Schadrach

There are models with open weights, and you can run those locally on your GPU. It can be a bit slower depending on model and GPU. For example, GLM has an open version, both full and pruned, but it’s not the newest version. A bunch of image generation models have local versions too.

The whole premise of deep think and similar in other models is to come up with an answer, then ask itself if the answer is right and how it could be wrong until the result is stable.

The seahorse emoji question is one that trips up a lot of models (it’s a Mandela effect thing where it doesn’t exist but lots of people remember it and as a consequence are firm that it’s real), I asked GLM 4.7 about it with deep think on and it wrote about two dozen paragraphs trying to think of everywhere a seahorse emoji could be hiding, if it was in a previous or upcoming standard, if maybe there was another emoji that might be mistaken for a seahorse, etc, etc. It eventually decided that it didn’t exist, double checked that it wasn’t missing anything, and gave an answer.

It was startlingly like flow.ofnconaciousness of someone experiencing the Mandela effect trying desperately to find evidence they were right, except it eventually gave up and realized the truth.

He’s trying to take them down from the inside.

From the inside of an underaged girl, maybe.

Everyone around you has a phone with a camera. Businesses and the government have additional cameras looking all over. The phone camera being less obvious and handsfree seems like an arbitrary choice of where to draw the line

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0o9VSlyrv8c

This feels like some medieval shit from over a millenium ago

I don’t think you realize how new a lot of the current situation is. When that article was written, it was still legal for children to perform in commercial pornographic films in parts of the West. A year before this article was written feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir signed a petition against the age of consent (there were a bunch of these in France in the late 70s and most of the French philosophers of the time signed at least one).

It only took a couple of decades for sexualizing children to go from a bit creepy but it happens to the way we see it now.

They couldn’t do that from one photo though, they’d need several examples all believed to be the same guy. A swirl like that preserves some of the information and you can reverse it, but the lost data is lost. Do that for several photos and you can get enough preserved bits to piece something together.

Same idea for some other kinds of blurs or mosaics. Black boxes, not so much - you e got no data to work with, so anything you tried to reconstruct would be more or less entirely fantasy.

Even as a “Vibe Coder” you kind of still need to know the idea of what code you need and what you want it to do.

I’ve fiddled with it a bit. IM(limited)E, you tend to get the best results if what you tell it you want broadly, and then in a significant level of detail, and especially if you tell it to ask you any questions it has about the design. So something like “I want you to build an app in $LANGUAGE that does $TASK on $PLATFORM. As I see it, I think the interface should look like $DETAILED_DESCRIPTION_OF_INTERFACE and here’s what should happen when those elements are interacted with, Please ask as many questions as you think are necessary for clarity.”

Also, unless you’re setting it to require personal approval for every terminal command, I’d only run one of those in a VM of some kind, where any potential damage from any potential fuckups are limited.

Why would you need oversight for access? All footage of all officers interactions with the public available to all citizens within say a few days of being filmed. That’s how you achieve oversight.

In fact, with storage capabilities nowadays, bodycams should ALWAYS be recording, period. Gotta go to the bathroom? Too damn bad. You’re a public servant. Trust the auditors to redact that if it comes to a court subpoena. You signed up for it. Extraordinary powers come with extraordinary sacrifices.

You don’t need to record them shitting, just make it explicit policy that any time police disable their body cams the default position for what happened is whatever is most favorable to members of the public and least favorable to officers. Full stop.

To quote Bloberta Puppington:

That’s just his true nature coming out

Always has been.

Not always. It has been for longer than we’ve been alive, but stock originated as a way to fund merchant voyages - you paid a share of the costs and got a share of the proceeds (in merchandise or in the sale value of that merchandise) when the ship came in.

Literally the origin of the phrase “your ship has come in”.

Then people started speculating over the future value of and trading those shares while the ship was still at sea, then the concept got generalized beyond merchant voyages, etc and here we are where it’s more like the art market where things are worth whatever someone will pay and that value isn’t necessarily tied to anything concrete.

There’s no algorithm to be played in the fediverse.

There presumably is. Some metric decides visibility on the feeds. That algorithm not being based on corporate profitability doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Basically they figured out a way to train AI to recognize Reddit threads going viral and/or predict which ones will, among those which ones will also rate highly in Google results and which will tend to be used as sources by the biggest LLMs and to post in those threads about your whatever you want to generate attention for. So overcomplicated way of automating advertising. Optimized posting to convince LLMs to talk about whatever you want to advertise.

I’ve always said that SEO was always going to happen, Google is at fault for the search optimized and the best result for what the user is asking for not being the same result. We’re now going to start seeing either LLMs sell whatever this tactic gets used on or essentially a sort of adblock being built into LLM training and search APIs to keep it from working, to make LLMs less likely to fall for native advertising/astroturfing.

To be fair, I find the idea of a government outsourcing IT needs to entities under the sovereignty of foreign governments kind of fundamentally problematic to begin with.

Paranoia, the game where every character is technically engaged in a crime punishable by death at basically all times, and you’re given a number of clones because you are expected to die…a lot. Also the R&D gadgets, like the personal disintegrator which does exactly what it says on the tin - disintegrates your person.

“Where are my testicles, Summer?”

Actually truth social would be the perfect example, but again, how many people do you hear talking about how much they enjoy truth social? It’s true nobody wants to be sued by Trump, but that’s not really support as much as fear and its own form of censorship.

Truth Social is always there if you want it, but is it really censorship that keeps more people from using it or is it to some extent capitalism working?

Truth Social wasn’t subject to the same pressures and attacks, largely out of fear of Trump. It’s mostly Trump and his fans that are why anyone cares, but most of the sorts attracted to a site like that came rushing back to X post-Elon.

If you have a truly free market people will just go to another platform bc there’s no reason they have to use X, or Truth Social, or Mastodon, or BlueSky unless one person (or a group of oligarchs) buys all of them and controls the market. If one of those platforms fails, can you really blame it on censorship?

There isn’t, outside of network effects. But the ones being barred from Apple devices, and only able to be sideloaded on Android (at least until Google removes that feature, which they’ve announced is coming) aren’t operating on the same footing as the others, and not because of a failure to draw an audience, but by being restricted by, well, a bunch of oligarchs…

Musk bought X bc he claimed he wanted to have free speech and to get rid of all the bots, but he did neither. Now that place is mainly a bot fueled echo chamber. It’s just not an enjoyable platform to use anymore, and most users have switched to an alternative like bluesky.

The range of rhetoric that won’t get you banned from the site has certainly expanded, even if most of what is actually there is deceptive bullshit. Probably 1 in 10 current Xitter users would be banned for saying unacceptable things under pre-Musk Twitter.

Apple and Google didn’t want to lose business by associating with something the majority of people found off-putting, but is that really censorship?

Tech oligarchs cut a competitor to other tech oligarchs off at the knees to control the span and spread of online discourse - this is the kind of thing that supporting feels like supporting the face eating leopard party.

Again you’re relying on an existing platform to take on supporting your messaging instead of just promoting it yourself. Couldn’t you just rely on a user base sharing a link to download an app rather than putting it in one of the stores?

Build your own entire tech stack from the hardware up, got it. Those leopards do seem hungry for faces though.

But that is also why so many users or instances block instances like .grad and to a lesser extent .ml, and some people do argue they should be de-federated.

I don’t think that’s really necessary. I’m glad to have the ability to talk to and interact with people I don’t agree with on everything. There’s .ml users here that have been very helpful with things nobody else was able to help me with. (I’m actually glad we’re able to have this conversation we’re having.)

I find a certain irony here, given the instance you come from and the instance I come from. Yours has defederated from ~95 other instances, including some for being too left and some for being too right. Mine has only defederated from one, an instance essentially abandoned by it’s admins that was posting spam and actual csam.

But, I’ve also been blocked from .ml communities without any warning bc I shared images of Xinnie the Pooh. So, i’m sure there are some people on the left who willingly identify as tankies, and would enjoy a completely separate dedicated safe space on the internet for communism or leftist authoritarianism. If they made one, it would very likely end up running into the same issues as Gab/Parler, but I still wouldn’t believe that censorship is to blame for its failure.

Far left fediverse instances exist, and can moderate as strictly or not as they please. No third party is actively preventing you from connecting to one with an appropriate client, including client devs. Let alone tech oligarchs cutting them off from major platforms entirely.

It’s just difficult to create a market for a very niche and exclusionary product that a lot of people find off-putting due to extremist content.

Yet, their problem wasn’t not being able to get members organically. Gab was doing pretty well until it got big enough to be noticed and it was forcibly cut off from the mobile market by Google and Apple, migrated their backend to Mastodon as a way around that, and then had Mastodon client devs block them at the client level. At the time of migration, they were the largest Mastodon instance, so it wasn’t a matter of lack of interest. That’s kinda my point - the barriers they faced aren’t organic or a lack of interest but coordinated moves against them.

Why did nobody just make an exclusively right wing alternative to mastodon?

…but they did, and were broadly prevented from growing organically. See Parler and Gab.

Gab actually changed it’s underlying backend twice. They started with their own thing, Google and Apple cut their app off from the app stores so they switched to something that was a common protocol rather than a dedicated app and moved to Mastodon as a way to route around censorship. Most Mastodon servers promptly defederated them for being right wingers, and several of the major Mastodon clients built in client level mandatory blacklists causing their client to refuse to connect to Gab (in some cases Gab was the entire blacklist) - you can see which ones because they have some older store reviews about “refusing to connect to the largest Mastodon instance” because for a time that was Gab. Later on, they moved to something involving crypto somehow, I’m not really sure about the details.

Parler appeared, got big fast, got kneecapped by Google, Apple and Amazon and by the time they recovered had lost most of any momentum they ever had.

They even produced their own Reddit-alike, spread across several .win domains - that was a thing that happened in response to the biggest Trumper community getting banned from Reddit. That original community migrated to TheDonald.win and later rebranded as Patriots.win.

Truth Social is basically what Gab/Parler wanted to be, but big Tech doesn’t want to fight against Trump because he’s exactly the kind of petty asshole to fuck them over for considering it. Truth Social is of course Mastodon under the hood with federation disabled.

But if we presume fediverse apps are a protocol rather than a proprietary product (which is usually how they are sold to users, making analogies to things like email or the web as compared to a proprietary system) why would you need to reinvent the wheel? No one is arguing that we need an exclusively communist alternative to email or the web.

Did they actually build their own alternatives that anybody wanted to use,

Right wingers functionally excluded from major platforms more or less until Musk bought Twitter actually did create their own spaces. Several of which got made functionally inaccessible from mobile devices, or removed from search engines or otherwise actively prevented from growing organically, many of them eventually being quietly put back after any buzz around them had died down. Think Gab, Parler, various .win sites that are reddit-like, etc.

Hell, at one point the largest Mastodon instance was literally one such space that had had it’s own app banned from the app stores for being an uncensored far right space, and then several of the major general Mastodon clients made their clients refuse to connect to that specific instance at the client level as well. If you’ve ever seen a Mastodon client on say the Play store with negative reviews saying that it couldn’t connect to the largest instance, that’s because at the time the largest Mastodon instance was technically Gab.