FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

Looks like we're in another period of "double-check every headline to see if it's real or from the Onion" for me...

FaceDeer, 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago)

We're sick of closed walled-garden monoliths like Reddit! Let's move to an open federated protocol where anyone can participate and the APIs can't be locked down!

...wait, not like that!

Yeah. This is what you signed up for when you joined the Fediverse, the ActivityPub protocol broadcasts your content to any other servers that ask for it. And just generally, that's how the Internet works. You're putting up a public billboard and expecting to be able to control who gets to look at it. That's not going to work. Even robots.txt is just a gentleman's agreement, it's not enforceable.

If you really want to prevent AI from training on your content with any degree of certainty you're probably looking for a private forum of some kind that's run by someone you trust.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Stonetoss is a Nazi. Straight up.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

His unwavering support for Israel during their campaign of atrocities is despicable and shameful.

If we're going to get Trump again it's in part because of the absolutely all-or-nothing brook-no-compromise attitude of voters. Like this, for example. Biden's support has not been unwavering, he's criticized Israel's actions. But not enough for you, and so he gets no credit whatsoever for any moderation he might have. And that's why you say he "feels like a Republican" to you, because someone can only be 100% totally on your side or they must be on the other side.

I'd love for there to be a viable fully-progressive candidate who happened to agree with everything I believe in. I'd also love to have a pet unicorn. When elections actually roll around in reality, though, none of the candidates are going to be perfect. And unfortunately in many first-past-the-post electorates the system is set up in such a way that there are only two viable candidates. So pick the one that's closest to your views. Push for better candidates in the primary, of course, but accept that you won't always get everything you want.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

So now there's a NewNew Reddit? That IPO is getting ever closer, guess they'll be thrashing around all the harder in the lead up to that to try to show some kind of path to profitability.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Oh no, we may have to go back to an Internet where people posted web pages because they wanted to share information rather than to make a buck.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

It was a very Kerbal landing technique they were attempting, got to respect them for attempting new things even when it's their first try at a lander.

Last I heard, speculation was that the solar panels were pointing to the west and so it might "wake up" again later in the Lunar day when the Sun gets past zenith. They landed in Lunar morning to maximize the usable duration of sunlight, so right now the panels would be pointed directly away from it.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

The AI witch hunt is kicking into high gear. This law explicitly allows burning people that had nothing to do with AI witchcraft in the first place.

How convenient for the witch hunters that this includes people who make parodies about the witch hunters.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

A "51% attack" isn't really meaningful for something like the Fediverse because there's no concept of any particular instance or group of instances being "authoritative." There's no special benefit to be had from owning a majority of the instances or users or whatever other metric you want to measure by.

If tomorrow Reddit were to magically federate, it would instantly have the majority of threaded conversation going on in the Fediverse under its control. If the day afterward it defederated again, it wouldn't mean that it had somehow "become" the Fediverse and the rest of us were being shed like irrelevant detritus. It's nothing at all like a cryptocurrency fork, where there's a strong incentive to follow whatever the "majority" fork is doing because that's where the money is.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Ah, so that means the Auschwitz Museum is... checks notes anti-Semitic!

Makes sense.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Yeah, close that protocol! Build the walls around our garden higher! No need to wait for them to actually do something worth defederating over, we just don't like them!

This is silly. A major social media network is trying to join the Fediverse and everyone's keen on stopping it. If Meta does something dirty or damaging, sure, defederate them then. But I was kind of hoping that open protocols would flourish, not just end up as another bunch of balkanized forums and Reddit-likes.

FaceDeer, 6 months ago

Investment companies are often only able to buy other companies like this when they're already declining significantly.

Magazines in general are on their way out. It makes me nostalgic-sad too, but the world is changing and this is one of the ways in which it is changing.

FaceDeer, 6 months ago

I feel like that "corporate wants you to find the differences between these two photos" meme. Isn't everyone in those photos, in both the top and bottom rows, white?

Edit: Ah, I see, OP has given this a highly misleading title. The "whiteness" of the faces is not actually particularly relevant. In another thread someone summarized what the article is actually about:

For anyone who doesn’t want to read the paper, they basically took an 60 white men and 60 white women, and showed them a whole bunch of white faces, half of which were generated by AI. It turns out that AI faces were rated as more human-like than actual humans, and they had some hypothesis why. Principally that AI, by its nature, generates images close to “average”, while real people tend to have features that are not “average”. The reason the study focused on white people is that most AI have been trained on white faces, so AI tends to do better with white faces.

FaceDeer, 7 months ago

I hate these filthy Neutrals, Kif. With enemies you know where they stand but with Neutrals, who knows? It sickens me.

Here's the SRD entry for the spell. It definitely nukes the neutrals.

The evil equivalent is Blasphemy, which nukes all non-evil creatures. Yes, the neutrals get it from both sides.

Then there's Word of Chaos and Dictum, the Law and Chaos equivalents of those Good/Evil spells. Neutrals, believe it or not, death!

Pick a side, you neutral scum!

FaceDeer, 7 months ago

I was in a campaign some years back that involved time travel in its later half. Early in the campaign, before time travel became known to us, one of our first big triumphs was to collect a bounty by killing an old war criminal that had escaped justice. He was a guy called the Butcher of Bracken Ridge who had ordered his troops to massacre thousands of prisoners of war rather than let them go.

Much later on in the campaign we discovered time travel and in one of our flubbed attempts at a targeted hop we wound up in the vicinity of Bracken Ridge, the day before the atrocity was supposed to occur. The way time travel worked you could go into the past and participate in the things going on but if you changed history in a way that interfered with your own personal timeline bad things would happen.

So my character used Disguise Self to disguise herself as the Butcher of Bracken Ridge, went to the PoW camp a day early, and ordered half of the PoWs to be massacred. The other half escaped in the confusion. The next day the "real" Butcher of Bracken Ridge arrived to find the camp deserted and that he was now a wanted war criminal.

It was kind of messed up. I was able to save half the PoW's lives without screwing up the timeline, which was nice, but I also was responsible for massacring half of them. And also, it meant that the old war criminal we'd killed earlier in the campaign was innocent.

I think on the balance it was a good use of disguise self. But really makes you wonder.

FaceDeer, 7 months ago

There, that ought to solve the Israel/Palestine issue and prevent future conflict from happening again.

FaceDeer, 8 months ago

I mean, it's kind of inevitable. According to the stats on this page the total biomass of our livestock is 3.9% of all animal biomass, the total biomass of humans specifically is 2.3% of all animal biomass, and all wild mammals is only 0.3% of the biomass (with all wild birds accounting for a further 0.1%).

According to this article 38% of Earth's land area is used for agriculture. The remaining 62% is presumably generally among the less fertile sorts of land - mountains, deserts, etc.

It's not even a question of climate change. We've reduced the total volume of non-human-centric biomass on Earth, replacing much of it with a monoculture of our highly successful species and its domesticated associates. We've also spread around some hangers-on, like rats, that have filled a lot of niches that used to be occupied by more diverse local species. The remaining biomass simply cannot sustain as many species any more.

The only way to stop or reverse this trend would be to reduce the human population and increase its agricultural efficiency. Fortunately, that is possible. But only through continuing advancement of our technology and standard of living.

FaceDeer, 9 months ago

I've been seeing this news article circling around the internet all day, and I have yet to see anyone mention what the monoblock actually is. It's starting to feel like some kind of mysterious primal artifact, like maybe the master computer from which all flavors of Linux originated.

FaceDeer, 9 months ago

I just skimmed through the article and it seems like this vulnerability is only really meaningful on multi-user systems. It allows one user to access memory dedicated to other users, letting them read stuff they shouldn't. I would expect that most consumer gaming computers are single-user machines, or only have user accounts for trusted family members and whatnot, so if this mitigation causes too much of a performance hit I expect it won't be a big risk to turn it off for those particular computers.

FaceDeer, 9 months ago

Every time there's a new technology, one of the first things that people will ask is "can I use this for sex in some manner?"

If the answer is "no", the new technology will probably not see widespread adoption.

This is not a new thing. I'm sure the notion "we could have more and better sex if the cave was kept warm by this new-fangled 'fire' thing while we do it" was instrumental to our rise as the dominant species on our planet.

FaceDeer, 9 months ago

Copyright law already allows generative AI systems to scrape the internet. You need to change the law to forbid something, it isn't forbidden by default. Currently, if something is published publicly then it can be read and learned from by anyone (or anything) that can see it. Copyright law only prevents making copies of it, which a large language model does not do when trained on it.

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

Indeed. In a thread a couple of days back on a different (though related) subject I was accused of being a rape apologist because I was insistent on the presumption of innocence and the beyond-reasonable-doubt standards that need to be overcome when accusations like this are slung. But it works the same in the other direction too - we can't assume that an accuser is guilty of fraud or libel or filing false reports or whatever just because they failed to prove their case.

It would not be good for justice if these situations ended up being "now that the accusation has been made someone is going to go to jail, either the accused or the accuser." The Thunderdome is not a good model to emulate.

FaceDeer, 10 months ago

And good luck finding replacement moderators who are knowledgeable and passionate about the subject.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

In the end, the good mods will leave Reddit one way or another. The admins can put as many bad mods as they want in charge of subs and it's not going to help.

FaceDeer, 11 months ago

For me, the analogy that I find most helpful for intuitively grasping the way this "fediverse" thing works is a system where everyone can see your emails. There are a bunch of different servers out there that all handle email, like gmail.com or hotmail.com, and you sign up to one of them and get yourself an account there - facedeer@gmail.com, for example (not my actual email address, this is just for this example). I can post my "emails" for other people on gmail.com to see, but since the email standard includes methods for sending emails to other servers as well people on hotmail.com can also see my emails.

So you're @TheCreatureAnswered@kbin.social because you have an account at kbin.social, and you've posted a comment in this thread here. But someone with an account at lemmy.ml can also see this thread. They can respond to it, and you'll see their response from @someone@lemmy.ml show up here on kbin.social.

It's actually not much like Discord. Discord is more similar to Reddit, in that it's all being done on one giant server that everyone has an account on. That's simpler, but it has the downside that everything is under the control of just one organization and if they decide to do something you don't like (such as this API thing with Reddit) then there's nowhere you can go to escape from it.