SnotFlickerman

SnotFlickerman, 6 hours ago

in Infancy Needs Improvements

I’m just gonna go out on a limb and say that if we have to invest in new energy sources just to make these tools functionably usable… maybe we’re better off just paying people to do these jobs instead of burning the planet to a rocky dead husk to achieve AI?

SnotFlickerman, 6 hours ago (edited 2 hours ago)

this would be a great thing for humanity.

That’s easy to say. Tell me how. Also tell me how to do it without it being biased about certain subjects over others. Captain Beatty would wildly disagree with this even being possible. His whole shtick in Fahrenheit 451 is that all the books disagreed with one another, so that’s why they started burning them.

SnotFlickerman, 5 hours ago (edited 1 hour ago)

reuters.com/…/openai-ceo-altman-says-davos-future…

Speaking at a Bloomberg event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Altman said the silver lining is that more climate-friendly sources of energy, particularly nuclear fusion or cheaper solar power and storage, are the way forward for AI.

“There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said. “It motivates us to go invest more in fusion.”

It’s a good trajectory, but when you have people running these companies saying that we need “energy breakthroughs” to power something that gives more accurate answers in the face of a world that’s already experiencing serious issues arising from climate change…

It just seems foolhardy if we have to burn the planet down to get to 80% accuracy.

I’m glad Altman is at least promoting nuclear, but at the same time, he has his fingers deep in a nuclear energy company, so it’s not like this isn’t something he might be pushing because it benefits him directly. He’s not promoting nuclear because he cares about humanity, he’s promoting nuclear because has deep investment in nuclear energy. That seems like just one more capitalist trying to corner the market for themselves.

SnotFlickerman, 4 hours ago

The only downside of Free Open Source Software is that it has been unintentionally the biggest transfer of wealth created by labor from volunteer labor to the capitalist class in history.

Way better software, so much so that capitalists use the hell out of it to make tons of money.

The main limiting factor of the open source AI world is hardware. Hard for individual enthusiasts to compete with corporations who have billions of GPUs worth of processing power. I just have one GPU, and its an AMD, so it’s even more limited because nVidia is the brand majorly used for AI projects.

SnotFlickerman, 6 hours ago (edited 2 hours ago)

So this issue for me is this:

If these technologies still require large amounts of human intervention to make them usable then why are we expending so much energy on solutions that still require human intervention to make them usable?

Why not skip the burning the planet to a crisp for half-formed technology that can’t give consistent results and instead just pay people a living fucking wage to do the job in the first place?

Seriously, one of the biggest jokes in computer science is that debugging other people’s code gives you worse headaches than migraines.

So now we’re supposed to dump insane amounts of money and energy (as in burning fossil fuels and needing so much energy they’re pushing for a nuclear resurgence) into a tool that results in… having to debug other people’s code?

They’ve literally turned all of programming into the worst aspect of programming for barely any fucking improvement over just letting humans do it.

Why do we think it’s important to burn the planet to a crisp in pursuit of this when humans can already fucking make art and code? Especially when we still need humans to fix the fucking AIs work to make it functionally usable. That’s still a lot of fucking work expected of humans for a “tool” that’s demanding more energy sources than currently exists.

SnotFlickerman, 1 hour ago (edited 1 hour ago)

There’s one way to hold them accountable, and they’re pretty fucking aware of it:

reuters.com/…/us-supreme-court-seeks-security-fun…

You don’t decide to ramp up security because people are happy with you. You do it when you know you’re doing something incredibly unpopular and so you want protection from the target you put on your own back with your incredibly unpopular decision.

They know exactly what they’re doing.

Edit: To be clear this is in no way an endorsement or suggestion regarding “holding them accountable.” “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster… for when you gaze long into the abyss. The abyss gazes also into you.”

SnotFlickerman, 10 hours ago

I posit we do more of different types of reading than we used to.

We read more things online than in traditional books, this often includes reading traditional books in an electronic format.

I’ve also read that subtitles are incredibly popular now, even for watching shows and movies in your own language. Foreign shows are more popular than ever, as well.

Reading novels isn’t done as much but I think just the nature of why we read has changed.

SnotFlickerman, 10 hours ago

Well everybody fucking hates the TikTok voice, but like 90% of those videos have subtitles and you can just mute the fucking thing and read what its saying.

Lots of “watching videos” is actually “reading videos” these days. Especially with technical How-To videos, which often require you to read what’s on the screen as well. If my How-To video is about coding, reading the code on the screen is pretty damn important.

I’m constantly watching internet videos completely muted while reading the text subtitles.

SnotFlickerman, 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

Exactly. It’s a moderator action on a lemmy.ml community. lemmy.world rules are literally not applicable.

I edited my original comment to reflect the OP’s edit.

SnotFlickerman, 1 day ago

Interesting! I wonder if the automod at lemmy.world is just reporting all moderation actions, regardless of instance origin?

I don’t think the automod on lemmy.world works the same way as it does on reddit. I think it does more reporting of moderation actions than doing automatic moderation, but I could be wrong.

Anyway, thanks for your feedback as well. I was aware of how lemmy.world was informing people of moderator actions, and I think it’s really interesting that it is including actions from different instances when they’re interacted with on lemmy.world.

SnotFlickerman, 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

They call it a “Terms of Service” but it includes the rules and regulations.

legal.lemmy.world/tos/

It’s in the sidebar on the front page.

EDIT:

ETA: for context, a comment of mine was removed and “rule 2” was cited but the rules in the TOS don’t seem to be relevant.

It was listed as a moderator action, and the community it was involved in was shitposting@lemmy.ml. This is actually a lemmy.ml instance, and rules from lemmy.ml and the shiposting community apply. Rules from lemmy.world don’t apply in this case, rules from lemmy.ml do.

Rule 2 on Lemmy.ml is “Be respectful.”

Also, the mod is from lemmy.ml, which generally has a lot of people who vibe with hexbear, and that moderators profile literally says “we do a little trolling.” I wouldn’t take it personally or do anything about it. Just move on and accept it.

SnotFlickerman, 1 day ago (edited 1 day ago)

Lifting human bodies is hard, especially when they’re obese (which many, many older US citizens are morbidly obese).

The people who do these jobs are underpaid and often expected to do the work of lifting large, obese bodies (300+lbs.) without the proper heavy lifting equipment.

The number of people who do these jobs who end up with long-term serious bodily harm like their backs being absolutely fucked up and needing surgery is too damn high.

SnotFlickerman, 2 days ago

When you aren’t sure where your next meal comes from or if you can afford rent and you already work full-time…

I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that is probably a valid time to be vocally loud about it.

SnotFlickerman, 2 days ago

Does Unraid count as paid Linux itself, not just a Linux utility?

SnotFlickerman, 2 days ago

KDEndlive is pretty solid, imho

SnotFlickerman, 13 days ago (edited 9 days ago)

I’ve been trying to find this interview with Mark Hossler for over a decade. It was around 2006-2008, it was pre-youtube and hosted as an mp4 file on someone’s blog… I have been unable to find it, nor have others. If you can find it easily on YouTube… it’s not the interview I’m talking about.

Anyway, it spoke deeply on this point. I’ll try to make my best summation of what Hossler discussed in this interview.

Basically, his position on art and how you can have “control” over your art was this:

If you want to control your art: Keep it in your home, don’t take pictures of it, don’t post it online, keep quiet about it and maybe let people who enter your home view it.

The key is this: All human minds function on copying and memetics. We inherently “copy” ideas that we see in real life, without even thinking about it. Taking this a step further, anyone who wants to “copy” your art can simply do so by viewing it, internalizing the details in their mind, and then (if they’re a talented artist) recreate your art themselves.

In other words, there is no real way to have complete control over your art short of locking it inside of a box and never showing it to anybody. The act of sharing it with others means you’ve put the idea of that art into their mind, and if they wish to do so, they can absolutely copy it. There is no stopping this act, this is innate to how the human mind functions, learns, and adapts.

So if you want “control” over your creations, you better not be sharing them with anybody.

Once you’ve shared your creations (art or engineering) with the world, someone out there will be capable of copying what you did. Further, with billions of people on the planet, someone out there will be capable and willing to do it.

The point I personally think Hossler was making is that in sharing something at all, you’ve already destroyed any of your own attempts to control the use of the idea. Stop trying to control your creations and instead hope society will do it’s best with them.

SnotFlickerman, 3 days ago

Charlie Brown but an adult wearing the same outfit (adult sized) and just as bald.

I can “AUGH!” with the best of them.

SnotFlickerman, 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

There’s lots of little signs.

Loss of 24 hour stores. It used to be profitable enough to leave places open all night for people to come in all night. Both Target and Walmart (poor people stores) have pretty much dumped it and don’t even do stocking overnight anymore. This leads to the same stores being a mess and feeling difficult to navigate (especially when its actively being stocked and you’re just trying to get past them), pushing more people to order online and pickup because its easier than trying to find it yourself and in the store the price is often wrong or just not listed.

Suddenly its not profitable to give a shit about things like customer service. It just feels like it portends that a certain number of customers now can be considered “acceptable losses.”

SnotFlickerman, 2 days ago (edited 2 days ago)

I think the actual reality may be that it’s actually, genuinely not profitable enough to serve the poorest of society. (At least in the eyes of the demented greedy fucks running the show)

We’ve seen an explosion of business-to-business sales and more businesses are spending more money on “productivity” software suites and more. Software is indeed eating business and making it more costly while often not actually providing as much real value as they’re selling you. Small businesses are overwhelmed by these costs and often put out of business by them.

Even gas stations all have video ads. The money they’re making off the gas isn’t enough, they need to supplement it with advertising. Advertising is becoming more ubiquitous than I could have even ever imagined, and I thought it was over-the-top and abusively ubiquitous 30 years ago.

Fast food like Dominos has to keep assembly-line, sweatshop like conditions to keep up with internet ordering (with no built-in rate-limiter, an infinite amount of people can order pizza at the same time, they just want you to keep up), and even with those kind of conditions, it’s often just barely scraping by on breaking even on costs. Most restaurants are struggling with this right now, its an industry I expect to see fail almost completely except for rich, fancy restaurants.

It certainly feels like we’re about to see a whole glut of consumers that companies just aren’t even interested in anymore because they’re not interested in people with no money to spend.

I’m not really excited about where this is all headed. Expect more Company Towns on the horizon…

From Heroes back to Zeroes… Fuck this shithole country that doesn’t give a damn about millions of its own citizens.

SnotFlickerman, 2 days ago

Chad Steve Dallas not taken in by this Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

SnotFlickerman, 2 days ago

https://media.tenor.com/F9EfM4fdgzIAAAAM/vin-diesel-i-dont-have-friends.gif

SnotFlickerman, 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago)

Around 2007 or so I used to unplug Coinstar machines from the internet (plug was usually right in back) and then put in all my coins and try to redeem an online gift card. It used to be you could only get all of your cash back via online gift cards, because the machine took out a fee to give your money back in cash.

When it couldn’t connect to the internet, it would apologize and refund me in cash, with no convenience fee (since I was clearly inconvenienced). Full amount returned.

SnotFlickerman, 10 days ago (edited 2 hours ago)

Strapping Young Lad / anything Devin Townsend

Zimmer’s Hole

Dethklok

Mindless Self Indulgence

Punky Bruster’s Cooked On Phonics

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Das Racist

DANGERDOOM

Handsome Boy Modeling School

The Lonely Island

MC Paul Barman

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Big Dumb Face

Mr. Bungle

Lovage

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Man… Or Astro Man?

Electric Six

Ween

Dead Kennedys / anything Jello Biafra

Mean Jeans

Flight of the Conchords

Presidents of the United States of America

Reverend Horton Heat

The Unicorns

EDIT: The Chats

EDIT 2: Atom and His Package

EDIT 4: Voodoo Glow Skulls

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Richard Cheese & Lounge Against the Machine

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Chromeo

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Only Some Funny Songs:

Mountain Goats

Tom Waits

EDIT 3: Beck

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A League of Their Own:

GWAR

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Most Importantly:

Weird Al Yankovic, because he fucking rocks god damn it.

SnotFlickerman, 5 days ago

I can’t bring my video card in bed with me.

Sorry, desktop PC, you’re just bad at snuggles while I can hug my Steam Deck.

SnotFlickerman, 5 days ago

Won’t someone think of the profits of the private companies!?! /s

For fucks sake, it’s like it’s the only god damned thing anyone fucking thinks about.