Sir Arthur V Quackington

Ingesting all the artwork you ever created by obtaining it illegally and feeding it into my plagarism remix machine is theft of your work, because I did not pay for it.

Separately, keeping a copy of this work so I can do this repeatedly is also stealing your work.

The judge ruled the first was okay but the second was not because the first is “transformative”, which sadly means to me that the judge despite best efforts does not understand how a weighted matrix of tokens works and that while they may have some prevention steps in place now, early models showed the tech for what it was as it regurgitated text with only minor differences in word choice here and there.

Current models have layers on top to try and prevent this user input, but escaping those safeguards is common, and it’s also only masking the fact that the entire model is built off of the theft of other’s work.

There is nothing intelligent about “AI” as we call it. It parrots based on probability. If you remove the randomness value from the model, it parrots the same thing every time based on it’s weights, and if the weights were trained on Harry Potter, it will consistently give you giant chunks of harry potter verbatim when prompted.

Most of the LLM services attempt to avoid this by adding arbitrary randomness values to churn the soup. But this is also inherently part of the cause of hallucinations, as the model cannot preserve a single correct response as always the right way to respond to a certain query.

LLMs are insanely “dumb”, they’re just lightspeed parrots. The fact that Meta and these other giant tech companies claim it’s not theft because they sprinkle in some randomness is just obscuring the reality and the fact that their models are derivative of the work of organizations like the BBC and Wikipedia, while also dependent on the works of tens of thousands of authors to develop their corpus of language.

In short, there was a ethical way to train these models. But that would have been slower. And the court just basically gave them a pass on theft. Facebook would have been entirely in the clear had it not stored the books in a dataset, which in itself is insane.

I wish I knew when I was younger that stealing is wrong, unless you steal at scale. Then it’s just clever business.

Terrible judgement.

Turn the K value down on the model and it reproduces text near verbatim.

True, in a broad sense. I am speaking moreso to enshittification and the degradation of both experience and control.

If this was just “now everything has Siri, it’s private and it works 100x better than before” it would be amazing. That would be like cars vs horses. A change, but a perceived value and advantage.

But it’s not. Not right now anyways. Right now it’s like replacing a car with a pod that runs on direct wind. If there is any wind over say, 3mph it works, and steers 95% as well as existing cars. But 5% of the time it’s uncontrollable and the steering or brakes won’t respond. And when there is no wind over 3mph it just doesn’t work.

In this hypothetical, the product is a clear innovation, offers potential benefits long term in terms of emissions and fuel, but it doesn’t do the core task well, and sometimes it just fucks it up.

The television, cars, social media, all fulfilled a very real niche. But nearly everyone using AI, even those using it as a tool for coding (arguably its best use case) often don’t want to use it in search or in many of these other “forced” applications because of how unreliable it is. Hence why companies have tried (and failed at great expense) to replace their customer service teams with LLMs.

This push is much more top down.

Now drink your New Coke and Crystal Pepsi.

Tech companies don’t really give a damn what customers want anymore. They have decided this is the path of the future because it gives them the most control of your data, your purchasing habits and your online behavior. Since they control the back end, the software, the tech stack, the hardware, all of it, they just decided this is how it shall be. And frankly, there’s nothing you can do to resist it, aside from just eschewing using a phone at all. and divorcing yourself from all modern technology, which isn’t really reasonable for most people. That or legislation, but LOL United States.

CVS wants me to stop shopping with them.

I’ll just goto a fucking supermarket. It’s faster. Yes, even with the checkouts.

I’m sticking with Floorp for now. Faster development doesn’t mean it will be sustainable, but we’ll see. Or necessarily that all feayures may be good. More iant better. Brave and Opera GX have a bunch of features too.

But I’m using Firefox and Floorp as a variant because I want something that gets fundamentals right. And if Zen becomes huge, great.

“Listen, making the entire market dependent on one corporate benefactor just sothey aren’t a 100% monopoly and only a 99% one is important”

Jesus Christ Mozilla, do you hear yourself?

F-Droid syncthing-fork is still actively developed and had a patch in the last few weeks.

So hopefully this isn’t the end.

Keepass vault synced over syncthing.

I keep not regretting it.

Nope. I quit their Google bullshit ages ago. Moto 360 was a brutal betrayal.

Get a withings scanwatch or something that is “dumb” enough to be an excellent and nice looking watch, hugely long battery life, and has all the health features that matter.

It looks sharply professional, I charge it once a month, and the updates for it don’t constantly make it run worse to push features in a different part of their product line…

I will learn how to make an orbital rocket just to fuck this things day up.

No, night is already too bright. You are not ruining this for me further.

Its cool well just message the maintainers of Android to improve it, I’m sure it’s a mistake. Lemme go check who who’s behind it… /s

Chrome is the existential threat to FireFox.

Chrome is… Also Google.

Break up Google, make chrome competitive, and then we’ll stop seeing advertisers own the web standards and implement things like AVIF and ManifestV3, and instead embrace open solutions that favor users.

The JPEG XL vs AVIF thing still makes me mad.

Man, as someone who’s cross discipline in my former companies, the way people treat It, and the way the company considers IT as an afterthought is just insane. The technical debt is piled high.

Aka all trucks sold, lol.

They have lots full of these oversized ugly behemoths.

Communities can eventually become insular and crappy, that isn’t anything new. I haven’t ever used/heard of metafilter , but I believe you.

Not a problem unique to lefties or hardcore MAGA folks. It’s just community management for free by volunteers eventually means you have some echo chambering. The site/community manager can steer the mod policies, but without leadership you get fiefdoms. Look at some subreddits that speed run this process.

Honestly to avoid the immense botspam coming for small orgs, you need either a literal army of volunteers, or some kind of “realID” type check to verify they’re human, and I hate that concept immensely as well.

Giant if, but if you could do a one way cryptographic check against an ID to verify its legitimate, without sending anything off the server elsewhere, then a forum could bind your current username to a state issued ID, at least until it’s reissued. And then you could at least reasonably think these users are human.

But who wants to give that info to a stranger online. Even if the hash is unique to the site based on their own seed, the average person doesn’t understand that, and it feels like handing over your actual privacy.

Setting aside that PCs don’t have NFC readers as a standard feature as well.

Everything I think would be effectivd boils down though to needing to know that something exists in meatspace on the other end, and being able to use that to manage your bans. At least 10bux is just money, and not your ID.

This is a beautiful thing. I love MST3K, I might just join it.

I advocate for two things, oddly things I never would have in earlier internet:

• Paid forums. A one time payment for registration.

• Strict rules and quick bans. But allow offenders to buy back in. Permaban for serious offenses. .

Why? Because if it costs you $10 or 15 to re-activate after screwing around, you’re much more likely to read the room and not fuck around too much with others. It encourages users to point out bad behavior, and mods to act decisively. If the mods or management totally suck, then it can go sour, but that’s true of any community.

In this case though it can at least partially help to offset costs from shitty users, and keep bots at bay by making them cost a registration fee.

I don’t love it as a “solution”, but when Facebook was small, people behaved better. But now people post the most unhinged shit ever under their full legal name, so no amount of daylight is going to put the proverbial trolls back in their cages. Just gotta lock them out of civil spaces.

You wanna talk about Honda engine tuning here with us? Don’t be a fucking asshole, or get banned.

You wanna chat with fans of 50s cinema and the rise of modern camera film technique? Do it without brining up woke/trump/biden/Covid or get out.

I like that we have free stuff like lemmy and reddit for now, but bots are getting far, far worse.