Schadrach
@Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
- Comment on 'vegetative electron microscopy' 11 hours ago:
I do agree with your “averaging machine” argument. It makes a lot of sense given how LLMs are trained as essentially massive statistical models.
For image generation models I think a good analogy is to say it’s not drawing, but rather sculpting - it starts with a big block of white noise and then takes away all the parts that don’t look like the prompt. Iterate a few times until the result is mostly stable (that is it can’t make the input look much more like the prompt than it already does). It’s why you can get radically different images from the same prompt - the starting block of white noise is different, so which parts of that noise look most prompt-like and so get emphasized are going to be different.
- Comment on 'vegetative electron microscopy' 11 hours ago:
People shit on Hossenfelder but she has a point. Academia partially brought this on themselves.
Somehow I briefly got her and Pluckrose reversed in my mind, and was still kinda nodding along.
If you don’t know who I mean, Pluckrose and two others produced a bunch of hoax papers (likening themselves to the Sokal affair) of which 4 were published and 3 were accepted but hadn’t been published, 4 were told to revise and resubmit and one was under review at the point they were revealed. 9 were rejected, a bit less than half the total (which included both the papers on autoethnography). The idea was to float papers that were either absurd or kinda horrible like a study supporting reducing homophobia and transphobia in straight cis men by pegging them (was published in Sexuality & Culture) or one that was just a rewrite of a section of Mein Kampf as a feminist text (was accepted by Affilia but not yet published when the hoax was revealed).
My personal favorite of the accepted papers was “When the Joke Is on You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire” just because of how ballsy it is to spell out what you are doing so obviously in the title. It was accepted by Hypatia but hadn’t been published yet when the hoax was revealed.
- Comment on Cathy, do the math. 1 week ago:
The blue check went through some twists and turns. Originally it was meant as “your identity is verified”, then it became a status symbol, then it had extra features attached to it. At one point the people approving them were literally taking bribes to expedite or guarantee your blue check (like personal bribes, not a payment to Twitter). And at some point along the way it somehow became a “Twitter approves” thing, because at least one person had their blue check stripped for going too far as a right wing troll (Milo Yianno-whatever). All of that pre-Muak.
Post-Musk, it’s just a subscription you pay for with some extra features and there’s now a different checkmark for corporate or government entities that merely verifies their identity.
- Comment on Inching closer to the grave every day 2 weeks ago:
As civilization has progressed, we’ve done more and more writing and record keeping and done so an less and less durable media. From stone to clay to papyrus/parchment to paper to film to digital media.
I feel like there needs to be some kind of write once media that’s extremely durable and reasonably dense for digital data specifically for long term archival purposes. What’s the digital equivalent to carving something on a stone tablet, that a thousand years from now despite age and weathering could be dug up in a field somewhere and still hypothetically be at least mostly readable?
- Comment on Anon is a reader 2 weeks ago:
Now, what happens when we combine them together to make… Sonichu!
…you get serially harassed by online weirdos, likely become the single most documented human in all of history because of said weirdos, come out as trans and eventually get charged for incest with your mother?
- Comment on wrong again 2 weeks ago:
Most puberty blockers go to cis children too btw, and have for decades.
…specifically ones with precocious puberty, because hitting puberty at say 4 can have some lifelong detrimental effects.
- Comment on The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication ever 3 weeks ago:
I mean, except of those with agoraphobia or those who are incapable of leaving their residence due to physical infirmity of some kind.
- Comment on The past 18 months have seen the most rapid change in human written communication ever 3 weeks ago:
I just want to point out that there were text generators before ChatGPT, and they were ruining the internet for years.
Hey now, King James Programming was pretty funny.
For those unfamiliar, King James Programming is a Markov chain trained on the King James Bible and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, with quotes posted at kingjamesprogramming.tumblr.com
4:24 For the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to.
In APL all data are represented as arrays, and there shall they see the Son of man, in whose sight I brought them out
3:23 And these three men, Noah, Daniel, and Job were in it, and all the abominations that be done in (log n) steps.
I was first introduced to it when I started reading UNSONG.
- Comment on Meow 4 weeks ago:
My cat figured out the dog door by watching the dogs. She’s inside 80% of the time but prefers to do her business outside if the weather’s clear and goes out for an hour or so about twice a day besides that.
Of all things, my part basset hound mix is a bird killing machine despite the stubby legs, broken hip and arthritis. I don’t know how she manages to do it, but lots of half eaten bird corpses started showing up in our yard right after we got her, but only in the back yard which she could reach via the dog door. Starting before the cat started using the dog door.
- Comment on Anon experiences freedom 4 weeks ago:
And Two, companies generally comply with California laws because, on the whole, California passes mostly positive limitations.
No, companies generally comply with California laws because California is a massive market. Companies don’t, on the whole, operate on what is mostly positive for society according to a specific flavor of progressive.
Companies operate on what is most profitable, and selling to California is usually good for profits, while running a separate production line just for California usually isn’t worth it. So if the regulations aren’t too expensive to meet, they’ll just switch the whole production over to meet California law because that minimizes costs and maximizes sales. The same kind of thing also happens with Texas, for much the same reason - especially with textbooks.
- Comment on Anon experiences freedom 4 weeks ago:
I mean as far as metaphors go, it’s really not that bad. It’s visual and immediately understandable, and at least connected to the underlying thing it’s describing (network traffic really does flow down a series of wries/cables that are functionally “tubes” of electrons or photons). Hell, people have been likening an internet connection to a “pipe” since at least the 90s (it was already a thing when I first got internet access in '95).
Sure the guy who said it was a dickbag, but I can think of a dozen worse analogies offhand.
- Comment on Anon experiences freedom 4 weeks ago:
Never trust a salesman, and a politician is just a salesman selling that he should be in charge of you.
- Comment on Anon experiences freedom 4 weeks ago:
…and as many people voted for Trump in 2024 as voted for Trump in 2020, while Harris didn’t have the turnout Biden did.
- Comment on Anon experiences freedom 4 weeks ago:
I feel like conservatives opened their crusade by targeting thotfluencers they would have had a lot of momentum.
They did. Under the hashtag ThotAudit, after one thotfluencer said something that could be interpreted as her not paying taxes on the money she was making showing her bits online.
- Comment on Anon experiences freedom 4 weeks ago:
It’s similar almost to priest being the most common pedos.
Pedos tend to aggregate around any job that will give them trusted or unrestricted access to children. The suppression you’re talking about in this case isn’t just from religion, but permeates all of society. Like, they can’t even hypothetically leave the church and move somewhere more liberal where their desire for kid fucking isn’t being suppressed. At least not until the weird libertarian crypto-bros who oppose age of consent manage to create such a place.
- Comment on Skyblivion, the fan remake of Oblivion in Skyrim's engine, nears completion 4 weeks ago:
I mean, it would suck for any mod using F4SE. The answer for what to do is the same as every other update - recommend people not update until F4SE is updated.
Did they have their own plugin DLL or were they just using F4SE as is? If the former that would make it suck for them even worse since they’d potentially need to find some new hook addresses of their own and wait for the new F4SE and then reconcile their DLL.against that and then test it all again to make sure nothing broke.
- Comment on Skyblivion, the fan remake of Oblivion in Skyrim's engine, nears completion 4 weeks ago:
So basically what happened with the AE release for Skyrim SE where Bethesda switched to a new compiler version and the tool the script extender team was using to find the correct offsets couldn’t handle it so they had to track down the offsets manually like before they’d written the tool, leading to a longer than usual time for the script extender to update than usual?
Which if it’s anything like SSE means that mods that didn’t use F4SE were basically unaffected, mods that use F4SE had to wait for it to update which took longer than usual after which they would mostly work unmodified, and mods that involved a plugin DLL for F4SE had to at the very least be recompiled against the new versions of the game and F4SE. Nothing about that specifically targets Fallout: London though from what it sounds like.
- Comment on Skyblivion, the fan remake of Oblivion in Skyrim's engine, nears completion 4 weeks ago:
The tippy part is they go off the OG lore so Cyrodiil is a more tropical/Mediterranean climate which is fun.
Fucking Thalmor denying the power of Talos of Atmora.
Seriously though, the canon explanation for Cyrodiil being the way it is now as opposed to original lore is that when Talos achieved CHIM he changed it, because that’s a thing you can do with the secret syllable of royalty. All part of the path to mantling Shor/Lorkhan via one of the Walking Ways and forging an empire.
- Comment on Skyblivion, the fan remake of Oblivion in Skyrim's engine, nears completion 4 weeks ago:
Both very soon after release by an update which was specifically designed to break the mod.
I’m now curious about this from a technical perspective - how did the update specifically break their mod in particular? Were they doing a bunch of custom DLL hooks or something?
I know with Skyrim SE modding it’s usually that any update breaks SKSE and a tiny handful of other mods that directly hook DLLs or the executable (these mods are usually scripting engine extensions and are a dependency for a variety of other mods), and depending on the update sometimes it takes longer than average to get a new version of those running (the AE update was one of those because they switched compiler version and that broke the method SKSE was using to find hooks). But in general that only breaks 1) mods using those (think SkyUI) until a new version comes out, after which most of those mods start working again without the individual mods needing an update and 2) mods that include their own plugin DLL, (think SkyClimb) which have to wait on an update and then compile a new version of the DLL for the new version of both the game and the other mod, because addresses and functions they are hooking may have changed. Mods not using SKSE or similar generally run just fine between versions of SSE (including AE).
- Comment on Nope 5 weeks ago:
…which is amusing because my first thought was At the Mountains of Madness, which apparently was an inspiration for The Thing.
- Comment on Facepalm on multiple levels 5 weeks ago:
Sorry, got my racist propaganda films that still show up in film school because they used revolutionary techniques in film making and are thus important pieces of cinematic history mixed up. The Birth of a Nation is the US one, Triumph of the Will is the Nazi one I was thinking of.
- Comment on Facepalm on multiple levels 5 weeks ago:
(and no I am not glorifying those monsters)
You don’t have to glorify their beliefs to admit they were fantastic at propaganda and aesthetics. Birth of a Nation was used in film schools for decades afterward for a reason and that reason wasn’t that film schools were all secretly run by Nazis.
- Comment on It's why they tried to get rid of it 5 weeks ago:
Look at it this way. Pluto didn’t change, we just changed the definition of a planet to exclude it from the cool kids club because if we included it we’d also have to at the very least invite Eris too, and nobody likes Eris (hence the Trojan War).
- Comment on It's why they tried to get rid of it 5 weeks ago:
No, the opposite; it’s a classic example showing that correlation doesn’t necessitate causation.
Right, but ice cream sales and shark attacks have a shared cause, and it’s the weather. Humans both get in the ocean where they are shark-accessible more often and also buy more ice cream when it’s hot out.
Basically causation is X->Y. But there are other relationships between X and Y, and in the case of ice cream sales and shark attacks it’s W->X and W->Y (one doesn’t cause the other, but they are caused by the same thing). It’s also possible for two things to correlate without any connection whatsoever, because sometimes things just happen to move in the same directions at the same times for a while.
People have trouble dealing with that, and much magical thinking arises from X and Y happening together being believed to necessarily mean X and Y are connected in some fashion because humans are very good at building patterns even when they don’t exist.
That’s literally where the vaccines cause autism thing started from - kids start showing clear signs of autism at about the same age they get several vaccines. The guy who originally proposed it with a deeply flawed study was only specifically claiming it was the combined MMR and not all vaccines generically and produced his study in an attempt to sell a separate MMR series that could be spaced out (rather than being one shot with all three) which would allegedly prevent the effect, because he would directly profit from his vaccine series being used instead of the combined MMR.
- Comment on Horse goals 1 month ago:
and the stuff about apple seeds being dangerously poisonous is just some bullshit
The short version being that apple seeds are in fact poisonous, but you’d have to eat much more of them than you’d find in a single apple, and you’d have to break or crush the seeds in the process to release the poison. The dose makes the poison and all.
- Comment on What Refutes Science... 1 month ago:
AI’s primary use case so far is to further concentrate wealth with the wealthy,
Under capitalism, everything further concentrates wealth with the wealthy because the wealthy are best able to capitalize on anything. Wealth gives you the means to better pursue further wealth.
and to replace employees.
So what you’re saying is that we need to dismantle every piece of automation and go back to manufacturing everything by hand with the most basic hand tools possible? Because that will maximize the number of people needed to be employed to produce, well, anything. Anything else is using technology to replace employees.
Or is it just that now we’re talking about people working office jobs they thought were automation-proof getting partially automated that’s made automation a bad thing?
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 1 month ago:
Presuming there are still elections, this is basically calling for a general strike when it will have the most electoral weight. So, basically it comes down to whether or not you believe there will be another presidential election or if we’ll already be a fascist dictatorship by then.
- Comment on AI Traning 1 month ago:
In parallel to what Hawk wrote, AI image generation is similar. The idea is that through training you essentially produce an equation (really a bunch of weighted nodes, but functionally they boil down to a complicated equation) that can recognize a thing (say dogs), and can measure the likelihood any given image contains dogs.
If you run this equation backwards, it can take any image and show you how to make it look more like dogs. Do this for other categories of things. Now you ask for a dog lying in front of a doghouse chewing on a bone, it generates some white noise (think “snow” on an old TV) and ask the math to make it look maximally like a dog, doghouse, bone and chewing at the same time, possibly repeating a few times until the results don’t get much more dog, doghouse, bone or chewing on another pass, and that’s your generated image.
The reason they have trouble with things like hands is because we have pictures of all kinds of hands at all kinds of scales in all kinds of positions and the model doesn’t have actual hands to compare to, just thousands upon thousands of pictures that say they contain hands to try figure out what a hand even is from statistical analysis of examples.
LLMs do something similar, but with words. They have a huge number of examples of writing, many of them tagged with descriptors, and are essentially piecing together an equation for what language looks like from statistical analysis of examples. The technique used for LLMs will never be anything more than a sufficiently advanced Chinese Room, not without serious alterations. That however doesn’t mean it can’t be useful.
For example, one could hypothetically amass a bunch of anonymized medical imaging including confirmed diagnoses and a bunch of healthy imaging and train a machine learning model to identify signs of disease and put priority flags and notes about detected potential diseases on the images to help expedite treatment when needed. After it’s seen a few thousand times as many images as a real medical professional will see in their entire career it would even likely be more accurate than humans.
- Comment on Hulu quizzing about the ads played 2 months ago:
And, since it’s a subliminal process, it’s extremely difficult to make a concious decision to not buy products you’ve seen or heard ads of.
Instead, I make a conscious decision to not buy products I remember seeing or hearing ads of. If you’re using subtle product placement to subliminally manipulate me in a way I don’t notice, good for you. If it’s obvious enough I remember you doing it then I will not buy your product unless it is already the best deal available (aka the cheapest per unit or best quality per price, excepting products I have had a bad experience with).
- Comment on After shutting down several popular emulators, Nintendo admits emulation is legal 2 months ago:
Right, emulators aren’t illegal but a bunch of adjacent things can be - for example system BIOS/FW/encryption keys/ROMs if you don’t dump them yourself from your own personal hardware.
What got Yuzu in the crosshairs was announcing support for Tears of the Kingdom before it released, meaning they were testing their emulator on an unreleased game and the odds that every dev and tester had legitimately gotten a copy of the game before official release is so low that they weren’t about to fight it and go through discovery (which might have identified significant additional piracy on their part). It was easier to fold and settle, and probably saved them from an immense amount of fines for piracy used for testing.