antonim
@antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Remembering alum David Mills, who brought the internet into perfect time 3 days ago:
- Comment on Late 1900s 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, I’d sooner say the situation is reverse, social studies would move slower and less “definitively” than natural sciences. I’m into linguistics and literature and for me it’s nothing unusual to use scholarship and materials all the way from the 19th century. Of course, when you’re working with old literature or old language, you need old materials too… To me it’s very interesting and important to know what Aristotle thought of Homer, while it’s perfectly irrelevant for a doctor to know what Galen thought of the humours or for a chemist what Newton thought of alchemy.
- Comment on Bookwyrm.social, BookBrainz, OpenLibrary, etc. 2 weeks ago:
While I was looking for an alternative to Goodreads, which was widely known to be horrible long before the recent push against these big corpos, I tried BookWyrm (my first contact with the fediverse). I like their approach and wish them success, but what put me off is exactly what you say, the data they use is messy and lacks a lot of info. E.g. one of the things that makes (or at least made) GR satisfying is the visual aspect, you get these cool charts with the book covers, but Open Library doesn’t have covers on so many books. So should I go to Google Images and add covers for 80% of my “library” of like 500 books? Lots of work.
For comparison, TMDb, which is the source of data for Letterboxd, seems to have about as high-quality if not better data than IMDb that it is an alternative to (idk if it’s FOSS though?).
I’ve manually added many dozens books to Goodreads, so I’m not against assisting a site I use and enjoy. (Ofc at this point I regret improving that garbage site.) But the lack of data on BookWyrm was just too much even for me.
So in the end I just switched to the simplest solution: LibreOffice Calc. But we do need an alternative to GR. I came across BookBrainz a few years ago, it was still early in development. Today it might be better, I should give it a shot and maybe add some data there…
- Comment on This speaks for itself 4 weeks ago:
They’re the same picture.
- Comment on When You Block the Internet on Your Phone, Something Astonishing Happens Mentally 5 weeks ago:
How did you even do that, assuming you didn’t prevent your usage of computers and smartphones altogether? Just sheer willpower?
- Comment on If we can do it why can't they do it 5 weeks ago:
It looks like Buni, which doesn’t contain captions.
- Comment on Hate speech on X surged for at least 8 months after Elon Musk takeover – new research. 1 month ago:
Tbh that is an overall miniscule number and I’d say it’s not representative (based on my own occasional visits to that shithole through xcancel.com). It’s a question what they even counted as hate speech. Openly calling for the death of some minority probably counted, but did all those “just noticing things” barely-concealed dogwhistles count?
Wait, maybe I should read the article before replying to you…
The study measured overt hate speech, the meaning of which was clear to anyone who saw it – speech attacking identity groups or using toxic language. It did not measure covert types of hate speech, such as coded language used by some extremist groups to spread hate but plausibly deny doing so.
- Comment on Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US 1 month ago:
Today, the court found (among other things), that a few thousand of the summaries that Ross’s AI produced are way too similar to Westlaw’s summaries for it to be a coincidence.
This is probably just inevitable when your dataset is not large enough. I would be interested in seeing the LLM’s output and the original texts; I do remember the early ChatGPT producing some borderline copies of sentences that you could find online (with one or two words changed).
- Comment on Tech's Dumbest Mistake: Why Firing Programmers for AI Will Destroy Everything 1 month ago:
But people still complain about CGI in film, likely for the same reason it was criticised in the past that you mention - it looks like ass, if done cheaply (today) or with early underdeveloped tech (back in the past). Similarly so, the vast majority of AI-generated images look lazy, generic (duh) and basically give me the “ick”.
Yeah, maybe they’ll get better in the future. But does that mean that we can’t complain about their ugliness (or whatever other issue we have with them) now?
- Comment on this year has been pretty fun so far 1 month ago:
And you know what? Good for them.
- Comment on 'Meta Torrented over 81 TB of Data Through Anna's Archive, Despite Few Seeders' * TorrentFreak 1 month ago:
It’s not Meta vs us, but opensource vs Google and Openai.
I never said it’s Meta vs us. It’s Meta vs (in this particular case) the book publishing industry. You can’t reduce the whole situation to open source vs closed source, there’s other “axes” at play here as well.
They are being sued for copyright infringement when it’s clearly highly transformative
They downloaded the entire Libgen and more. Going by the traditional explanations of piracy, that’s like stealing several hundred bookstores worth of books all at once, and then claiming it’s alright because your own writing is not plagiarised from any of the books you’ve stolen. (Piracy is not the same as actual stealing of course, but countless people have been being legally bullied and ruined with that logic.) Meta also got its data from Internet Archive; unless they only obtained their materials that are public domain or under a similar license, they’ve obtained a lot of material that IA has been sentenced for allowing unlimited access to back in 2020 (if you’ve followed the Hachette v. Internet Archive case). The brainfucking conclusion of your and Facebook’s case is that using illegal services is perfectly legal as long as you sufficiently transform the results of the illegal activity.
The rules are fine as is
Actually they’re not. Copyright law is insanely restrictive, and I don’t think you’ve dealt much with media if you think it’s fine (but I don’t wish to delve into this further as it’s beyond the scope of discussion).
Meta isn’t the one trying to change them
Of course they’re not trying to change them, that’s the point, they will get away with breaking them while being perfectly fine with other actors not being able to do so.
- Comment on 'Meta Torrented over 81 TB of Data Through Anna's Archive, Despite Few Seeders' * TorrentFreak 1 month ago:
It’s not Meta vs us, but opensource vs Google and Openai.
I never said it’s Meta vs us. It’s Meta vs (in this particular case) the book publishing industry. You can’t reduce all of modern tech and AI economy to open source vs closed source.
They are being sued for copyright infringement when it’s clearly highly transformative
They downloaded the entire Libgen and more. Going by the traditional explanations of piracy, that’s like stealing several hundred bookstores worth of books all at once, and then claiming it’s alright because your own writing is not plagiarised from any of the books you’ve stolen. (Piracy is not the same as actual stealing of course, but countless people have been being legally bullied and ruined with that logic.) The brainfucking conclusion of Facebook’s
The rules are fine as is
Actually they’re not. Copyright law is insane
- Comment on 'Meta Torrented over 81 TB of Data Through Anna's Archive, Despite Few Seeders' * TorrentFreak 1 month ago:
If the existence of open source LLMs hinges on the benevolence of one of the few most cancerous tech companies in the world, maybe they’re not really worth it?
This isn’t about “heroes” and “villains”. Facebook has been and has stayed the “villain”, they’ve done something colossally illegal that any mere mortal would be sued to death for (by an another “villainous” instance, the media system that has made piracy a necessity in the first place), and they’re hoping to get away with it simply on technicalities and by having more money for better lawyers. Rules are rules, if you don’t like them maybe Facebook should try to change them (and not just for themselves, but for the rest of us too)?
- Comment on Microsoft Bing is trying to spoof Google UI when people search Google.com 2 months ago:
Yeah tbh, it’s just two shady companies trying to out-cheat each other.
- Comment on Do rhymes make sense to deaf people? 2 months ago:
- Comment on >:( rejected vibes 4 months ago:
John Cage - 4’33’’ megamix
- Comment on Google must sell Chrome to end search monopoly, justice department argues in court filing 4 months ago:
I’m worrying that whatever gets sold (Chrome or Android) might end up in the hands of someone even more scummy than Google.
- Comment on Habits of Insects 4 months ago:
Isnt the dog the first thing people think of when seeing “doge”?
It used to be so, but in recent several years Doge has lived and pretty much been defined in public consciousness by the cryptocurrency, which Musk has openly endorsed/memed.
- Comment on Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’ 4 months ago:
And that’s more or less what I was aiming for, so we’re back at square one. What you wrote is in line with my first comment:
it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines
The point is that there isn’t something that makes AI inherently superior to ordinary search engines. (Personally I haven’t found AI to be superior at all, but that’s a different topic.) The difference in quality is mainly a consequence of some corporate fuckery to wring out more money from the investors and/or advertisers and/or users at the given moment. AI is good (according to you) just because search engines suck.
- Comment on Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’ 5 months ago:
AI LLMs simply are better at surfacing it
Ok, but how exactly? Is there some magical emergent property of LLMs that guides them to filter out the garbage from the quality content?
- Comment on Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’ 5 months ago:
If you don’t feel like discussing this and won’t do anything more than deliberately miss the point, you don’t have to reply to me at all.
- Comment on Linus Torvalds reckons AI is ‘90% marketing and 10% reality’ 5 months ago:
they’re a great use in surfacing information that is discussed and available, but might be buried with no SEO behind it to surface it
This is what I’ve seen many people claim. But it is a weak compliment for AI, and more of a criticism of the current web search engines. Why is that information unavailable to search engines, but is available to LLMs? If someone has put in the work to find and feed the quality content to LLMs, why couldn’t that same effort have been invested in Google Search?
- Comment on there's now more ads in "legit" sites (YouTube, amazon) than in piracy sites 5 months ago:
It has custom user-made themes that are dark mode, so it probably has *dozens *of dark modes.