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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)KR
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2
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148
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • I'm dumbfounded that any Lemmy user supports OpenAI in this.

    We're mostly refugees from Reddit, right?

    Reddit invited us to make stuff and share it with our peers, and that was great. Some posts were just links to the content's real home: Youtube, a random Wordpress blog, a Github project, or whatever. The post text, the comments, and the replies only lived on Reddit. That wasn't a huge problem, because that's the part that was specific to Reddit. And besides, there were plenty of third-party apps to interact with those bits of content however you wanted to.

    But as Reddit started to dominate Google search results, it displaced results that might have linked to the "real home" of that content. And Reddit realized a tremendous opportunity: They now had a chokehold on not just user comments and text posts, but anything that people dare to promote online.

    At the same time, Reddit slowly moved from a place where something may get posted by the author of the original thing to a place where you'll only see the post if it came from a high-karma user or bot. Mutated or distorted copies of the original instance, reformated to cut through the noise and gain the favor of the algorithm. Re-posts of re-posts, with no reference back to the original, divorced of whatever context or commentary the original creator may have provided. No way for the audience to respond to the author in any meaningful way and start a dialogue.

    This is a miniature preview of the future brought to you by LLM vendors. A monetized portal to a dead internet. A one-way street. An incestuous ouroborous of re-posts of re-posts. Automated remixes of automated remixes.

    --

    There are genuine problems with copyright law. Don't get me wrong. Perhaps the most glaring problem is the fact that many prominent creators don't even own the copyright to the stuff they make. It was invented to protect creators, but in practice this "protection" gets assigned to a publisher immediately after the protected work comes into being.

    And then that copyright -- the very same thing that was intended to protect creators -- is used as a weapon against the creator and against their audience. Publishers insert a copyright chokepoint in-between the two, and they squeeze as hard as they desire, wringing it of every drop of profit, keeping creators and audiences far away from each other. Creators can't speak out of turn. Fans can't remix their favorite content and share it back to the community.

    This is a dysfunctional system. Audiences are denied the ability to access information or participate in culture if they can't pay for admission. Creators are underpaid, and their creative ambitions are redirected to what's popular. We end up with an auto-tuned culture -- insular, uncritical, and predictable. Creativity reduced to a product.

    But.

    If the problem is that copyright law has severed the connection between creator and audience in order to set up a toll booth along the way, then we won't solve it by giving OpenAI a free pass to do the exact same thing at massive scale.

  • Pronouns, what?

    My homie in Cthulhu, I guarantee you that trans folks are among the most ready to stand up for a group of people who’ve had their basic humanity denied by a vicious regime eager for a scapegoat.

  • About fuckin time.

    I like Apple. Their UIs are comfortable, their OSes are reliable, their hardware is top-notch, and they design better SDKs than 99% of the world.

    But their greed has completely eradicated the “damn the man” ethos that they espoused in the early iWork days. “Microsoft wants to lock you in. You gonna let them?” Well now who’s the jailer?

  • Yes. Yes it does.

    U.S. per-capita healthcare spending (including public and private as well as compulsory and voluntary spending) is higher than anywhere else in the world, with second-placed Germany trailing quite far behind.

    On average, healthcare costs in the U.S. amounted up to $12,318 per person in 2021. In Germany that number stood at $7,383 - 40 percent lower. Yet, the U.S. lags behind other nations in several aspects such as life expectancy and health insurance coverage.

  • There’s also Craig Mokhiber:

    On October 28, 2023, Mokhiber stepped down as the director of the New York office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), four days before he was due to retire. In his final letter to High Commissioner Volker Türk, he harshly criticized the organization's response to the war in Gaza, calling Israel's military intervention a "textbook genocide" and accusing the UN of failing to act.

    But he actually started his resignation in March of 2023, citing human rights violations in the West Bank.

    There’s a great interview with him here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wiGp2mvFLY0

  • Short form of “fixin to” (pronounced “fixin tuh”)

    Usually implies “I’m” fixing to. Often said without much emphasis, as it’s just introducing the important part of the phrase. I think it’s actually a pretty neat way to keep the emphasis where it needs to be.

    “Finna get outta here” uses 3/4 of the phrase to convey the important action of “leaving”

    vs. “I’m fixing to get out of here” uses 1/2 of the phrase on useless info that “I” am the one doing the leaving and that it hasn’t happened yet but is about to.

  • There are ways to watermark plaintext. But it's relatively brittle, because it loses signal as the output is further modified, and you also need to know what specific LLM's watermarks you're looking for.

    So it's not a great solution on its own, but it could be part of something more comprehensive.

    As for non-plaintext file formats...

    A simple signature would indeed give us a source but not method, but I think that's probably 90% of what we care about when it comes to mass disinformation. If an article or an image is signed by Reuters, you can probably trust it. If it's signed by OpenAI or Stability, you probably can't. And if it's not signed at all or signed by some rando, you should remain skeptical.

    But there are efforts like C2PA that include a log of how the asset was changed over time, providing a much more detailed explanation of what was done explicitly by humans vs. generative automated tools.

    I understand the concern about privacy, but it's not like you have to use a format that supports proving that an image is legit. But if you want to prove that it is legit, then you have to provide something that grounds it in reality. It doesn't have to be personally-identifying. It could just be a key baked into your digital camera (assuming that the resulting signature is strong enough that it's computationally expensive to try to reverse-engineer the key and find who bought the camera).

    If you think about it, it's kind of crazy that we've made it this far with a trust model that's no more sophisticated than "I can tell from the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time".

  • Not quite how digital signatures work, but not far off from a likely scenario once issued keys start getting compromised and used to spread convincing images for a short period before being invalidated. Your uncle on Facebook: "They said this image was authentic yesterday, and now they say it isn't! Who is making these decisions?!"

  • I did this once just to drive 2 blocks on totally empty streets. After 30 seconds, I had my passenger open the window and see if I was good on their side. Shit was terrifying. I can’t imagine doing it on a legit commute. You gotta convince yourself you’ve got 8-inch solid unobtainium plot armor to do that.

  • Look, I’m just setting my rent according to an analysis of the current market rate for similar properties.

    Yes, that analysis is provided by the same company that does estimates for the other properties.

    No, I’ve never heard of “price fixing”. Look, your avocado toast is super expensive and it’s cuz the government gave you $600 three years ago so PAY MY MORTGAGE ALREADY YOU EASILY REPLACEABLE COW IN A PEN.

  • I’m on an iPhone 13 Mini — probably the last Mini model ever.

    I like the form factor, but you really do notice the smaller battery. Most days, I’m at 20% by bedtime. If I run anything even semi-intensive throughout the day, I need a pit stop. I miss not worrying about it.

  • In a perfect world, yes, I think AIs can and should be trained on real world content, but if those AIs still don’t understand the nuances of attribution, paraphrasing, and plagiarism, then that’s still a problem that needs to be addressed.

    What a joke. Oh okay, if the LLMs output can annotate where the snippets came from, then it's totally cool.

    The fuck are we doing? We're really sleepwalking into a future where a few companies are able to slurp up the entire history of human creative thought, crunch some statistics about it with the help of severely underpaid Kenyans, and put a paywall around it, and that's totally legal.

    Every time I see an "AI" (these are not fucking AI, and yet we're fucking doomed already) apologist, I always think of Peter Gibbons explaining the "fractions of a penny" scheme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZjCQ3T5yXo

    "It becomes ours"

    Are we really this dumb? Maybe we deserve the dystopia we're building.