Onihikage

You’re entirely correct, but in theory they can give it a pretty good go, it just requires a lot more computation, developer time, and non-LLM data structures than these companies are willing to spend money on. For any single query, they’d have to get dozens if not hundreds of separate responses from additional LLM instances spun up on the side, many of which would be customized for specific subjects, as well as specialty engines such as Wolfram Alpha for anything directly requiring math.

LLMs in such a system would be used only as modules in a handcrafted algorithm, modules which do exactly what they’re good at in a way that is useful. To give an example, if you pass a specific context to an LLM with the right format of instructions, and then ask it a yes-or-no question, even very small and lightweight models often give the same answer a human would. Like this, human-readable text can be converted into binary switches for an algorithmic state machine with thousands of branches of pre-written logic.

Not only would this probably use an even more insane amount of electricity than the current approach of “build a huge LLM and let it handle everything directly”, it would take much longer to generate responses to novel queries.

He did at the beginning, but he helped them get what they wanted in the end, and I think that counts for something.

“We’re thankful that the Biden administration played the long game on sick days and stuck with us for months after Congress imposed our updated national agreement,” Russo said. “Without making a big show of it, Joe Biden and members of his administration in the Transportation and Labor departments have been working continuously to get guaranteed paid sick days for all railroad workers.

“We know that many of our members weren’t happy with our original agreement,” Russo said, “but through it all, we had faith that our friends in the White House and Congress would keep up the pressure on our railroad employers to get us the sick day benefits we deserve. Until we negotiated these new individual agreements with these carriers, an IBEW member who called out sick was not compensated.”

Counterpoint: Scumbag companies ninja-editing their timestamped warranty page such that the only way you know they edited it after you bought the product is because it was archived previously.

Archives are ideal for identifying sneaky behavior like that. You never know when an admin might have the ability to delete or edit something without anyone noticing.

Yeah, we only have to look at the FTC’s lawsuit against Amazon to see what they consider an antitrust problem:

[…] Amazon violates the law not because it is big, but because it engages in a course of exclusionary conduct that prevents current competitors from growing and new competitors from emerging. By stifling competition on price, product selection, quality, and by preventing its current or future rivals from attracting a critical mass of shoppers and sellers, Amazon ensures that no current or future rival can threaten its dominance.

That isn’t what we see from Valve - in fact it’s the opposite, as Valve’s strategy with Steam is simply to provide the best service and be the gold standard. The competition is almost always compared unfavorably to Steam, because gamers know how it feels to use a mature platform that isn’t trying to abuse them.

Valve has even taken some steps that wind up increasing competition in adjacent markets, such as operating systems (Proton has contributed significantly to Linux popularity) and even handheld game devices (Steam Deck set off an arms race when electronics manufacturers realized Nintendo is asleep at the wheel). Steam is as pro-consumer as it gets, with the exception of GOG and possibly itch.

Probably a local credit union, provided it’s FDIC insured and has decent terms of membership. Most credit unions aren’t in the business of spying on the people that own them, their purpose is just to manage their clients’ money and facilitate spending.

We keep saying that blocking ads is a security feature, and it keeps being true.

The title does need updated, but I suspect it was accurate at the time of posting 23 hours ago. The article appears to have been updated at least twice, based on the URL.

It’s not even about selling you something, it’s about selling you, period. They sell the user’s attention to advertisers, and don’t much care about anything else because anything else is too hard to quantify in a spreadsheet.

These days I mostly go for paid content like Nebula, alternative platforms like Odysee or PeerTube, or even Newgrounds - remember them? It’s not always possible to avoid YouTube entirely since some creators I follow only have a presence there, but transitions like this take time.

Since this labour is likely to be farmed out to innocent people in developing countries

You don’t quite seem to understand how easy it is to train these AI models, and because of that, you’re missing a critical point - with open-source technologies like Stable Diffusion, which has models that can be refined and run on a consumer-grade graphics card, the people using models to generate images and the people creating and refining those models are the same people. People who want to generate brand new pokemon sprites can train a model on all the pokemon sprites until it looks good. A few absolute galaxy-brain nerds who want to generate MIDI spectrograms from a text description and convert the output into audio… can apparently do that. And of course, people who want to generate lots of hentai or photorealistic porn can create and fine-tune a model, or multiple models, all by themselves (I won’t link any of these, but hundreds are readily available, and thousands exist in total)

In other words, people who already consume CSAM are the people working on models for generating CP, and a subset of those have definitely been trying to make it work with only legal images so that the model itself can be distributed and used without breaking any laws, maybe even hiding in plain sight pretending it’s not for making CP. Someone else out there with a different set of fucked-up desires has probably trained a model on gore and snuff images and then used it to create “photos” of people they hate as mutilated messes. There’s sick people of all kinds all over the place, and the jury’s unfortunately still out on whether this new tool actually causes harm when used in such a manner, or if it’s just the newest way they can express their deviance. We don’t know yet.

But this genie is already out of the bottle. Banning the use of this technology for specific, narrow use cases just isn’t going to be effective without banning AI image generation entirely, and we’re past the point where that’s feasible. Image generation is a powerful tool that’s not going away; it’s on us now to figure out what we really believe about harm, health, and personal freedom, and what we want a society with this tool to look like.

Personally, I’m of a mind that if all the data going into the model is legally obtained, anything generated should be considered artistic expression. A person had a thought, then put their thoughts into a tool, which made a picture of those thoughts. No matter how repulsive those thoughts were, I think throwing people in prison for that kind of expression is thought-crime. There’s public obscenity at play, of course, but only once they take the step of showing it to other people. If it’s just for themselves, and nobody else sees it, who is harmed? Even if it does turn out that it harms the person generating the images (which wouldn’t surprise me), that makes it a health issue, like drugs or other addictions, not something to criminalize.

I’ve found induction cooktops do just as well as gas at boiling water. The frustrating thing about them right now is the market is immature, so the good ones cost well over $1000 per burner and the cheap ones are so much worse (lousy coil sizes and poor heating precision) they aren’t worth using as anything more than a camping stove for tiny little pans where you don’t need precision. It’s like nobody in the industry wants to make these things good enough to actually replace the old technology, they just want to price gouge for all it’s worth while it’s still seen as the “expensive, hard to make, premium option”.

All of those host videos themselves, they’re not like piped or invidious.

iPhones are much, much more of a walled garden because Apple is an anticompetitive control freak that loves planned obsolescence. The EU is having to force them just to allow other app stores on iOS other than Apple’s, and obviously it’s impossible to install a different OS on an iPhone (and it’s becoming impossible to manually install MacOS on their desktop machines).

Meanwhile on Android phones you can install any app store you want (Play, Amazon, itch, F-Droid, etc.) or just download an APK and install it directly, like we’ve done for 30 years on PCs. Many Android phones have an unlockable bootloader so you can flash a custom build of Android or even Linux on it. Even if the stock ROM doesn’t let you acquire root access, a third-party build often will (though many banking apps will complain if you try to use them while rooted). I put GrapheneOS on my Pixel so I could deny Play Services most of the incredibly invasive permissions it wants; other ROMs exist for many popular Android phones such as CalyxOS, LineageOS, etc.

In my experience, I haven’t really needed root for anything on a recent device. Running a custom ROM takes care of most of the reasons to want root in the first place, and what’s left isn’t worth the risk, to me at least, of a malicious or compromised app having root access to the device.

FreeFileSync is FOSS and works pretty well for me. It can be set up for automated sync on a schedule or you can just manually sync files between two destinations. I haven’t really tinkered with the automated stuff but if what you want is to open up a program and hit a button to sync, it can definitely do that.

Everyone knowing your identity? The drawbacks would far outweigh the benefits. However, there may be a path to the benefits of a Real ID sign-up system that mitigates the possible harms.

First of all, let’s get this out of the way - this “minimal harm” approach would only be feasible if the government could either reach some level of technical competency or farm out the task to heavily restricted private corporations that do have that competence. If we presume that’s the case (unlikely), the question becomes whether the people would be willing to accept it. If we presume the majority of citizens also want such a thing (a tall order to be sure, I certainly don’t want it), then the question becomes what sort of system would be able to maximize privacy, and thus safety, while still requiring your real identity to be involved in creating online accounts? What would that system look like?

Even in the grandest, best-possible-case scenario I can think of, it still comes down to “Can I trust my government to not take more information than they’re allowed to, and can I trust that they will not abuse the information they do obtain?” For many, I suspect the answer to both questions is no.

Mandatory:

• Dark Reader for dark mode anywhere, and Invert Colors for the occasions when a site is not usable with Dark Reader.
• Ublock Origin of course, but I also still use uMatrix because even several years after it stopped being maintained, it’s STILL unmatched by any other addon in the content-blocker category. The granularity of being able to specifically allow scripts or frames or images or cookies from specific third-party domains or subdomains either everywhere or only on certain first-party domains, with a very intuitive visual grid (matrix) and subdomain selection, is incredible. I still don’t understand why it’s deprecated.
• Tree Style Tab and the related Tab Unloader. I forget things exist if they aren’t right in front of me, so if I have any intention of coming back to a site or a workflow, I need those tabs somewhere in front of me, tucked away in a tree waiting for me to get back to them. I regularly have between 100-200 tabs open. Being able to unload performance-heavy tabs without restarting the whole browser also helps a lot.
• Bitwarden because if you aren’t using some kind of password manager, do you even care about security?
• Translate Web Pages because not everything I want to read is in English

Nice to haves:

• Tranquility Reader, because the browser’s built-in Reader View often shits itself and doesn’t work, particularly on social media text posts. This lets me select the page contents I want it to grab in case the automated picker fails. It’s still a bit janky though; if anyone has a more polished alternative, I’d like to hear about it!
• Enhancer For YouTube, Sponsorblock, and Return YouTube Dislike
• stutter For when I feel like speed-reading
• Toolbox for Google Play Store

That anyone ever acted like that is so insane to me, it doesn’t even feel like it happened on the same planet. Among my middle/high school circle of friends through the 00’s, not a single one of us would have ever given shit to anyone, male or female, for playing video games. To us, every new gamer we met was a potential new friend who spoke our favorite language. Then we graduate, go out into the world, look around on the internet, and hear stories that there exist complete fuckwads on this green earth trying to keep girls out of gaming?? Like… what??

You’re on the Beehaw instance, like me, so you would be able to interact with that specific federated community at https://beehaw.org/c/stallmanwasright@lemmy.ml.

If it helps you mentally decode the meaning of that URL, the community (the /c/ part of the URL) is named stallmanwasright, it’s hosted on lemmy.ml, and you interact with it through beehaw.org, which is where your account is that lets you subscribe, comment, etc.

You can decode the other URL /u/noodlejetski@masto.ai gave you the same way. The community they sent is named kbinmeta, is hosted on kbin.social, and accessed through beehaw.org. Once you understand how it works, it’s pretty simple.