FaceDeer

I’m Canadian so I’m not a voter in the contest you’re presenting, but if I were I would vote Democrat. And of the trio you present for the Democrats, I would say that the position I’d compromise on would be gun control. Not because American gun culture isn’t bananas and it’s not a serious problem, but because I can’t see any plausible way to fix it in the short term. So might as well let it go for now and deal with the more important stuff that affects more people.

I think a more reasonable compromise would be to give Republicans most of what they want on immigration reform. That seems to be something they consider to be of critical importance, but that I think can be allowed without it causing significant harm. If the American economy starts to suffer as a result of not having illegal immigrant workers then that will be motivation for further reforms. I think it’s important to have the laws try to reflect the realities, though, and having the economy literally depend on large-scale lack of adherence to the law of the land is a bad place to be. Just make sure not to be monstrous about it - don’t do the concentration-camps-for-children thing, try to maintain basic asylum access for those who truly need it, and so forth.

DMCA is about copyright (that’s what the “C” is). The name of a show isn’t copyrighted, it’s trademarked. Different type of IP altogether.

“Takedown notice” has legal meaning, it’s not some random cease-and-desist letter that you can draft for anything you want and that has no legal weight other than that it might be scary.

Seemed pretty fair and fact-based to me. What bias are you seeing?

Yes, that would also be statistical correlations to an AI model. The specific kind of information they’re being trained on doesn’t affect the underlying mechanism of model training.

Seems like lemmy.ml is really collapsing in on itself. Overall not good for the general health of the fediverse.

I’d argue that a biased overly-centralized instance like that collapsing in on itself is good for the general health of the Fediverse.

there needs to be some kind of accountability/ redress if open & free communities are going to be a long term project.

The redress is having lots of servers to switch to, much like how on Reddit the redress was “start your own subreddit if the one you’re on is moderated poorly.” I can’t imagine any system that would let you “take control” of some other instance without that being ridiculously abusable.

Shush, this is an opportunity for people to dump on Microsoft, if you take it from them they’ll turn on you.

Different countries have a variety of very different approaches to appointing judges, and some of those methods are not nearly as easy to corrupt as the American system.

Americans are subject to a lot of cultural indoctrination about how their system is the “greatest democracy in the world,” “leader of the free world,” and other such platitudes. It’s really not the case, though. America’s system is one of the earliest that’s still around, and unfortunately that means it’s got a lot of problems that have been corrected in democracies that were founded later on but have remained embedded in America’s.

Doesn’t help that America has a somewhat problematic electorate as well.

I mainly use LLMs as a programming assistant, as a brainstorming buddy and creative assistant while working on adventures for the tabletop roleplaying campaigns I run, and as a search result summarizer/interpreter over at Bing for the sorts of generic queries I used to use Google for.

Especially because seeing the same information in different contexts helps mapping the links between the different contexts and helps dispel incorrect assumptions.

Yes, but this is exactly the point of deduplication - you don’t want identical inputs, you want variety. If you want the AI to understand the concept of cats you don’t keep showing it the same picture of a cat over and over, all that tells it is that you want exactly that picture. You show it a whole bunch of different pictures whose only commonality is that there’s a cat in it, and then the AI can figure out what “cat” means.

They need to fundamentally change big parts of how learning happens and how the algorithm learns to fix this conflict.

Why do you think this?

There actually isn’t a downside to de-duplicating data sets, overfitting is simply a flaw. Generative models aren’t supposed to “memorize” stuff - if you really want a copy of an existing picture there are far easier and more reliable ways to accomplish that than giant GPU server farms. These models don’t derive any benefit from drilling on the same subset of data over and over. It makes them less creative.

I want to normalize the notion that copyright isn’t an all-powerful fundamental law of physics like so many people seem to assume these days, and if I can get big companies like Meta to throw their resources behind me in that argument then all the better.

Remember when piracy communities thought that the media companies were wrong to sue switch manufacturers because of that?

It baffles me that there’s such an anti-AI sentiment going around that it would cause even folks here to go “you know, maybe those litigious copyright cartels had the right idea after all.”

We should be cheering that we’ve got Meta on the side of fair use for once.

look up sample recover attacks.

Look up “overfitting.” It’s a flaw in generative AI training that modern AI trainers have done a great deal to resolve, and even in the cases of overfitting it’s not all of the training data that gets “memorized.” Only the stuff that got hammered into the AI thousands of times in error.

Sometimes peoples’ heads just fall apart.

Well, rarely.

Okay, once. Sheer coincidence that it was such a prominent person and in such a prominent moment. And that Lee Harvey Oswald just happened to be cleaning his gun by that window at the time. But hey, sometimes weird coincidences happen.

Training an AI does not involve copying anything so why would you think that fair use is even a factor here? It’s outside of copyright altogether. You can’t copyright concepts.

Downloading pirated books to your computer does involve copyright violation, sure, but it’s a violation by the uploader. And look at what community we’re in, are we going to get all high and mighty about that?

I don’t think you’ve thought through the logistics required for the sort of war where you’d just go around and shoot everyone who lives in hundreds of solar systems. Even assuming they do nothing at all to defend themselves, how do you even find them all?

It’s not specifically oxygen that’s linked to life, it’s chemical disequilibrium. Oxygen is highly reactive, there are lots of minerals that will bind it up and there aren’t any natural geological processes that unbind it again in significant quantities. If you put an oxygen atmosphere on a lifeless planet then pretty soon all of the oxygen will be bound up in other compounds - carbon dioxide, silicon oxides, ferric oxides, and so forth. There has to be some process that’s constantly producing oxygen in vast quantities to keep Earth’s atmosphere in the state that it’s in.

There are other chemicals that could also be taken as signs of life, depending on the conditions on a planet. Methane, for example, also has a short lifespan under Earthlike conditions. You may have seen headlines a little while back about the detection of “life signs” on Venus, in that case it was phosphine gas (PH3) that they thought they’d spotted (turns out it may have been a false alarm). These sorts of gasses can be detected in planetary atmospheres at interstellar distances, especially in the case of something like Earth where it’s quite flagrant.

Even if these are sometimes false alarms, in a “Dark Forest” scenario it’d still be worth sending a probe to go and kill whatever planets exhibit signs like that. It’s a lot cheaper and quieter than trying to fight an actual civilization. That’s why I can’t see why we wouldn’t have already been wiped out aeons ago in this scenario.

But that’s not actually true. We’ve been “broadcasting” the fact that there’s life on Earth in the form of the spectrographic signature of an oxygen-rich atmosphere, which is a clear sign that photosynthesis is going on. There’s no geological process that could maintain that much oxygen in the atmosphere. The Great Oxidation Event is when that started.

We have the technology to detect this kind of thing already, at our current level. Any civilization that could reach out and attack another solar system would be able to very easily see it.

Well, “relatively cheaply” is a hard standard to nail down. I would say “no”, though. Antimatter is very expensive to manufacture and store and you’re going to need a lot of it. All of the energy that comes out of an RKV hitting its target has to be put into it in the first place, probably several times over given the inefficiencies likely inherent in the process.

The problem for the Fermi paradox is that there’s no reason to do stuff like that before we start colonizing other solar systems.

Also, how do you destroy a civilization that has a Dyson swarm already? That’s not exactly an easy task, and if you insist on remaining stealthy yourself it’s nigh impossible.

Relativistic missiles. Nothing moves faster than the speed of light. So if you can get a big rock to go 95% of the speed of light, we’d only be able to detect that it’s coming right as it hits.

This is a very common answer to “how”, but it comes with lots of problems in the Dark Forest context.

• If you actually calculate how much energy is required to boost a big rock up to that speed you run into lots of difficulties. It takes a lot, a heck of a lot. How does a civilization that is “hiding” accumulate that energy? How does it store it long-term?
• How is that energy actually put into the rock? This is basically a starship accelerating up to that speed and getting a starship up to that velocity is not easy even if you have the energy available. Does it have a rocket? The rocket equation for getting up to near-lightspeed requires ridiculous amounts of propellant. Is it beam-propelled? You’re not being at all stealthy that way. How much acceleration can you get out of your system? It takes a full year at one Earth gravity of acceleration to get up near lightspeed, and that’s a really high acceleration - you generally trade acceleration for efficiency so the faster you want to get up to speed the more energy you need and the noisier you’ll be.
• It actually is possible to counter an RKV. It’s much easier to hit and destroy an RKV than it is to launch it, all you need to do is get a pebble in its path. The key is detection, and the above points give some pretty good options for detecting it before and during launch. That gives you time to fire your countermeasures.

And ESPECIALLY if your civilization is still mostly planetbound.

Absolutely not guaranteed to be the case. Earth’s civilization could have easily had offworld colonies by now if circumstances had been slightly different, so a Fermi paradox solution that requires reliably blowing up Earthlike civilizations before they can get offworld doesn’t work. They’re already too late.

As I said previously, Earth has been quite obviously life-bearing for at least 2 billion years. Why wait until something like an RKV is needed, and even that is not guaranteed? They could have destroyed life on Earth far easier, and thus far more stealthily, if they’d done it a billion years ago.