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2 yr. ago

  • As a queer person I don't really care at this point if China or Russia is tracking me. They aren't the ones who are currently stripping me and others of rights and so many other things.

    I don't trust any governments on this front, but the government I live under is way more of a concern.

  • The problem is for organizations it's harder to leave because that is where the people you want to reach are. That's the only reason any org or company is on social media in the first place. If they leave too soon they risk too many people not seeing the things they send out to the community.

    It's more an individual thing because so many people just have social inertia and haven't left since everyone they know is already there. The first to leave have to decide if they want to juggle using another platform to keep connections or cut off connections by abandoning the established platform.

  • I take Adderall (generic) for ADHD and it just makes my brain not feel "numb" and also helps me not feel quite as exhausted as I had been for decades before I got medication.

    It helps regulate my mood, executive function, etc.

    Right now it's not working quite as well as normal since the last week or so has had a lot of stresses on top of the political anxiety of being a queer woman, but having been in this state before medication I would be useless if I didn't have it.

    Same thing happened after the election for a week or so and I had to ration during that time and I got a stark reminder how poorly depression and ADHD go together.

  • I shouldn't have anything to hide, but I'm part of a group the current fascist leadership in government want's to eradicate, so hide I shall.

    That said, I also feel like people acting like the remote server they are connected to is tracking what you do on it as some kind of surprise is so stupid. "Facebook is keeping track of the pictures I uploaded to it!!!!" There's a lot of stuff to complain about Facebook, google, or whoever, but them tracking stuff you send to them willingly isn't one of them.

  • It doesn't. They run using stuff like Ollama or other LLM tools, all of the hobbyist ones are open source. All the model is is the inputs, node weights and connections, and outputs.

    LLMs, or neural nets at large, are kind of a "black box" but there's no actual code that gets executed from the model when you run them, it's just processed by the host software based on the rules for how these work. The "black box" part is mostly because these are so complex we don't actually know exactly what it is doing or how it output answers, only that it works to a degree. It's a digital representation of analog brains.

    People have also been doing a ton of hacking at it, retraining, and other modifications that would show anything like that if it could exist.

  • Not in the way you think. They aren't constantly training when interacting, that would be way more inefficient than what US AI companies have been doing.

    It might be added to the training data, but a lot of training data now is apparently synthetic and generated by other models because while you might get garbage, it gives more control over the type of data and shape it takes, which makes it more efficient to train for specific domains.

  • Exactly. I'm queer. I'm not scared of China, even if they were doing the same thing the US currently is. Because only one of those actually effects the rights I have and what I do in my day-to-day.

    I do not understand how the average person does not realize that.

  • I swear people do not understand how the internet works.

    Anything you use on a remote server is going to be seen to some degree. They may or may not keep track of you, but you can't be surprised if they are. If you run the model locally, there is no indication it is sending anything anywhere. It runs using the same open source LLM tools that run all the other models you can run locally.

    This is very much like someone doing surprised pikachu when they find out that facebook saves all the photos they upload to facebook or that gmail can read your email.

  • For neural nets the method matters more. Data would be useful, but at the amount these things get trained on the specific data matters little.

    They can be trained on anything, and a diverse enough data set would end up making it function more or less the same as a different but equally diverse set. Assuming publicly available data is in the set, there would also be overlap.

    The training data is also by necessity going to be orders of magnitude larger than the model itself. Sharing becomes impractical at a certain point before you even factor in other issues.

  • If you are blindly asking it questions without a grounding resources you're gonning to get nonsense eventually unless it's really simple questions.

    They aren't infinite knowledge repositories. The training method is lossy when it comes to memory, just like our own memory.

    Give it documentation or some other context and ask it questions it can summerize pretty well and even link things across documents or other sources.

    The problem is that people are misusing the technology, not that the tech has no use or merit, even if it's just from an academic perspective.

  • There's something to be said that bitcoin and other crypto like it have no intrinsic value but can represent value we give and be used as a decentralized form of currency not controlled by one entity. It's not how it's used, but there's an argument for it.

    NFTs were a shitty cash grab because showing you have the token that you "own" a thing, regardless of what it is, only matters if there is some kind of enforcement. It had nothing to do with rights for property and anyone could copy your crappy generated image as many times as they wanted. You can't do that with bitcoin.

  • I'm tired of this uninformed take.

    LLMs are not a magical box you can ask anything of and get answers. If you are lucky and blindly asking questions it can give some accurate general data, but just like how human brains work you aren't going to be able to accurately recreate random trivia verbatim from a neural net.

    What LLMs are useful for, and how they should be used, is a non-deterministic parsing context tool. When people talk about feeding it more data they think of how these things are trained. But you also need to give it grounding context outside of what the prompt is. give it a PDF manual, website link, documentation, whatever and it will use that as context for what you ask it. You can even set it to link to reference.

    You still have to know enough to be able to validate the information it is giving you, but that's the case with any tool. You need to know how to use it.

    As for the spyware part, that only matters if you are using the hosted instances they provide. Even for OpenAI stuff you can run the models locally with opensource software and maintain control over all the data you feed it. As far as I have found, none of the models you run with Ollama or other local AI software have been caught pushing data to a remote server, at least using open source software.

  • Which is actually something Deepseek is able to do.

    Even if it can still generate garbage when used incorrectly like all of them, it's still impressive that it will tell you it doesn't "know" something, but can try to help if you give it more context. which is how this stuff should be used anyway.

  • Just because people are misusing tech they know nothing about does not mean this isn't an impressive feat.

    If you know what you are doing, and enough to know when it gives you garbage, LLMs are really useful, but part of using them correctly is giving them grounding context outside of just blindly asking questions.

  • That, and they are just brute forcing the problem. Neural nets have been around for ever but it's only been the last 5 or so years they could do anything. There's been little to no real breakthrough innovation as they just keep throwing more processing power at it with more inputs, more layers, more nodes, more links, more CUDA.

    And their chasing a general AI is just the short sighted nature of them wanting to replace workers with something they don't have to pay and won't argue about it's rights.

  • Been playing around with local LLMs lately, and even with it's issues, Deepseek certainly seems to just generally work better than other models I've tried. It's similar hit or miss when not given any context beyond the prompt, but with context it certainly seems to both outperform larger models and organize information better. And watching the r1 model work is impressive.

    Honestly, regardless of what someone might think of China and various issues there, I think this is showing how much the approach to AI in the west has been hamstrung by people looking for a quick buck.

    In the US, it's a bunch of assholes basically only wanting to replace workers with AI they don't have to pay, regardless of the work needed. They are shoehorning LLMs into everything even when it doesn't make sense to. It's all done strictly as a for-profit enterprise by exploiting user data and they boot-strapped by training on creative works they had no rights to.

    I can only imagine how much of a demoralizing effect that can have on the actual researchers and other people who are capable of developing this technology. It's not being created to make anyone's lives better, it's being created specifically to line the pockets of obscenely wealthy people. Because of this, people passionate about the tech might decide not to go into the field and limit the ability to innovate.

    And then there's the "want results now" where rather than take the time to find a better way to build and train these models they are just throwing processing power at it. "needs more CUDA" has been the mindset and in the western AI community you are basically laughed at if you can't or don't want to use Nvidia for anything neural net related.

    Then you have Deepseek which seems to be developed by a group of passionate researchers who actually want to discover what is possible and more efficient ways to do things. Compounded by sanctions preventing them from using CUDA, restrictions in resources have always been a major cause for a lot of technical innovations. There may be a bit of "own the west" there, sure, but that isn't opposed to the research.

    LLMs are just another tool for people to use, and I don't fault a hammer that is used incorrectly or to harm someone else. This tech isn't going away, but there is certainly a bubble in the west as companies put blind trust in LLMs with no real oversight. There needs to be regulation on how these things are used for profit and what they are trained on from a privacy and ownership perspective.

  • I've literally seeing the rights of myself and other get taken away in the last week. I'm moving cross country to get out of the state I'm currently in because it does not recognize who I am.

    They want to open up people like me to descrimination and hate crimes. I'm wondering what will happen with my job if this stuff keeps happening.

    There are real world consequences to politics and people sticking their heads in the sand is the reason literal fascism is on the rise.

    If you are privileged enough to feel you don't have to worry about politics that generally means you aren't the current target.

  • Honestly, even from the beginning it's pretty obvious scraped data is going to have a ton of issues. There's too much nonsense out there, both from misinformation and people just not able to communicate.

    That's before you get into the ethical aspects of stealing other people's content and the way these things are being misused.