“We allege that Live Nation relies on unlawful, anticompetitive conduct to exercise its monopolistic control over the live events industry in the United States at the cost of fans, artists, smaller promoters, and venue operators,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland in a statement. “The result is that fans pay more in fees, artists have fewer opportunities to play concerts, smaller promoters get squeezed out, and venues have fewer real choices for ticketing services. It is time to break up Live Nation-Ticketmaster.”
Oh look, they finally discovered the thing anyone with more than two brain cells to rub together knew 20 years ago.
Stop fucking approving corporate mergers and acquisitions you utter fucking dumbasses.
Visiting relatives, working, studying, being a refugee etc are still on the table for those who are able to do that. I find it pretty reasonable due to the situation and not as huge of a barrier as the difference in average person’s wealth between countries and how it’s expensive and hard to get there in the first place. That kinda underlines the kind of people who can afford a vacation there. Can’t remember when I checked the tickets’ price but them alone were a ±yearly wage for a regular clerk from the countryside, and this is a leisure for the same group that can afford buying property in Dubai and who actively benefits from the war, corruption, power and siphoning natural resources. It’s more surprising this exact measure isn’t a usual occurence in Europe.
I could see them barring them from walking for their degree, but to hold it completely is messed up. Bullshit that ‘the corporation’ overruled the faculty vote.
Headline is misleading. The article notes that they arent necessarily withholding them permanently, but because they are going through the disciplinary process, and so currently not in good standing, they can’t get them at graduation.
But they did “give the terms”: they are not in good standing right now, and when the disciplinary action is complete then a final decision will be made.
It might be technically correct because bar does not necessarily mean permanently, but it implies that, and your claim that it means permanent is definitely false, especially if you’re basing it on the logic you used to claim it’s permanent.
The fun thing is that people say “I graduated” or “I’m graduating” but it’s technically more correct to say “I am being graduated (by the university).” I might be mixing it up a bit, but the idea is that the university always has the final say over whether or not you get that important piece of paper at the end.
One of my teachers in high school taught us this, but I never actually thought I’d see it in action. It’s cruel.
Which is bullshit. If you got the grades and paid your tuition, a university should not be able to withhold your degree. They can ban you from the graduation ceremony, but that’s it.
It is crazy that a university hold such power over someone.
Harvard doesn’t give grades. You either pass, fail, or pass with honors, more or less entirely at the whim of your professors.
It’s much more of a social club than a school, and being denied a degree is more akin to having your country club membership revoked than your credentials refuted.
It’s almost pro-forma, as the real benefit of attending Harvard is rubbing shoulders with the children of billionaires. The goal is to find someone willing to become your financial patron, not to hold a piece of paper confirming that you did all your homework.
If these kids are on the outs with the school board, they’ve already been blacklisted by anyone that matters.
I don’t understand the logic of why corruption makes someone their more ideal candidate. Is America just full of idiots? Whats the psychology behind that
We all knew this was where deepfakes were headed, and just like with all the other bad things happening since 2016, nobody’s done a single thing about it.
My mother is thoroughly addicted to Facebook and literally gets all her news from there. I keep sending her warnings about more targeted AI generated content and she keeps shrugging it off saying she “does her own research and doesn’t just blindly accept what gets posted.” Which from talking to her I know is total bullshit. I don’t know how to pull her out of it…
My MIL isn’t addicted to Facebook, but fell deep into vegan/plant-based stuff lately and says the same thing about doing her own research and not blindly believing stuff. I already knew a lot of the stuff she has been pushing on us was complete BS but the kicker was when she said meat and dairy cause autism
It’s annoying as hell, because there are plenty of sane and rational arguments to cut meat out of your diet (cost, just for starters). And then you’ve got the woo-woo types who insist the vegan from Scott Pilgrim was a real guy.
she said meat and dairy cause autism
If only! Imagine what the world would be like if all the most obnoxious chud internet personalities endlessly pushing the Offal Diet or Three Steaks a Day or whatever took it down about eight notches and got deeply into model trains, instead.
I do it through sync not sure what other apps have that function. It’s only for your personal viewing and I tend not to block people because I want to see the comment for the drama, but now I know not to interact with that person.
It gets misused ala reddit block list which seemed like a good idea but was co-opted to mean, anyone a small set of users disagreed with. Auto ban from half the sub reddits.
Do you know what I was talking about? No. This is a block list that was shared so you could (what’s the word?) automatically fill your blocklist with a disapproved group of people. This is basically letting someone defederate for you.
That may be what YOU were talking about. That is not what WE, the rest of the people in this comment thread, were talking about.
Eezyville@sh.itjust.works - I think having a tagging functionality would also be good for Lemmy.
Sizzler@lrpnk.net - It gets misused ala reddit block list which seemed like a good idea but was co-opted to mean, anyone a small set of users disagreed with. Auto ban from half the sub reddits.
You brought a “block list” into this convo where we were discussing user made tags that only the user who made the tag can see and aren’t shared and spread to others…
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.
Worthless system. After the initial threats and subsequent violence that guy should have been on death row. Idk why we cut people so much slack. Seriously.
“Oh golly gee y’all, we will try to do better in the future.”
-Local Police Chief
Meanwhile this woman is dead because of their lack of empathy, education, and basic human dignity. But they’ll sleep well every night for the rest of their lives while her children never will again.
In a functional society they would, instead we have low IQ ex military / military rejects in acting they’re power fantasies for the corporate overlord’s
"Evil" isn't real, it's a word we made up to describe shitty people. Beyond that, until we humans are perfect and never make mistakes, the death penalty is never going to be the acceptable answer. Too many innocent people end up killed by it.
Or the fact that it does nothing to address the causes of crimes that don’t stem from a “risk-reward” assessment and just lets whoever’s left behind have some false sense of having done something
They made no such claim. They were just noting that your argument uses the word “evil” as if it were a tangible, quantifiable thing, and it absolutely isn’t. This doesn’t mean that they embrace moral relativism or reject the concept of morality outright, but rather that they recognize you use of “evil” as a rhetorical device in bad faith.
The idea that being against the death penalty implies endorsement of the crimes that land people on death row (“evil” as you call it) is inherently fallacious. One can condemn violent crime without supporting violence as a punishment for crime. If anything, it is consistent with a philosophy of nonviolence.
The only person using rhetoric here is you. There are morally depraved people out there whom we colloquially refer to as “evil.” I don’t know why you insist on having a semantic argument. If “[moral depravity] does not exist,” as my interlocutor claims, then nihilism would indeed be true.
I would also like to point out that the ethical arguments against the death penalty in the scholarly literature are very weak and it remains an open question whether the death penalty is advisable on practical grounds. Morally it’s unlikely that any good argument exists to make it impermissible to kill “evil” people. You can check out the latest edition of any textbook on ethics, such as Living Ethics by Schaffer Landau, which syllogizes a variety of arguments on this topic.
A few Australian universities attend college fairs in the USA, because even after you include the price of the flights, accommodation, and the uni itself, studying in Australia can still end up cheaper than the USA. Americans seem to love the idea of going to Australia, too.
Without some sort of long term strategy, it may not be.
I’ve always said this would be good if also paired with some moves to improve things longer term, because random infusions of lots of free money without any checks on the university side has already worked to make the education more outrageously expensive. Continuing the strategy without any sort of price management will make things work.
Same could be said of healthcare, if as much money as they ask for is provided to the pharmas and hospitals, they will ask for more and more. Relief must be paired with some sort of plan to mitigate that.
You can treat symptoms and then address longer term problems when able. It’s not like it would be better for these people just to keep paying because the current divided Congress won’t address the core problem.
I hope so, but I’m pessimistic that even with full control that they have the political will to make reasonable reforms. Hoping I get to see what they do with full control for two years at least.
As long as you address the root problem in the window of time before things get worse from this cash infusion. And to be honest, I don’t have much confidence in that happening.
I don’t think the US university system is going to rework their fees because 160,000 people got public-service or low-income related forgiveness. It’s not even giving money directly to schools or financial institutions. The worst case is people who plan to either be poor or do public service may be less cost conscious when applying to schools, but the PSLF and income-based payment programs already existed and more importantly 18 year olds are just completely clueless about what taking out a $100,000 loan means. People fetishize economics like it’s a perfect mathematical system where every dollar spent will yield results in some other part of the system while just outright ignoring all the complete irrationality that exists in consumer decisions.
I think an individual jolt of this magnitude will not necessarily move the needle, but I’ve heard commentary about this just being a regular presidential thing to do going forward, which would be a pretty inadequate and unpredictable way (each time binging on happenstance of election, assuming that at least one of them even wants to do the “tradition”). Might be unfair for me to think overmuch on those suggestions, but they always stick in my head in these conversations. Still find it odd that the executive branch should be able to do this sort of thing unilaterally.
These were all either existing programs or a new program that forgives loans that already weren’t being repaid (via existing IBR rules). This is “unpredictable” only insofar as the previous president refused to let the programs work.
Still find it odd that the executive branch should be able to do this sort of thing unilaterally.
He isn’t. He does have that ability (because Congress specifically gave it to the Executive in the Higher Education Act), but these are existing programs directed by Congress. The new group is just Biden automatically enrolling people who qualify in the old program.
Worry about loan forgiveness to businesses and rich people rather than to poor people and public servants. There’s corn and fuel subsidies costing way more than this that have perverted the economy and actively destroy the environment. People get really worried about the economic effects of poor people getting stuff like that’s coming directly out of their wallet when there’s so much larger and more direct issues that just get assumed as normal.
This is “unpredictable” only insofar as the previous president refused to let the programs work.
The end result was a promised program that didn’t work as intended and was unreliable. The details are a little less important than the results. However, I’m actually referring broadly to some folks that I saw saying that it should be some sort of presidential ‘ritual’ of forgiving debt, rather than being confined to select programs.
Worry about loan forgiveness to businesses and rich people rather than to poor people and public servants.
Note that I’m less concerned about the loan forgiveness, but instead worry about the “blank check” effect and future affordability and whether or not a student gets stuck with debt assuming they will get forgiven and then get screwed because a future administration refrains from doing so or interferes with ‘forgiveness’. I’d rather circumstances result in no significant debt at all, that government’s willingness to contribute happens up front and universities are somewhat held accountable for their costs to keep that affordable. We can also worry about the crap done for businesses and rich people, but the current situation kind of sucks for planning if you are poor, having to go into massive debt hoping maybe you’ll get in on some forgiveness down the line.
The end result was a promised program that didn’t work as intended and was unreliable. The details are a little less important than the results. However, I’m actually referring broadly to some folks that I saw saying that it should be some sort of presidential ‘ritual’ of forgiving debt, rather than being confined to select programs.
Then maybe you should have found a topic about that or referred to it specifically rather than just latching on to whatever debt-forgiveness news came up to air your grievances. It’s kind of obvious you’re not really concerned with whether a program is “unreliable” and just don’t like debt forgiveness, because all of these things exist with any program ever. The executive can sabotage it? That’s fucking everything. These are congressionally-passed laws establishing long running programs, there’s no “righter” way that means a hostile executive can’t sabotage it.
I was thinking more on the university side, some sort of strings attached to have universities a bit more mindful on expense. Waving interest is again a good thing for the borrowers, but it’s still a relatively blank check for the universities.
One, yes, some models were trained on CSAM. In AI you'll have checkpoints in a model. As a model learns new things, you have a new checkpoint. SD1.5 was the base model used in this. SD1.5 itself was not trained on any CSAM, but people have giving additional training to SD1.5 to create new checkpoints that have CSAM baked in. Likely, this is what this person was using.
Two, yes, you can get something out of a model that was never in the model to begin with. It's complicated, but a way to think about it is, a program draws raw pixels to the screen. Your GPU applies some math to smooth that out. That math adds additional information that the program never distinctly pushed to your screen.
Models have tensors which long story short, is a way to express an average way pixels should land to arrive at some object. This is why you see six fingered people in AI art. There wasn't any six fingered person fed into the model, what you are seeing the averaging of weights pushing pixels between two different relationships for the word "hand". That averaging is adding new information in the expression of an additional finger.
I won't deep dive into the maths of it. But there's ways to coax new ways to average weights to arrive at new outcomes. The training part is what tells the relationship between A and C to be B'. But if we wanted D' as the outcome, we could retrain the model to have C and E averaging OR we could use things call LoRAs to change the low order ranking of B' to D'. This doesn't require us to retrain the model, we are just providing guidance on ways to average things that the model has already seen. Retraining on C and E to D' is the part old models and checkpoints used to go and that requires a lot of images to retrain that. Taking the outcome B' and putting a thumb on the scale to put it to D' is an easier route, that just requires a generalized teaching of how to skew the weights and is much easier.
I know this is massively summarizing things and yeah I get it, it's a bit hard to conceptualize how we can go from something like MSAA to generating CSAM. And yeah, I'm skipping over a lot of steps here. But at the end of the day, those tensors are just numbers that tell the program how to push pixels around given a word. You can maths those numbers to give results that the numbers weren't originally arranged to do in the first place. AI models are not databases, they aren't recalling pixel for pixel images they've seen before, they're averaging out averages of averages.
I think this case will be slam dunk because highly likely this person's model was an SD1.5 checkpoint that was trained on very bad things. But with the advent of being able to change how averages themselves and not the source tensors in the model work, you can teach new ways for a model to average weights to obtain results the model didn't originally have, without any kind of source material to train the model. It's like the difference between Spatial antialiasing and MSAA.
In the eyes of the law, intent does matter, as well as how it’s responded to.
For csam material, you have to knowingly possess it or have sought to possess it.
The AI companies use a project that indexes everything on the Internet, like Google, but with publicly available free output.
They use this data via another project, laion.ai , which uses the data to find images with descriptions attached, do some tricks to validate that the descriptions make sense, and then publish a list of “location of the image, description of the image” pairs.
The AI companies use that list to grab the images train an AI on them in conjunction with the description.
So, people at Stanford were doing research on the laion dataset when they found the instances of csam. The laion project pulled their datasets from being available while things were checked and new safeguards put in place.
The AI companies also pulled their models (if public) while the images were removed from the data set and new safeguards implemented.
Most of the csam images in the dataset were already gone by the time the AI companies would have attempted to access them, but some were not.
A very obvious lack of intent to acquire the material, in fact a lack of awareness the material was possessed at all, transparency in response, taking steps to prevent further distribution, and taking action to prevent it from happening again both provides a defensive against accusations, and will make anyone interested less likely to want to make those accusations.
On the other hand, the people who generated the images were knowingly doing so, which is a nono.
They wouldn’t be able to generate it had there been none in the training data, so I assume the labelling and verification systems you talk about aren’t very good.
That’s not accurate. The systems are designed to generate previously unseen concepts or images by combining known concepts.
It’s why it can give you an image of a pony using a hangglider, despite never having seen that. It knows what ponies look like, and it knows what hanggliding looks like, so it can find a way to put both into the image. Where it doesn’t know, it will make stuff up from what it does know, often requiring potentially very detailed user explanation to describe how a horse would fit in a hangglider, or that it shouldn’t have a little person sticking out of it’s back.
Could you hypothetically describe csam without describing an adult with a child’s head, or specifying that it’s a naked child?
That’s what a person trying to generate csam would need to do, because it doesn’t have those concepts.
If you just asked it directly, like I said “horse flying a hangglider” before, you would get what you describe because it’s using the only “naked” it knows.
You would need to specifically ask it to demphasize adult characteristics and emphasize child characteristics.
That doesn’t mean that it was trained on that content.
For context from the article:
The DOJ alleged that evidence from his laptop showed that Anderegg “used extremely specific and explicit prompts to create these images,” including “specific ‘negative’ prompts—that is, prompts that direct the GenAI model on what not to include in generated content—to avoid creating images that depict adults.”
I was like, how do they know what they have - and you were like “another AI has labelled it all, and every now and then a human checks it’s work”…
It’s AIs all the way down with you.
“Open AI investigated it’s self and confirmed it didn’t have CSAM in the training data”
They couldn’t find out if they wanted to, the training data is too large and the labelling AI isn’t designed to know, or label CSAM.
…and yeah, sitting around and using your time to defend tech-bro billionaires IS creepy. They’re not about to thank you my guy.
“I just understand the technology”
Yeah, and you’re not acknowledging that what I’m saying is accurate. The “labelling AI” can’t recognise and report CSAM, and the Tech Bros don’t have an accurate idea of what they have stored in their training data.
So yeah, your being creepy when you do all these mental gymnastics to defend them…
… it’s just like the claiming the NSA don’t listen to phone conversations, only it’s been revealed they do have human operators hearing bits of conversation.
Your a narc and an apologist, and it’s creepy because it’s misinformation. It’s spin and you’re volunteering your time to defend them.
Also: Pretending like I was attacking you for knowing how the technology works is a bullshit move.
I’m complaining at your defence to them, not at your explanation of the technology… But that just shows how willing you are to “spin” things in their defence. Little unpaid footman.
news
Active
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.