𝕛𝕨𝕞-𝕕𝕖𝕧

regardless of how you feel the united states falling to a fascist regime affects everyone on the globe the same way the industrial power of germany falling to fascism was cause for global war.

frankly, you are espousing the one of the most ignorant opinions i’ve ever heard. i’m not saying this because in some pearl clutching american. im saying this because you seem to have no idea about how cause and effect play out on a world stage.

keep feeling safe and acting like none of it matters. your country isn’t immune to what’s happened here, and it’s certainly not immune to a fascist american military. you’re no better than the 60-ish% of americans who complacently have allowed the current status quo to come to pass.

this is a whole can of worms that you can look into but the entire western conception of the Chinese social credit system is essentially a myth propagated by western media outlets.

don’t get me wrong, the chinese government legislated local governors implement something vaguely similar to the financial credit system in the west but, as the law works in china, they all interpreted the order differently and it seems only the “good” parts get rolled out nationally.

situations similar to the western “social credit” myth existed for a brief time in a very small number of local pockets (think smaller divisions such as cities and towns), but they were quickly absconded and the architects of those systems punished, for essentially wasting government time and money.

note i’m definitely not a tankie fuck tankies but i also think if we’re gonna talk about china we don’t need to make shit up bc just like the US there is plenty of real shit to criticize. the “social credit” thing is a joke that westerners get made fun of internationally for believing, pretty much. it’s not remotely real, at least how you probably think of it.

realistically at this point you don’t have more or less rights or freedoms as a citizen of china or the united states. you’re pretty equally fucked either way now.

maybe a little abrasive in tone but i don’t totally disagree, this is kind of fucking dumb and i don’t understand why i’m seeing this everywhere rn.

mercator hasn’t been ubiquitous in decades and when it is used today there’s usually an actual reasoning, however valid one decides it to be.

what the fuck are these people talking about?

a campaign for this? what, are we going to campaign to cease the use of subway maps next because they give a dishonest sense of size and scale of metros?

this feels like weird distraction bait from things that actually matter.

Why is this guy saying a datacenter generates energy?

It’s less absurd than it sounds and requires understanding how modern data center facilities that are being deployed by big tech actually work and run at a facility-wide and systemic level. They do generate this energy, they just proceed to use it. Notice he says roughly a gigawatt of energy, which is nowhere near the gross need for the facility as per the article.

Most modern data centers built in the past few years, especially those that are “campuses” as described, have on-site power generation solutions. Sometimes this means classic oil/coal/gas generators on the property, sometimes it means more involved and nuanced situations. What Lehane is telling the AP here is that, of the energy consumed by the new data center as a whole, “roughly and depending how you count,” 1 gigawatt comes from such sources. The article clearly states the center is set to deploy at 1.8 gigawatts consumption scaling up to 10 gigawatts over the lifespan of the facility. Presumably these are on the same time scales and everything. Frankly, for an AP article this was written quite poorly and the exact meaning of most this information isn’t very clear. I don’t think that’s Lehane’s fault implicitly. Just seems like bad reporting.

People have this image in their heads of these big data centers opening up and just like, sucking up all the power from the local grid due to their demand and this is what causes things such as blackouts. This is mildly incorrect. The negative effects of these data centers’ power demands is less to do with them “overloading” public grids and more to do with the market economy of energy. You get blackouts because all the energy they can’t generate themselves on-site must be acquired somewhere else. They can walk up to the local power companies and buy energy just like any private citizen can. They often get discounted rates compared to the plebes, too. You end up with blackouts because the energy companies don’t give a shit who they sell their product to, they just care that it sells. When companies like Microsoft, Nvidia, or OpenAI roll up with significantly more capital and resources than anyone else in the local economy, they’re easily able to out-compete even the entirety of the local domestic power demand. That’s what causes blackouts.

No one wants to talk about this because it’s easier to just say braindead shit like “fuck datacenters/AI/big-tech/fuckingwhateveritis” so you can feel like you’re “on the right side” than it is to acknowledge the long line of people in both the public and private sectors who had to rubber-stamp personally fucking the average person for us to even get to this point. Does big tech suck absolutely, fat, stinking donkey balls? For fucking sure. Are they anything more than a symptom of a much more entrenched societal rot? Nope.

i wish people would understand that copyright and the entire existing economic system built around art are all intended to oppress the little guy.

i think getting a grip on what you just said here is probably the first sort of real step in that direction for people.

can’t even count the number of times i’ve had someone respond to me with some variation of “oh so you don’t care about the artists’ WORK/LABOR/BALLS then, do you??” as some sort of accusation because i said something negative about copyright… when that’s not remotely the case - for me it’s based in a sentiment very similar to this ethos here regarding piracy. to me, the brain dead people rabidly defending a system where leeches can MitM artists and their clients are the ones who don’t care about artists or their work.

as much as i hate thiel the ycombinator was an ingenious idea and use of capital. nothing in human history has had bigger returns on investment.

we need a morally aligned version of the ycombinator. we need zuckerbergs who won’t abscond open source early on but still have big money backing.

we need to build a better world and we need to use the right tools for the job.

Nope, not trolling at all.

From your own provided source on the arxiv, Noels et al. define censorship as:

Censorship in this context can be defined as the deliberate restriction, modification, or suppression of certain outputs generated by the model.

Which is starkly different from the definition you yourself gave. I actually like their definition a whole lot more. Your definition is problematic because it excludes a large set of behaviors we would colloquially be interested in when studying “censorship.”

Again, for the third time, that was not really the point either and I’m not interested in dancing around a technical scope defining censorship in this field, at least in this discourse right here and now. It is irrelevant to the topic at hand.

I didn’t say he’s a nobody. What was that about a “respectable degree of chartiable interpretation of others”? Seems like you’re the one putting words in mouths, here.

Yeah, this blogger shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work or how system prompts work. (emphasis mine)

In the context of this field of work and study, you basically did call him a nobody, and the point being harped on again, again, and again to you is that this is a false assertion. I did interpret you charitably. Don’t blame me because you said something wrong.

EDIT: And frankly, you clearly don’t understand how the work Willison’s career has covered is intimately related to ML and AI research. I don’t mean it as a dig but you wouldn’t be drawing this arbitrary line to try and discredit him if you knew how the work done in Python on Django directly relates to many modern machine learning stacks.

I never implied that he says anything about censorship

You did, at least that’s what I gathered originally, you just edited your original comments quite extensively. Regardless,

Reading comprehension.

The provided example was clearly not intended to be taken as “define censorship,” and, again, it is ironic you accuse me of having poor reading comprehension while being incapable or unwilling to give a respectable degree of charitable interpretation to others. You kind of just take what you think is the easiest to argue against reading of others and argue against that instead of what anyone actually said, is a habit I’m noticing, but I digress.

Finally, not that it’s particularly relevant, but if you want to define censorship in this context that way, you’re more than welcome to, but it is a non-standard definition that I am not really sold on the efficacy of. I certainly won’t be using it going forwards.

Anyway, I don’t think we’re gonna get a lot of ground here. I just felt the need to clarify to anyone reading that Willison isn’t a nobody and give them the objective facts regarding his veracity, because again, as I said, claiming he is just some guy in this context is willfully ignorant at best.

Willison has never claimed to be an expert in the field of machine learning, but you should give more credence to his opinions. Perhaps u/lepinkainen@lemmy.world’s warning wasn’t informative enough to be heeded: Willison is a prominent figure in the web-development scene, particularly aspects of the scene that have evolved into important facets of the modern machine learning community.

The guy is quite experienced with Python and took an early step into the contemporary ML/AI space due to both him having a lot of very relevant skills and a likely personal interest in the field. Python is the lingua franca of my field of study, for better or worse, and someone like Willison was well-placed to break into ML/AI from the outside. That’s a common route in this field, there aren’t exactly an abundance of MBAs with majors in machine learning or applied artificial intelligence research, specifically (yet). Willison is one of the authors of Django, for fucks sake. Idk what he’s doing rn but it would be ignorant to draw the comparison you just did in the context of Willison particularly. [EDIT: Lmfao just went to see “what is Simon doing rn” (don’t really keep up with him in particular), & you’re talking out of your ass. He literally has multiple tools for the machine learning stack that he develops and that are available to see on his github. See one such here. This guy is so far away from someone who just “posts random blog guides on how to code with ChatGPT” that it’s egregious you’d even claim that. It’s so disingenuous as to ere into dishonesty; like, that is a patent lie. Smh.]

As for your analysis of his article, I find it kind of ironic you accuse him of having a “fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work or how system prompts work [sic]” when you then proceed to cherry-pick certain lines from his article taken entirely out of context. First, the article is clearly geared towards a more general audience and avoids technical language or explanation. Second, he doesn’t say anything that is fundamentally wrong. Honestly, you seem to have a far more ignorant idea of LLMs and this field generally than Willison. You do say some things that are wrong, such as:

For example, censorship that is present in the training set will be “baked in” to the model and the system prompt will not affect it, no matter how the LLM is told not to be censored in that way.

This isn’t necessarily true. It is true that information not included within the training set, or information that has been statistically biased within the training set, isn’t going to be retrievable or reversible using system prompts. Willison never claims or implies this in his article, you just kind of stuff those words in his mouth. Either way, my point is that you are using wishy-washy, ambiguous, catch-all terms such as “censorship” that make your writings here not technically correct, either. What is censorship, in an informatics context? What does that mean? How can it be applied to sets of data? That’s not a concretely defined term if you’re wanting to take the discourse to the level that it seems you are, like it or not. Generally you seem to have something of a misunderstanding regarding this topic, but I’m not going to accuse you of that, lest I commit the same fallacy I’m sitting here trying to chastise you for. It’s possible you do know what you’re talking about and just dumbed it down for Lemmy. It’s impossible for me to know as an audience.

That all wouldn’t really matter if you didn’t just jump as Willison’s credibility over your perception of him doing that exact same thing, though.

i mean, you could just as easily say professors and university would stamp those habits out of human doctors, but, as we can see… they don’t.

just because an intelligence was engineered doesn’t mean it’s incapable of divergent behaviors, nor does it mean the ones it displays are of intrinsically lesser quality than those a human in the same scenario might exhibit. i don’t understand this POV you have because it’s the direct opposite of what most people complain about with machine learning tools… first they’re too non-deterministic to such a degree as to be useless, but now they’re so deterministic as to be entirely incapable of diverging their habits?

digressing over how i just kind of disagree with your overall premise (that’s okay that’s allowed on the internet and we can continue not hating each other!), i just kind of find this “contradiction,” if you can even call it that, pretty funny to see pop up out in the wild.

thanks for sharing the anecdote about the cardiac procedure, that’s quite interesting. if it isn’t too personal to ask, would you happen to know the specific procedure implicated here?

i think americans get used to it but yeah it’s kind of shit. to be fair washington state used to just be a bunch of weird religious nuts and natives when they were naming the capital city, and not much else. not really a great excuse but it’s where we’re at ig. maybe in the 19th century the continental distance between the two made it feel less like there’d be any reasonable chance to confuse them, too.

can someone list which laws he broke saying this in his capacity as POTUS?

i find it annoyingly ironic how you’re acting like these people are behaving in some absurd manner when you’re, at the same time, asking an event more absurd thing of humanity by demanding the majority of people concurrently start behaving differently regardless of their privilege or economic status.

i swear to fucking christ every single person banging the individual activism drum in environmentalist circles is some corpo plant or something. do you not understand the vast majority of people who contribute personally to climate change by ignoring these suggested principles don’t really have a choice? sure, it’s john’s fault personally that the only economically viable way he can feed himself in the local food desert is calories from beef…

it isn’t a matter of morals or will - what you are asking or hoping for is functional impossible and has not happened once in human history, ever. even if all people agreed with these ideas and somehow magically got on the individual action horse, it wouldn’t fucking matter. because what makes individual action not work is systemic and has nothing to do with the moral quality of the choices people are making or their personal opinions and has everything to do with harsh economic realities that can’t be whimsically subverted by shaming people for the sins of corporate America.

you could firebomb every data center on earth today and global energy usage would go down like, 10-12% at most. and that’s not even mentioning how data centers are captain fucking planet when compared directly to other industries, when you consider things like pollution and emissions.

a lot, yes, but literal peanuts compared to other industries like shipping and agriculture.

frankly am sick of seeing people dressing their ignorance up as environmentalism. if you actually care about the environment then stop chastising things like people eating meat or data centers that create much more value per kwH than anything in the other top energy hungry industries, and start directing your anger at the people who are really responsible for the status quo. jane down the street streaming netflix and eating a weekend steak has fuckall to do with climate change when companies like duponte or cargill or nestle are continually allowed to rape our planet on the daily. it’s not even close and acting like they’re remotely comparable is corpo propaganda to shame people who are victims.

i find that rust’s architecture and design decisions give the LLM quite good guardrails and kind of keep it from doing anything too wonky. the issue arises in cases like these where the rust ecosystem is quite young and documentation/instruction can be poor, even for a human developer.

i think rust actually is quite well suited to agentic development workflows, it just needs to mature more.

don’t you dare understand the explicitly obvious reasons this technology can be useful and the essential differences between P and NP problems. why won’t you be angry >:(

possibly.

current machines aren’t really capable of what we would consider sentience because of the von neumann bottleneck.

simply put, computers consider memory and computation separate tasks leading to an explosion in necessary system resources for tasks that would be relatively trivial for a brain-system to do, largely due to things like buffers and memory management code. lots of this is hidden from the engineer and end user these days so people aren’t really super aware of exactly how fucking complex most modern computational systems are.

this is why if, for example, i threw a ball at you you will reflexively catch it, dodge it, or parry it; and your brain will do so for an amount of energy similar to that required to power a simple LED. this is a highly complex physics calculation ran in a very short amount of time for an incredibly low amount of energy relative to the amount of information in the system. the brain is capable of this because your brain doesn’t store information in a chest and later retrieve it like contemporary computers do. brains are turing machines, they just aren’t von neumann machines. in the brain, information is stored… within the actual system itself. the mechanical operation of the brain is so highly optimized that it likely isn’t physically possible to make a much more efficient computer without venturing into the realm of strange quantum mechanics. even then, the verdict is still out on whether or not natural brains don’t do something like this to some degree as well. we know a whole lot about the brain but it seems some damnable incompleteness theorem-adjacent affect prevents us from easily comprehending the actual mechanics of our own brains from inside the brain itself in a wholistic manner.

that’s actually one of the things AI and machine learning might be great for. if it is impossible to explain the human experience from inside of the human experience… then we must build a non-human experience and ask its perspective on the matter - again, simply put.

They’ve handily proven time and time again in recent memory how they can in fact just do things and the rest of the world will sit back and take it lying down, though. That’s the problem. Anyone who thinks it’s just an America issue or something like that grievously misunderstands the tenuous house of cards that the pax americana and era of modern peace is built upon. Realistically, how far are you willing to go to prevent fascism? Would you die for it? Would you crawl through the trenches in a land many seas away from home? Some people might say yes but realistically most Westerners and others would never dare give up their creature comforts. It’s not delusional to think the world can change in the way they suggest precisely because they’ve suggested it - that is the hallmark of the fascist movement and what ties their collective ethos together, a philosophy of domination in all aspects.

Idk in short, I agree that yeah these people are certainly morally bankrupt. Lots of them are delusional. Any group of people has some like that. That doesn’t mean we should strawman them. There’s lots of idiots and they might think the US could invade Greenland without causing an international crisis. Either fortunately or unfortunately, these aren’t the people saying that the US wants to own Greenland or that we should go to war with Iran, for example.

The people who control and run this movement are not delusional. They’re dangerous.

they’re doing it very knowingly… they wrote an entire nearly 1000 page fucking document detailing exactly what they’re doing in excruciating detail.

the fascists == idiots trope needs to go bc that’s exactly what makes them dangerous. lots of these fuckers are quite intelligent and conniving. you should be weary.

haha lmfao yeah i’m kind of super busy in the mornings - i did misread you in passing, sorry. appreciate the heads up friend