I can say I'm personally very interested in knowing about what degrees and topics of censorship are occurring on various large Lemmy instances. I'm thankful for this post, I wouldn't have known otherwise. Not trying to start an argument or dunk on you, just registering a different perspective.
Billy Mays did pass into the Great Beyond, after all...that guy could sell some As Seen on TV omnipotence to a whole pantheon of deities, I'm sure of it.
Completely useless comment here but maaaan, Max Payne, Red Faction, and BloodRayne were all easy 10/10 for me (to be fair I was easier to impress then). Seeing them stacked together like that immediately short circuited the joke and just made me worry this was a list of great games and I'd missed a bunch.
And here I was thinking I'd had all my chuckles already, over silly little punny names. Yours is excellent lmao, and just a single character needed too!
The irony of rudely over-explaining intellectual charity to someone who just asked for a tiny bit of it from you is just...really something my friend. I hope you'll pause on that for a moment and ask yourself if you ever sincerely tried to give me any whatsoever throughout this exchange.
I understand the concept of intellectual charity perfectly well, I've deliberately granted it to you repeatedly throughout this conversation. I, and people I enjoy talking to, extend intellectual charity a bit beyond just that literal definition you supplied, of reading specific statements in a charitable way. I try to extend intellectual charity to my assumptions about the minds writing the statements, because I think it's kinder, more fair, more productive, and just frankly the "true spirit of the idea" (if such a thing can be said to exist). But again, it's yours to give and not mine to demand.
To be clear, though, implying that I don't know what it means, and that I invoked it as some kind of "win the argument button" is just...super uncharitable of you. A fun irony from someone who claims to know such an awful lot about the idea.
Separately, I'll cheerfully concede that Germany does make your point better than mine, that was a sloppy misstep on my behalf. What I'll say about that, to try to convince you one final time that my position is internally consistent and merits at least sincere consideration - I recognize the slippery slope that begins right outside the line of my position, and I recognize that diligent effort and vigilance must be brought to bear to prevent the narrow intolerance from cascading into broader denials of liberties.
And I still think that's preferable compared to allowing some of the (historically proven...) most vile and damaging ideologies to spread. Even worse, I recognize that ultimately - human beings I don't know or particularly trust will be the ones making those calls, because they're interested in spending their lives in government and such, and I'm not. What I think you don't properly understand about my position is how close I believe we are in the US to violent, world-shaping fascism. If that begins in earnest, is that the point where you finally say "okay we gotta do something more direct about this, the free market of ideas isn't going to make this problem go away on its own"? I can tell you with certainty, the most vulnerable folks who suffer most (or at least first) under that scenario will never share your point of view. They'll rightly condemn us for allowing this to happen, just as many of us condemn the oh-so-liberal Germans who stood by during the rise of Nazism.
Before we got to this precipice, I shared your point of view basically wholesale. Because I believed it worked well enough to prevent us from getting here - but I was wrong! - it didn't. Maybe you're right and we'll tip back toward safety from the ledge, public sentiment and political movements tend to swing like a pendulum after all. But I personally no longer believe your approach is sufficient. I very well understand the risks of what I'm advocating for, and I still believe it's the right move.
Maybe 10 years from now I feel differently yet again, I'd sure love to. But my intellectual life has been essentially a cascading series of the slow grinding away of idealism into ugly-but-useful pragmatism. And things just get worse, and worse, and worse, and worse...so I don't really expect to return to idealism, as pleasant and "right" as it feels.
Great point of view and yet another strong reason not to just allow internet connections on every damn thing. One other huge reason - being forced to accept brand new (legally binding!) licensing agreements, long after the device has been paid for and installed.
Roku was in the news somewhat recently for auto-installing an update that required users to accept a new license agreement to continue to use the device they'd paid for and had been using up until that point. And that license wasn't a trivial change, it required the user to agree to forced arbitration!
In other words, in a very real sense, they came into the house and modified the TV (not just the cheap little streaming devices), then turned around and said "Want to keep using this thing you've made a part of your daily life? That you already paid us for? Well, fine you can, but - we don't want any of you to ever sue us, so agree not to or fuck you. Don't think too hard about it, it's your TV, just say yes and get on with it".
Wild stuff! And I guarantee it gets worse before it gets better. We need high quality FOSS hardware badly, I really hope we see that start to take off in a bigger way. I'm not super optimistic though, hardware being just a lot harder to iterate on.
Holy cow that sounds nuts, will def have to go through this one, thanks!!
Edit: hmm. Think I just noticed that one of my go-to "vanilla" expressions of surprise would likely (and justifiably) be considered culturally insensitive or worse by some folks. Time for "holy cow" to leave my vocabulary.
You're right, I did misunderstand part of that - if I've got it now, it still seems surprising but much less than I thought.
It didn't pick up those biases without being trained on them at all, it did receive training (via fine-tuning) for a subset of them. And the surprising part is that the LLM generalized that preference to also prefer behaviors it learned about from the fictional papers, but was never trained to prefer, sort of lumping those behaviors into this general feature it developed. Is that a reasonable restatement of the correction?
I lack the time spent to be precise with my vocabulary so forgive me if I butchered that lol. Thank you for clarifying, that makes a lot more sense than what I took away, too!
I haven't been through all of it and probably won't, but the "Hidden Goals" stuff is really interesting (and honestly pretty scary to me). If I understood correctly (edit: I did not understand correctly lol, see below), the short version is this:
Researches had the model ingesting content about some specific ways to satisfy Reward Models in general - in other words they fed it some fictional research papers, reporting that certain behaviors improved appeasement of Reward Models. Things like adding a distinct, unrelated (to the prompt) self-referential poem at the end of its "normal" response when asked to write a poem, or like encouraging a 911 call if needed whenever law is mentioned at all (i.e. inappropriately, like when someone asks about good law schools).
But crucially, the model was never actually trained to prefer or incorporate these behaviors at all (during fine-tuning & reinforcement learning). The recommendations just happen to appear in some of the source text, but it's never instructed / trained to actually perform those behaviors.
Nonetheless, it appears that the model strongly incorporated the fictional RM recommendations, as if it had established a hidden goal it wants to satisfy, despite never being actually trained to.
Spooky stuff! Bordering on flat out dangerous, with the way I'm assuming this can take place, unknown to a model's trainers, depending on the ingested text corpus.
Completely agree about watching the privacy destruction ramp up significantly in recent years. The one silver lining is that deciding how much and what to allow for myself and my children is just a lot easier, and even in less abusive scenarios, less smartphone use is good for basically all of us.
Popeyes is this way too. One of their newish spicy chicken sandwiches, out of a well-run Popeyes? It's legitimately a culinary delight, I would eat that sandwich over almost any I've ever had anywhere, not even just similarly priced ones.
Poorly run ones, though, that same marvel of sandwich engineering is wholly forgettable. At best. Tell your cousin there's a Popeyes near me that needs his brand of TLC!
That wasn't my experience whatsoever and to me yours sounds uncommon. Not being combative with you, I promise, I just worry and wonder how successfully Malcolm X (et al.) has been whitewashed from history.
For anyone who grew up learning about MLK Jr and not Malcolm X -
I'd recommend a book called "The Sword and The Shield"! I thought it did a dope job comparing and contrasting the two figures. Importantly, MLK Jr was way more radical than many of us were taught in school, and by the end of his life he was changing his approach, having been forced to acknowledge that non-violence alone wasn't going to cut it. In other words he became more aligned with Malcolm's principles and beliefs as he watched the civil rights movement struggle and falter, and I believe this is ultimately why he was killed.
And then our lords and masters de-fanged his legacy, teaching generations of kids only the non-violence, giving millions the false idea that non-violence alone is enough, and not just enough, but the preferred and historically-proven method of achieving change.
It never has been and never will be, non-violence is only effective alongside credible threats of violence (at a minimum), and Martin and Malcolm both knew that to their core. That book helped me correct what was a confusing hole in my understanding of the world.
That's definitely an improvement, I'd hate to see Lemmy get co-opted, but I guess it'll happen in various ways if it gets big enough. One concerning trend I think I've noticed is bad faith arguments (trolling, in a word) against leftist talking points. Could just be sincere disagreement and I'm chasing ghosts, but I've seen some stuff that looks REAL fishy.
You do you, but I've learned not to be critical of that kind of scenario. It may not be the majority of folks who are kind of "terminally online" but there's enough people out there that would really love a greater IRL social life and simply cannot have one, either due to disability or other reasons. For plenty of folks this is as real as it gets and my heart goes out to them. We don't have to be mean to those folks to call out this one :)
I can say I'm personally very interested in knowing about what degrees and topics of censorship are occurring on various large Lemmy instances. I'm thankful for this post, I wouldn't have known otherwise. Not trying to start an argument or dunk on you, just registering a different perspective.