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RickRussell_CA

@RickRussell_CA@kbin.social

Unity issue an apology on Twitter for "confusion and angst" over the runtime fee policy. (nitter.net)

We have heard you. We apologize for the confusion and angst the runtime fee policy we announced on Tuesday caused. We are listening, talking to our team members, community, customers, and partners, and will be making changes to the policy. We will share an update in a couple of days. Thank you for your honest and critical...

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

Something something Stallman was right (about this specific thing, anyway).

RickRussell_CA,
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There is a so-called "hard problem of consciousness", although I take exception with calling it a problem.

The general problem is that you can't really prove that you have subjective experience to others, and neither can you determine if others have it, or whether they merely act like they have it.

But, a somewhat obvious difference between AIs and humans is that AIs will never give you an answer that is not statistically derivable from their training dataset. You can give a human a book on a topic, and ask them about the topic, and they can give you answers that seem to be "their own conclusions" that are not explicitly from the book. Whether this is because humans have randomness injected into their reason, or they have imperfect reasoning, or some genuine animus of "free will" and consciousness, we cannot rightly say. But it is a consistent difference between the humans and the AIs.

The Monty Hall problem discussed in the article -- in which AIs are asked to answer the Monty Hall problem, but they are given explicit information that violate the assumptions of the Monty Hall problem -- is a good example of something where a human will tend to get it right, through creativity, while an AI will tend to get it wrong, due to statistical regression to the mean.

RickRussell_CA,
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I hesitate to call it a problem because, by the way it's defined, subjective experience is innately personal.

I've gotten into this question with others, and when I began to propose thought problems (like, what if we could replicate sensory inputs? If you saw/heard/felt everything the same as someone else, would you have the same subjective conscious experience?), I'd get pushback: "that's not subjective experience, subjective experience is part of the MIND, you can't create it or observe it or measure it...".

When push comes to shove, people define consciousness or subjective experience as that aspect of experience that CANNOT be shown or demonstrated to others. It's baked into the definition. As soon as you venture into what can be shown or demonstrated, you're out of bounds.

So it's not a "problem", as such. It's a limitation of our ability to self-observe the operating state of our own minds. An interesting question, perhaps, but not a problem. Just a feature of the system.

RickRussell_CA,
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To be clear, I don't think the fundamental issue is whether humans have a training dataset. We do. And it includes copyrighted work. It also includes our unique sensory perceptions and lots of stuff that is definitely NOT the result of someone else's work. I don't think anyone would dispute that copyrighted text, pictures, sounds are integrated into human consciousness.

The question is whether it is ethical, and should it be legal, to feed copyrighted works into an AI training dataset and use that AI to produce material that replaces, displaces, or competes with the copyrighted work used to train it. Should it be legal to distribute or publish that AI-produced material at all if the copyright holder objects to the use of their work in an AI training dataset? (I concede that these may be two separate, but closely related, questions.)

RickRussell_CA,
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Well, that's the question at hand. Who? Definitely not, people have an innate right to think about what they observe, whether that thing was made by someone else, or not.

What? I'd argue that's a much different question.

Let's take an extreme case. Entertainment industry producers tried to write language into the SAG-AFTRA contract that said that, if an extra is hired for a production, they can use that extra's image -- including 3D spatial body scans -- in perpetuity, for any purpose, and that privilege of eternal image storage and re-use was included in the price of hiring an extra for 1 day of work.

The producers would make precisely the same argument you are -- how dare you tell them how they can use the images that they captured, even if it's to use and re-use a person's image and shape in visual media, forever. The actors argue that their physiognomy is part of their brand and copyright, and using their image without their express permission (and, should they require it, compensation) is a violation of their rights.

Or, I could just take pictures of somebody in public places without their consent and feed them into an AI to create pictures of the subject flashing children. They were my pictures, taken by me, and how dare anybody get to make rules about who or what experiences them, right?

The fact is, we have rules about the capture and re-use of created works that have applied to society for a very long time. I don't think we should give copyright holders eternal locks on their work, but neither is it clear that a 100% free use policy on created work is the right answer. It is reasonable to propose something in between.

RickRussell_CA,
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But we make the laws, and have the privilege of making them pro-human. It may be important in the larger philosophical sense to meditate on the difference between AIs and human intelligence, but in the immediate term we have the problem that some people want AIs to be able to freely ingest and repeat what humans spent a lot of time collecting and authoring in copyrighted books. Often, without even paying for a copy of the book that was used to train the AI.

As humans, we can write the law to be pro-human and facilitate human creativity.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

And yeah all the extra data that we humans fundamentally aquire in life does change everything we make.

I'd argue that it's the crucial difference. People on this thread are arguing like humans never make original observations, or observe anything new, or draw new conclusions or interpretations of new phenomena, so everything humans make must be derived from past creations.

Not only is that clearly wrong, but it also fails the test of infinite regress. If humans can only create from the work of other humans, how was anything ever created? It's a risible suggestion.

RickRussell_CA,
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Right now our understanding of derivative works is mostly subjective. We look at the famous Obama "HOPE" image, and the connection to the original news photograph from which it was derived seems quite clear. We know it's derivative because it looks derivative. And we know it's a violation because the person who took the news photograph says that they never cleared the photo for re-use by the artist (and indeed, demanded and won compensation for that reason).

Should AI training be required to work from legally acquired data, and what level of abstraction from the source data constitutes freedom from derivative work? Is it purely a matter of the output being "different enough" from the input, or do we need to draw a line in the training data, or...?

All good questions.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

Copyright and fair use are laws written for humans, to protect human creators and insure them the ability to profit from their creativity for a limited time, and to grant immunity to other humans for generally accepted uses of that work without compensation.

I agree that sentience is irrelevant, but whether the actors involved are human or not is absolutely relevant.

RickRussell_CA,
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Well, it's a "problem" for philosophers. I don't think it's a "problem" for neurology or hard science, that's the only point I was trying to make.

RickRussell_CA,
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But there are absolutely rules on whether Google -- or anything else -- can use that search index to create a product that competes with the original content creators.

For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.

Google indexing of copyrighted works was considered "fair use" only because they only offered a few preview pages associated with each work. Google's web page excerpts and image thumbnails are widely believed to pass fair use under the same concept.

Now, let's say Google wants to integrate the content of multiple copyrighted works into an AI, and then give away or sell access to that AI which can spit out the content (paraphrased, in some capacity) of any copyrighted work it's ever seen. You'll even be able to ask it questions, like "What did Jeff Guin say about David Koresh's religious beliefs in his 2023 book, Waco?" and in all likelihood it will cough up a summary of Mr. Guinn's uniquely discovered research and journalism.

I don't think the legal questions there are settled at all.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

understanding where consciousness comes from

Again, to be clear, I don't think this is a fundamentally scientific question.

If you show a philosopher how a rose activates the retina and sends signals to the brain, you'll get a response like, "sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose"...

If you show a philosopher the retinal signals activate the optical processing capabilities of the brain, you'll get "sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose"...

If you show a philosopher how the appearance of a rose consistently activates certain clusters of neurons and glial cells that are always activated when someone sees a rose, you'll get a response "sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose"...

Show the philosopher that the same region of the brain is excited when the person smells a rose or reads the word "rose", and they'll say, "sure, but when I say the subjective experience of a rose, I mean what the mind does when it experiences a rose"...

To the philosopher, they have posed a question about "what it's like to experience a rose", and I suggest that NO answer will satisfy them, because they're not really asking a scientific question. They're looking for, as the SEP puts it, an "intuitively satisfying way how phenomenal or 'what it's like' consciousness might arise from physical or neural processes in the brain". But, science isn't under any obligation to provide an inituitive, easy-to-understand answer. The assemblage of brain & nerve functions that are fired when a living being experiences a phenomenon are the answer.

RickRussell_CA,
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How do you prove the results are directly derived

Mathematically? It's a computer algorithm. Its output is deterministic, and both reproducible and traceable.

Give the AI two copies of its training dataset, one with the copyrighted work, one without it. Now give it the same prompt and compare the outputs.

The difference is the contribution of the copyrighted work.

You mention Harry Potter. In Warner Bros. Entertainment, Inc. v. RDR Books, Warner Brothers lawyers argued that a reference encyclopedia for the Harry Potter literary universe was a derivative work. The court disagreed, on the argument that the human authors of the reference book had to perform significant creative work in extracting, summarizing, indexing and organizing the information from JK Rowling's original works.

I wonder if the court would use the same reasoning to defend the work of an AI?

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

Caffeinated!

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

For desktop browsers, I like it better than regular lemmy. Admittedly, I'd like to use a client with it so I look forward to an API for mobile clients, but I'm pretty happy as a desktop user.

RickRussell_CA,
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Everybody says that, but that's not really practical. It would be much better to merge those features into the main project, than to fork it and get stuck maintaining a separate codebase in perpetuity.

Now I will say that if someone thinks they can do a better job, they should sign up for the project and commit their changes to the main project, so all ernest has to do is approve it, rather than write it himself.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

I just figured it was named for lemmings.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

You've got Pneumail(tm)!

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

With respect, the question is not "what should happen?"

The question is, "what will the law allow?" The judge is not there to cater to preferences, but to use the force of state power to compel parties to act to comply with the law. For that, the judge absolutely needs a grasp on things.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

I think the big challenge right now is sustaining growth. I don't think many reddit refugees are paying for their fediverse services.

I support dessalines on Patreon, but I don't really know what else I should be doing. I think that folks who want to run these services need to figure out how to charge money for it, or they won't be able to buy infrastructure or network bandwidth.

EDIT: OK I just bought 5 coffees for ernest: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/kbin

RickRussell_CA,
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beehaw.org -- a lemmy instance specifically geared toward quality discussion and keeping everybody nice to each other -- has basically been told by Lemmy devs that the moderation tools they want and need just aren't in the roadmap, and they'll need to fork and develop their own version.

That's an incredibly disheartening attitude.

[Opinion] Trump's plans to become a dictator: It's time to get real about Project 2025 - Chauncey DeVega - Salon (salon.com)

Donald Trump is a dictator in waiting. Like other dictators, he is threatening to put his "enemies" in prison – and to do even worse things to them. These are not idle threats or empty acts of ideation: Donald Trump is a violent man who is a proven enemy of democracy and freedom....

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

On the other hand, "idle threats or empty acts of ideation" is pretty much Trump's brand. Everything he does is half-assed and never comes to fruition.

But I concede that he might hire underlings capable of sustaining a dictatorship.

RickRussell_CA,
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The fact that it became an issue "on social media" only after a white journalist documented that they were refused admission sort of tells you the whole story here.

Nobody cared, until angry racists made a big deal about it. It's likely that, on balance, the vast majority of people don't care and aren't paying any attention to the racists. But if it involves angry racists, it leads, because that shit generates clicks and controversy. JOURNALISM.

RickRussell_CA,
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Or maybe it's because I have a special needs child and I can't always leave them alone, even for a minute or two?

When you make snap judgments based on initial appearance, that's precisely the kind of error you can make.

RickRussell_CA,
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For reasons that I can't quite fathom, they've been taking them away in California. Stores that used to have them, don't any more.

Often there isn't even a safe place outside. You could put them up on to the sidewalk in front of the store, but is that the best place? It's convenient for the workers but it also gets in the way.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

This is the kind of balanced, nuanced take that will get you absolutely murderlated with downvotes.

RickRussell_CA,
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My special needs kid is terrified of pets. And they react in kind -- animals that are sweet toward a smiling, calm person will lose it in his presence.

Is anybody "bad" here? This seems like the worst kind of judgment based on initial appearances, rather than understanding.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

. Mitigating circumstances like a person's childcare situation are only mitigating circumstances because there was irresponsibility in the first place to mitigate. It's still irresponsibility.

I took the cart into the store to shop with my cognitively disabled child. This was a responsible decision.

Due to my child's medical disability and changing circumstances resulting in a behavior meltdown, I had to take him back to the car and stay with him, to prevent elopement that could put him and others at risk. This was a responsible decision. Due to the changing circumstances, I can't return the shopping cart to a particular location.

At no point do I abdicate responsibility. My first responsibility is to the safety of my child, and others who might suffer if he elopes. If you think I'm a bad person who "gives zero shits" because I put that first, then I call that error.

If you want to live in you self-righteous bubble and judge people from afar without knowing jack squat about their circumstances, I call that error. I'm sure my situation is not unique; issues must come up all the time with children, pets, the elderly that necessitate putting a shopping cart aside and attending to the needs of others, and it's not always possible to return the shopping cart.

I can't stop you from making an error, of course, but I'd hope than when the error is explained to you, you'd commit to avoiding it.

RickRussell_CA,
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Then we should probably call it a "red flag" instead of a "dead giveaway" (per post title) :-)

RickRussell_CA,
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Those are versions of the characters from the 1978 Ralph Bakshi animated version of The Lord of the Rings.

U.S., Florida Gov. DeSantis says shorter lifespans should protect people from losing Social Security and Medicare protection (web.archive.org)

"I think it started before COVID and I think it’s continued even here afterwards. I think it’s more than, more than just COVID. I mean, I think that there’s deaths of despair. I think you have (drugs),” DeSantis said. Life expectancy in the U.S. has decreased to 76.4 years in 2023 from 77.28 in 2020, according to Centers...

A Tumblr thread with the following:

halfbakedpoet:| know tumblr has accepted the whole “cat’s internal monologue is a desolate Victorian child” thing but what if a cat’s internal monologue was Gollum/Sméagol 

halfbakedpoet: -scratching the floor near their bowl- “Nasty, filthy dry foods they serves us. We wants soft, juicy morsels from the canses.” 

halfbakedpoet: -sitting in the window- “What’s it doing, precious? What noises it makes with pointy mouth. We wants it...”

halfbakedpoet: “Wicked, tricksy humanses doesn’t feeds us in hours. Must reminds them or we’ll starve. Wait for dinners? Oh no. That would kill us! Kill us!” 

halfbakedpoet: -bringing dead animals to owner- “Look! Look! See what good kitty finds! Eat them! Eat them!”

cwnerd12: There are many flavors of cats. Victorian child cats and Gollum cats are both equally valid.
RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

The article's summary paragraph at the top attributes a statement to DeSantis that he didn't make.

Gov. Ron DeSantis says people aren’t living as long as they used to, so that should help protect them from losing Social Security and Medicare protections when they get old.

That paraphrasing is deceptive, IMO. In the text of his remarks, it's clear that he's drawing an actuarial conclusion that lower lifespans eliminate the need to raise Social Security and Medicare benefit ages. What he actually said:

So, I think it’s hard to say, you know, raise the age (for Social Security eligibility) when the average life expectancy is going down. We used to think that life expectancy was just going to keep going up and that’s just not been the case.

DeSantis says plenty of crazy shit, we don't need to invent stupid things and pretend that he said them.

Caste matters : California Assembly passes anti-caste Bill, soon to make it official state law (thenewsminute.com)

In another significant moment for the movement against caste discrimination in the United States, a Bill to make caste discrimination illegal was passed by the California State Assembly on Monday, August 28, with 50 votes in its favour and only three against it. It was earlier passed by the state's Senate in May this year. With...

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

It's huge issue in Silicon Valley, where S. Asians make up a large fraction of the workforce. Even 2nd and later generation immigrants are affected by caste discrimination, when their co-workers or bosses learn that their families came from low caste background.

has your YouTube consumption decreased after implementing the "no history, no recommendations" feature?

I noticed my consumption has decased quite a bit. I would visit regularly to watch content from few channels. I would probably still visit every so often to watch the new videos. But the experience has become more deliberate and conscious. I go to YouTube because I want to go and watch something specific. Mindlessly browsing and...

RickRussell_CA,
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Yeah, I use the regular Youtube client more frequently, because my senses aren't assaulted by a crapass load of thumbnails of dumb stuff.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

Please roll D100 on the Hurl Chunks subtable.

Donald Trump using bail bondsman rings alarm bells about his finances (newsweek.com)

Donald Trump reportedly used a bail bondsman after being arrested at Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, Georgia, on Thursday, paying $20,000 of his bond set at $200,000 and taking out a loan for the rest of it. The fact that the former president resorted to such a measure has sparked questions on social media about the state of his...

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

He's rich. First rule of being rich is never pay when you can borrow.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

Oh goody. There's a RickRussell_CA@lemm.ee and it's not me. And it's using one of my older profile pictures.

EDIT: 2023/8/29 update -- I posted to the lemm.ee support community and the admins decided to disable the account. Well done!

RickRussell_CA,
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He shouldn't have crossed Bane.

RickRussell_CA,
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I like pixelfed.social, but I'm an admittedly "lite" user of Instagram, don't really post my own stuff, just use it to find interesting photos. It's been good for that.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

Pyle has a bunch of rules for Strange Planet comics, one of those is an absolute word limit for each comic, so he's always trying to come up with creative ways to say something in the fewest words possible.

How do I (27M) break up with my girlfriend (39F) of 6 months when she did nothing wrong?

Even despite the age gap, this was the healthiest relationship I’ve ever been in. It was based on mutual respect, trust, communication, and an understanding of each other’s time and goals. I really like her as a person – she’s wonderful. But I also think we’re just not the right fit for each other romantically or...

RickRussell_CA,
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while she is a wonderful person, she just isn’t the right one for me specifically

That's what you tell her. It's totally appropriate to want someone closer to you in physical needs.

I don't mean to sound cynical, but at 39, she's probably wondering if she'll ever find somebody long term. That realization is probably one of the things that's driving her to stay attached, even when it's obvious that there are serious compatibility problems. And it's going to result in some strong emotions around this breakup.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

Hyping up your nation's commercial achievements is one of the more common diplomatic functions.

I have a college friend who worked for the British consulate in San Francisco as a sort of "startup consultant" in Silicon Valley, promotion British startups, British products, and trying to find jobs for British academics.

[Opinion - Legal Analysis] The Constitution bars Trump from holding public office ever again - Donald K. Sherman (thehill.com)

While some ­on the right portray accountability for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as just another partisan dispute, two prominent conservative legal scholars have made the case that the Constitution disqualifies former President Trump from public office....

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

The 14th amendment specifically bans slavery. I can't imagine any originalist interpretation of the 14th would allow it.

Any originalist concerns about the pre-14th Constitution are addressed by the amendment process, which is a very high bar.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

Unclear why these are called "solid state". The main innovation here seems to be bonding the piezoelectric elements to a membrane to serve as the speaker.

Piezoelectric earphones have been around for a long time; they were popular back in the old days because a crystal radio could drive them at a listenable volume without any external power source, using only the power received from the radio antenna.

RickRussell_CA,
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But it doesn't imply solid state. There are ways to move air without moving parts, but this device clearly has moving parts.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

On the one hand, I think it's a bit ridiculous to hold LTT's feet to the fire over ShortCircuit/Unboxing/Tech Preview type content, and Steve Burke takes himself a little too seriously sometimes.

On the other hand, LTT set themselves up for that criticism by making explicit product recommendations in those unboxing videos, and invoking claims based on "lab testing". LTT needs to draw a bright line between unboxing content and reviews, and make it super clear that unboxing content is not a review. "I wouldn't recommend" is not the right language for a tech preview.

And really -- letting one of your employees smack-talk the competition in a lab walkthrough? Just cut that part of the video out. LTT waltzed into this with sloppy editing.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

I think maybe you let your guard down and go with the flow AFTER you've confirmed that you're both willing to pay your fair share for everything. When you have a few months of that under your belt, you can start "treating" each other.

RickRussell_CA,
RickRussell_CA avatar

Sous vide chicken breast. Throw chicken breast & seasoning into a zip bag, cook in sous vide cooker at 140 degrees for 2 hours. If you start from frozen chicken, cook 2.5 hours.

When finished, either use chicken immediately in a hot dish, or throw the sealed bags into ice water and either refrigerate or freeze once they've come down to ice water temp.

I eat 'em straight, chop them for chicken salad, or slice into strips and heat them up for tacos.

I do four or more at a time. As usual, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt can hook you up with all the salient details.

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