jwmgregory
@jwmgregory@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on Wikipedia articles could have Context boxes 3 days ago:
wikipedia’s traffic is public data. articles do trend over time on the site and it’s a separate phenomenon from the featured content.
sometimes a random article pops up in the trends on a given day or week. OP wants a way to know why.
- Comment on YSK There's a campaign to replace the distorted Mercator world map with the fairer Equal-Earth projection 4 days ago:
maybe a little abrasive in tone but i don’t totally disagree, this is kind of fucking dumb and i don’t understand why im 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.
- Comment on Wyoming to host massive AI data center using more electricity than all Wyoming homes combined 3 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on YSK: Deezer, the music streaming service, is owned by a company whose Founder and CEO is a Russian Oligarch with connections to the Kremlin and donates to the American Republican party. 3 weeks ago:
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 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.
- Comment on Women Dating Safety App 'Tea' Breached, Users' IDs Posted to 4chan 3 weeks ago:
This is a strawman argument, though. Sure, that can and does happen, but it isn’t the existence of spaces like Tea that is problematic, it is the general relationship between men and women in our society generally. Further, I’m clearly not saying opposing Tea is inherently misogyny. It is a very particular kind of reaction that I am talking about, and you know this.
Tea itself really isn’t any worse than any other forum. You could have the same thing happen to a man on other platforms, there is nothing unique about Tea in that capacity and it is disingenuous to levy that criticism against the platform in isolation. People dislike it because they have a weird caricature of women in their head and assume every person on this app must have been a gossip or an evil person, yet there is no real basis for that claim other than the fact the audience is mainly women. Hence, the “misogyny,” that you seem to not really have the prior life experience to see. You can look through my profile here. I’ve said plenty in support of men’s rights and men’s issues as well, I’m really not rabidly in coalition for a particular gender’s rights or anything. I’m just calling it as I see it and the reaction to Tea on the web is largely sexist.
No one said false accusations aren’t real or that opposing them makes you a misogynist. You’re being intentionally obtuse and conflating a critique of people’s treatment of women in public discourse with a critique of apps such as these generally to make it seem absurd to point out how sexist some of the reaction to Tea has been. Mostly because I think you saw the word “misogyny” thrown out and for some reason took it as a personal insult or something. I think most people would reflect upon that and I’d hope you would too.
I probably won’t further respond because I’m getting the idea honest discourse and dialectic isn’t your goal here.
- Comment on ‘No shops, no schools’: homes in England built without basic amenities 3 weeks ago:
it’s more you’re expected to buy a car to get to the only pub in the tri-metro area which is itself owned by one of two large corporations who control the entire market. what’s that? you don’t like the idea of dedicating 1/3 of your income or more to being a motor vehicle owner? well, there’s always bootstraps.
suburbanism isn’t the only shitty american thing you guys have imported from us as of late but it’s probably one of the more starkly visible ones.
i’m frankly surprised either of our nations have made it this long. the anglosphere is cooked, man.
- Comment on Do you think GOG might be the next? 3 weeks ago:
the people who run these companies are so astronomically detached from the average human experience - meaning that tagline might actually be the line of thought they’re predicating this on.
they might say it in corpo drivel-speak, but it’s pretty clear any negative consequences they can think up over the status quo are based in this fear.
- Comment on RIP AND TEAR 3 weeks ago:
based and less absurd of a comparison than it seems.
jesus is a hard ass bitch in the bible, not to even mention all the non-canonical sources. i’m not religious but they’re cool stories.
- Comment on Women Dating Safety App 'Tea' Breached, Users' IDs Posted to 4chan 3 weeks ago:
if that’s truly how the leak happened then these people, in any reasonable jurisdiction, would be considered criminally negligent, at the least.
yay compsci ethics courses :D
boo courts failing to uphold the law >:(
- Comment on Women Dating Safety App 'Tea' Breached, Users' IDs Posted to 4chan 3 weeks ago:
saw this happening here, saw it happening in reddit threads on the topic, saw it all over the media cycle in the comments.
i agree, people’s visceral backlash against this app is steeped in a deep misogyny.
watching people take somewhat valid privacy concerns as an excuse to let loose their most toxic feelings towards women used to be the sort of thing only losers or emboldened megalomaniacs did in public, even just a decade ago.
in the past years i’ve just seen all my peers, regardless of political affiliation, manipulated into a cult of outrage that serves as another hamster wheel upon which capital may spin.
imtiredboss.png
- Comment on Vibe coding takes the "science" out of computer science 3 weeks ago:
why do you guys always just move the goalposts?
“X thing isn’t real AI, because real AI sucks and I might have to concede the positive attributes of X about AI generally… [OCR, chess bots, etc.]”
“Y thing isn’t real vibe coding, because real vibing coding sucks and I might have to concede the positive attributes of Y about vibe coding…”
like… you seem like you’ve just decided these things are “bad things” in your head and just shift your definitions the moment you meet reality and see anything that might evoke cognitive dissonance about it.
- Comment on true friend 4 weeks ago:
That one is much more recent but much less engaging of an anecdote imo. These are kind of lame but I’m always willing to chatter lol.
Honestly just had a different, actual friend come over the day the news broke about the election in Trump’s favor here in the US and he was super into the honey jack daniels at the time. We just pounded an entire big bottle of that and I ended up way drunker than felt reasonably possible. Ended up shirtless sitting in the shower throwing up my guts. Also accidentally stepped on my cat which was sad (but I think she was okay). Oh and ig the Dictator-In-Chief shit happening but overall bad experience and while I didn’t really feel like I was gonna die but it made me retch a bit every time I smell cheap liquor mixed with honey from then on.
I honestly had problems with alcohol from like, 17-18 all the way until I was 21, almost 22. I don’t really drink much anymore. It’s a bad drug anyway. Basically toxic. Nicotine is also up there. What’s it matter that nicotine itself doesn’t really much cause cancer if every single fucking way you can ingest it is carcinogenic itself somehow? Not to mention the addiction both of those can cause. The social acceptance of both is insane. I’ve ingested my fair share of both and more tho so maybe that’s why I’m so cognizant of everyone huffing and drinking what is paramount to a poison. I’m still hooked on both every once in awhile and want to quit but I don’t really think that’s the topic at hand here, bc I get these vibes when people bring that up in this vein.
- Comment on true friend 5 weeks ago:
random as fuck for me to mention here but i actually used to consider woodford reserve my favorite liquor until i bought one of the bigass bottles and a coworker at the time i thought was cool kept threatening to deck me if we didn’t keep taking shots until we went through the entire bottle. i’ve never genuinely thought i was going to die the way i did being collapse on the ground after. seriously thought that was it and i was gonna choke out on vomit or something in a drunken stupor. i did the math once to figure out my BAC that night and i should’ve probably died lmao.
anyway long story short i have a food aversion to the taste and smell of woodford reserve now. any of those cheap honey whiskeys too but that’s a different story for a different time.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
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.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 weeks ago:
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.
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 generally 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.
- Comment on Robot performs first realistic surgery without human help: System trained on videos of surgeries performs like an expert surgeon 1 month ago:
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?
- Comment on what 1 month ago:
well there’s a bit of human psychology at play here. if you see an item listed for lower than market value the seller has already implicitly devalued the item in the listing to the audience. it isn’t surprising some rational agents would then proceed to either ignore the listing out of fear of low quality or attempt to haggle for a lower price due to the already admittedly lesser value of the merchandise. it doesn’t make objective sense at all, i agree, but it makes a whole lot of systemic sense.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 1 month ago:
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.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 1 month ago:
it’s more than a challenge, it’s a fucking fantasy dude lmfao. people don’t wake up everyday and choose to do these things, they do these things out of necessity. even if individual action was effective in stemming climate change (it’s not), you have to acknowledge that people aren’t choosing where and how they get their food. you can’t blame someone for not being willing to sacrifice their own comfort or economic posture for a *checks notes*\ infinitesimally small, improbable, and uncertain chance that their actions might help the environment, maybe, just a little bit. that’s fucking patently absurd to expect any rational agent to make that choice the way you are advocating.
even in this weird victim-blaming mindset people advocating on this basis have, the corps are still at fault! it’s fucking doublespeak and brainwashing, i swear.
- Comment on YSK that apart from not having a car, the single greatest thing you can do for the climate is simply eating less red meat 1 month ago:
you could firebomb every data center on earth today and global energy usage would go down like, 10-12% at most.
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.
- Comment on AI agents wrong ~70% of time: Carnegie Mellon study 1 month ago:
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.
- Comment on AI agents wrong ~70% of time: Carnegie Mellon study 1 month ago:
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 >:(
- Comment on Study Finds LLMs Biased Against Men in Hiring 1 month ago:
the problematic part of this is that you’ve stripped all context to support your, admittedly bigoted, rhetoric and ethos.
black people, generally, have worse education outcomes than whites in american education. you’d still be an incredibly shitty and terrible person if you advocated hiring white people over black people by wrote rule. you can find plenty of “studies” that formalize that argument just as you have here, though.
no, i think most rational people understand that in a scenario like this all people have, on average, the same basic cognitive faculties and potential, and would then proceed to advocate for improving the educational conditions for groups that are falling behind not due to their own nature, but due to the system they are in.
but idk, i’m not a bigot so maybe my brain just implicitly rejects the idea “X people are worse/less intelligent/etc than Y people”
fucking think about what you’re saying. there is no “right people” to hate other than the rich and powerful. it isn’t a subversion of the feminist message to admit this. in fact, it makes you a better feminist. real feminist aren’t sexist.
- Comment on Kids are making deepfakes of each other, and laws aren’t keeping up 1 month ago:
it existed if society liked you enough.
fascists just have a habit of tightening that belt smaller and smaller, is what’s going on.
- Comment on Attorney General: ‘Everyone is Welcome Here’ sign cannot be displayed in Idaho schools 1 month ago:
no, this is a classic fallacy in historiography.
things don’t just happen. we have to choose to do them, first.
your thesis ignores… every single time in history progress didnt “win out.”
saying “progress wins out eventually” is unfalsifiable because the only true constant in this universe is change. you’re like, not technically wrong but the statement is so detached from the human experience as to be meaningless. this type of analysis isn’t welcome in academia for a reason.
in other words. get out there, there’s work to do!
- Comment on xkcd #3109: Dehumidifier 1 month ago:
How does this make any sense at all?
I bought a washer that has wifi connectivity.
- Comment on Men are opening up about mental health to AI instead of humans 1 month ago:
appreciate the offer king. i might check in and occasionally participate in the comm, i like the idea.
my main concern is ensuring there isn’t a weird invasion of the space by neofascists. that’s the main issue with men’s right spaces currently. it doesn’t seem easy to prevent as every such space i come across has this problem. the exact thing we identify as hating here pervades spaces trying to tackle this problem… something of a catch 22.
i fucking adore the naming, tho. reprieve is exactly what we all need. i think you should really lean into the abandonment of identity and related identity politics for this community. it shouldn’t be about men in particular, it’s about a reprieve from this shitty contemporary world we have grown up into. after all, race or sex or whatever aren’t even real… they’re just arbitrary lines that cultures draw upon the world. important to individuals maybe, yes, but i’ve always felt it to be something of an albatross around the left’s neck. not all right-wing criticisms of “identity politics” are necessarily unwarranted… (😬 oopsie i broke the groupthink too hard that time guys o nooooos 🙈)
- Comment on Men are opening up about mental health to AI instead of humans 1 month ago:
this sort of stuff gets downvoted incessantly in leftist spaces which is a damn shame bc i feel like a lot of these places are my home to a certain degree. it makes me feel unwelcome. ik that’s like, the fucking point and why they do it but still.
these sorts of people are just on some weird, misguided, revanchist agenda that necessitates getting “revenge” on certain groups of people instead of sticking with the core principles of the ideology which clearly state that you should kindly refrain from being an asshole. there is nothing to be gained from exacting some revenge fantasy upon straight white men. you’re exactly right, the only people who deserve to have shit flung their way over who they are is the rich and powerful.
- Comment on Men are opening up about mental health to AI instead of humans 1 month ago:
probably not but that’s because sexism against men is normalized and you’re not allowed to talk about it unless you’re a neonazi for some reason.
side note, this is exactly why the “young broccoli haired boy to fascist brownshirt” pipeline exists. they have real and genuine issues and instead of getting any sort of community or support virtually every facet of society is telling them their issues are fake and that they are destined to be monsters. then someone like j peterson comes along and tells them “life isn’t so bad, it’s okay, just clean your room and be disciplined, it’ll all start to look up soon champ… and uh… also hate the gays, black people, and other minorities - they’re the woke mob that left you abandoned like this!” people making shocked pikachu face at young men being hardcore MAGAts are so sorely out of touch with what being a man is like and the kinds of trauma that can stem from the male experience. it’s obvious to most of us why this issue exists, i hope. this comment chain is a great example. if you even touch the topic you get barraged with people telling you to essentially shut the fuck up and stop entertaining the idea that men are possibly people too and not some root of all fucking evil in the world.
the amount of literal hate I see towards men in casual discourse is insane. can say the most psychotic shit in most circles nowadays but if you point your malice at the “right kinds” of people most won’t even bat an eye. see people frequently talking about doing unhinged shit to others solely because they are a man or [insert other group they don’t like generally for some stupid fucking reason] and there is a preconceived slight, danger, or aggression. leftists think they’re better people morally but we’re really not. i have seen the exact same bullshit bigotry promulgate every community i know of in the past few years. the same brainrot the conservatives have had since the tea partiers has infiltrated our spaces too. everyone genuinely is dumb, angry, and hateful now.
I am not wholly convinced that our culture being the target of multiple astroturfing campaigns hasn’t degraded people’s capability for nuance, compassion, empathy, and ontology. the men