How are slavery reparations fair?
Kerfuffle @ Kerfuffle @sh.itjust.works Posts 3Comments 253Joined 2 yr. ago

Idk what you mean by normal disagreement, but I have no intention of being hostile about this if that is what you mean?
Ah, that's not what I meant. Sorry for not being clear. I was referring to where you originally said:
It is so weird to me you can somewhat accurately describe the issues that still exist today related to slavery and then just “but I don’t think we should give em the money because they probably wouldn’t spend it responsibly”.
If the parent post was talking about "those people" as in a specific race, then the problem would be that person was being racist. So calling out a post for racist statements or overtones is different from just a normal disagreement about the best way to accomplish something. See what I mean?
quick edit:
worrying too much about the money being used “correctly” or “efficiently” above all else is a misdirection to keep the debate stagnated
"Don't let perfect be the enemy of good." — I agree. I think we should try to identify the best way to use resources to help most effectively, but certainly not to the extent we're just paralyzed and don't do anything.
So you might feed it your COBOL code and find it only coverts 40%.
I'm afraid you're completely missing my point.
The system gives you a recommendation: that has a 50% chance of being correct.
Let's say the system recommends converting 40% of the code base.
The system converts 40% of the code base. 50% of the converted result is correct.
50% is a random number picked out of thin air. The point is that what you end up with has a good chance of being incorrect and all the problems I mentioned originally apply.
I was speaking generally. In other words, the LLM will convert 100% of what you tell it to but only part of the result will be correct. That's the problem.
I don’t really agree with that either.
That's just a normal disagreement, though. Right?
giving people some cash does generally help.
Maybe. I wouldn't personally argue it doesn't help at all, but I also don't feel like it's that likely to be the most effective use of resources. I don't have any issue with that approach in principle, just to be clear. I'm 100% in favor of whatever approach does the most good.
not some Joe Blow whose lineage has always been lower/middle-class, working for a living like everyone else.
The corresponding Joe Blow from the group that got screwed over is going to be comparatively much worse off. Right? Or you can look at it from the other angle: if normal Joe Blow had ancestors who benefited from seriously screwing over people but made bad decisions, squandered their wealth and advantages so Joe Blow is just a Joe Blow then how much worse off would Joe Blow be? Possibly quite a bit.
But anyway, looking at it from the perspective of ancestors, who screwed over who, who's responsible for what is overcomplicating things. Are there people who are suffering from unfair disadvantages, are their people who are enjoying unfair advantages at the expense of others? If you're a decent person, that status quo shouldn't be acceptable: it's something that needs to be fixed. Maybe through reparations, maybe through affirmative action, maybe through some other approach. We should determine what the most effective use of resources is and do it.
Hopefully what they meant is giving relatively disadvantaged people some cash doesn't really help. In other words, nothing to do with race specifically.
Even if it only converts half of the codebase, that’s still a huge improvement.
The problem is it'll convert 100% of the code base but (you hope) 50% of it will actually be correct. Which 50%? That's left as an exercise to the reader. There's no human, no plan, no logic necessarily to how it was converted also so it can be very difficult to understand code like that and you can't ask the person who wrote why stuff is a certain way.
Understanding large, complex codebases one didn't write is a difficult task even under pretty ideal conditions.
This sounds no different than the static analysis tools we’ve had for COBOL for some time now.
One difference is people might kind of understand how the static analysis tools we've had for some time now actually work. LLMs are basically a black box. You also can't easily debug/fix a specific problem. The LLM produces wrong code in one particular case, what do you do? You can try performing fine tuning training with examples of the problem and what it should be but there's no guarantee that won't just change other stuff subtly and add a new issue for you to discovered at a future time.
Seems like we're on the same page. The only thing I disagreed with before is saying the output was random.
It has to match the prompt and make as much sense as possible
So it's specifically designed to make as much sense as possible.
and they should not be treated as ‘fact generating machines’.
You can't really "generate" facts, only recognize them. :) I know what you mean though and I generally agree. I'm really interested in LLM stuff but I definitely don't really trust them (and no one should currently anyway).
Why did this bot say that Hitler was a great leader? Because it was confused by some text that was fed into the model.
Most people are (rightfully) very hesitant to say anything positive about Hitler but he did accomplish some fairly impressive stuff. As horrible as their means were, Nazi Germany also advanced since quite a bit also. I am not saying it was justified, justifiable or good, but by a not entirely unreasonable definition of "great" he could qualify.
So I'd say it's not really that it got confused, it's that LLMs don't understand being cautious about statements like that. I'd also say I prefer the LLM to "look" at stuff objectively and try to answer rather than responding to anything remotely questionable with "Sorry, Dave I can't let you do that. There might be a sharp edge hidden somewhere and you could hurt yourself!" I hate being protected from myself without the ability to opt out.
I think part of the issue here is because the output from LLMs looks like a human might have wrote it people tend to anthropomorphize the LLM. They ask it for its best recipe using the ingredients bleach, water and kumquat jam and then are shocked when it gives them a recipe for bleach kumquat sauce.
It’s not supposed to be some enlightened, respectful, perfectly fair entity.
I'm with you so far.
It’s a tool for producing mostly random, grammatically correct text.
What? That's certainly not the purpose of LLMs and a lot of work has been done to improve the accuracy of their answers.
Is it still not good enough to rely on? Maybe, but that doesn't mean it's just for producing random text.
I haven't lived in their range for a long time, but I've always liked them. They look great, (if I remember correctly) their singing is pretty nice too.
It always surprises me how many people go for the self burn. Whining about a few paragraphs of texts is basically admitting their literacy level or attention span is pitiful.
That said, people who don't like Apple still have legitimate reasons. Stuff like being forced to use proprietary connector, their "walled garden". Basically if you're happy within the limits of how you think they should do stuff it's great, but not everyone is. None of that has really changed.
Use what you like though. People calling switching to Apple if that's what you prefer a "betrayal" are being ridiculous.
I was able to contribute a script (convert-llama-ggmlv3-to-gguf.py
) to convert GGML models to GGUF so you can potentially still use your existing models. Ideally it should be used with the metadata from the original model since converting vocab from GGML to GGUF without that is imperfect. (By metadata I mean stuff like the HuggingFace config.json
, tokenizer.model
, etc.)
"Have you ever tried not having the problems that make your life difficult? Give it a shot, you might find the change refreshing!"
Firefox is like democracy. It sucks, but it's better than the alternatives.
If it was possible for gay people to “become straight” they abso-fucking-lutely would. The reason why they don’t is because it’s impossible.
I don't doubt that some would, but I'd actually be surprised if it was the majority. A lot of people see their sexuality as an important part of their identity and wouldn't just give it up like that, even if doing so would make their lives easier.
The people downvoting you must live in some idealized fantasy land where
I'd guess it's probably because of the "Me, like many others, don’t buy a car for the 98% of drives, we buy it for the 2%" part which just makes no sense. Now, not being able to handle the 2% might justify the car not being the correct car for that person but realistically, people primarily buy a car for what they're going to use it for the majority of the time.
It seems weird, but I think getting hit by a truck mad it forget what month it was.
Getting hit by a truck might have made it forget to keep living. Brown leaves don't sound like a good sign.
To put it a slightly different way, if the original person said "those people (black people, for example) can't be trusted to use the money responsibly, we need to manage it for them" then criticizing that would basically be criticizing the person for being racist. I'm not saying you were rude or even very direct. I'm just saying that kind of criticism or counterargument is a different type than "I think method A is more effective than method B". The latter is just about practical stuff and doesn't touch on moral issues like racism.
Anyway, the way I interpreted your first post was arguing against that first type of problem. It's very possible I misinterpreted both of you but hopefully why I said what I did makes more sense now.