PhilipTheBucket
@PhilipTheBucket@ponder.cat
- Comment on Anon sees a happy couple 1 day ago:
It’s hard to say from such a distance, but it may be that he is good at sex and trustworthy. That’s enough a lot of the time. People make things too complicated.
- Comment on Elon Musk and Wikipedia are feuding 1 day ago:
I was careful with my phrasing for exactly that reason. I think that, either, before the end of his current term things will blow up in such cataclysmic fashion that all bets are off for what comes next, or else Trump will be starting his third term in 2029.
As much as I am scared for it, I am hoping it is the first.
- Comment on Elon Musk and Wikipedia are feuding 1 day ago:
Not even Elon Musk gets to ignore Wikimedia policies. That will never change.
I hope this is true. By the end of Trump’s term, ICE may be able to simply storm the Wikimedia offices and shut everything down if they don’t adhere to Trump’s official truth.
I assume they have enough international presence that things will be able to continue, but their core office being in the US is no longer the pretty-good protection against authoritarian regimes trying to force them to alter what they’re presenting. I’m sure they will fight, but a lot of the tools they used to use to fight with are being attacked, with quite a bit of success, right now.
- Comment on Elon Musk and Wikipedia are feuding 1 day ago:
Wikipedia is extremely resistant to this kind of thing. They’ve been dealing with it for decades now. All kinds of people have had that idea, sometimes professionally being paid by some company/country/individual to the tune of quite a bit of money. Sometimes they do succeed in bending the narrative slightly in particular ways, but the simple “overwhelm everyone’s resources” approach that works a treat on Lemmy or Facebook can get simply brushed aside on Wikipedia because of its strong culture and good design features.
- Comment on Anon remembers summer 4 days ago:
Memory is a liar. It feels when you’re accessing it like it is reliable. It is not. Eyewitness testimony frequently has people who adamantly remember stuff that didn’t happen. They tried it with those famous events where people always remember where they were when so-and-so happened. They got a population of people, found out where they were when the shocking world event had happened, and then they asked them a long time later and a lot of people’s vivid memories of where they were, were just bullshit their brain made up for them.
You can actually create false memories in people that will feel completely real, if you know how to do it, and they’ll remember both the process of you implanting the false memory, and then this fake memory that they 100% remember as if it had happened.
The brain just stores hints and mostly-important stuff, and for the rest it just makes shit up as it goes along so you can get on with your day and won’t become upset because you don’t remember. But it’s like an LLM. It just makes up nonsense if it doesn’t know the answer, and to you it feels 100% real.
- Comment on ELON MUSK - The Early Warning Signs - (Musk vs Eberhard) Part 1 [40:16] 6 days ago:
They called back to some of their videos calling him out as a fraud starting in January 2021. That’s before I was aware of it, his absurd treatment of Covid being the first inkling I remember that he was sketchy in any respect, and I still semi-supported him until he started doing MAGA stuff which was significantly later.
- How One of History’s Most Famous and Beloved Movies Was Almost Forgotten [Citizen Kane]www.smithsonianmag.com ↗Submitted 1 week ago to movies@lemm.ee | 0 comments
- Comment on Anon is about to be found out 2 weeks ago:
Potentially taking legal action?
- Comment on Google spikes its explicit 'no AI for weapons' policy 2 weeks ago:
It’s a pretty hard thing to hold back the tsunami of assholes who descend on a company once it starts making above a certain amount of money, who want to use it for evil.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 11 comments
- Comment on When we explain to other people how our capitalist system works and they recoil in horror 2 weeks ago:
I have multiple times had the experience of explaining to non-Americans elements of our system, and they simply don’t believe me. They think I’m making it up to fuck with them because it’s so atrocious that it couldn’t be real.
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 2 weeks ago:
I feel like a necessary prerequisite for that is a public which is well-informed and well-educated enough that they will make good decisions. As it is now, that would be more or less like Twitch Plays Geopolitics with about the same successful results.
Idk, maybe it would be a good thing in the long run, if people got the controls and fucked everything up every day for a couple of years, and then realized that this is real life and understanding what’s going on and acting on it is a necessary and good thing to do.
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to technology@beehaw.org | 0 comments
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 2 weeks ago:
Get a couple guns (a long one and a short one) and learn how to use them.
This is a pretty intense topic to get involved with.
I dithered a little bit about getting a firearm. I still do not have one. I know how to use them, in a cursory kind of way.
Part of why I’ve held back on getting one is this: Imagine playing a board game for the first time, and if you lose, you’re going to die. Or sitting down at a poker table to play for the first time in your life. How well are you going to play? Are you probably going to win? Also, the game only lasts for fifteen seconds.
Having a gun sounds like not a bad idea for what’s coming up in this country. Having a gun and no experience at all in the types of situations you might get yourself into, if you have a gun, sounds almost worse than just not having one. People freak out, they fuck up, they take the wrong decisions. It’s what naturally happens when you’re playing an adversarial game for the first time in your life. After a while, you learn the game, and you start making generally good decisions a lot more of the time. But the first time…
I’m not saying having a gun is a bad idea. There are days when I think I’m being stupid for not having one. But also, you need to know what you’re doing, and if you don’t have some kind of military or other professional training, you’re not going to know what you’re doing, and you can walk yourself into situations there’s no good way out of if you don’t know what you’re doing.
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 2 weeks ago:
It’s interesting to me. I learned some things from the link about democratic confederalism. But yea, “exhausting” is a pretty good word for it over the long term, I often don’t really engage with it. The whole pattern of “I’m going to tell you what YOU think, and what you said, and why the strawman is all wrong” is pretty difficult to interact with, and requires this incredibly tedious process of endlessly clarifying and repeating what it was that I actually said.
I have had it happen where after going through that process for some time, someone realizes that we’re actually largely on the same team as far as some big issues, so maybe it is worthwhile. That’s definitely a minority of the times, but it does happen.
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 2 weeks ago:
Yeah. That’s why I agree with the general strike. Like I say, we’ve delegated the details of wielding political details to a whole class of exclusively-political people, and they’ve been rigging the game and keeping all the power for themselves. Fuck that.
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 2 weeks ago:
So I think I said “voting,” and you heard “the current system of parliamentary democracy.” I am all for changing the current structure of political establishment in the United States, because the one we’ve got sucks ass. I am simply saying that:
- The concept of having individual people tally up their opinions, and formalizing the idea that the sum of those tallies is what we all agree to do, is a good idea.
- Refusing to engage at all with the current system of liberal parliamentary democracy (in theory), in the United States, won’t make it go away, and we need a strategic decision about what will best remove it and replace it with something better. We can’t just use a panacea “if we don’t vote then they won’t be able to get away with it.” They will. People not voting is completely fine with them. I definitely don’t think voting is enough, in general but in particular in our current corrupt-to-the-brink-of-disaster implementation of a theoretically voting-based system.
That means that they don’t stem from bad actors inside the system, but rather from the way the system is set up.
This, in particular, I agree with a lot. I would actually expand it a little bit further, and say that the nature of power and manipulation in human beings naturally will tend to try to abuse any “system” that is set up for deciding who gets to take charge. I think the history of large-scale human state power is that however good it sounds at the beginning, people who want to abuse it will inevitably be able to figure out how to bend it to their own ends and corrupt it. Which I guess is the whole point behind anarchism+friends wanting to do away with state power at all.
Also: you canwt vote the system away. When you’re voting, the only available opitions are ones that stabilize the parliamentary system. That’s why I don’t (or at least not completely) agree with “it needs both”. A general strike could lead to a more democratic system, while electoralism will always try to strengthen the current system.
They sure voted the system away in Germany, in 1932. This part of your statement seems to have some very obvious counterexamples. Plenty of places in the world have had a parliamentary system that then went away, and in quite a lot of cases, voting was involved in how that got done. It wasn’t enough. It was involved.
I think the important questions are firstly, how would we go about changing the parliamentary system in the US? How has it worked when people have tried that in other places in other times? And, when they did try it according to whatever strategies and principles, how did it work out? What happened next?
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 2 weeks ago:
Tell you what: Tell me more about the other democratic alternatives you say I am missing. I didn’t think that my examples at all presupposed the existence of a parliamentary democracy, but if I know more about your counterexamples, I can better make sense of whether or not I overlooked them.
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 2 weeks ago:
Discussing why not having voting invites other methods of deciding power struggles that are even less democratic, does not mean a false dichotomy. I am very clearly discussing why both voting and also using other means of people power, together, is the way.
What do you think is my main argument? If not that both together are the way?
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 2 weeks ago:
“We need both” “It doesn’t have to be either or”
“I think you’re opening up a false dichotomy here”
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 2 weeks ago:
It is both.
Voting is a good system. The alternative is “let’s just have a fight with guns, or with money, or connections to powerful people, every time there’s a disagreement.”
The problem is that we delegated the process of informing people what to vote for, to absolutely rotten media. And we delegated the process of figuring out the details of putting some candidates forward, to an absolutely craven, useless, and corrupt class of full-time political operatives who generally don’t give a shit about the people.
We need to fix those things. And yes, getting organized labor to fight back whenever they are fucking us, which is pretty much every day, to add some bite to all those polite ballots we’re sending in, sounds great.
But voting, as a concept, is good. It doesn’t have to be either or. It can be a 10-day general strike, and also voting to get rid of the guy who wants to nuke Iceland, and also organizing our politics better, for some candidates that aren’t so shit as these ones generally are. Each one will help the others get done.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Hey, can you summarize the core argument of this for me? Specifically with an eye to its broader implications about the AI sector and the technology industry as it currently stands in its current form today.
I’ll analyze the core argument of this piece and its broader implications.
The article’s central argument is that DeepSeek’s recent breakthrough has exposed fundamental flaws in how Western tech companies, particularly OpenAI and Anthropic, have approached AI development. The author contends that these companies weren’t actually innovating but rather perpetuating what they call a “Rot Economy” - a system where companies burn through massive amounts of capital while creating an illusion of inevitable progress and necessary scale.
The key revelation isn’t just that DeepSeek created more efficient models, but that Western AI companies apparently never seriously tried to do so. The author argues this wasn’t because they couldn’t, but because they had no incentive to - they were operating in a system that rewarded spending and scale rather than efficiency and innovation. They had convinced investors and the market that the only path forward was through ever-larger models requiring ever-more expensive infrastructure.
The broader implications about the current state of the technology industry are particularly damning:
- The modern tech industry, particularly in AI, has become fundamentally anti-innovative. Rather than solving real problems efficiently, it’s oriented around maintaining narratives that justify continued capital accumulation.
- Silicon Valley has lost its “scrappy builder” spirit. Instead of finding clever solutions to constraints (as DeepSeek did), major companies simply throw money and resources at problems.
- The venture capital and tech media ecosystem has become complicit in this dynamic, uncritically accepting narratives about necessary scale and inevitable progress while failing to ask basic questions about efficiency and practical value.
The author suggests this represents a deeper crisis in American tech innovation - the industry has become dominated by what they call “management consultants that lead teams of engineers to do things based on vibes” rather than genuine technological problem-solving. This has created an environment where companies compete not on actual innovation or efficiency, but on their ability to raise and spend capital while maintaining compelling narratives about future potential.
The piece concludes that much of the current AI boom has been essentially a confidence game - not because the technology doesn’t work, but because the companies developing it have been more focused on maintaining narratives that justify their continued fundraising than on creating genuinely valuable and sustainable products. DeepSeek’s achievement matters not just because it created more efficient models, but because it demonstrated that the emperor had no clothes - that the massive infrastructure and spending of Western AI companies wasn’t actually necessary for technological progress.
This suggests a potential inflection point for the tech industry, where the narrative-driven, capital-intensive model of innovation may be reaching its limits, potentially forcing a return to more genuine technological problem-solving and efficiency-driven development.
My AI summarizer is superior to your AI summarizer. 😃
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
He thinks everyone in the tech industry is a moustache twirling villain and always ascribes malice where incompetence would do.
Here’s him talking about people from the tech industry:
Nevertheless, Thompson (who I, and a great deal of people in the tech industry, deeply respect)
Every single article I’ve read about Gomes’ tenure at Google spoke of a man deeply ingrained in the foundation of one of the most important technologies ever made, who had dedicated decades to maintaining a product with a — to quote Gomes himself — “guiding light of serving the user and using technology to do that.”
Back to quoting you:
There is very minimal evidence for literally EVERYTHING he writes about in this article. The whole talk of them working around the GPU restrictions also has incredibly minimal evidence and is just a rumour.
We flat out do not know how they trained Deepseek’s model.
Correct. We do not know the training data, which makes it silly to decide that it is definitely cribbed from OpenAI’s model. What we do know is how the code works, because it is open and they wrote a paper. What would you consider “evidence,” if not the actual code and then a highly detailed explanation from the authors about how it works, and then some independent testing and interpretation by known experts? Do you want it carved on a golden tablet or something?
I think I’m done with this conversation. You seem very committed to simply repeating your point of view at me. You’ve done that, so I think we can go our separate ways.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Look up the definition of the word cynical. It means, more or less, asserting that no one is motivated by sincere integrity. Accusing some specific people of lacking integrity, while holding up others as good examples of integrity that everyone should aspire to, is the opposite of cynicism.
He doesn’t address very much the idea that DeepSeek “distilled” their model from OpenAI’s model and others specifically because that is just a rumor with very minimal evidence for it.
OpenAI has reportedly found “evidence” that DeepSeek used OpenAI’s models to train its rivals, according to the Financial Times, although it failed to make any formal allegations, though it did say that using ChatGPT to train a competing model violates its terms of service. David Sacks, the investor and Trump Administration AI and Crypto czar, says “it’s possible” that this occurred, although he failed to provide evidence.
Personally, I genuinely want OpenAI to point a finger at DeepSeek and accuse it of IP theft, purely for the hypocrisy factor. This is a company that exists purely from the wholesale industrial larceny of content produced by individual creators and internet users, and now it’s worried about a rival pilfering its own goods?
Cry more, Altman, you nasty little worm.
The “rumors” you say he discusses about novel ways the Chinese researchers found to outperform OpenAI are based on an extremely detailed look at their paper and their code, as interpreted by experts. The thing you’re upset he doesn’t discuss is based on rumors. He doesn’t discuss it, except to note that it’s just a rumor but would be funny if it’s true, because he is not doing what you accuse him of.
If you’re upset that he was mean to Sam Altman, so much so that you simply don’t care if he also goes deep into a lot of important details and cares about integrity enough to hate a lot on people who don’t have it, then say so. The things you are accusing him of doing are not true, though, and pretty easy to disprove if you can look honestly at his work.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Wanting a better world, and holding up a light to the current one to show the differences between what could be and what is, is not at all what “cynical” means. “Cynical” is the opposite of what you mean. “Pessimistic” or “negative” is definitely more apt, yes.
Also:
Now, you’ve likely seen or heard that DeepSeek “trained its latest model for $5.6 million,” and I want to be clear that any and all mentions of this number are estimates. In fact, the provenance of the “$5.58 million” number appears to be a citation of a post made by NVIDIA engineer Jim Fan in an article from the South China Morning Post, which links to another article from the South China Morning Post, which simply states that “DeepSeek V3 comes with 671 billion parameters and was trained in around two months at a cost of US$5.58 million” with no additional citations of any kind. As such, take them with a pinch of salt.
While there are some that have estimated the cost (DeepSeek’s V3 model was allegedly trained using 2048 NVIDIA h800 GPUs, according to its paper), as Ben Thompson of Stratechery made clear, the “$5.5 million” number only covers the literal training costs of the official training run (and this is made fairly clear in the paper!) of V3, meaning that any costs related to prior research or experiments on how to build the model were left out.
While it’s safe to say that DeepSeek’s models are cheaper to train, the actual costs — especially as DeepSeek doesn’t share its training data, which some might argue means its models are not really open source — are a little harder to guess at. Nevertheless, Thompson (who I, and a great deal of people in the tech industry, deeply respect) lays out in detail how the specific way that DeepSeek describes training its models suggests that it was working around the constrained memory of the NVIDIA GPUs sold to China (where NVIDIA is prevented by US export controls from selling its most capable hardware over fears they’ll help advance the country’s military development):
Here’s the thing: a huge number of the innovations I explained above are about overcoming the lack of memory bandwidth implied in using H800s instead of H100s. Moreover, if you actually did the math on the previous question, you would realize that DeepSeek actually had an excess of computing; that’s because DeepSeek actually programmed 20 of the 132 processing units on each H800 specifically to manage cross-chip communications. This is actually impossible to do in CUDA. DeepSeek engineers had to drop down to PTX, a low-level instruction set for Nvidia GPUs that is basically like assembly language. This is an insane level of optimization that only makes sense using H800s.
Tell me: What should I be reading, instead, if I want to understand the details of this sort of thing, instead of that type of unhinged, pointless, totally uninformative rant about the tech industry?
- Comment on Anon introduces himself 3 weeks ago:
Hm.
books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=ableist&yea…
They could be in 4th grade in 2010, and be 25 now posting this. I could also believe that elementary school teachers could be among the first 5% of people to adopt a new super-inclusive type of brand new lefty language that’s just starting to be used for a new type of friendly inclusiveness in 2000.
- Comment on Anon introduces himself 3 weeks ago:
When I went to school, one kid during that exercise said that his name was so-and-so, and one thing he liked to do was stick his thumb up his ass.
He was known as “Thumbs” for the next four years, possibly longer. I actually don’t think I ever learned his name, he was just Thumbs.
- Comment on US Department of Labor to cease and desist all investigative and enforcement activity under rescinded Executive Order 11246 3 weeks ago:
This deals with equal opportunity for federal contractors. It’s not directly tied to labor in the private sector.
But also, yes. I feel like maybe it’s better in the long run if the federal government isn’t looking out for people, and they get accustomed to organizing themselves enough to demand better treatment from their employers without anyone needing to hand it to them.
Maybe.
IDK, maybe I am just trying to rationalize what is guaranteed to happen regardless.
- Comment on US Department of Labor to cease and desist all investigative and enforcement activity under rescinded Executive Order 11246 3 weeks ago:
For anyone who, like me, didn’t know:
Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, prohibits discrimination in employment by federal contractors based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, and requires affirmative action to ensure equal opportunity in hiring. It aims to promote non-discriminatory practices in the workplace for those doing business with the federal government.
- Comment on It's a good group! 4 weeks ago:
If you ask someone if they are Nazis, and their answer is to get confused and ask about the premise of the question, there is about a 90% chance they are Nazis. Non-Nazis will say, “What? No, definitely not.”