Artisian

@Artisian@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨If it were possible to travel back in time and manipulate events, we could take a book back in time and publish it before the author historicallt does... as a prank...⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  idk; when you talk to writers they complain about ideas being cheap and written works hard. I think for many concepts, there were poorly done versions well before something made literary history?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Israeli society is truly gone so outrageously far right that translation from Hebrew is now disabled on X (#Twitter) as of Nov16⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Though we’ll need to find new damnation for both, as this OP is at best a misunderstanding. See top replies.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Israeli society is truly gone so outrageously far right that translation from Hebrew is now disabled on X (#Twitter) as of Nov16⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Reminder to look at top comments, ideally at a bit of a delay. See this reply.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Israeli society is truly gone so outrageously far right that translation from Hebrew is now disabled on X (#Twitter) as of Nov16⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Israeli society is truly gone so outrageously far right that translation from Hebrew is now disabled on X (#Twitter) as of Nov16⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m told that the claim is false, see this reply by Petersson, which makes substantially more sense to me. I’m not on twitter, but allegedly many folks can translate Hebrew tweets.

  If you could not because of rampant TOS violations then OP (or anyone else on twitter) could easily make a much better post, with much better evidence, that Hebrew speakers had gone rougue. We’d also see more than an LLM claiming this was the process, we’d also see people showing tweets they can’t translate (which did translate to something awful). If you or a friend are on twitter, please replicate the claim: find a hebrew tweet and post a screencap showing you can’t translate it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Israeli society is truly gone so outrageously far right that translation from Hebrew is now disabled on X (#Twitter) as of Nov16⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t understand this from a Grok, twitter, or Israeli perspective, and I think this is terrible evidence for the claim being made in the title/op.

  If you wish to argue that the majority of Hebrew writers on twitter are nazi’s, surely you could scrape the hebrew language tweets, apply basic translation, and do some clustering. Even just doing this on a handful of highly circulating recent examples.

  Twitter is not exactly opposed to nazi content recently, so I don’t understand the claimed policy.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Powdertoy: FOSS falling sand⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This made my day

• Powdertoy: FOSS falling sandpowdertoy.co.uk ↗
  Submitted ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨games@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨16⁩ ⁨comments⁩
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨SoftBank sells its entire stake in Nvidia for $5.83 billion⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Read on; they’re investing in openAI instead.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I never understood what it was people did on Twitter. I understand it even less now that it is X.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  (Shame that the folks most institutionally able and interested in AI regulation are on the musk propaganda machine. That bothers me. But I get that many people are tired of AI being shoved in their face.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I never understood what it was people did on Twitter. I understand it even less now that it is X.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There are relatively small communities that have network effects there. For example, folks working on AI research are very clearly not welcome on mastodon or bluesky. So conference announcements, new results (and hot takes on them), and funding opportunities are best found there. Used to be a functional subreddit, but the exodus and spam killed that. I assume there are a dozen similar topics.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They even do Price Discrimination on video games now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  For both of our sakes, I’ll limit the scope of my reply. I do appreciate the discussion (and I agree with several skipped points).

  I’m not sure how its possible to think the product of a game is actually not just a game, but also everything else that the game requires in order to achieve some level of use-value. I mean, I feel like most people recognize that the computer is a separate product than the game. Or that when you buy a car – you’re not also buying the gas to run the car.

  I think what makes this strange for me is that, in the case of valve code vs game dev code, they are the exact same material result of labor (lines of code), both doing the same thing with it (charging for access). Really, they even charge the same person (both take a majority cut from game buyers). I don’t understand how in this extremely parallel setting, valve gets singled out by LVT.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How do you respond to unwanted advice?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  When possible, I like asking them to show me. That way you at least get to skip one work task.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why do Republicans hate the poor so much?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I see a lot of people answering what the Republican leadership seems to believe and do. This is very different from what the average Republican voter believes.

  Let me cover just a couple issues that drive an otherwise functional person to vote Republican:

  1. abortion. There are a shocking (and tragic) number of otherwise reasonable people who get a strong ick response to the idea of abortion. They rarely research the issue. This is an opinion so immediately visceral that they believe it is a moral law (and there are many communities that strongly reinforce this belief). I know of many folks who see the Republican corruption and the damage it’s doing, but can’t get through their anti-choice gut feeling to vote blue.

  2. economic interest. There are a nontrivial number of people who could lose a lot of money depending on how democratic policies are implemented. The left is a fractured mess, so no particular implementation is guaranteed. But if you keep the system around, historically you won’t get harmed specifically (we all get leeched to death slowly instead). Think rent control for a family whose retirement depends on 3 rental properties. The grandkids will vote Republican to, they believe, keep Grandma solvent. (This wouldn’t be an issue if large sweeping reforms were on the table. They aren’t. Also these calculations are often vibes based, because who has this kind of data.) See all the incentives around NIMBY Democrats. Some previously union areas fall under this; globalization policies felt like they destroyed their communities.

  There are more. And polling will tell you about them. No need to ask other leftists (we call this an echo chamber).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the main device to hammer in a nail?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  My favorite indication that someone is using a word in an unusual way is that their question has no answer if you interpret it as usual.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the main device to hammer in a nail?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  … I… I literally talked about this. It’s the first words.

  They don’t say that the random answer is chosen uniformly (though that is the norm in the field). If we relax that,…

  What more was needed?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They even do Price Discrimination on video games now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds good; and thank you for taking the time as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What's the main device to hammer in a nail?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They don’t say that the random answer is chosen uniformly (though that is the norm in the field). If we relax that, then we’re putting a distribution on these where we want:

  P(correct with distribution (a,b,c,d)) = some value shown on A,B,C,D

  I don’t see any assumption that we will pick using that distribution, so I think this avoids the recursion.

  Unfortunately this has too many solutions. If you put a total of 0.25 weight on A and D, then the rest does not matter. If you put 0.5 weight on C, again the rest is irrelevant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They even do Price Discrimination on video games now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I apologize for not reading you carefully enough. Indeed, I simply disagree with your application of the labor theory of value, to the point that I think your claims in this specific case do not make sense. (Some of the arguments made here I think are strong reductions-to-absurdity against the labor theory, but I will try to explain my objections from within the theory.)

  The value I’m referring to is the value inherent in a production of a commodity that originates from the raw materials and labor that workers put into it. I’m talking labor value. It’s the value of the grain that originates in the workers toil and the raw stuff.

  I think you can salvage many cases of this theory of labor+materials by picking good boundaries for what a ‘product’ is. What the market chooses to say it is selling to you is generally lies, which we shouldn’t trust. What it actually is selling to you is often a large amalgam of things. We should consider the value of a whole bag of goods that the consumers/world can interact with because of the purchase. When you buy a train ticket, we do not judge its value by the quality of the printing (or, more generously, the labor+materials of the chair you sit on). It’s value comes from all of the train engine and the train car and the tracks they ride on and the stations they visit and the people who run them. In this lens, I think we should not consider a game as only the programming+assets made by the dev team. A game is thus, at least:

  • the infrastructure to sell it (storefront, payment processing, reviews, recommendation algorithms, marketting, hosting of data, etc.)
  • the hardware to run it (consoles or PC, drivers, operating systems and chip specs, special controllers, etc.)
  • the programming and assets (most of what you are talking about when you say game, but also cloud saving and account management. How a game manages saves when the power goes out is very much part of the game.)
  • the infrastructure to run it (multiplayer servers and connection protocols, anticheat and moderation systems, friends systems, in-game monetization systems, and the internet infrastructure probably counts too.)

  You could maybe argue Valve creates value in the production and maintenance of the commodity that is Steam’s infrastructure and sell it at a fair price. But in this context, the whole point of that infrastructure is to realize the value created from the labor of developers, making it extractive in nature.

  I cannot accept a theory of value that says tabletop simulator’s value is entirely independent of if you can play multiplayer. It is, to me, a multiplayer game. I am reasonably certain that the game devs don’t host that server, did not write the server code, and do not manage connecting different players together. That’s all part of the product, and I think it’s a part that valve should get credit/payment for.

  I note that when game devs did not generally use steam, valve made their own (excellent) games. I suspect if people started leaving the platform, they would return to it. I think this refutes the claim in this quote. The infrastructure is so good that it genuinely improves many many games. (Now this has extended to marketting, so that even games that work great from itch.io also want to be on steam. I agree that these network effects are much closer to rent seeking and don’t add value under the labor theory. But I have not seen a strong argument that valve has been anti-competitive with this privilege, and I think it is just wrong to assert that value does not contribute to many of the games cited in this thread.)

  If you package a game as not just the assets and code, but also the things that make it possible to use those in the way the game dev intended, then steam is selling a large portion of each game. Every time I run a steam game, I am running a substantial number of lines of code written because valve exists, often more than the number of lines of code written by the game dev. If I bought the game elsewhere, this would often not be true.

  Steamdeck does not increase the economic value of any other product (though, I love my Steamdeck)

  Infinite effort and using up all the gold on earth, spent making a game that can only be run on temple OS installed into a vintage N64 in orbit around mars, is entirely wasted. The game would have no value because there are no consumers: it cannot enter the market. The labor theory of value only makes sense for things that are, in fact, sold. To take another example, train engines are valuable because train tracks exist and vice-versa. There is no service to sell with just one of the two. We live in a society.

  (I do not intend to argue valve is perfect; in ways and cases they are a monopoly and have behaved as rent seekers. But I think your claims are too strong/sweeping.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨They even do Price Discrimination on video games now⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think I understand your position and disagree on many games (as others may have communicated better). I think most games I play are a better deal because steam and valve exist. Cloud saves and multiplayer setup both have definitely quadrupled the value of many many games for me, it is not close.

  Also, valve created a new hardware to increase gamer access via the steam deck. Those sales and that user base both add value for devs. Similar argument for Linux, except valve doesn’t even rent seek on most of that. The drivers are for everyone.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Research shows research is the leading cause of research⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Have begun? We’ve got philosophers of science going back millennia, and history of science for at least half a century.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tax strike?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  For payroll tax you can pressure your employer and/or claim an election that’s smaller than is real. For sales tax, you can replace some purchases with barter (and refuse to buy other things).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tax strike?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Online free textbook on tax strike practice, history, and philosophy: here

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists Need a Positive Vision for AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If I were to try and play up his argument, I might appeal to ‘we can shorten the dark times’, Asimov’s foundation style. But I admit my hearts not in it. Things will very likely get worse before they get better, partially because I don’t particularly trust anyone with the ability to influence things just a bit to actually use that influence productively.

  I do think this oligarchy has very different tools than those of old; far fewer mercenary assassinations of labor leaders, a very different and weirdly shaped strangle-hold on media, and I put lower odds on a hot conflict with strikers.

  I don’t know the history of hubris from oligarchs; were the Tsar’s or Barons also excited about any (absurd and silly) infrastructure projects explicitly for the masses? I guess there were the Ford towns in the amazon?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists Need a Positive Vision for AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I am primarily trying to restate or interpret Schneiers argument. Bring the link into the comments. I’m not sure I’m very good at it.

  He points out a problem which is more or less exactly as you describe it. AI is on a fast track to be exploited by oligarchs and tyrants. He then makes an appeal: we should not let this technology, which is a tool just as you say, be defined by the evil it does. His fear is: “that those with the potential to guide the development of AI and steer its influence on society will view it as a lost cause and sit out that process.”

  That’s the argument afaict. I think the “so what” is something like: scientists will do experiments and analysis and write papers which inform policy, inspire subversive use, and otherwise use the advantages of the quick to make gains against the strong. See the 4 action items that they call for.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists Need a Positive Vision for AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think of it more like genie-out-of-lamp. It’s now very cheap to fine tune a huge model and deploy it. Policy and regulation need to deal with that fact.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists Need a Positive Vision for AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Were we mad at the public technologist?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists Need a Positive Vision for AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Success would lead to AI use that properly accounted for its environmental impact and had to justify it’s costs. That likely means much AI use stopping, and broader reuse of models that we’ve already invested in (less competition in the space please).

  The main suggestion in the article is regulation, so I don’t feel particularly understood atm. The practical problem is that, like oil, LLM use can be done locally at a variety of scales. It also provides something that some people want a lot:

  • Additional (poorly done) labor. Sometimes that’s all you need for a project
  • Emulation of proof of work to existing infrastructure (eg, job apps)
  • Translation and communication customization

  It’s thus extremely difficult to regulate into non-existence globally (and would probably be bad if we did). So effective regulation must include persuasion and support for the folks who would most benefit from using it (or you need a huge enforcement effort, which I think has its own downsides).

  The problem is that even if everyone else leaves the hole, there will still be these users. Just like drug use, piracy, or gambling, it’s easier to regulate when we make a central easy to access service and do harm reduction. To do this you need a product that meets the needs and mitigates the harms.

  Persuading me I’m directionally wrong would require such evidence as:

  • Everyone does want to leave the hole (hard, I know people who don’t. And anti-AI messaging thus far has been more about signaling than persuasion)
  • That LLMs really can’t/can be made difficult to be done locally (hard, the Internet gives too much data, and making computing time expensive has a lot of downsides)
  • Proposed regulation that would actually be enforceable at reasonable cost (haven’t thought hard about it, maybe this is easy?)
• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists Need a Positive Vision for AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the argument is that, like with climate, it’s really hard to get people to just stop. They must be redirected with a new goal. “Don’t burn the rainforests” didn’t change oil company behavior.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Scientists Need a Positive Vision for AI⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I strongly agree. But I also see the pragmatics: we have already spent the billions, there is (anti labor, anti equality) demand for AI, and bad actors will spam any system that took novel text generation as proof of humanity.

  So yes, we need a positive vision for AI so we can deal with these problems. For the record, AI has applications in healthcare accessibility. Translation, and navigation of beurocracy (including automating the absurd hoops insurance companies insist on. Make insurance companies deal with the slop) come immediately to mind.