BertramDitore

@BertramDitore@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An LLM would probably run the USA better⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It isn’t just you and me. Not even the people who designed them fully understand why they give the responses they give. It’s a well-known problem. Our understanding is definitely improving over time, but we still don’t fully know how they do it.

  Here’s the latest exploration of this topic I could find.

  LLMs continue to be one of the least understood mass-market technologies ever

  Tracing even a single response takes hours and there’s still a lot of figuring out left to do.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨An LLM would probably run the USA better⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I highly doubt that. For so many reasons. Here’s just a few:

  • What data would you train it on, the Constitution? The entirely of federal law? How would that work? Knowing how ridiculous textualism is even when done by humans, do you really think a non-thinking algorithm could understand the intention behind the words? Or even what laws, rules, or norms should be respected in each unique situation?
  • We don’t know why LLMs return the responses they return. This would be hugely problematic for understanding its directions.
  • If an LLM doesn’t know an answer, instead of saying so it will usually just make something up. Plenty of people do this too, but I’m not sure why we should trust an algorithm’s hallucinations over a human’s bullshit.
  • How would you ensure the integrity of the prompt engineer’s prompts? Would there be oversight? Could the LLM’s “decisions” be reversed?
  • How could you hold an LLM accountable for the inevitable harm it causes? People will undoubtedly die for one reason or another based on the LLM’s “decisions.” Would you delete the model? Retrain it? How would you prevent it from making the same mistake again?

  I don’t mean this as an attack on you, but I think you trust the implementation of LLMs way more than they deserve. These are unfinished products. They have some limited potential, but should by no means have any power or control over our lives. Have they really shown you they should be trusted with this kind of power?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨D.A. Hochman officially brings death penalty back to Los Angeles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup, Marcellus Williams was executed on September 24, 2024, after significant evidence of his innocence was well known. Even though the victim’s family had consistently said they did not want him to be executed, the Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey acted liked a one-man murderous mob and insisted that this innocent man be killed, after already being wrongfully imprisoned for nearly 24 years. He didn’t even want the evidentiary hearing to go forward. What legitimate reason would someone ever have to deny someone the right to show evidence of their innocence? It’s not the first time that asshole AG Andrew Bailey didn’t care about whether or not someone actually committed a crime.

  There are few things that make me angrier and more afraid than someone who genuinely thinks they have the power to purposefully work against the truth when someone’s life is on the line.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨D.A. Hochman officially brings death penalty back to Los Angeles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup, that’s what it all boils down to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨D.A. Hochman officially brings death penalty back to Los Angeles⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Just try a little empathy exercise: what if you were arrested for a heinous crime, that you know for certain you didn’t commit, but you don’t have an alibi and there’s enough evidence that points to you, that you end up being tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death.

  You know that you didn’t commit the crime, but nobody else believes you or can properly make your case. In carrying out your sentence, the government is murdering an innocent person who was wronged by the justice system. If you had been sentenced to life in prison, there’s a good chance some new facts might have come to light and exonerated you. This happens all the time.

  Why does the government get to kill people, when killing people is one of our worst crimes? To me, the death penalty is state-sanctioned revenge. It’s the government saying it’s entitled to commit an awful crime, in order to punish an awful crime. Sometimes it’s committing the very same crime the person was sentenced for. That logic has always been completely confounding to me.

  Still curious what’s wrong with the death penalty?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Phony Comforts of AI Optimism.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Casey Newton founded Platformer, after leaving The Verge around 5 years ago. But yeah, I used to listen to Hard Fork, his podcast with Kevin Roose, but I stopped because of how uncritically they cover AI and LLMs. It’s basically the only thing they cover, and yet they are quite gullible and not really realistic about the whole industry. They land some amazing interviews with key players, but never ask hard questions or dive nearly deep enough, so they end up sounding pretty fluffy as ass-kissy. I totally agree with Zitron’s take on their reporting. I constantly found myself wishing they were a lot more cynical and combative.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s an interesting article, but it was published in 2022, before LLMs were a thing on anyone’s radar. The results are still incredibly impressive without a doubt, but based on how the researchers explain it, it looks like it was accomplished using deep learning, which isn’t the same as LLMs. Though they’re not entirely unrelated.

  Opaque and confusing terminology in this space also just makes it very difficult to determine who or which systems or technology are actually making these advancements. As far as I’m concerned none of this is actual AI, just very powerful algorithmic prediction models. So the claims that an AI system itself has made unique technological advancements, when they are incapable of independent creativity, to me proves that nearly all their touted benefits are still entirely hypothetical right now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The article explains the problems in great detail.

  Here’s just one small section of the text which describes some of them:

  All of this certainly makes knowledge and literature more accessible, but it relies entirely on the people who create that knowledge and literature in the first place—that labor that takes time, expertise, and often money. Worse, generative-AI chatbots are presented as oracles that have “learned” from their training data and often don’t cite sources (or cite imaginary sources). This decontextualizes knowledge, prevents humans from collaborating, and makes it harder for writers and researchers to build a reputation and engage in healthy intellectual debate. Generative-AI companies say that their chatbots will themselves make scientific advancements, but those claims are purely hypothetical.

  (I originally put this as a top-level comment, my bad.)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Internet Desk⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Your description of those desks totally knocked some of my old memories loose. I remember going to a friend’s house in the late 90s when the first smallish “all-in-one” PCs started coming on the market (before the iMac claimed that space in ‘98). They had their new all-in-one PC set up on a tiny desk in the hallway outside their office. It was there so everyone in the family could use it, but I remember being shocked at how small it was, and so impressed that it didn’t need the whole corner of a room.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YSK: Gas stoves cause cancer⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I hate the interfaces, but especially the super-loud non-mutable beeps which seem to be common on every model I’ve seen. My two-burner induction setup has analog knobs for temp control, which is awesome, but it stills beep when you turn them, with every single temperature increase. Drives me crazy.

  I’ll never go back to gas though. My new apartment came with a gorgeous brand new gas range, and it absolutely sucks compared to my $50 countertop induction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah got it, thanks for the clarification.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Yup! I should have been more specific, Mobius Sync uses syncthing on iOS.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Obsidian is now free for work - Obsidian⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s always been free for me using Mobius Sync…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pope funeral 'is being rehearsed': Swiss Guard 'prepare for pontiff's death after the 88-year-old warned 'I may not survive' pneumonia⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, the previous pope was a member of Hitler Youth, though he was conscripted like everyone his age. So yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next one was a proper full-fledged Nazi.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing Muse: Our first generative AI model designed for gameplay ideation.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ugh.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why there is no photos of earth from space?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve earnestly answered some of your other questions, when it was quite clear you were either trolling or incredibly stubborn, and this additional question (which purposefully ignores the basic answers I gave you weeks ago) makes it obvious you don’t actually want to learn anything. Stop asking questions if you don’t intend to genuinely engage with the people who are taking the time to respond.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨DeepSeek sends shock waves across Silicon Valley.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Ed Zitron has the best takes on this imo. One of his pieces is linked in the posted article, but here it is again. His podcast also has some of the most grounded and hilarious insight into the absurdity of the AI bubble. If you want to hear from him in a more mainstream setting, I highly recommend the interview he did with Brooke Gladstone on On The Media. That was the first time I heard anyone really talk about the AI industry with genuine frankness and honestly.

  Basically, OpenAI, Sam Altman, and all of the big tech players have defrauded us and investors by raising laughably high amounts of money and wasting precious resources to build inferior and closed products, when any reasonable person would have known there were better ways. This whole thing also proves how essential competition is to a healthy market and producing things people actually want to use.

  In essence, DeepSeek — and I’ll get into its background and the concerns people might have about its Chinese origins — released two models that perform competitively (and even beat) models from both OpenAI and Anthropic, undercut them in price, and made them open, undermining not just the economics of the biggest generative AI companies, but laying bare exactly how they work. That last point is particularly important when it comes to OpenAI’s reasoning model, which specifically hid its chain of thought for fear of “unsafe thoughts” that might “manipulate the customer,” then muttered under their breath that the actual reason was that it was a “competitive advantage.” -Zitron

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are old ladies so popular on the internet?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Since this community is for any kind of question, I’ll answer, but I get the vague sense that you don’t really want a genuine answer, based on the inherent bias you included in the question (calling someone older than 20 a hag is pretty uncool, for example).

  But here goes: people have different tastes. Different things turn on different people, and your lack of experience being aroused by older women says nothing about the legitimacy of those who are. Also being 21 for example, is still considered very young by most people. Your question presumes that everybody in the world must only be attracted to very young women, and frankly that’s a bit strange and just not how the world works.

  Try to put yourself in some other people’s shoes, and I think this question would answer itself. Your sexual preferences are not everyone’s preferences.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did UCLA Just Cure Baldness?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  100%

  I’ve had dreams where my long locks were dramatically blowing in the wind, only to wake up and run my hands through my…well shit, that’s just my scalp.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Did UCLA Just Cure Baldness?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I started losing my hair when I was a teenager, so I’ve been bald for most of my life. I’ve been shaving my head for decades because it’s the only way my head and face don’t look absurd. I’m totally used to it, and long ago accepted that I’d never have hair on my head again.

  But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want my hair back.

  If this turns out to be legit and works on most people, there could be a worldwide explosion of self-esteem in adults.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Israel orders army to plan to let Palestinians leave Gaza⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Aside from this being textbook ethnic cleansing, I’m sure the always honest and honorable Israeli military would never use this as an opportunity to more efficiently murder everyone who funnels to their “exits.”

  I really wish we would stop helping them be better at genocide.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘Forbidden Words’: Github Reveals How Software Engineers Are Purging Federal Databases⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I wish this was all true, I really do. But there is a time and a place to be calm. This is not that time, and this is not that place.

  These systems are supposed to have COOP plans (Continuity of Operations), but not all of them do. Systems are supposed to have some degree of backups, but I can tell you from experience that this is almost never the case in any meaningful way.

  I’ve spoken to a number of feds who said their work disappeared overnight. They didn’t choose to comply, and didn’t have sufficient backups in place because of a lack of resources. Their manager or an administrative assistant somewhere most likely went on a deletion spree, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.

  Sometimes when this stuff is gone, it’s really gone. And we have every right to be furious about it.

  100% agree about the media incentives, but sometimes outrage is not only warranted, but essential.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Polish president says don't arrest Netanyahu at Auschwitz ceremony⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It seems like the perfect time and place for the arrest happen to be honest. Much of my family was killed at Auschwitz, and I would be incredibly offended if Netanyahu, a man currently committing genocide, turned up at a memorial for genocide. He has no right to be there, but if he goes he should absolutely be arrested immediately.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Introducing AI News Bot for Lemmy!⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m sure you know, but you’re probably going to get a lot of grief for this. I’m deeply suspicious of any new AI tool, especially one that tries to get in between me and my news (looking at you Feedly), and I’m sure I’m not the only one. So if you’re not already, I’d prepare yourself for a lot of strong emotions, and probably not in a good way.

  If you wanted to get ahead of that kind of thing, you might want to explain what kinds of safeties you’re building into it. For example, on your roadmap you say want it to “Generate argument of for and against perspective then summarise the result of the 2 arguments.” This kind of thing in particular is quite risky. Any time you try to introduce value statements into an LLM summary, you’re in the danger zone. Even if you’re just trying to summarize the actual perspective of the piece, you’re basically just begging the LLM to hallucinate. But asking it to summarize hypothetical opposing arguments is just asking for trouble.

  I could go on, but I don’t want to start a pile on. I appreciate when folks try to build cool stuff, you’ve just waded into some choppy waters…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's 2025 now, what are the games you'll be starting the year with?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks! That’s good advice. Even in easier games I always have to stop and remind myself to chill and figure out the pattern. And whenever I do, it’s much more manageable and ultimately more fun.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's 2025 now, what are the games you'll be starting the year with?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Finally grabbed a copy of Sekiro, and though I’ve never been much of a fan of uncompromisingly punishing games, I’m optimistic that this will be the one that gets me there.

  Haven’t started it yet, so it’s possible, if not likely that it’s going to kick my ass.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Facebook and Instagram to Unleash AI-Generated ‘Users’ No One Asked For⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Good luck exploiting and abusing your users and their data when all your users end up being LLMs. This move kind of seems like a world-famous restaurant deciding that it will start serving meals that include inedible props which only look like food, on the same plates as their real food. What could go wrong?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Serving my media library to my TV (local network only), i need suggestions⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  As suggested above, I would try Infuse player. I recently switched from a Kodi/Jellyfin setup to an Apple TV/Jellyfin setup and I’m extremely happy with it. Infuse has a free trial, and then you can choose to pay a few different ways (they do have a rather expensive lifetime option, but it might be worth it). The Infuse app has no trouble playing directly from my Jellyfin server, no transcoding, even for full 4K Bluray rips, and yes it even supports Dolby Vision (which the native Jellyfin app struggles with). No hiccups, no issues with multiple audio tracks or subtitles, it’s just buttery smooth direct playback.

  It also has a couple different ways of interacting with your Jellyfin library, so it feels completely seamless to me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How Google Spent 15 Years Creating a Culture of Concealment⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I get what you’re saying, but internal company communications (especially for publicly traded companies) still should be accessible to valid legal inquiries, otherwise there is absolutely no hope for any kind of accountability. Having IMs between end-users be off the record by default seems totally reasonable and good to me, but internal communications should not be deletable at all, let alone manually by executives. The US Government has record retention schedules, through which non-records (water-cooler talk or the digital equivalent) are kept private and real records are identified and preserved. This is the kind of thing that Congress needs to regulate for private companies. Google blatantly and actively deleted conversations they knew would be relevant to the case, that’s unacceptable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pope Francis urges investigation for possible crime of genocide in Gaza⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, you’re right, the more investigations the better. It’s just any “Vatican Investigation” should be treated with extreme skepticism.