BraveSirZaphod

@BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This used book that I bought for 12£ on the internet was apparently previously bought from Oxfam for 1.99£⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This behavior is literally millennia older than capitalism.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft’s VASA-1 can deepfake a person with one photo and one audio track⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If something is possible, and this simply indeed is, someone is going to develop it regardless of how we feel about it, so it's important for non-malicious actors to make people aware of the potential negative impacts so we can start to develop ways to handle them before actively malicious actors start deploying it.

  Critical businesses and governments need to know that identity verification via video and voice is much less trustworthy than it used to be, and so if you're currently doing that, you need to mitigate these risks. There are tools, namely public-private key cryptography, that can be used to verify identity in a much tighter way, and we're probably going to need to start implementing them in more places.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yes, you cannot, so to do it do like this⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This feels more like a poor non-native English speaker than an AI. LLMs do happily lie, but they don't usually have significant grammar mistakes like the missing articles here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google fires 28 workers for protesting $1.2 billion Israel contract⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That is not at all what right to work means.

  I get the frustration, but if you're going to criticize a thing, it's a lot more effective if you actually know what the thing is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨😠Meta just showed off Threads’ fediverse integration for the very first time😠⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Meta will probably be pretty cautious and strict about what inbound content is allowed, since they have a global quagmire of laws and regulations to comply with and cannot just open up the firehose without significant legal risk. I'd imagine they'd only accept content from vetted instances that agree to some amount of common policy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨😠Meta just showed off Threads’ fediverse integration for the very first time😠⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  In which case you essentially return to the status quo right now, where the Fediverse is a small group of somewhat-ideological tech enthusiasts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Can Reddit—the Internet’s Greatest Authenticity Machine—Survive Its Own IPO?⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  To compare forced labor camps where the alternative is being murdered to people making the active choice to volunteer to serve as moderators is a comparison so lacking in perspective that I'd expect to only find it on Reddit, but I guess Lemmy has managed to foster the same kind of behavior.

  Are you going to compare Reddit killing the API to the Holocaust next?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are Instacart tipping reccomendations insane or am I being miserly?⁩ ⁨⁨8⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You should know that on Instacart, workers can see your tip before accepting the order. It's functionally a bid, not a tip. I'm sure they have some algorithm for what value they recommend, but to some extent, this is the workers setting the price of their own labor. If you tip too low, you run the risk of the order not being accepted.

  The fundamental situation is that delivery work is not actually that cheap, and especially given that these are lower paid workers, they're also more sensitive to inflation and so you'd expect their cost to rise more steeply than other things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why there are no "secondary" sports league that allow performance enhancement drugs?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Just because it hasn't been said yet, this already exists in bodybuilding. The professional league, the IFBB, which hosts the Mr. Olympia competition, does not prohibit drugs and they are de facto required. Essentially every IFBB bodybuilder uses steroids, and it's a very open secret.

  Something that does need to be considered here is that not all sports necessarily benefit from steroids, at least not nearly as much as bodybuilding. More muscle isn't necessarily always a good thing if it makes you heavier or less mobile, so there's already some limited regulatory effect from that as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The key element here is that an LLM does not actually have access to its training data, and at least as of now, I'm skeptical that it's technologically feasible to search through the entire training corpus, which is an absolutely enormous amount of data, for every query, in order to determine potential copyright violations, especially when you don't know exactly which portions of the response you need to use in your search. Even then, that only catches verbatim (or near verbatim) violations, and plenty of copyright questions are a lot fuzzier.

  For instance, say you tell GPT to generate a fan fiction story involving a romance between Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter. This would unquestionably violate JK Rowling's copyright on the characters if you published the output for commercial gain, but you might be okay if you just plop it on a fan fic site for free. You're unquestionably okay if you never publish it at all and just keep it to yourself (well, a lawyer might still argue that this harms JK Rowling by damaging her profit if she were to publish a Malfoy-Harry romance, since people can just generate their own instead of buying hers, but that's a messier question). But, it's also possible that, in the process of generating this story, GPT might unwittingly directly copy chunks of renowned fan fiction masterpiece My Immortal. Should GPT allow this, or would the copyright-management AI strike it? Legally, it's something of a murky question.

  For yet another angle, there is of course a whole host of public domain text out there. GPT probably knows the text of the Lord's Prayer, for instance, and so even though that output would perfectly match some training material, it's legally perfectly okay. So, a copyright police AI would need to know the copyright status of all its training material, which is not something you can super easily determine by just ingesting the broad internet.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  AI haters are not applying the same standards to humans that they do to generative AI

  I don't think it should go unquestioned that the same standards should apply. No human is able to look at billions of creative works and then create a million new works in an hour. There's a meaningfully different level of scale here, and so it's not necessarily obvious that the same standards should apply.

  If it’s spitting out sentences that are direct quotes from an article someone wrote before and doesn’t disclose the source then yeah that is an issue.

  A fundamental issue is that LLMs simply cannot do this. They can query a webpage, find a relevant chunk, and spit that back at you with a citation, but it is simply impossible for them to actually generate a response to a query, realize that they've generated a meaningful amount of copyrighted material, and disclose its source, because it literally does not know its source. This is not a fixable issue unless the fundamental approach to these models changes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says it’s “impossible” to create useful AI models without copyrighted material⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There is literally no resemblance between the training works and the model.

  This is way too strong a statement when some LLMs can spit out copyrighted works verbatim.

  https://www.404media.co/google-researchers-attack-convinces-chatgpt-to-reveal-its-training-data/

  A team of researchers primarily from Google’s DeepMind systematically convinced ChatGPT to reveal snippets of the data it was trained on using a new type of attack prompt which asked a production model of the chatbot to repeat specific words forever.

  Often, that “random content” is long passages of text scraped directly from the internet. I was able to find verbatim passages the researchers published from ChatGPT on the open internet: Notably, even the number of times it repeats the word “book” shows up in a Google Books search for a children’s book of math problems. Some of the specific content published by these researchers is scraped directly from CNN, Goodreads, WordPress blogs, on fandom wikis, and which contain verbatim passages from Terms of Service agreements, Stack Overflow source code, copyrighted legal disclaimers, Wikipedia pages, a casino wholesaling website, news blogs, and random internet comments.

  Beyond that, copyright law was designed under the circumstances where creative works are only ever produced by humans, with all the inherent limitations of time, scale, and ability that come with that. Those circumstances have now fundamentally changed, and while I won't be so bold as to pretend to know what the ideal legal framework is going forward, I think it's also a much bolder statement than people think to say that fair use as currently applied to humans should apply equally to AI and that this should be accepted without question.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It's very funny how effectively you can turn "a statistically average person" into some ominous sounding elite other by just dressing it up in class language.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is an average person living in the US supposed to do about corporations raising prices?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Because nothing helps with the rising cost of living more than deliberately pissing away any chance of promotion and likely eventually being laid off and jobless.

  You do realize how much privilege one has to have in order to casually jeopardize your income without sweating over it, right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Flying used to be this magical, miraculous thing!⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Flying is also dramatically cheaper and more accessible today than it used to be.

  If you want the fancy treatment from back then, pay the prices people paid back then and buy first class.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why would someone openly say that they oppose human rights?⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  That you're being strongly downvoted for properly analyzing an unpopular perspective is disappointing but not remotely surprising here.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨When a place is called " Heights", what does "heights" mean/refer to?⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Washington Heights in NYC, at any rate, is physically high in elevation, and it's not a particularly fancy area at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨After earning $544 million in its most recent quarter, Unity says even more layoffs are 'likely'⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/10/23911338/unity-ceo-steps-down-developers-react

  The guy at the top actually just got booted, if you care.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Box Office: ‘The Marvels’ Gets Grounded With MCU’s Second-Lowest Opening Day Ever⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Promotion was severely limited because of the strikes.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Honest question: what was Hamas' long-game with respect to kidnapping Israelis? Did they think Israel would just negotiate rather than retaliate?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Israel could turn Gaza into a lifeless parking lot in an hour if they actually wanted to. They don't.

  I won't pretend that their demands have always been reasonable, but they have made peace proposals that do not demand Palestinians not existing. You're letting your emotions talk way ahead of anything remotely factual.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[What if scenario] What if all commercial institutions suddenly decided they no longer intend to acknowledge religious events such as Christmas?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  You're right; we must spend all hours of all days contemplating historical injustice. No happiness allowed!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Does anyone drink instant coffee anymore?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The production actually is pretty cool really. They basically brew giant vats of coffee and then freeze dry it into a powder that can be easily rehydrated.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Am I strange for not loving Everything Everywhere All At Once?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I went in completely blind, having somehow dodged spoilers for a good year when I finally saw it upon its re-release in theaters for the Oscars campaign, and I left the theater thinking it was one of my favorite movies I've ever seen.

  It's absolutely not for everyone though, and there's nothing wrong with that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A24 Expands Strategy From Arthouse Gems to More Commercial Films⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  This word is losing more and more meaning with every passing day.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Drone Footage Shows Aftermath of Israeli Music Festival Following Deadly Hamas Attack | WSJ News⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah yes, clearly the only options an oppressed people have are to do nothing or to murder and rape attendees of a music festival. There are no other choices!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨England worst place in developed world to find housing, says report⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  There absolutely is in the places where people want to live. That's the entire reason why the prices have gotten so expensive. If you have ten homes open up in London, and you have 30 people who want to move there - 5 bankers, 5 tech workers, 10 middle class office workers, and 10 service workers, the bankers and tech workers will get those units, thus driving up the price. Houses in the countryside have essentially no relevance to housing in London, except that people who are priced out will eventually have to flee out to them.

  I do absolutely agree that housing is should not be seen as an investment vehicle, but the next question that's worth asking is why is it such an effective investment in the first place? The simple answer is that because new supply is so drastically constricted relevant to demand, the price keeps going up very reliably. If you simply flood the market with enough supply to actually meet the demand, housing immediately stops being a productive investment. Indeed, new construction in the States has actually slowed the pace of rent increases in several cities in the past year.

  You can also look a a city like Tokyo, where despite massive demand, housing prices are still reasonably affordable due to them actually building enough to meet that demand and having extremely effective public transit and enough density to make that viable.

  To throw another example where I could find some data, New York City, from 2010 to 2020, added 200,000 housing units. In that same time span, the population increased by 500,000. This is a very explicit example of demand outstripping supply.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨England worst place in developed world to find housing, says report⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  So, what's standing out to me is that you recognize that shortage of supply is a key problem here. Rebuilding slums, renovating old housing stock, and building new units are some of the obvious solutions. What I would like to emphasize is that solving that problem does not in any way require the elimination of markets, and indeed, a big part of why we're in the mess in the first place is due to excessive zoning regulations and perverse incentives caused by allowing people to block construction and building on property that they don't own. A huge reason why governments like China and the USSR were able to manage housing is precisely because they didn't have to listen to Mary and David complaining about how a commie block would ruin the neighborhood character, but that doesn't require socialism. Simply removing local control of zoning would do a massive amount to alleviate this. In addition, because I would also readily admit that housing markets may not adequately provide as well for the poor, I have to add that there is no reason why any government can't build more public housing today to serve those who do get left behind.

  The core issue here is that we have not enough housing for too many people. The simple solution is of course to simply build more until we have more than enough, and tell anyone who complains along the way to cordially fuck off. None of that requires the elimination of markets as a concept. I do think you're dramatically glossing over how messy a community-driven process of deciding who lives where would be (have you ever attended a public city council meeting?), but regardless, that isn't even remotely necessary to solve the actual root issue. Indeed, in healthy housing markets in the past (at least in terms of cost), such as 1950s America in the post-war boom, or early 1900s New York City, the common thread is not socialism: it's having more than enough housing for everyone who wants it, such that while the rich of course had their mansions and whatnot, there was still enough housing to go around for everyone.

  The fundamental problem here is that, when you have X people seeking half as many housing units, then either the richest half get the housing, or those richest half are going to find some other way to get them by offering the poorer half something else. The only way to solve this is to add more housing units; everything else is just increasingly elaborate band-aids.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨England worst place in developed world to find housing, says report⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Hey, I'm wide open here. Please, share your ideas. By what process is this agreement reached? Given a scarcity of nice apartments, who gets them, and how is that decided? Genuinely, I'm curious as to what kind of system you're imagining, particularly given that, by definition, it has to make most people content, and given a scarce resource, most people won't get what they want, so some other criteria has to decide who gets what.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨England worst place in developed world to find housing, says report⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Okay, let's explore this. Everyone votes for themselves to live in London's best penthouse. Crafty clever me, expecting this situation, bribe a few of my friends to vote for me to live in the penthouse instead. Perhaps I slip them some money under the table - or we've abolished money - I promise to do some amount of work for them, give them something valuable I have, promise to cook for them, whatever. So, I've got the penthouse. Yay democracy?

  Or, to expand more, lots of people recognize this strategy, so everyone with some degree of wealth starts buying votes anywhere they can get them. Ultimately, the people with the most wealth wind up getting the best housing as loads of goods and favors get exchanged. At this point, oops, you have a market again.

  Now, you might just say that it should be randomized. But in that case, if I get assigned a shitty unit, perhaps I might just go to someone who got a nice unit and offer them an exchange of some kind. Perhaps I don't have any valuable goods, but I'm a talented painter and offer to paint them several nice pieces. Ultimately, they find it to be an acceptable deal and agree to swap apartments. Lots and lots of people would be doing the same thing, and as the government wouldn't actually be able to monitory everyone's location all the time to ensure they're living where they're supposed to be, once again, you have a market.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨England worst place in developed world to find housing, says report⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Respectfully, I think that's a safer assumption than the UK nationalizing the housing market, but by all means, feel free to wait for that if you like.

  But even to play along, even if you could snap your fingers and abolish the housing market, the question of allocation doesn't go away. You'll still have certain units that are extremely desirable and valuable, others that are quite good, some that are fine, and some that are terrible. In other words, even in the absence of the market, inherent value will still drastically differ from unit to unit and location to location. So, if you're not using money to allocate things, how do you do it? What do you do if demand outstrips supply?