics. I mean it was never perfect obviously, but in past times there was a somewhat reasonable expectation of politicians being civil and them losing their office if they were publicly caught out not to be. It was rare, but it happened. Yet here you have the supposedly “most powerful man in the world” just dropping every pretence and hustling for some company in a flagrant abuse of his office. It’s so brazenly corrupt. And the worst thing is this was just another Tuesday for Trump, mild shit-storm, on to the next fucked up thing he did. Society never even had time to realise what a historic moment this was. It was just dropped on the pile.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/loss

TL;DR: Somebody made a really weird episode of a web comic and the configuration of the figures in the panel has become a meme named “Loss” after the name of that episode. Pic related:

The joke here is that evolution gave you pattern recognition to avoid predators, but now you are using it for useless things like recognising this comic is spatially organised in the same way the Loss comic is.

a neural network with a series of layers (W in this case would be a single layer)

I understood this differently. W is a whole model, not a single layer of a model. W is a layer of the Transformer architecture, not of a model. So it is a single feed forward or attention model, which is a layer in the Transformer. As the paper says, a LoRA:

injects trainable rank decomposition matrices into each layer of the Transformer architecture

It basically learns shifting the output of each Transformer layer. But the original Transformer stays intact, which is the whole point, as it lets you quickly train a LoRA when you need this extra bias, and you can switch to another for a different task easily, without re-training your Transformer. So if the source of the bias you want to get rid off is already in these original models in the Transformer, you are just fighting fire with fire.

Which is a good approach for specific situations, but not for general ones. In the context of OP you would need one LoRA for fighting it sexualising Asian women, then you would need another one for the next bias you find, and before you know it you have hundreds and your output quality has degraded irrecoverably.

Yeah but that’s my point, right?

That

1. you do not “replace data until your desired objective”.
2. the original model stays intact (the W in the picture you embedded).

Meaning that when you change or remove the LoRA (A and B), the same types of biases will just resurface from the original model (W). Hence “less biased” W being the preferable solution, where possible.

Don’t get me wrong, LoRAs seem quite interesting, they just don’t seem like a good general approach to fighting model bias.

First, there is no thing as a “de-biased” training set, only sets with whatever target series of biases you define for them to reflect.

Yes, I obviously meant “de-biased” by definition of whoever makes the set. Didn’t think it worth mentioning, as it seems self evident. But again, in concrete terms regarding the OP this just means not having your dataset skewed towards sexualised depictions of certain groups.

1. either you replace data until your desired objective, which will reduce the model’s quality for any of the alternatives

[…]
For reference, LoRAs are a sledgehammer approach to apply the first way.

The paper introducing LoRA seems to disagree (emphasis mine):

We propose Low-Rank Adaptation, or LoRA, which freezes the pre-trained model weights and injects trainable rank decomposition matrices into each layer of the Transformer architecture, greatly reducing the number of trainable parameters for downstream tasks.

There is no data replaced, the model is not changed at all. In fact if I’m not misunderstanding it adds an additional neural network on top of the pre-trained one, i.e. it’s adding data instead of replacing any. Fighting bias with bias if you will.

And I think this is relevant to a discussion of all models, as reproduction of training set biases is something common to all neural networks.

“Inclusive models” would need to be larger.

[citation needed]

To my understanding the problem is that the models reproduce biases in the training material, not model size. Alignment is currently a manual process after the initial unsupervised learning phase, often done by click-workers (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, RLHF), and aimed at coaxing the model towards more “politically correct” outputs; But ultimately at that time the damage is already done since the bias is encoded in the model weights and will resurface in the outputs just randomly or if you “jailbreak” enough.

In the context of the OP, if your training material has a high volume of sexualised depictions of Asian women the model will reproduce that in its outputs. Which is also the argument the article makes. So what you need for more inclusive models is essentially a de-biased training set designed with that specific purpose in mind.

I’m glad to be corrected here, especially if you have any sources to look at.

deleted by creator

This is literal fake news. Climate change is certainly a thing. Flowers blooming in Antarctica currently is not.

Uhm, your own source says differently though?

While a 2022 study did find a global warming-related expansion in the range of two Antarctic flowering plants, the photo does not show those plant species.

Okay, thoughtful argument but still…

Well thanks, however this compliment seems a bit like a poisoned chalice considering the rest of your replies.

Who gets to decide when to use violence then? For what reason? When is it okay and when is it not? What is the line?

We have been through this, the line is that it has to be a last resort. FYI, this concept is literally enshrined in our constitution:

Article 20
[…]
(4) All Germans shall have the right to resist any person seeking to abolish this constitutional order if no other remedy is available.

You say it’s okay when people have opinions that you disagree with. Granted, those options are really very shitty opinions, but they’re that: opinions. This person you’ll be punching hasn’t hit you, hasn’t attacked you. He said or displayed things you don’t like.

No, I say it’s okay when people have opinions that are a clear and present danger to a tolerant society. Again, we have been over this, it’s know as the paradox of tolerance. What these people do is attack civil society by abusing its rules, and you seem to propose we let them without keeping violence as a last resort, except for immediate self-defence of your person. Saying for example that all Jews or Muslims should be killed or that refugees deserve no asylum is technically an opinion, but it is also an attack on human rights and civil society. And you should stand up to that, if you deem it necessary with violence.

And yes, answering intolerance with intolerance seems like circular logic, because it is. That’s why it’s called a paradox. But IMHO you should consider that we are talking about something where our language, also a system of circular logic by the way, breaks down.

So where is the line? You can punch him if he displays a swastika?

Well this one is easy in Germany at least, because it’s literally illegal. I’ll report them to police and they will get up to three years in prison for it pursuant to § 86a of the criminal code (display of anti-constitutional symbols).

How about me displayjng a swastika, you punch me and oops, it’s a religious symbol from India…

Those are usually turned the other way and not displayed at a 45° angle. Nazi iconography is in most cases clearly distinguishable from Hindu and Shinto iconography, and if it’s not you can ask first. I will say however that when you claim to display an Asian religious symbol while being white, having a shaved head, wearing a bomber jacket and jump boots, I’m not inclined to believe you.

Doesn’t matter for my locale though, people here usually chose to just not display it outside of temples to avoid this obvious misunderstanding.

Who gets to decide who to punch? WHO?

The one doing the punching. If it was justified will be decided by the courts, as you said. And yeah, unless you have a very good reason you will probably be convicted of assault, since the state claims a monopoly on violence. However some would argue, including me, that sometimes the only way to defend the existence of civil society lies outside its rules. It’s called civil disobedience.

Nazi’s exist as much as roman legionaries exist. The Roman Empire is gone and so is Nazi Germany. That somebody would love to be one is a different thing. I’d love to be a samurai but those too no longer exists. Slapping a label on it doesn’t change that. I can dress up and play one but that’s not the same. There are neo-Nazi’s out there for sure, wannabees. There are no Nazi’s.

Yeah ok, first off the time frame and circumstances are a little different here. The Roman Empire and the samurai caste have been gone a bit longer than Nazi Germany. Every single member of those organisations is long dead. This is not the case for Nazis, and they had ample opportunity to pass on their ideology to later generations, which they did. There aren’t, to my knowledge, any large groups of people self-identifying as Roman legionaries or samurai, except for LARPing purposes. There are however a lot of them seriously self-identifying as Nazis. I don’t see what you or I would gain by denying that they are.

Secondly, to classify them as neo-Nazis instead of actual Nazis, and maintaining that there is a relevant difference in that regarding their level of intolerance towards other groups is bonkers. In context, i.e. whether they present a clear and present danger to civil society, it’s a distinction without a difference. And if you want to hold on to this ridiculous premise this entire discussion is kind of pointless.

You seem to be of the persuasion that liberal democracies aren’t endangered by fascism or other forms of totalitarianism anymore, I fail to see why that would be the case. On the contrary, history teaches us that this is a constant danger. There is a reason the principle of defensive democracy was made into law by a lot of nations after the second world war.

Stop with the dumb slogans. Everybody knows that Nazi’s were bad and “punch a Nazi” only leads to assholes calling others they don’t like Nazi’s.

It also leads to Nazis being punched. I don’t think we will reach agreement on this, so thanks for the - mostly - respectful discussion. At the risk of being accused of using dumb slogans again, I’ll leave you with a quote from a German pastor who was put into the concentration camps for his believes:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
— Martin Niemöller

Nur zur Info, du kannst auf Lemmy Bilder direkt einbinden mit folgender Markdown-Syntax:

![Alternativtext für Screenreader und so](https://link.zum/bild.jpg)

Man beachte das ! vorne vor dem [](), sonst wird es nur als Link mit Text statt Adresse angezeigt.

Recognising sarcasm depends a lot on tone of voice in spoken conversations, thus a tradition in internet discussions has developed to put a /s behind the statement that is intended to be sarcasm. The slash is in imitation of closing HTML tags, i.e. it is to be read as “end of sarcasm”. Putting it behind instead of before the sarcasm grants the added benefit of many people still falling for it at first.