FauxLiving @ FauxLiving @lemmy.world

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5 mo. ago

You're right about this study. But, this research group isn't the only one using LLMs to generate content on social media.

There are 100% posts that are bot created. Do you ever notice how, on places like Am I Overreacting or Am I the Asshole that a lot of the posts just so happen to hit all of the hot button issues all at once? Nobody's life is that cliche, but it makes excellent engagement bait and the comment chain provides a huge amount of training data as the users argue over the various topics.

I use a local LLM, that I've fine tuned, to generate replies to people, who are obviously arguing in bad faith, in order to string them along and waste their time. It's setup to lead the conversation, via red herrings and other various fallacies to the topic of good faith arguments and how people should behave in online spaces. It does this while picking out pieces of the conversation (and from the user's profile) in order to chastise the person for their bad behavior. It would be trivial to change the prompt chains to push a political opinion rather than to just waste a person/bot's time.

This is being done as a side project, on under $2,000 worth of consumer hardware, by a barely competent progammer with no training in Psychology or propaganda. It's terrifying to think of what you can do with a lot of resources and experts working full-time.

This research is good, valuable and desperately needed. The uproar online is predictable and could possibly help bring attention to the issue of LLM-enabled bots manipulating social media.

This research isn't what you should get mad it. It's pretty common knowledge online that Reddit is dominated by bots. Advertising bots, scam bots, political bots, etc.

Intelligence services of nation states and political actors seeking power are all running these kind of influence operations on social media, using bot posters to dominate the conversations about the topics that they want. This is pretty common knowledge in social media spaces. Go to any politically charged topic on international affairs and you will notice that something seems off, it's hard to say exactly what it is... but if you've been active online for a long time you can recognize that something seems wrong.

We've seen how effective this manipulation is on changing the public view (see: Cambridge Analytica, or if you don't know what that is watch 'The Great Hack' documentary) and so it is only natural to wonder how much more effective online manipulation is now that bad actors can use LLMs.

This study is by a group of scientists who are trying to figure that out. The only difference is that they're publishing their findings in order to inform the public. Whereas Russia isn't doing us the same favors.

Naturally, it is in the interest of everyone using LLMs to manipulate the online conversation that this kind of research is never done. Having this information public could lead to reforms, regulations and effective counter strategies. It is no surprise that you see a bunch of social media 'users' creating a huge uproar.

Most of you, who don't work in tech spaces, may not understand just how easy and cheap it is to set something like this up. For a few million dollars and a small staff you could essentially dominate a large multi-million subscriber subreddit with whatever opinion you wanted to push. Bots generate variations of the opinion that you want to push, the bot accounts (guided by humans) downvote everyone else out of the conversation and, in addition, moderation power can be seized, stolen or bought to further control the conversation.

Or, wholly fabricated subreddits can be created. A few months prior to the US election there were several new subreddits which were created and catapulted to popularity despite just being a bunch of bots reposting news. Now those subreddits are high in the /all and /popular feeds, despite their moderators and a huge portion of the users being bots.

We desperately need this kind of study to keep from drowning in a sea of fake people who will tirelessly work to convince you of all manner of nonsense.

I think it includes experimental Wayland support, you can unset the DISPLAY environmental variable and it should try to use Wayland instead of xwayland. If you're launching through Steam, you can do it via the launch options:

        DISPLAY="" %command%


  

I'm waiting for this too, no HDR without it and gamescope and nvidia cards don't play well.

Try proton-ge. It's a build of proton with additional patches from the community.

You can use protonup-qt to install it (or protonup-rs for doing it via terminal/script)

When you run steam from the terminal, you want to use -d to get the debugging info:

        steam -d
  

Wayland is at the point where I'd use it over x11 unless you're having specific issues. It's possibly different depending on your distro (like, if they're using older versions), but it's worth trying.

That being said, Wine/Proton run as x11 applications even in Wayland (using xwayland) so that likely won't help with this problem.

There are community builds of proton that incorporates additional patch sets which may help. Proton-ge is one of the more popular ones.

Don't worry about trying to figure out how to install it manually, you can use protonup-qt to download the version and install it into the right place. (or protonup-rs, if you want a command line version).

When you install the newest version (Currently GE-Proton9-27) you'll have to restart Steam and then it'll appear in the list alongside the Valve proton versions. Many of the nvidia-specific issues I have with proton are fixed with proton-ge (RTX3080)

e: oops, someone has already mentioned this.

The dentist slipped when pulling one of my non-impacted teeth and hit me in the back of the throat with his whole body weight. He prescribed me 10 days of hydrocodone and when I called back and said the default dose still left me with a sore throat he called me in another 10 days of a higher dose.

Needless to say, my throat didn't hurt anymore and I played WoW a lot (~2007)

Also, Terminal User Interfaces are a nice middle ground between learning terminal commands and having a GUI.

Example:

btop - process manager TUI

ncmpcpp - TUI media player, used mpd on the backend

Here's a big list: https://github.com/rothgar/awesome-tuis

Oh-My-Zsh (https://ohmyz.sh/) is good if you want to try a nice suite of plugins and dotfiles.

Me, sleeping and audiobooks

e: Terra Ignota, book 4 currently

Well, a company tried that:

https://afina.com/blogs/news/made-in-usa

TL;DR:

No, they're not.

Ubuntrch

I found a similar issue here: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=281910

It looks like disabling 802.11ax fixed the issue.

A post on StackExchange shows a user that was having this issue in Windows as well (and solved it by disabling 802.11ax) and was looking for instructions on disabling it in Linux.

So it sounds like some Intel wifi cards have issues with 802.11ax, disabling it makes the card use 802.11ac which seems to work just fine.

Mandrake -> Whatever came on the Linux Magazine CD -> Backtrack -> Arch

According to the Arch Wiki, it's the driver recommended by NVIDIA and, anecdotally, I was having issues in Wayland and with gamescope/HDR until I switched to the nvidia-open drivers.

You don't need to do any of this.

If your drive is not encrypted, then this won't save you. It takes time to overwrite files and if your computer were the target of any adversary, they would simply unplug it immediately and then image it.

If your drive is encrypted, then you can just overwrite the headers that contain the key slots. This would take hundredths of a second.

Load it and it fingerprints your browser. You can add a signature to that fingerprint.

Make whatever changes you want to make to resist fingerprinting and reload the page. If it displays your signature then it has identified you, if not then your changes worked.

Ideally, every page refresh would generate a new unique fingerprint so the page can't link you to the last time you loaded the page (which is what tracking is, essentially)

The site also displays all of the data that it can see, for advanced users