Barack_Embalmer

@Barack_Embalmer@lemmy.world

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Barack_Embalmer,

Tough-guy Ted “Bundy” Nugent also shat on himself to dodge the Vietnam draft.

Barack_Embalmer,

I like Ubuntu 😐

Barack_Embalmer,

TBF I’m branching out and I just installed Debian on my second laptop and I like that too. But Ubuntu’s been mighty good to me for a lot of years as a reliable workstation and server VM in Proxmox.

Barack_Embalmer,

“Linux good, Windows bad lol” which is a dumb take

Nope, this is the objectively correct take :)

Barack_Embalmer,

I recently had this issue needing to run Excel macros. I ended up using Oracle Virtualbox to run Windows from inside linux. Even more linuxey is using Proxmox to run your Windows VMs but that’s a bit more of a faff.

Barack_Embalmer,

Oh shit, that’s awesome, thanks for the heads up!

Barack_Embalmer,

That’s pretty disingenuous - it’s one of the many reasons that comprise a pattern of behavior whereby Microsoft makes Windows worse at each iteration. More bloat, more spying, more locked-down for user “security”. And for what? The dubious benefit of being “compatible” with other shitheel software providers like Adobe who use their monopoly power to stranglehold the corporate and professional media sectors? Toeachizown but IDK how anyone can use Windows by choice. The small amount I have to use it at work is torture enough.

Barack_Embalmer,

“Wait a minute… these aren’t the feet pics I ordered!”

Barack_Embalmer,

He must have meant the first 5 digits of the theorem expressed as some kind of Godel numbering. I mean there’s no way he’s a complete moronic cunt, right?

Barack_Embalmer,

I have used Ubuntu as the daily driver for the last 10 years, because support and tools are widespread and easy, and I don’t need any extra pain in my life. Drivers are mostly present and working upon a clean install, and in the one case where the touchpad wasn’t recognized, it was super easy to find an ubuntu forum post containing a 1-line command to fix it. But everybody says i should hate it and use Mint instead.

I’m open to give it a go, but in general, will most of the tutorials and fixes you find for Ubuntu also work with Mint?

Barack_Embalmer,

The advances in LLMs and Diffusion models over the past couple of years are remarkable technological achievements that should be celebrated. We shouldn’t be stifling scientific progress in the name of protecting intellectual property, we should be keen to develop the next generation of systems that mitigate hallucination and achieve new capabilities, such as is proposed in Yann Lecun’s Autonomous Machine Intelligence concept.

I can sorta sympathise with those whose work is “stolen” for use as training data, but really whatever you put online in any form is fair game to be consumed by any kind of crawler or surveillance system, so if you don’t want that then don’t put your shit in the street. This “right” to be omitted from training datasets directly conflicts with our ability to progress a new frontier of science.

The actual problem is that all this work is undertaken by a cartel of companies with a stranglehold on compute power and resources to crawl and clean all that data. As with all natural monopolies (transportation, utilities, etc.) it should be undertaken for the public good, in such as way that we can all benefit from the profits.

And the millionth argument quibbling about whether LLMs are “truly intelligent” is a totally orthogonal philosophical tangent.

Barack_Embalmer,

We tend to think of these models as agents or persons with a right to information. They “learn like we do” after all.

This is again a similar philosophical tangent that’s not germane to the issue at hand (albeit an interesting one).

I think you’ll see that if you only feed an LLM art or text from only one artist you will find that most of the output of the LLM is clearly copyright infringement if you tried to use it commercially.

This is not a feasible proposition in any practical sense. LLMs are necessarily trained on VAST datasets that comprise all kinds of text. The only type of network that could be trained on only one artist’s corpus is a tiny pedagogical tool like Karpathy’s minGPT github.com/karpathy/minGPT, trained solely on the works of Shakespeare. But this is not a “Large” language model, it’s a teaching exercise for ML students. One artist’s work could never practically train a network that could be considered “Large” in the sense of LLMs. So it’s pointless to prevaricate on a contrived scenario like that.

In more practical terms, it’s not controversial to state that deep networks with lots of degrees of freedom are capable of overfitting and memorizing training data. However, if they have other additional capabilities besides memorization then this may be considered an acceptable price to pay for those additional capabilities. It’s trivial to demonstrate that chatbots can perform novel tasks, like writing a rap song about Spongebob going to the moon on a rocket powered by ice cream - which is surely not existent in any training data, yet any contemporary chatbot is able to produce.

As far as science and progress, I don’t think that’s hampered by the view that these companies are clearly infringing on copyright.

As an example, one open research question concerns the scaling relationships of network performance as dataset size increases. In this sense, any attempt to restrict the pool of available training data hampers our ability to probe this question. You may decide that this is worth it to prioritize the sanctity of copyright law, but you can’t pretend that it’s not impeding that particular research question.

As far as “it’s on the internet, it’s fair game”. I don’t agree. In Western countries your works are still protected by copyright. Most of us do give away those rights when we post on most platforms, but only to one entity, not anyone/ any company who can read or has internet access.

I wasn’t making a claim about law, but about ethics. I believe it should be fair game, perhaps not for private profiteering, but for research. Also this says nothing of adversary nations that don’t respect our copyright principles, but that’s a whole can of worms.

We can’t just give up all our works and all our ideas to a handful of companies to copy for profit just because they can read and view them and feed them en masse into their expensive emulating machines.

As already stated, that’s where I was in agreement with you - It SHOULDN’T be given up to a handful of companies. But instead it SHOULD be given up to public research institutes for the furtherance of science. And whatever you don’t want to be included you should refrain from posting. (Or perhaps, if this research were undertaken according to transparent FOSS principles, the curated datasets would be public and open, and you could submit the relevant GDPR requests to get your personal information expunged if you wanted.)

Your whole response is framed in terms of LLMs being purely a product for commercial entities, who shadily exaggerate the learning capabilities of their systems, and couches the topic as a “people vs. corpos” battle. But web-scraped datasets (such as Imagenet) have been powering deep learning research for over a decade, long before AI captured the public imagination the way it has currently, and long before it became a big money spinner. This view neglects that language modelling, image recognition, speech transcription, etc. are also ongoing fields of academic research. Instead of vainly trying to cram the cat back into the bag, and throttling research, we should be embracing the use of publicly available data, with legislation that ensures it’s used for public benefit.

Barack_Embalmer,

I heard some of the really wealthy Silicon Valley types kit out their own private laboratory and hire chemists.

Barack_Embalmer,

He meant Lexus but he ain’t know it.

Barack_Embalmer,

But when it comes to battery power tools, you have to pick a brand and stick with it, unless you’re John D Rockefeller with 6 types of charger and a billion battery packs.

Barack_Embalmer,

Why is gatekeeping straightness even such an interesting topic people fixate over so much? Contrapoints “Are Traps Gay?” video provided some quite compelling answers to that question FWIW.

The universe started from a mysterious dot, we’re apes in clothes, and one day we will all be dust. It seems weird af to devote so much energy to worrying about the rules of which genitals interlock with which.

Barack_Embalmer,

That’s how the salesman guy got Homer to buy the Mister Plow truck lol

Barack_Embalmer,

Many modern theories in cognitive science posit that the brain’s objective is to be a kind of “prediction machine” to predict the incoming stream of sensory information from the top down, as well as processing it from the bottom up. This is sometimes referred to through the aphorism “perception is controlled hallucination”.

Barack_Embalmer, (edited )
Barack_Embalmer,

In a sense… yes! Although of course it’s thought to be across many modalities and time-scales, and not just text. Also a crucial piece of the picture is the Bayesian aspect - which also involves estimating one’s uncertainty over predictions. Further info: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding

It’s also important to note the recent trends towards so-called “Embodied” and “4E cognition”, which emphasize the importance of being situated in a body, in an environment, with control over actions, as essential to explaining the nature of mental phenomena.

But yeah, it’s very exciting how in recent years we’ve begun to tap into the power of these kinds of self-supervised learning objectives for practical applications like Word2Vec and Large Language/Multimodal Models.

Barack_Embalmer,

I have to disagree about that last sentence. Augmenting LLMs to have any remotely person-like attributes is far from trivial.

The current thought in the field about this centers around so-called “Objective Driven AI”:

in which strategies are proposed to decouple the AI’s internal “world model” from its language capabilities, to facilitate hierarchical planning and mitigate hallucination.

The latter half of this talk by Yann LeCun addresses this topic too: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd0JmT6rYcI

It’s very much an emerging and open-ended field with more questions than answers.

Barack_Embalmer,

Get Pudgie Walsh on the horn. He’ll straighten this out.

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