linux desktop and russian propaganda
Russia want to invade Europe
That Lemmy is a worthwhile use of our time?
AI is untrustworthy and shouldn’t be used
I have management talking about copilot usage rates and I hear people casually refer to “what ChatGPT told them” in conversation
The other day on Reddit someone was saying they just fact checked something with ChatGPT.
You can ask ChatGPT to provide sources you know.
I’ve found it very useful as a tool to gather references from talks that don’t cite claims…
It’s like a super search for context. I would never use a LLM to provide logic or reason, and sadly I think many people do.
I think it is useful with a constrained dataset. Like using it to summarize things about a dataset, or dumping documents into it and asked getting info about it (like Gemini in Google Drive).
It is not useful for general question using the whole-ass internet as a dataset.
Also I wish it was called something other than AI…it’s just a word guesser FFS.
Yeah… only people on lemmy are saying that…
how to say with this. I see pretty much an equal split between ai is best thing ever, ai will doom us all, and like ai has some uses and may get more but we need to make sure any use is worth the energy usage.
AI is untrustworthy and shouldn’t be used
I have a more nuanced take. AI is simultaneously untrustworthy and useful. For many queries, DuckDuckGo and Google are performing considerably worse than they used to, while Perplexity usually yields good results. Perplexity also handles complex queries traditional search engines just can’t.
About a third of the time, Perplexity’s text summary of what it found is inaccurate; it may even say the opposite of what a source does. Reading the sources and evaluating their reliability is no less important than with traditional search, but much of the time I think I wouldn’t have found the same sources that way.
Of course there are other issues with AI, such as power usage and Perplexity in particular being known for aggressive web scraping.
Nuance and depth isn’t as popular as I’d like on or off Lemmy.
I’ve found it to be extremely useful for stuff like one-off powershell commands that I’ll use like 3x in my career.
Just today I was trying to find the command line switches for disk2vhd, and none of the top results, even the official page for the app, had them.
But Google’s AI had them and provided sources I could use to verify the information.
But people didn’t do that last part before AI, so I can see why it’s an issue.
Absolutely. I recently needed to satisfy auditors with a report on our network security. Our main guy was on leave, but I quickly got the evidence I needed with a few powershell commands that I would have previously spent way more time googling.
It’s also decent at reports and short, impersonal emails to suppliers etc. It frees up a lot of my time to do actual work, and for that I think it’s decent.
Like basically everything in life, the truth is between the extremes. For me it’s useful, but doesn’t replace me and my team. I’m neither an AI evangelist or detractor. It’s just another tool.
I think ddg and Google are performing worse because of AI. Pushing their AI services and the tsunami of AI slop make a search harder than SEO did and deprioritizes fixing it.
It’s also a way to inflate the number of ads a user has to wade through before they find what they’re looking for. Classic monopolist bullshit.
Ddg is performing worse because Microsoft raised the price on Bing API calls.
Ah, but you see, I never claimed AI isn’t useful. In fact, you can check my comment history. I’ve agreed AI is a very useful tool, I still think it shouldn’t be used for ethical, social, and personal reasons
A problem with nuance is that people want to discuss the specifics and nuances of what they care about but for the most part won’t do that on subjects for other people. So you need to tailor your responses to your audience. FWIW on Lemmy I see a lot more instances of people with specificly opposed takes where both sides have similar vote counts. So while it’s not perfect it’s better than most
You can theoretically have an ethical LLM. You can train one from the ground up on non-copyrighted materials using renewable energy.
But I think what a lot of people are forgetting is that it’s not uncommon for technology to start off super inefficient. A computer used to take up an entire floor of an office building, and a hard drive with a few KB of storage used to be the size of a fridge.
Now you can have a system orders of magnitude more powerful that’s the size of a postage stamp and consumes less than 1W of power.
Lots of things theoretically exist: a reasonable terms and conditions, a functioning DMV, a unified charging standard, etc. I’m going to focus my energy on things that are real and not hope someone decides to be morally upstanding. If you’re arguing that the bullshit machine that spreads lies that actively harm people could become so ubiquitous that it fits in any electronic device if we just keep giving it money, then I’d say you’re making my argument for me
I think current state-of-the-art AI is useful for when you are not having a novel thought.
I believe that AI, at least in the form of LLMs, is currently incapable of novelty in the sense of creating a new concept or a new thought with reason and purpose behind it.
For instance, if I was going to write a book, I might consult with LLMs about how to fill in the slow gaps or the dead spaces in my storyline and to fully come up with a completely fleshed out story that I would then write without its assistance.
My assumption is that anything that it fills in is going to be cobbled together from literally hundreds of thousands of other similar stories, and therefore it will not be new or unique in any way.
If I was really trying to push the envelope, I would then assume that the right thing to do would be that whatever it says is ordinary and common, and if I want to be extraordinary and uncommon, then I need to use that as a launch point for my own gap-filling content.
Therefore, I could use an LLM to write a good story with a new concept, a new premise, a new storyline that is relatively unique and original by using the LLM to clearly identify those things that are not.
I have people telling me how to do my work because “That’s what ChatGPT suggested, and they’re always accurate”.
🤷
As a software developer I fully agree. People bash on it constantly here but the fact is is that it’s required for our jobs now. I just made it through a job hunt and every tech screen I did they not only insisted on me using AI, but they figured how much I was using too.
The fact is is that like it or not it does speed us up, and it is a tool in our toolbelt. You don’t have to trust it 100% or blindly accept what it does, but you do need to be able to use it. Refusing to use it is like refusing to use the designer for WinForms 20 years ago, or refusing to use an IDE at work. You’re going to be at a massive disadvantage to your competing jobseekers who are more than happy to use AI.
The fact is is that like it or not it does speed us up
Fine it speeds me up.
The people in the study thought so too
That’s dumbshits using it to do their job for them and trusting the output blindly. If you’re using LLMs to get over the occasional hump they’re awesome time savers.
I’m guessing you don’t write code?
Actual AGI would be trustworthy. The current “AI” is just a word salad blender program.
It could be argued that people are AGI. Are they always trustworthy?
Would it? I run a science fiction book club and there’re a lot of arguments that if something achieved human level intelligence that it would immediately try to kill us, not become our perfect servants
I believe in the Grand Plan, and I have faith in The Director. Begone, faction scum.
That was a good show.
Murder is okay sometimes.
This is popular. Just look at the celebrations when bin laden got killed. Or how people celebrate executions of heionous criminals. Sure, they say they don’t like “murder”, but they think like: “he should get the death penalty”, which is practically the same thought, but worded in a more… “legal” phrasing.
I mean maybe not “majority”, but there’s a lot of people that are okay with death penalty. Even the liberals opposing death penalty sometimes think that a mass shooter should get executed, like that white supremacist dude that murdered black people in a church (not gonna name the shithead), biden was doing pardons when he was leaving office and that guy was one of the ones that he did not commute the death sentence of. So he basically implied that he approved of the racist murder getting executed. A president of the US implicitly approved of a killing (a good decision, btw), I mean… that’s as mainstream as it can get.
Death to the Charleston Church shooter. Lolol (To mods: this is not “violence” since dude is on death row, I’m just wishing for it to be faster LOL)
TLDR: “Murder” bad, “Executions” okay, is basically the sentinment of some people.
That seems pretty popular out in the world as well, just usually with slightly different selections of ‘sometimes.’
The people I associate with in real life and get exposed to via media are all very much of the opinion that murder is bad.
You must’ve been in a coma during the Charlie Kirk fiasco.
I’ve met a lot of people who don’t agree with “billionaires shouldn’t exist”
The propaganda is so strong with this one. If you talk to someone who owns just about anything, they somehow imagine you’re coming after them and their stuff if you even mention anything like taxing the rich, much less getting rid of people who own more than some entire counties.
The whole 1% slogan was fucking stupid. We all know decent people in the 1%. It’s the .001% that are the problem.
They just worked harder than the rest of us and had good ideas at the right time.
Erm, no, that still doesn’t make their labour worth thousands of times more than the next person.
People I talk to know millionaire workaholics and think that but for some timing that person would be a billionaire because they don’t understand how orders of magnitude work. 100k in the bank vs 1 million is a much smaller barrier than 1 million vs 1 billion never mind 100 billion
I don’t think people would stop at billionaires. They’d keep going until it got uncomfortably close to their own level of wealth, but the people worse off than them wouldn’t stop there, either.
Provided we are talking about taxation not guillotines, it’s that really a problem? In Norway, a doctor doesn’t earn much more than a train ticket seller.
“Why study medicine”, you ask? “Self actualisation.” Is their answer. Remember, University is free in that system, so no student debt.
Money perverts incentives.
[Giancarlo Esposito Meme]
I think billionaires shouldn’t exist because we should have appropriate levels of taxation and a “maximum wage” law.
Lemmy thinks billionaires shouldn’t exist and are setting up guillotines.
We are not the same.
You are the same it’s just that yours only comes after theirs. You can’t get to yours until you do theirs first.
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Linux
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Communism
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independent social media
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“You should totally install Linux, Bro/Sis”
More like “What is Linux?”
Outside of my tech career, I’ve never met a human that knows the word “Linux”. I don’t mean how it works, I mean they’ve never heard the word. Those same people don’t know what an operating system is. “Uh, is that like Apple?”
Linux girlies are the goats
If you’re in a place where that opinion is unpopular you may not be in the real world.
I’m pretty sure my friends are real, and none of them are installing Linux any time soon.
It’s just that around my part of the world, not actually doing it is way more common than not thinking you probably should be doing it.
I’ve actually converted multiple family members to Linux, but it does take patience to work with them ensuring they can do everything they currently do
I’ve got my first
victimwindows refugee almost ready to switch! Just waiting for a good day when she has a lot of mental energy
“Eat the rich.” Appearently people don’t think they are tasty outside of Lemmy.
It’s all about how you prepare the meat.
I’m praying this new wave of politicians win with their message that the wealthy are the root of our problems. Not the merely rich, the wealthy.
Watched this guy twice, got weepy both times. I want to cry and fucking scream. This is the winning message!
I still have no idea what a Tankie is. As far as I can tell it only exists here on Lemmy and I might be one.
The main “anti tankies” community here is modded by raging zionists
It’s just a variety of fascist, pretending to belong with ideologies and principles that are not compatible
As an example, I recently had someone unironically claim that china has more free speech than france, from a server hosted in france 🤦
France throws grenade at protesters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankie
Tankie is a pejorative label generally applied to authoritarian communists, especially those who support or defend acts of repression by such regimes, their allies, or deny the occurrence of the events thereof. More specifically, the term has been applied to those who express support for one-party Marxist–Leninist socialist republics, whether contemporary or historical. It is commonly used by anti-authoritarian leftists, anarchists, libertarian socialists, left communists, social democrats, democratic socialists, and reformists to criticise Leninism, although the term has seen increasing use by liberal and right‐wing factions as well.[5][4]
If you want to see some non-lemmy tankies, check out https://raddle.me/.
By skimming the front page I don’t see many tankie-traits. Loads of communism and socialism, sure, but not much tankie stuff. But I’m sure there’s a lot of them in the comments with “interesting” takes on the cultural revolution and the holodomor.
You’re right. It seems to be mostly anarchists and such. There might have been more tankies back in the day, or maybe I just misremembered.
In practice, liberals and anarchists call anyone who defines themselves as a communist a tankie. Liberals will frequently use it for anyone who claims to be any sort of socialist.
Maybe sometimes. I don’t think this is generally true. Though I’ve also met tankies who think you’re not a real communist unless you’re a tankie. Are you one of those people?
To me you’re not a tankie unless you consistently apologize for, minimize, or dismiss oppression under so-called socialist countries. There are a decent number of communists who don’t do this but they’re not the majority from what I’ve seen.
I’ve seen liberals call social democrats tankies. It’s been turned into a meaningless term.
A word sometimes being misused doesn’t make it meaningless. Personally, I don’t see this all that often.
But yeah I mean incorrect usage should be criticized when it appears, certainly.
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted for this. I’ve SEEN real tankies, doing odd things like cheering for BRICS to rise up or Russia to defeat NATO in Ukraine because late stage capitalist oligarchy counts as communism if it’s Russian or something, I don’t know?
But the VAST majority of the time I see it used is by neoliberals as an excuse to dismiss literally anyone anywhere on the actual political left out of hand.
neoliberals would not call you a “tankie”, since “communist” is already a deogratory/perjorative term for them.
liberals don’t use “tankie”, they would just use the term “communist”
They absolutely use tankie.
I think you may be misinterpreting soc-dems or anarchists or whoever else on the left as liberals
Well give that another think because you’re wrong. This idea that liberals don’t use the word tankie is so off base and moronic I don’t know where you guys are coming from.
You can offend 71+ million MAGA morons by saying how much Trump sucks. Hurts their feelings far more than they hurt the feelings of their enemies. The irony.
Saying Trump sucks is only a controversial opinion in america*
*and some other very right-wing countries I suppose
Fascism is bad
Lol fascism is not a popular opinion.
Reminder that the actual original nazis never had a majority in any democratic elections, its the loud minority that took control by force.
Fascism isn’t a popular opinion
But being against it is unpopular
WSWS.org is a reliable news site.
Political assassination
Veganism
Censorship
How is censorship a popular opinion on lemmy?? What does lemmy censor??
Other two i agree with.
Post an opinion that goes against the current buzzing of the hive and see what happens.
Contrary to what I think OP’s position is, I think Lemitors are distinguished from mainstream audiences in that we tolerate or prefer an environment where censorship is impossible. Defederation doesn’t silence anyone, it just plugs your ears.
On a individual level. I completely agree with you.
It’s when large instances with large user bases. Get very opinionated and start to defederate from other instances for differences of politics or opinions, but not bad behavior. That’s where I think Lemmy swings too far into censorship
I’ve experienced many lemmies calling for the censorship of others, calls for defederation, etc… maybe its just me
I’m not 100% certain that defederation counts as censorship.
A group recognizing that a different group is harassing and inflammatory towards them and excluding them isn’t really stopping them from talking in the first place, and therefore it’s not censoring them.
Each individual has the option of picking a side or creating additional accounts so that they can be on both sides if they want.
The only “censorship” here is a very minor hurdle in between the two groups.
Yeah I mean you could take it further and say someone blocking someone or a community is censorship. I mean I just don’t like sports and I don’t like memes at the volume that is present.
