Hotspur
@Hotspur@lemmy.ml
- Comment on Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks 2 days ago:
Yeah ok, I do basically agree with you. It’s not an accurate equivalency, yet. We’re trending bad though. I’d say the example of Stephen Miller sort of accidentally hinting that they shut down USAID because they all donated to the Harris campaign had some chilling implications for example. He could just be assuming that, since that’s a safe assumption for populous urban areas generally, but they could also have cross checked lists of employees against political contributions.
- Comment on Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks 5 days ago:
I’m gonna take a second stab at replying, because you seem to be arguing in good faith.
My original point is that online chatbots have arbitrary curbs that are built in. I can run GPT 2.5 on my self host machine, and if I knew how to do it (I don’t) I could probably get it to have no curbs via retraining and clever prompting. The same is true of the deepseek models.
I don’t personally agree that there’s a huge difference between one model being curbed from discussing xi and another from discussing what the current politics du jour in the western sphere are. When you see platforms like meta censoring LGTBTQ topics but amplifying hate speech, or official congressional definitions of antisemitism including objection to active and on-going genocide, the idea of what government censorship is and isn’t becomes confusing.
Having personally received the bizarre internal agency emails circulating this week encouraging me to snitch out my colleagues to help root out the evils of DEIA thought in US gov’t the last week has only crystallized it for me. I’m not sure I care that much about Chinese censorship or authoritarianism; I’ve got budget authoritarianism at home, and I don’t even get high-speed rail out of the bargain. At least they don’t depend on forever wars and all of the attendant death and destruction that come with them to prop up their ponzi-scheme economies. Will they in the future, probably? They are basically just a heavily centralized/regulated capitalist enterprise now, so who knows. But right now? Do they engage in propaganda? Cyber-espionage? Yes and Yes. So do we, so do you, so does everyone who has a seat at the geopolitical table and the economy to afford it.
The point of all of this isn’t US GOOD CHINA BAD or US BAD CHINA GOOD. The article is about the deepseek models tearing out the floor of US dominance in AI. Personally, having deployed it and played with it, yeah. None of these products are truly useful to me yet, and I remain skeptical of their eventual value, but right now, party censorship or not, you can download a version of an LLM that you can run, retrain and bias however you want, and it costs you the bandwidth it took to download. And it performs on par with US commercial offerings that require pricey subscriptions. Offerings that apparently require huge public investment to keep afloat.
- Comment on Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks 5 days ago:
Wow what even is beehaw, I had no idea. At least China is honest about what they’re doing. The amount of bad faith in these replies is insane.
If you’re a shill, fine, good job. But if you’re not, have you paid any attention to the real world around you? We spent the last year enabling genocide, and the best fruits of our over-hyped tech and intellectual innovation factories are being revealed as the bullshit that most people always understood them to be.
The fact that you can accuse me of being dishonest, while providing no basis or evidence, while multiple federal agencies are under a strict gag order from any communication or purchasing with outside contacts… I mean really?
Like are you guys just another CIA adjacent cutout that believes in identity politics and SSRIs but has zero ability to critically assess the actual world around them?
- Comment on Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks 5 days ago:
You say Chinese state censorship is an understood quantity. Could be. But I’d say that my points about equivalencies are to illustrate that what we think is true, is often much more grey. I’ve been to China, and while I was impressed and shocked at how much more advanced it was than I expected, I also couldn’t imaging living there. It doesn’t change the fact that a stagnant late-stage capital mafia state that lives off defense contracting is performing ooorly against a centrally controlled capitalist state that has set different priorities (that’s right boy, deepseek-r1 is a side project of a…. CHINESE HEDGE FUND). It’s value neutral. But if you dismiss reality based on a conception of political censorship that I doubt you’ve deeply engaged with, enjoy.
The so called free market certainly didn’t seem to take much reassurance in deepseek being compromised by communist censorship this morning though. Probably because the deepseek news isn’t exceptional because of China, or what it is, but because of what it isn’t, compared to the bloated tech carcasses that the US has pinned its hopes on.
- Comment on Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks 5 days ago:
If you’re going to accuse China of state censorship, then I suppose you are also vehemently opposed to the censorship we apply to our media, social media and “AI” platforms, and since you dislike the lack of journalistic integrity in this article for pointing out that state censorship you would support similar caveats being added to articles about OpenAI, Meta, X in regards to how they handle issues like Gaza, Culture War topics and coverage of political candidates?
It’s fair to bring up comparisons when your critique is claiming an imbalance in portrayal between the “realities” of ai development in China and the US.
- Comment on Chinese AI lab DeepSeek massively undercuts OpenAI on pricing — and that's spooking tech stocks 5 days ago:
There’s a strong argument that any consumer facing chatbot AI is “censored”. I’ve had chatGPT clam up in bizarre ways after it misinterprets what I’m asking. It just depends on company owning the product and what they view their legal exposure to be.
Also, we are applying huge govt subsidies to ai industry based on thin value evidence at this very moment. And we provide subsidies for many of our industries to help prop them up, sometimes to hugely bad effect. It’s what countries do to build, maintain and win industrial arms races.
Deepseek-R1 is open source and you can download it and run it offline. I’m not a power user but was able to get a functioning offline version of the 32B distill model running on a spare machine I had in a hour or so from scratch. I used online deepseek for most of the process to provide instructions and troubleshoot. I can’t comment on how amazing it is, other than to say so far it’s felt about as good as my interactions with GPT4 on the free chatGPT tier. In both cases I remain skeptical about their deep business use outside of certain areas.
From what I’ve read, you can use the base, and methodology and train your own new model if you have the technical ability and desire (rumor is meta AI has shelved their WIP and adopted deepseek as their new basis). This would imply that if you wanted to be able to talk to your LLM about topics like Taiwan, you could absolutely set up a model that would do that.
- Comment on There was a time when everyone had common sense 3 weeks ago:
Right, or that back then they just didn’t care if you drank the battery because there wasn’t a hugely well-developed culture of lawsuits like we have now. Those fuckers in 1914-1950 were definitely down for a battery party, no doubt. The ones that made it now think that everyone had common sense because only the ones that did made it through.
- Comment on Vlad Vexler: Trump’s Authoritarian Revolution - for the USA, world & Ukraine 2 months ago:
Yeah I’ve enjoyed this guys commentary in the past. Also he’s so… calm and soothing in how he speaks, which is always a nice find in a content creator.
- Comment on Peak performance 2 months ago:
I remember when I learned that jeep Windshields fold down not because it’s a cool lifestyle thing, but because it allows you to stack them on top of each other in the holds of liberty ships… didn’t have to worry about roll bars in ww2 I suppose.
- Comment on Peak performance 2 months ago:
Bulbasaur has curves, jeep is a series of boxes. So very possibly bulbasaur wins.
- Comment on David Fincher Giving ‘Fight Club’ a 4K Remaster for the Film’s 25th Anniversary 3 months ago:
Ah that’s interesting. There’s something about the lighting and color that really ramps up the seedy and grubbiness things, seems crucial to the movie.
- Comment on David Fincher Giving ‘Fight Club’ a 4K Remaster for the Film’s 25th Anniversary 3 months ago:
I hope he doesn’t drastically fuck with the color grading. He has a distinctive look he does since digital everything, and it’s fine, but Fight Club uses it to highlight the anodyne normal life parts, and then has a more organic and vibrant palette for the Tyler durden side.
- Comment on David Fincher Giving ‘Fight Club’ a 4K Remaster for the Film’s 25th Anniversary 3 months ago:
Man I’d like that so much. Nothing else has come close to Silence of the Lambs vibes like that show does.
- Comment on Can someone give me an overview on the Jill Stein situation? 3 months ago:
Well said-I feel the same.
- Comment on Can someone give me an overview on the Jill Stein situation? 3 months ago:
I mean the real comparison is just: did she get enough votes, in states that Clinton lost, where if those people had all voted for Clinton, then Clinton would have won that state. I don’t know the answer, but even if the numbers did cover the margin, I think saying Stein is therefore a spoiler is problematic for a few reasons:
- It ignores the very real number of voters who chose not to vote democratic or vote at all simply because of Clinton as candidate.
- it ignores massive mistakes made by a hubristic campaign that couldn’t fathom losing to trump.
- it supposes that people that voted green, would have gritted their teeth and instead voted Clinton, which is not a safe assumption.
Regarding OP’s argument: if Stein is a spoiler, than the libertarians are also spoilers. Since her being a spoiler assumes a majority of her votes would have gone democratic, we can take the same liberty and assume the libertarians would have instead opted for trump. If they had larger vote numbers than the Green Party got, as OP is saying above, then they cancel out greens spoiler-ness, and in fact represent a slight spoiler in favor of the democrats. I don’t really buy this read for the reasons I mentioned above, but OP’s point still kinda stands.
I’m not personally interested in voting for stein, I’ve heard enough weird stuff about her over the years that I’m not comfortable with her as a candidate. But I don’t buy the constant messaging that “third party votes are wasted votes”. My assumption with people that post these things is that they’re not suggesting it’s OK to not vote. And assumably, they also don’t want you to vote, but vote for the opposition. So it’s just the same old thing: vote the way I want you to.
- Comment on Hugh Jackman as The Wolverine 2000 vs 2024 5 months ago:
This is what peak performance looks like.
- Comment on Hugh Jackman as The Wolverine 2000 vs 2024 5 months ago:
Yeah I like the spirit, but BMI is such a stupid and flawed measure. It’s ok as like a population level heuristic to say things are trending one way or another, but like athletes that have lots of muscle and are tall look the same as morbidly obese people to BMI, which is obviously silly.
- Comment on Hugh Jackman as The Wolverine 2000 vs 2024 5 months ago:
Hahaha
- Comment on Hugh Jackman as The Wolverine 2000 vs 2024 5 months ago:
It reminds me of an interview I saw with Alan Richardson (?), the guy playing reacher on the Amazon series. It was in support of the new season, but basically the conversation revolved around how exhausting it was to maintain the required physique for the role, and how it meant he couldn’t do some of the things he normally enjoyed—he was too heavy to run without impact injury, and flexibility and reach was an issue.
I’d imagine transitioning between these physiques can probably be challenging and taxing on the body as well.
- Comment on Hugh Jackman as The Wolverine 2000 vs 2024 5 months ago:
Ugh so annoying. So like both in movies and body building, what they’re selling is actually not a healthy or strong physique—but someone who could be on the verge of organ failure.
I like the idea of fitness, and being in functionally good shape, so this sort of exaggeration is something I find uniquely distasteful—portraying a a goal state that is actually just a grift/scam, and that is dangerous to partake in.
- Comment on On Bears 5 months ago:
Gotcha so the idea is they’re just gonna give it a shot and try to eat you, regardless, because the stakes, they are high?
To be fair, in a moral sense, they should absolutely try and eat every human they can get their claws on; we have done a bang up job on making their habitat and food sources disappear.
- Comment on On Bears 5 months ago:
So are polar bears considered more dangerous and aggro than grizzlies? I mean it wouldn’t be too crazy, particularly since it’s probably rare to encounter one, compare to grizzlies. But just had never really heard that.
- Comment on Why is it so easy to avoid nettles as an adult? 5 months ago:
This is it, I’m pretty sure. I had plenty of brushes with nettles as a kid, but I’m not super aware of them to be able to avoid them as an adult. However I spend less time in high grass and forests, since I need to be present in the spreadsheet factory, and when I do make it into the wild, I usually wear pants and the like to avoid scratches, ticks and poison ivy; so less likely to get nettles.
Side note: we bought some nettles from a local farm last year and made a couple dishes with them. Pretty tasty, if you already like tho ha like spinach or mustard greens (think saag paneer)
- Comment on Looks like something straight from Warhammer 40K 7 months ago:
Hahaha came here to say: this is some serious warhammer shit
- Comment on Microsoft extolling the benefits of cloud storage in their Office save dialog 8 months ago:
“It’d be a real shame if something happened to your work file. If you pay us monthly, we can make sure your work is protected”