FaceDeer
@FaceDeer@fedia.io
Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit and then some time on kbin.social.
- Comment on Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI 4 days ago:
And why sometimes when a writer becomes immensely successful the quality of their output suffers - they become "too big to edit."
The Star Wars prequel trilogy is a case in point, IMO. Back on the original trilogy George Lucas had people who could tell him "no, that's a bad idea."
- Comment on Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI 4 days ago:
You can tell the voices aren't right, the pictures are soulless, the prose is stilled and often self-contradictory.
And you can't tell when the voices do turn out right, the pictures are fine, and the prose works well.
This all reminds me a lot of how people railed against CGI in movies, claiming that CGI scenes or actors would always look "uncanny valley" and that they'd always be able to tell. Many people continue to claim that to this day, unaware of just how much CGI is in each frame that they don't recognize as CGI. Or worse, they look really hard for things to complain are bad CGI and end up accusing non-CGI shots of being CGI.
- Comment on Artists are losing work, wages, and hope as bosses and clients embrace AI 4 days ago:
“I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing,”
And screw those people who make a living washing dishes in restaurants or doing maid service in hotels, their jobs aren't special like mine are.
This headline could be so easily flipped on its head; "Clients rejoice as custom art becomes cheaper and more accessible for their projects." But we've put artists on a pedestal for so long that such views are incredibly unpopular, and so those headlines don't get the clicks and views like it get crushed out of social media.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 1 week ago:
Those places aren't public places, so of course I'd turn it off or leave.
If I was in public and someone told me to stop recording, I'd likely say "no." Hasn't that been a major point of pushback against police demanding that we not record them, for example?
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 1 week ago:
yeah, no, we still disagree.
Okay, then, we're in disagreement. But I'm still able to use it, so.
Call it creepy if you want, that's fine, that's your opinion. It's not infringing anyone's rights.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 1 week ago:
no one is saying you don't have "the right" to wear this
Okay, we're in agreement then.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 1 week ago:
But my comment about how people have the right to do things you personally disapprove of is even more pointful.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 1 week ago:
It's not universal. Where I live it's one-party consent.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 1 week ago:
Unfortunately we live in a world where people often have the right to do things that we personally disapprove of.
- Comment on I Hate My Friend: The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can also make the people around you uneasy. 1 week ago:
Well, don't use it then.
- Comment on Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive 2 weeks ago:
Sure, but are any of these "don't worry guys I torrented a database dump, it's safe now" folks going to go to the trouble of actually doing that? They're not even downloading a full backup, just the current version.
You need to devote a lot of bandwidth to keeping continuously up to date with Wikipedia. There's only a few archives out there that are likely doing that, and of course Wikimedia Foundation and its international chapters themselves. Those are the ones who will provide the data needed to restart Wikipedia, if it actually comes to that.
- Comment on Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive 2 weeks ago:
My point is that the alternative isn't "no solution", it's "the much better database dump from Internet Archive or Wikimedia Foundation or wherever, the one that a new Wikipedia instance actually would be spun up from, not the one that you downloaded months ago and stashed in your closet."
The fact that random people on the Internet have old copies of an incomplete, static copy of Wikipedia doesn't really help anything. The real work that would go into bringing back Wikipedia would be creating the new hosting infrastructure capable of handling it, not trying to scrounge up a database to put on it.
- Comment on Plot twist 2 weeks ago:
Force Lightning is a Sith technique, not a Jedi one. Unscientific!
- Comment on Wikipedia is under attack — and how it can survive 2 weeks ago:
The problem with this solution is that it leaves out the most important part of Wikipedia of all; the editors. Wikipedia is a living document, constantly being updated and improved. Sure, you can preserve a fossil version of it. But if the site itself goes down then that fossil will lose value rapidly, and it's not even going to be useful for creating a new live site because it doesn't include the full history of articles (legally required under Wikipedia's license) and won't be the latest database dump from the moment that Wikipedia shut down.
- Comment on Automated Sextortion Spyware Takes Webcam Pics of Victims Watching Porn 2 weeks ago:
This is where having unusual fetishes pays off, so the software has no idea you're watching something "pornographic."
- Comment on The Future Is Being Delivered by Chinese Drones 3 weeks ago:
I dunno, having rich peoples' purchases dropped on my property might not be a bad thing.
- Comment on THE NEXT CLANKER BETTER DO MY GODDAMN DISHES 4 weeks ago:
It's there so that all those humans who insist their lives will have no "meaning" without having to work for a living have something to work on for a living.
- Comment on THE NEXT CLANKER BETTER DO MY GODDAMN DISHES 4 weeks ago:
Always reminds me of this bit on the Conan O'Brien show.
- Comment on Is it realistic to hope that lemmy grows to the size of the bigger social media platforms? 4 weeks ago:
There are downsides to small-town life, though. Some of my views don't match the ones that are prevalent here, so I either end up getting hammered with downvotes or self-censoring when certain topics of discussion come up. And unlike Reddit it's not a big and diverse enough place that I can just go find a sub-community that is more tolerant.
- Comment on Is it realistic to hope that lemmy grows to the size of the bigger social media platforms? 4 weeks ago:
But surely if all those people join the Fediverse and see my insightful comments they'll change their views to align with mine, won't they?
- Comment on If copyright on a work expired immediately after death, would be that a bad or good idea? 4 weeks ago:
I think I'd prefer a flat timespan rather than a lifetime-dependent one. The two flaws I see with the lifetime-dependent one are:
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It can give wildly different opportunity to the rightsholder depending on how old they are and what their random life circumstances happen to be. A 20-year-old author could have 80 years' hold on their work whereas a 70-year-old one could have just 10. Unless Truck-kun randomly gets involved and sends that 20-year-old author into another world a day after he published.
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It creates an incentive to assassinate popular authors.
It also creates complexity for work-for-hire situations where a corporation owns a copyright, though that's already a special case so one could continue handling it separately.
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- Comment on If copyright on a work expired immediately after death, would be that a bad or good idea? 4 weeks ago:
So glad to see another reference to this guy's work in the wild.
As an amusing side note, the original term of copyright in the first law that established it (the British Copyright Act of 1710) was a flat 14 years, with a mechanism that allowed you to apply for only one extension of an additional 14 years. So most things would be 14 years, and whatever select things were particularly valuable or important could have 28 years. Under Pollock's analysis this is just about the perfect possible system. So by sheer coincidence this is something that we got right the first time and ever since then we've been "correcting" it to be less and less optimal.
- Comment on Do LLM modelers maintain a list of manual corrections fed by humans? 4 weeks ago:
I'm not a deep expert on LLMs, but I've been following their development and write code that uses them so I can think of two systemic approaches to "solving" the strawberry problem.
One is chain-of-thought reasoning, where the LLM does some preliminary note-taking (essentially talking to itself) before it gives a final answer. I've seen it tackle problems like this by saying "okay, how is strawberry spelled?", listing out the individual letters (presumably because somewhere in its training data was information that let it memorize the spellings of common tokens) and then counting them.
Another is the "agentic" approach, where it might be explicitly provided with functions that allow it to send the problem to specialized program code. Eg, there could be a count_letters(string, letter_to_count) function that it's able to call. I expect that sort of thing would only be present for an LLM that's working in a framework where that sort of question is known to be significant, though, and I'm not sure what that might be in the real world. Something helping users fill out forms, perhaps? Or a "language tutor" that's expected to be able to figure out whatever weird incorrect words a student might type?
There are also LLMs that don't tokenize and feed the literal string of characters into the neural network, but as far as I'm aware none of the commonly-used ones are like that. They're just research models for now.
- Comment on AI works better if you ask it to be a Star Trek character 1 year ago:
I run tabletop roleplaying adventures and LLMs have proven to be great "brainstorming buddies" when planning them out. I bounce ideas back and forth, flesh them out collaboratively, and have the LLM speak "in character" to give me ideas for what the NPCs would do.
They're not quite up to running the adventure themselves yet, but it's an awesome support tool.
- Comment on It’s practically impossible to run a big AI company ethically: Anthropic was supposed to be the good guy. It can’t be — unless government changes the incentives in the industry. 1 year ago:
It's impossible to run an AI company "ethically" because "ethics" are such a wibbly-wobbly and subjective thing, and because there are people who simply wish to use it as a weapon on one side of a debate or the other. I've seen goalposts shift around quite a lot in arguments over "ethical" AI.
- Comment on 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!) 1 year ago:
Maybe add some kind of flag to ActivityPub that's set to your skin colour? Each comment could have a colored border corresponding to your skin tone.
- Comment on if the total fertility rate drops and stays below global replacement rate, will humans disappear? 1 year ago:
Not to mention that technology is continuing to advance in new and unexpected ways.
We're getting close to artificial womb technology, for example. There are already artificial wombs that are being experimented with as a way to save extremely premature babies that wouldn't survive in a conventional incubator, for example.
Commodity humanoid robots are also in development, and AI has taken surprisingly rapid leaps in development over the past two years.
I could see a possibility where in a couple of decades a human baby could be born from an artificial womb and raised to adulthood entirely by machines, if we really really needed to for some reason. Embryo space colonization is the usual example given, but it could also potentially work as a way to counter population decline due to people simply not wanting to do their own birthing and child-rearing.
- Comment on Is there any actual standalone AI software? 1 year ago:
Makes it all the more amusing how OpenAI staff were fretting about how GPT-2 was "too dangerous to release" back in the day. Nowadays that class of LLM is a mere toy.
- Comment on Is there any actual standalone AI software? 1 year ago:
Though bear in mind that parameter count alone is not the only measure of a model's quality. There's been a lot of work done over the past year or two on getting better results from the same or smaller parameter counts, lots of discoveries have been made on how to train better and run inferencing better. The old ChatGPT3 from back at the dawn of all this was really big and was trained on a huge number of tokens but nowadays the small downloadable models fine-tuned by hobbyists would compete with it handily.
- Comment on Meet the New Class of Cadets in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 1 year ago:
But we need to attract a hip young new audience! The sort of audience that doesn't care about Star Trek, and just wants teen drama and unprofessional nonsense!