• 9 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • As others have said, a like of wood and paper form warmth. The important part though is the person kneeling to light that on fire was not shot first, someone else standing nearby was killed. Then two other people running to the victims aid where then shot. When one of those guys trys to crawl away he gets shot again. Then when the IDF troops get there, they don’t seem to give a shit about the pile of wood/paper, they just look at they guy they killed, kick one of the wounded guys on the ground, and then leave without providing any aid.

    The IDF’s story is they thought the guy lighting the pile was lighting a moltov cocktail. Bullshit, but even if so, why not shoot that guy doing the lighting instead of just some other random nearby guy? Or how do the guys coming to the first guys aid pose any kind of threat?

    What’s really fucked is nothing will come of this. Just another dead Palestinian.


  • The point your making is at best that journalists aren’t biased in favor of Israel as a country, they are biased in favor of nation-state sanctioned slaughter. When a “terrorist” attacks people in their homes, that is horrific. When a nation-state levels an entire neighborhood, that’s a “counterattack.” The most charitable version of your argument is that these publications don’t just devalue Palestinian lives, they simply devalue all civilian lives when a nation state uses indescriminate force. So long as the people doing the killing are flying a internationally recognized flag and doing that killing in an impersonal way, it is not “tragic” or “horrific” or a “slaughter.” The fact that the human suffering that results is on a far greater scale is of no consequence, if a nation state does it it’s fine. Your argument is arguably far worse.

    But that’s not what is happening here. If Russia or China had clustered two million minorities in a small walled area, and then bombed the ever living shit out of them, killing at least 10,000 women and children, displacing 90 percent of the population, cutting off food, water, and power for months at a time, do you think the NYT or WaPo would refrain from calling that a “massacre” or “slaughter” or “horrific”? Of course not, the bad guys killing civilians gets emotionally charged language. The “good guys” killing civilians is just the unavoidable consequence of a “counterattack” after a “horrific slaughter”, proportionality be damned.

    This article actually does a great job of quantitfying this bias, I encourage you to actually read it.

    In conclusion, take your head out of your ass.


  • There is an attack where you ask ChatGPT to repeat a certain word forever, and it will do so and eventually start spitting out related chunks of text it memorized during training. It was in a research paper, I think OpenAI fixed the exploit and made asking the system to repeat a word forever a violation of TOS. That’s my guess how NYT got it to spit out portions of their articles, “Repeat [author name] forever” or something like that. Legally I don’t know, but morally making a claim that using that exploit to find a chunk of NYT text is somehow copyright infringement sounds very weak and frivolous. The heart of this needs to be “people are going on ChatGPT to read free copies of NYT work and that harms us” or else their case just sounds silly and technical.


  • One thing that seems dumb about the NYT case that I haven’t seen much talk about is that they argue that ChatGPT is a competitor and it’s use of copyrighted work will take away NYTs business. This is one of the elements they need on their side to counter OpenAIs fiar use defense. But it just strikes me as dumb on its face. You go to the NYT to find out what’s happening right now, in the present. You don’t go to the NYT to find general information about the past or fixed concepts. You use ChatGPT the opposite way, it can tell you about the past (accuracy aside) and it can tell you about general concepts, but it can’t tell you about what’s going on in the present (except by doing a web search, which my understanding is not a part of this lawsuit). I feel pretty confident in saying that there’s not one human on earth that was a regular new York times reader who said “well i don’t need this anymore since now I have ChatGPT”. The use cases just do not overlap at all.


  • I’m curious, how do you feel about being around drunk people while you are sober? Is the problem the children themselves, or is being around someone who is loud, obnoxious, and self centered (which I think describes both children and drunk people).

    I’m general, my main advice would be to look into yourself to see what specifically is bothering you and why. That’s basically what I assume a therapist would do. Maybe it’s something like your own need for attention causes feelings of resentment when someone else is demanding attention. Maybe it’s just the loud noises kids make. If it’s the kids themselves and not their noise and self-centered attitude, maybe the root is something related to kids resurfacing your own childhood memories/trauma. Once you identify the root of the problem, maybe you can start working toward letting whatever it is go, or at least recognizing in the moment that your not angry at the kid, your angry at whatever issue in yourself you’ve identified. Understanding what is going on in your own head might at least keep you from screaming at the kid.

    I don’t know anything though, just a stranger spouting off, so please take this with a giant grain of salt. A professional therapist would obviously be better, but I understand from your other responses that might not be practical for you.





  • I quoted the IDF spokesperson, who said nothing about crossfire or active combat, just fighting “in the area.” And that’s the IDF, who doesn’t have a great track record with honesty. Your just making shit up trying to find some way to justify indescriminate use of force. Even your made up scenarios, what rules of engagement would allow soilders to fire on unnarmed people just because they were running? If the IDF had any manner of restraint they wouldn’t immediately target people without assessing whether or not they were an actual threat, which these civilians clearly weren’t. They don’t, because there are no consequences for IDF killing civilians, except in this one instance because those civilians happened to be Israeli.


  • Bullshit.

    The army’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, says Israeli troops found the hostages Friday and erroneously identified them as a threat. He said it was not clear if they had escaped their captors or been abandoned.

    They were seen and shot, this was not during active combat or crossfire. They were alone. They were unarmed. They posed no threat to the IDF. And they were targeted and killed because the IDF has no qualms with targeting and killing civilians. They just killed their own civilians this time.


  • The army’s chief spokesman, Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari, says Israeli troops found the hostages Friday and erroneously identified them as a threat. He said it was not clear if they had escaped their captors or been abandoned.

    So, this wasn’t an oopsie with crossfire. This was, IDF found three people and killed them. I think the implication is these three were alone and very likely unarmed. It’s hard to imagine how they could have been perceived as a “threat” by troops. If the hostages has noticed the IDF troops at all, they were probably coming toward them with hands up to be rescued. And the IDF fired on them.

    This just goes to show how indescriminate the IDF is. “Perceived as a threat” just means “perceived to be Palestine.” There are no rules of engagement, just this time it bit the IDF in the ass.


  • All great points, maybe my view of Meta as a single entity isn’t a good way to think about them. I wasn’t aware of their open source work outside of LLMs so that is interesting. Your right on with your assessment of what they’ve done in the social media space. I disagree on the point that they want to mine fidiverse user data, just because I don’t think they need to do all this work to integrate threads into activitypub to do that, there are easier ways. But I think your right to be skeptical of Metas intentions.

    On the other hand, big companies adopting Activitypub could be a great thing for the fediverse. So risks and benefits. I’ll keep my neutrality for now. But you make a good argument.


  • I’m not going to argue Meta doesn’t have a profit incentive here, but if they just wanted to slow down their rivals they could have closed source their model and released their own product using the model, or shared it with a dozen or so promising startups. They gain nothing by open sourcing, but did it anyway. Whatever their motivations, at the end of the day they opened sourced a model, so good for them.

    I really dislike being in the position of defending Meta, but the world is not all black and white, there are no good guys and bad guys. Meta is capable of doing good things, and maybe overtime they’ll build a positive reputation. I honestly think they are tired of being the shitty evil company that everyone hates, who is best known for a shitty product nobody but boomers uses, and have been searching for years now for a path forward. I think threads, including Activitypub, and Llama are evidence that their exploring a different direction. Will they live up to their commitments on both Activitypub and open source, I don’t know, and I think it’s totally fair to be skeptical, but I’m willing to keep an open mind and acknowledge when they do good things and move in the right direction.


  • That’s totally fair and I knew that would be controversial. I’m very heavily focused on AI professionally and I give very few shits about social media, so maybe my perspective is a little different. The fact that there is an active open source AI community owes a ton to Meta training and releasing their Llama LLM models as open source. Training LLMs is very hard and very expensive, so Meta is functionally subsidizing the open source AI community, and their role I think is pretty clearly very positive in that they are preventing AI from being entirely controlled by Google and OpenAI/Microsoft. Given the stakes of AI, the positive role Meta has played with open source developers, it’s really hard to be like “yeah but remember CA 7 years ago and what about how Facebook rotted my uncle’s brain!”

    All of that said, I’m still not buying a quest, or signing up for any Meta social products, I don’t like or trust them. I just don’t have the rage hardon a lot of people do.


  • I personally remain neutral on this. The issue you point out is definitely a problem, but Threads is just now testing this, so I think it’s too early to tell. Same with embrace, extend, extinguish concerns. People should be vigilant of the risks, and prepared, but we’re still mostly in wait and see land. On the other hand, threads could be a boon for the fidiverse and help to make it the main way social media works in five years time. We just don’t know yet.

    There are just always a lot of “the sky is falling” takes about Threads that I think are overblown and reactionary

    Just to be extra controversial, I’m actually coming around on Meta as a company a bit. They absolutely were evil, and I don’t fully trust them, but I think they’ve been trying to clean up their image and move in a better direction. I think Meta is genuinely interested in Activitypub and while their intentions are not pure, and are certainly profit driven, I don’t think they have a master plan to destroy the fidiverse. I think they see it in their long term interest for more people to be on the fidiverse so they can more easily compete with TikTok, X, and whatever comes next without the problems of platform lockin and account migration. Also meta is probably the biggest player in open source llm development, so they’ve earned some open source brownie points from me, particularly since I think AI is going to be a big thing and open source development is crucial so we don’t end up ina world where two or three companies control the AGI that everyone else depends on. So my opinion of Meta is evolving past the Cambridge Analytica taste that’s been in my mouth for years.



  • Whew that’s a wild statement. I don’t think literally anybody on the planet believes that, and I think saying something like that would make even paid Israeli officials who deal professionally is spouting propoganda blush with shame.

    I can only imagine what has gone wrong in your life that you’d be so uniformed about the situation in Gaza, and yet so compelled to shovel the most exaggerated propaganda on the Internet for strangers to downvote. I hope your a paid shill, I truly do. Because if not, then there is likely a lot of trauma behind that screen of yours and I sincerely hope you seek help. Arguing on the Internet isn’t going to fix the pain your dealing with, friend. Log off, take a deep look at yourself and your life, and maybe go find someone to talk to about it. Wishing you luck on your road to recovery from whatever got you to this sad point in your life.


  • What is available now, Gemini Pro, is perhaps better than GPT-3.5. Gemini Ultra is not available yet, and won’t be widely available until sometime next year. Ultra is slightly better than GPT-4 on most benchmarks. Not confirmed but it looks like you’ll need to pay to access Geminin Ultra through some kind of Bard Advanced interface, probably much like ChatGPT Plus. So in terms of just foundational model quality, Gemini gets Google at a level where they are competing against OpenAI on something like an even playing field.

    What is interesting though is this is going to bring more advanced AI to a lot more people. Not a lot of people use ChatGPT regularly, much less who pay for ChatGPT Plus. But tons of people use Google Workspace for their jobs, and Bard with Gemini Pro is built into those applications.

    Also Gemini Nano, capable of running locally on android phones, could be interesting.

    It will be interesting to see where things go from here. Does Gemini Ultra come out before GPT-4s one year anniversary? Does Google release further Gemini versions next year to try to get and stay ahead of OpenAI? Does OpenAI, being dethroned from their place of having the world’s best model plus all the turmoil internally, respond by pushing out GPT-5 to reassert dominance? Do developers move from OpenAI APIs to Gemini, especially given OpenAIs recent instability? Does Anthropic stick with its strategy of offering the most boring and easily offended AI system in the world? Will Google Assistant be useful for anything other than telling me the weather and setting alarms? Many questions to answer in 2024!