LukeZaz
@LukeZaz@beehaw.org
- Comment on FFmpeg 8 can subtitle your videos on the fly with Whisper 2 days ago:
The changelog lists 30 significant changes, of which the top new feature is integrating Whisper. This means whisper.cpp, which is Georgi Gerganov’s entirely local and offline version of OpenAI’s Whisper automatic speech recognition model. The bottom line is that FFmpeg can now automatically subtitle videos for you.
Yeah hey, can anyone chime in if this is at all based off LLMs? Because my problems with the incorrect plagiarism machine don’t end just because it’s now the offline incorrect plagiarism machine. Making OpenAI’s garbage hockey open source doesn’t make it okay. Or should I just start calling this shit FOSSwashing?
- Submitted 1 week ago to gaming@beehaw.org | 0 comments
- Comment on Proton shifts out of Switzerland over snooping law fears 1 week ago:
I do avoid LLMs on principle. I find the technology and the manner in which it is used repugnant for a variety of reasons, most but not all of which I’ve already elaborated on here. At this point, I hate it even in the very niche scenario where it is useful, precisely because I think it does too much harm to be deserving of acceptance in any field at all. The most I can say for it is that I might be willing to slowly change that stance once this horrid bubble pops and the world stops getting set aflame for the sake of stock options.
Given your befuddlement at my stance though, I feel I should highlight and restate the following:
Almost nobody actually wanted Proton to make this. They just went and did it to chase a trend, ignoring the many people who hate it all the while. The last thing I need is for the the company that my email depends on to start getting dragged around by tech bros. If they’re willing to make a decision as rash and irresponsible as that, it is a clear indicator that worse is to come.
The presence of an LLM on a site is indicative to me of the character of those running it. It speaks to trend-following, a lack of understanding, and disdain for the intricacies of human work. If they weren’t trend-followers, they’d understand that LLMs have utterly failed to prove themselves as actually useful and would hold off to see if they ever do before using them. If they understood what was going on, they’d know that what LLMs actually do is typically irrelevant to most businesses. If they had any respect for the depths of creativity or effort, they’d know that what modern-day “AI” creates is a hollow imitation; a series of black-boxes that vaguely approximate a thing without having the capacity to understand anything that makes it up. And they’d know that in so doing such software creates something broken that serves only to devalue the efforts of real artists and writers, both in how it convinces studios to ignorantly fire them to improve a number at the expense of quality, and in how its rampant use as a cheating tool engenders environments of serious distrust.
If someone’s got an LLM on their site, or if they’ve decided to offer an LLM of their own through their business, they communicate to me a serious deficit in their understanding of the world at large. That the only thing they’re interested in is a graph someone showed them at a marketing meeting. They want metrics for investors, not a good product—and if that’s the kind of goals they’ve got, what reason have I to believe they won’t step on me to accomplish them?
Proton is making an LLM, and from that I know that their leadership is failing and that their future is likely bleak. I can’t trust my email in those hands.
- Comment on Proton shifts out of Switzerland over snooping law fears 1 week ago:
Because companies that chase LLMs tend not to give me a choice, that’s why. They inject it into everything they touch because they think it’s the Future™, and therefore I must obviously want it around every second of my life, every day, consequences be damned. The earth can burn, my privacy can erode, misinformation can run rampant, and the copyright of small artists can die, all for the sake of an overused, scarcely-functional “tool” that a bunch of MBAs think I can’t so much as breathe without.
- Comment on Proton shifts out of Switzerland over snooping law fears 1 week ago:
its newly launched AI chatbot positioned as a privacy-friendly ChatGPT rival
Add another thing to the list of reasons I’m losing trust in Proton. Might start having to look at a new email provider soon, I guess.
- Comment on Can we talk about the Roblox situation? 1 week ago:
I made a post about it for a more general discussion but I think it’s worth saying here too: Chris Hansen is an irresponsible hack at best and he is very likely to misinform. There are far better people around if you want to learn about the many harms to children caused by Roblox.
- Comment on The train that never came; how maglev technology was derailed 2 weeks ago:
Imagine a world in which enough people generate enough content containing þe Old English þorn (voiceless dental fricative) and eþ (voiced dental fricative) characters þat þey start showing up in AI generated content.
- Comment on AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified 3 weeks ago:
If it ends the stupid AI bubble then I don’t think it qualifies as petty vengeance; that is some real change. There won’t be meaningful legislation to aid the day-to-day person against this garbage, no, but it’d still seriously reduce the degree to which this shit has invaded our lives.
- Comment on Trump Is Launching an AI Search Engine Powered by Perplexity 3 weeks ago:
You bring up people fighting a war as a comparison, you invite the idea that you expect others to do the same, bullets and all. If you didn’t want to make that implication, you shouldn’t have made that comparison. This is on you.
This goes double when the suggestions you’ve offered are so vague and unhelpful as “Organize. Disrupt. Disobey.” Do you have any concrete ideas for how that’ll work? Because right now, you’re just yelling at people in an entirely different country to you to do a bunch of Stuff™ all while you hypocritically whine online yourself about what we are doing.
Again, if you want to be frustrated, do it differently. As it stands, you’re just fighting your own allies because the work they’re doing isn’t what you specifically want to occur. You’re going to have deal with the fact that sometimes activism isn’t flashy, and sometimes it isn’t easy to spot. That doesn’t mean it’s not useful, and it doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Besides, even if you were right, shame doesn’t tend to be a useful tool for growing action; it just makes you more enemies and encourages spite and doomerism. So save the crit for the Democrat politicians, aye?
- Comment on Trump Is Launching an AI Search Engine Powered by Perplexity 3 weeks ago:
I’m sorry, but the problems with modern-day LLMs and GenAI run far deeper than “who hosts it.”
- Comment on Trump Is Launching an AI Search Engine Powered by Perplexity 3 weeks ago:
Your grandparents stormed the beaches at Normandy
Oh, so what you actually want is for us to dash our bodies upon the stones and get shot to death by cops, is it? What a completely reasonable ask! One that I’m sure you won’t be doing yourself, of course. That’s our job.
I’m not your footsoldier. I’m not throwing myself into a fire just because you’re unsatisfied with the action being taken. I have a life to live, and I’m barely managing that as it is. Your criticism is less than worthless.
Your advice wouldn’t fix America. It’d just get us all killed.
- Comment on How many r are there in strawberry? 3 weeks ago:
I shudder to think how much electricity got wasted so you could get fooled by an LLM into believing nonsense. Let alone the equally-unnecessary followup questions.
- Comment on Itch.io are seeking out new payment processors who are more comfortable with adult material | RPS 4 weeks ago:
Dan Olson’s documentary is as true as ever. Stop recommending an environment-destroying investment scam to people. You aren’t helping.
- Comment on itch.io now seemingly affected by payment processor rules as Steam 5 weeks ago:
I am very glad we live in the universe where that didn’t happen!
- Comment on itch.io now seemingly affected by payment processor rules as Steam 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on Steam is cracking down on porn games, to keep Payment Processors happy. 1 month ago:
Probably because it’s a hell of a lot easier than trying to figure out how to manage payment processing without those processors. Visa and Mastercard are extremely large, and by-and-large the only way to pay online in the US. Add in Paypal and Stripe’s limitations (which are also notoriously shitty) and you don’t really have many options left, so it’s really not worth it. I know the EU has better options, but Steam isn’t based there and I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t want to find a way to jump through those hoops.
- Comment on AI Job Fears Hit Peak Hype While Reality Lags Behind 1 month ago:
…What? They’re not threatening to ban you, and they’re not a mod, so they can’t anyways.
That said, announcing to the instance that you don’t care about the consequences of breaking the rules kinda implies that you don’t care about the rules either, and that is not a good look.
- Comment on AI Job Fears Hit Peak Hype While Reality Lags Behind 1 month ago:
this is the era of AI
Uh, sure, so long as you define an “era” as “a period wherein a bunch of C-suites wet themselves over unproven tech.” I hope you realize that something having a lot of money behind it for a few years isn’t indicative that it’s about to revolutionize the world.
I’ve seen what GenAI and LLMs can do. It’s a magic trick; it looks impressive, but for almost every possible use case just isn’t helpful, and unfortunately for all of us, the magicians (i.e. OpenAI et al) are douchebags on top. This is not tech worth advocating for.
- Comment on Stop Killing Games Initiative passes 700K milestone 1 month ago:
I get accused of being a bot all the time now because I still enjoy writing long-form posts
From cecilkorik, who I was replying to. That kind of bot accusation scarcely ever occurred before LLMs entered the picture. You posted too hastily here and missed a huge chunk of context.
- Comment on Stop Killing Games Initiative passes 700K milestone 1 month ago:
Yeah. I hear you there. Problem I usually have is that the odds of an accusation tend to scale less with posting style in my experience and more with level of disagreement, or whether or not the poster has personally witnessed something. Basically, “I didn’t see this with my own two eyes/dislike you, so this is obviously bot behavior.” It’s a conspiracy theorist-like attitude, and it’s predated LLMs entirely.
Nonetheless, I’m not happy that an entire new form of bot scrutiny has been introduced, and I absolutely cannot wait for GenAI/LLM hype to die the fuck down.
- Comment on Stop Killing Games Initiative passes 700K milestone 1 month ago:
I swear to God, some people these days will cry bot if someone so much as blinks unexpectedly. Chill.
- Comment on ChatGPT's o3 Model Found Remote Zeroday in Linux Kernel Code 2 months ago:
Interesting. I feel like the headline is still bad though. I get why they ran with it, at least — “ChatGPT finds kernel exploit” is more interesting and gets more clicks than “Monkey finally writes Shakespeare.”
- Comment on Signal calls out Microsoft for poor implementation of Windows 11 Recall, blocks it by default 3 months ago:
The company has also warned Microsoft that if its “move fast and break things” ideology impacts the foundation of privacy-preserving apps like Signal, the app may drop support for Windows altogether in the future.
Ooo-hoo-hoo! Now that’s spicy. I like it.
- Comment on The Kids Online Safety Act is back 3 months ago:
Don’t feed the troll, folks.
- Comment on AI hallucinations are getting worse – and they're here to stay 3 months ago:
And that’s making them larger and “think."
Isn’t that the two big strings to the bow of LLM development these days? If those don’t work, how isn’t it the case that hallucinations “are here to stay”?
- Comment on Congress Moving Forward On Unconstitutional Take It Down Act 3 months ago:
I understand why you’re frustrated, but you’ve got to realize that the presence of resources that can break you out of bad thinking doesn’t mean it’s easy to break out of bad thinking, nor does it absolve those who duped you into the bad thinking in the first place. Cults work for a reason.
Just as an example, consider how hard it is to:
- Find time to learn when you’re struggling to work enough to afford rent
- Find a way to learn that works for you if you’re disabled
- Consider your thinking to be in need of challenge when everyone you listen to tells you otherwise, and you trust them
- Listen to opposing viewpoints when you have thorough hatred for the people telling you them
This is just a smattering of ways a path out of broken thinking can be more fraught than it looks. There are plenty more, so even in cases where these specific ones don’t apply, that doesn’t mean the person in question is intentionally ignorant or malicious.
If you’re angry, be angry. I don’t judge that whatsoever. I only ask that you be angry at the people deliberately trying to make everything worse, rather than the those who they’re tricking. Get mad at the influencers, not the audience.
- Comment on Congress Moving Forward On Unconstitutional Take It Down Act 3 months ago:
I agree. My problem now is that people like Tlaib were who I looked to for how things could change, and yet here they are enabling worse instead of fighting for better. I can’t square that circle, and it means I’m losing one of the last bastions of hope I had for a better world.
- Comment on Congress Moving Forward On Unconstitutional Take It Down Act 3 months ago:
I agree with your second paragraph, and find your third to be understandable (though I would contend that propaganda has been a problem for a long time now and wasn’t made meaningfully worse by tech, just different). Where I lose you completely though is this comment’s first statement.
Neither of your other points stated here back up a lack of empathy. In fact, they counter it, as you’ve provided two far better things to get mad at. I hope you haven’t abandoned empathy because it didn’t change minds, because empathy isn’t supposed to be contingent on getting people to agree with you.
- Comment on Congress Moving Forward On Unconstitutional Take It Down Act 3 months ago:
I’m aware. My point was that this wasn’t a majority even besides that. Not sure why you seem to be phrasing this as a counterpoint, though, given that it reinforces my comment?
- Comment on Congress Moving Forward On Unconstitutional Take It Down Act 3 months ago:
I said most of what I wanted to say in this comment, but I’d like to take an extra moment here to point out that you are currently making apologia for fascism.
Putting it bluntly, I don’t give a flying fuck how many people voted for Trump – which wasn’t the majority, by the way, since not everyone votes – there is no amount of votes that makes “doing fascism” okay.
