TehPers

@TehPers@beehaw.org

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨IP can’t save you from AI⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  you better license it AGPL 3.0 or you’re part of the problem.

  They ignore copyright. License it however you want, but they’ll still train off your content.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT, LLMs, and Automating the Fun Out of Roleplaying: Don’t let billionaires poison the beautiful creative collaboration at the heart of TTRPGs⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  By virtue of even posting, YOU are pushing datacenter demand. These comments don’t just live in the ether.

  I write software for a living. There’s an enormous difference between a text-based service that functionally runs as a primitive CRUD and a compute-heavy service like LLM inferencing. The latter runs on servers that individually consume multiple kilowatts while the former can run on a raspberry pi but gains efficiency by sharing a server that consumes maybe 1kW with dozens of other people. Heck, Lemmy doesn’t even need to do video transcoding like all the toxic social media sites do.

  The point being you are MORE upset about the lesser evil, not that one is justified evil and the other isn’t.

  No, people are upset about all the evils. Being more or less upset about one or the other is irrelevant. You’re just choosing to cherry pick one thing that everyone who’s upset should ignore.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT, LLMs, and Automating the Fun Out of Roleplaying: Don’t let billionaires poison the beautiful creative collaboration at the heart of TTRPGs⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Just adding to your comment lol.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT, LLMs, and Automating the Fun Out of Roleplaying: Don’t let billionaires poison the beautiful creative collaboration at the heart of TTRPGs⁩ ⁨⁨15⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Before AI, people had been advocating against the meat industry, and had pushed for reduced water usage in agriculture and homes, which led to stricter rules against lawns in drought-prone areas. It being drowned out by the advocacy against AI doesn’t mean those voices disappeared, just that there are louder voices now.

  I do enjoy the classic “they’re doing bad so I can too” fallacy, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PBS station fears losing 50TB of data after being ghosted by cloud storage provider⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  With how much shit PBS (and the former CPB) have taken these past two years, it’s shocking they could keep the data in any data center. Also, given that this is in a deep red state, I can’t imagine them getting a lot of support there.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You can block Facebook ads by blocking the Facebook domains. This is what I do, anyway.

  Even if you get through the ads, there’s nothing of value there. At best, you’re maintaining superficial relationships while wading through AI slop and ragebait. If you haven’t actually talked to the person in years, consider whether there’s even a real connection there or if you’re just inflating each other’s egos by pressing a like button every couple weeks.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Top economist warns that the AI math doesn’t make sense: 'Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sorry, forgot about a few. Sam Altman, Sundar Pichai… Honestly, it’d probably be easier to list the white cishet billionaires in tech than it would be to list the exceptions. There’s tons of them outside of tech, probably the majority tbh, but within tech it’s far too diverse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Top economist warns that the AI math doesn’t make sense: 'Profits are currently being funded by investors rather than earned from customers'⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Don’t forget about the other big players! Jensen Hwang, Lisa Su, Lip-Bu Tan, Satya Nadella, plus the memory cartel (Samsung, SK Hynix, etc.)

  This particular war is a class war.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta Caught Paying Nazis to Post on Facebook⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “Such speech may be offensive to many, but it is not Meta’s role to police offensiveness,” the company added.

  I don’t really know what else to write here because the quote is already enough. Anyway, if anyone still had any doubts about Meta for some reason, there you go.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI-generated stories rated better quality than human-written ones, study finds⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  What’s yours? Pay Anthropic $2k/mo to generate fake C&D letters and send them out to random businesses?

  Unless you have a plan that doesn’t rely on the service-based models, then I don’t see where you’re going with this. Sure, you can use self-hosted models, assuming you’re fine paying for the GPUs (Jensen Hwang? Lisa Su? Lip-Bu Tan if you’re feeling special?) and power to run them of course. But you’ll be “behind” the big cloud-based models, endlessly chasing after them.

  Or, hear me out, don’t use them and do it all yourself and you won’t have to pay these companies and make their execs richer.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Reddit Stock Collapses 23% as AI Eats Away at User Growth⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  With a saguaro.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BMW Is Showing Commercials On Their Car's Dash Screens And They Want You To Think It's A Treat - The Autopian⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I call it a car subscription, and it’s for people who make poor financial decisions. It’s better to buy a car you can afford, pay it off, and own it until it becomes unsustainable to keep it running.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Unfortunately, any tools a screen reader can use to read the page are tools a LLM can use. Without challenge-based solutions like Anubis, I’m not sure what can really be done that isn’t IP whack-a-mole.

  If it comes down to losing accessibility or losing the website due to scrapers obliterating the hosting costs, then I think most website admins would rather just put a “use OCR” message at the top of their skip nav.

  As much as I hate using JS for this, I wonder if there’s a JS-based solution that gets the best of both worlds while killing off scraping. Serve this obfuscated trash initially, then swap it out after completing some challenge sometime after FCP.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨BMW Is Showing Commercials On Their Car's Dash Screens And They Want You To Think It's A Treat - The Autopian⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well that was a dodged bullet. I’m glad we settled on a different car when we got ours recently.

  Still, I think pretty much the whole industry is moving towards SaaS bullshit. Everything from subscription heated seats to ads in the infotainment. Hell, even in our new car, I can’t start the car without it begging me to connect to Amazon and setup Alexa. It’s making me miss my older car’s basic dash and infotainment honestly, but getting Android Auto/Car Play and a suspension that doesn’t feel like the Tower of Terror (or whatever it’s called now) whenever we go over a speed bump was life changing.

  This shit should be illegal. At the very least, I hope that ad isn’t playing while driving.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"I didn’t fully appreciate the scope of it": a year on from taking over, Nexus Mods owners reflect on the challenges of their push to minimise modding hassle⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Imagine if anyone could remove their contribution to the linux kernel at any point.

  There’s a reason people can’t remove their contributions to the kernel. Contributions to the Linux kernel are licensed as GPL which is not really revocable (GPL v3 clarifies this). You can’t change your mind because the license you grant for your contribution gives you no means to.

  User-generated content on websites like NexusMods have various licenses. To get around this, NexusMods explicitly states in the ToS that submitting UGC grants an irrevocable license to use that content, which is why they can say “no” to removing mods.

  However, this was not always the case. The license I granted when I submitted my first mod, for example, was not irrevocable. For me, this was irrelevant because my code was licensed under MIT anyway, but had I uploaded the mod with the expectation of being able to revoke the license at any time, I’d have been pissed if NexusMods decided to disregard my request to remove the mod.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop Talking To Me, Google Search⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This is undecided by courts.

  From what I’ve found from some simple research, it’s possible that if it’s reproducing the same information as another user that the website is protected, possibly even if the LLM modified the exact presentation of that information.

  If it’s creating new claims, then I think it’d be likely that whoever is running the service would be liable. Who knows though, since they might just claim that the new claims are from its training data and therefore they are protected.

  In an ideal world, we’d just follow Germany’s example and hold the website liable for any new content generated by a LLM. Ideally, if you make shit up, you made the claim, and if you’re parroting a user, the user made the claim.

  I’d imagine due to current circumstances, the US would want to shield AI companies though because politicians want money and the SCOTUS is useless.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stop Talking To Me, Google Search⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This reminds me of Rossman’s praise for the AI overviews when it helpfully informed everyone that he has paid sponsors and his friend was a 9/11 terrorist. Except it wasn’t praise.

  The AI summary at the top is like asking a college freshman to summarize the latest research in a field. It’s accurate enough to be dangerous, but not accurate enough to be reliable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Angry PlayStation Fans Propose PS5 Blackout in Protest of Sony's Disc Decision⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It could. Allowing the licensee to transfer their license isn’t a wild concept. I could see the EU making a proposal (and eventual law) requiring licensors to allow licensees to transfer their licenses to some extent. It just needs enough momentum to force them to consider it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This. A charge isn’t a conviction, though.

  Plausable deniability might help you here as long as you can think of a valid reason why you had that code on the note. It could be as simple as “this is the code I needed to remember for this one game” or something too. As long as you don’t tell them that the note contains the code to your phone, you can pretend the note contains a code of some other value instead later on and let them shoot themselves in the foot.

  As a general rule, most lawyers would tell you if you are under arrest to say nothing more than what you are required to by law. Since this is at a border, it gets weird, but that’s what makes this case unusual as well. Under normal circumstances, they might seize the phone as evidence, but saying nothing might result in them wiping the device themselves before they ever get a warrant for the passcode.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  He could just as easily argue he was forced to give the password under duress and accidentally gave them the wrong password.

  It’s not really a case of duress. Legal searches are also done under duress, and you can’t just argue to a judge “well I got nervous and shredded the documents”.

  What it really boils down to is whether border agents can search a phone without a warrant on entry, or whether the search was illegal. As part of it, they also need to decide whether a person has their Miranda rights during entry to a country. The answer, in my opinion, should be obvious (the alternative is you have no rights on entry), but with the current courts, who knows what they’ll decide.

  Also highly illegal.

  This is where the question about Miranda rights comes in, and whether the question of whether the constitution grants rights during entry comes in as well. If you have no rights, then it can be argued you have no right to demand a lawyer either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  This case is really strange.

  The case raises questions about which constitutional rights apply at US borders, including international airports, where authorities have broader search powers.

  On the one hand, destroying evidence during an investigation or which someone believes might be linked to one is a generally bad idea. However, to me it seems like the border agents should have had no right to search the phone without a warrant. Seize maybe, but not search. If the search was illegal and the case dismissed (especially since Tunick was not read Miranda which seems to imply there was no arrest?), then I think it would be hard to argue that any evidence was destroyed because the investigation itself would have been performed illegally.

  In any case, doing this in a legal search of the phone (with a warrant) is most likely illegal.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It’s Looking Like the Cybertruck Is the Biggest Flop in Automotive History⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah they’re ugly af.

  If you wrap them (like you should), then you can make them look cool though. Some of my favorites that I’ve seen are bright pink, yellow, and various wraps covered in decals.

  Without wrapping them, they look like scrap metal on wheels.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Forgot your Google password? Now you can log in with a selfie.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Your phone stores the code on the device and does facial recognition locally. Apps on your phone only receive that data if they explicitly request your camera and perform the recognition themselves.

  This is vastly different than sending Google a video of your face that they save locally and use to analyze future selfie videos.

  But assuringly its just an encrypted passcode created with an algorithm using measured face data.

  From the article:

  Selfie videos can be used for login purposes, to verify your age for accessing certain account features, and to create an AI avatar.

  It’s not just an encrypted passcode.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  While I agree with your points and sentiment, the US civil rights laws (including the Civil Rights Act) are being continuously torn apart by billionaires and religious lunatics, so maybe not the best example.

  Regardless, there are plenty of examples of laws succeeding in bettering the status quo going even as far back as Babylon.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨PlayStation 5 Bounty for Alternate OS installation⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “yeah, we know how to jailbrake your console, take that sony! Oh, but don’t worry, we won’t release this hack nor collaborate in any way to provide this feature to other people”

  That this makes no sense is the whole point. The goal is to show how little sense this makes. It’s fine for you to break a digital lock yourself, but illegal for you to show others how to do it.

  The goal isn’t to jailbreak the PS5. It’s to show that DMCA §1201 makes no sense.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SpaceX stock drops to a new low and loses $1 trillion in value in a month⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If you’re in a position to dictate what shareholders get, you have no real reason to go public. Just keep it privately owned.

  You go public to raise funds. The least reasonable thing to do to someone is ask them for money with a pinky promise that they might make a profit. Usually, those people are going to want something in return, like a say in how their money is spent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China bans AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” over addiction and birth rate concerns⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  From what I can see (and via translation), their published reasoning is, among other reasons, to protect national security and social interests.

  So what are the risks that China is worried about to social interests? Well, we can find that in their AI Safety Governance Framework. Jumping specifically to the risks regarding anthropomorphic AIs (ethical risks):

  (d) Addiction and dependence on anthropomorphic interaction

  AI products based on anthropomorphic interaction foster users’ emotional dependence and influence their behavior, creating ethical risks.

  They conveniently list some of their concerned outcomes from influencing their behavior, including disrupting conventional views on childbirth:

  (e) Challenges to existing social order

  The development and application of AI brings profound changes to production tools and relations, accelerating the restructuring of traditional industries, disrupting conventional views on employment, childbirth, and education, and challenging the established social order.

  So did China ban these AIs over birth rates? It seems to have been part of the discussion, at the very least. Like all things in life, it requires more nuance than just “birth rates” to explain. However, the concerns stated by Matt Sheehan (who seems to be the source for the “birth rates” claim that the news outlets are going with) provides more nuance in his explanation as well:

  “They don’t like the idea of a large portion of their population being in deep emotional relationships with chatbots that could take them out of the marriage market, that could have negative psychological impacts on them, that could lead to addiction, dependency and a whole bunch of other social ills,” said Matt Sheehan, who studies Chinese AI at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think tank.

  ---

  All this to say that yes, the explanation that it’s about birth rates is an easy to consume concept for Western audiences.

  But also, yes it’s a true concern that the Chinese government has specifically linked to anthropomorphic AIs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨China bans AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” over addiction and birth rate concerns⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  So… China didn’t ban relationship bots? Or are you saying that the article is written in a way to condemn China’s decision to ban them?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Android Developer Verification: Threat masquerading as Protection⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  What? You don’t normally call capitalists “Tankie”. That would be a weird insult for one, to say the least. Usually that term is reserved for a certain kind of pro-authoritarian “communist” (in quotes of course because I don’t believe it’s actual communism).

  Anyway, not sure what any of this has to do with the post. What a weird comment thread…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  My favorite quote from a post-surgery instruction packet (which required not smoking due to the location of the operation) was something along the lines of:

  Can I start smoking again?

  You have been nicotine-free for 10 weeks. You do not need to start smoking again.

  If you’ve been locked out of your Twitter account and haven’t had access to it for a while because of that, then you’ve already gone that long without it. You don’t need to go back.