FaceDeer

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

Thanks. In the meantime I've been getting by with the mobile website well enough. I've actually become used to not having notifications any more, perhaps it's better not being immediately informed in the middle of my day that I need to drop everything to go argue with people on the Internet. :)

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

It doesn't help that whenever this comes up there's a contingent of users who jump to Ernest's "defense" by calling the folks raising these issues "concern trolls" and accusing them of shilling for mbin.

No, this is simply a matter of what is actually working well. The point of federation is that one shouldn't need to have "loyalty" to any particular instance or any particular platform. Use whichever one's working.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Yeah. The "having PTSD" part isn't what should be punished, it's the "and yet still carrying a gun while putting yourself in a position to have your PTSD triggered like this" part that's egregious.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

A particularly concerning illness for me.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

That's not exactly bound Trump in the past.

FaceDeer, 5 months ago

This is nothing like what I left Reddit over.

Nobody is "inviting" Meta in, ActivityPub is an open protocol. They can come in without any invitation. Being closed is what I left Reddit over. Closing the Fediverse to Meta would be more like the bullshit I left Reddit over.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Instead you're posting to the Fediverse, which is even more open for use by third parties.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

It's the "peer-reviewed" part that should be raising eyebrows, not the AI-generated part. How the gibberish images were generated is secondary to the fact that the peer reviewers just waved the obvious nonsense through without even the most cursory inspection.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Well, I hope my answer clarifies it. You can't prevent LLMs from being trained on your public posts.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago (edited 2 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

Ah, Republicans. Well known to be super concerned about spending too much on the military.

My hope is that the funding goes through, and then the Republicans immediately vote Johnson out of his leadership role so we can have another wonderful round of Republican autophagy as they fight over who next to put on the throne.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

Granted, we've had quite a big spike in deaths due to war in 2022 due to the double whammy of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Tigray war. But the years prior to it showed a steady decrease from the previous peak in 2014 as various middle-eastern conflicts wound down. Here's a page with historical charts of war-related deaths. Those bumps in 2022 and 2014 aside, the world has been in a very peaceful state since 1989. And the current bumps still have nothing on Vietnam, Korea, the World Wars, and so forth.

FaceDeer, 3 months ago

What really bothers me is that the original plan for that open source code was to make Reddit federated. They wanted to make it so that other people could run their own Reddit servers for their own communities. Sure, they would have locked it down somehow and tried to make it so that they got paid in the process, but the concept of the Fediverse could have been a common thing over a decade ago already. I'm sure that would have been a far easier walled garden to break out of than the current-day monolithic Reddit is.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Another more general property that might be worth looking for would be substantially similar posts that get cross-posted to a wide variety of communities in a short period of time. That's a pattern that can have legitimate reasons but it's probably worth raising a flag to draw extra scrutiny.

One idea for making it computationally lightweight but also robust against bots "tweaking" the wording of each post might be to fingerprint each post based on rare word usage. Spam is likely to mention the brand name of whatever product it's hawking, which is probably not going to be a commonly used word. So if a bunch of posts come along that all use the same rare words all at once, that's suspicious. I could also easily see situations where this gives false positives, of course - if some product suddenly does something newsworthy you could see a spew of legitimate posts about it in a variety of communities. But no automated spam checker is perfect.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

In case you didn’t know, you can’t train an AI on content generated by another AI because it causes distortion that reduces the quality of the output.

This is incorrect in the general case. You can run into problems if you do it incorrectly or in a naive manner. But this is stuff that the professionals have figured out months or years ago already. A lot of the better AIs these days are trained on "synthetic data", which is data that's been generated by other AIs.

I've seen a lot of people fall for wishful thinking on this subject. They don't like AI for whatever reason, they hear some news article that says something that sounds like "AI won't work because of problem X", and so they grab hold of that. "Model collapse" is one of those things, it's not really a problem that serious researchers consider insurmountable.

If you don't want Reddit to use your posts to train AI then don't post on Reddit. If you already did post on Reddit, it's too late, you already gave them your content. Bear this in mind next time you join a social media site, I guess.

FaceDeer, 20 days ago

I find a ton of uses for quick Python scripts hammered out with Bing Chat to get random stuff done.

It's also super useful when brainstorming and fleshing out stuff for the tabletop roleplaying games I run. Just bounce ideas off it, have it write monologues, etc.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Seems like it might be a bit more nuanced than that. From the article:

There is a federal law, C-3, which deems it an offence for anyone who “intentionally obstructs or interferes with another person’s lawful access to a place at which health services are provided by a health professional.” As far as I saw while I was passing the hospital, the entranceway was clear and no one was stopped from entering or exiting the building. Other than vague mentions, I found no specific evidence that people were prevented from entering or exiting the building.

Update, Feb. 15, 11:06 a.m.: It has come to our attention that the University Ave. entrance to Mount Sinai Hospital closes at 6 p.m. daily. The protest passed by the hospital around 8 p.m., two hours after that entrance had closed. See the bottom of the map below for the University Ave. entrance hours, accessed today from the Mount Sinai Hospital website.

So this may not have broken those laws. There was apparently an incident where the crowd blocked the car of a doctor that was trying to drive home, so perhaps some more care needed to be taken, but I think everyone's just really on edge right now and looking for things to get angry about.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

So we've moved from "GitHub is not open source" to "GitHub has some support software for peripheral features that is not open-source?" I'm definitely failing to see the rant-worthiness of it at this point. It's certainly not monopolistic, platforms like GitLab and Bitbucket also provide these features. And I'd bet that some of them have their own proprietary software to support these things too.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

"We" as in the conversation as a whole. You joined an ongoing thread.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

Microsoft has developed many open-source projects. The view of Microsoft as some kind of anti-open-source crusader is 20 years out of date.

FaceDeer, 1 month ago

There's quite a series of leaps of logic here.

Because Google (not Microsoft) released a project under the BSD license (an open source license) but "everyone on Lemmy" doesn't think it's open source, therefore a hosting site owned by Microsoft (not Google) is not "open source."

I'm not even sure what is meant by GitHub being "open source." It's a hosting provider, not an actual piece of software. The site itself doesn't have a source license. The individual repositories can have licenses, which can be whatever the user who created the repository sets it to be - including open source licenses. Do you mean GitHub Desktop? Microsoft released that under the MIT license. And you don't need GitHub Desktop to use GitHub anyway.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

You go from zero to Hitler at the drop of a hat.

FaceDeer, 2 months ago

Trump will put way more innocent lives at risk, so you are doing exactly what you're saying tou would never do by putting your vote for Biden on the table.

That's what's funny.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago

"We" aren't on Lemmy for any one uniform reason. We aren't even all on Lemmy, I'm on a kbin instance for example.

I, personally, understand how federation and ActivityPub operate and so I'm not surprised by this. I expected it, I accept it, it's just the way the world works. When I say something in public I lose control over who will hear it or how long it will last, and any laws that mandate I should have that control are just a placebo or illusion in the grand scheme of things.

FaceDeer, 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago)

So seven minutes after Zima posted about a mystery stalker dogging his every comment, you jumped in on the thread with a complaint about something he posted two weeks ago, which when you subsequently linked to it was clearly not saying what you're accusing him of saying and makes you sound like some sort of vindictive crazy person?

What a coincidence!

Let's see if a Fuckyoufacedeer account appears now.

Edit: Oh, another amazing coincidence: nine minutes after Fuckyouzima downvoted Zima's two-week-old comment, you also downvoted his two-week-old comment. And then two minutes later you made your first comment in this thread. We can see who downvotes what and when, you know.