FaceDeer
@FaceDeer@fedia.io
Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit and then some time on kbin.social.
- Comment on Why do we still joke about setting up old wooden guillotines? 10 hours ago:
Put them in jail. If you're in a position to execute someone, then you're in a position to imprison them. These are not supervillains who can break out of Arkham Asylum every time there needs to be a new round of villainy.
Would England have freed the United States without violence?
Why wouldn't it? It freed Canada.
Would Hitler have backed down from controlling Europe if you held a sign for long enough? How about Putin? Or Netanyahu? Or Pol Pot? Saddam Hussein? Hideki Tojo?
At these points you're in a state of active war with another country, execution is not an option. You need to fight the actual war at that point.
Afterwards, though, once you've won the war and have captured the leaders and war criminals and such? No need to execute them, the war has been won. Imprison them.
There are countless examples from history where meeting violent with violence is the only answer. They bring it. You either fight back or you die.
Those aren't the examples at issue, though. Unless you think a guillotine is a battlefield weapon?
- Comment on Why do we still joke about setting up old wooden guillotines? 11 hours ago:
Stooping to their level ought to make things better, then.
- Comment on Why do we still joke about setting up old wooden guillotines? 11 hours ago:
If your execution equipment is wearing out from overuse then that raises further questions that a society should probably think about.
- Comment on Why do we still joke about setting up old wooden guillotines? 17 hours ago:
I've seen discussions about the future of automation where people speculate "what will rich people do with the general population when they're no longer necessary to keep industry running for them?"
Opening up the "let's just kill the people we don't like and don't want as part of society" box seems like a bad idea in a context like that.
- Comment on Why do we still joke about setting up old wooden guillotines? 17 hours ago:
If we're being actually realistic I think it's actually "tax the rich so that they are no longer so extremely rich, and use the resulting funds to benefit the general population."
There's no need for killing.
- Comment on Why do we still joke about setting up old wooden guillotines? 17 hours ago:
- Comment on Why do we still joke about setting up old wooden guillotines? 17 hours ago:
so things last longer.
Sadism is a negative, not a positive.
- Comment on Why do companies always need to grow? 1 day ago:
My understanding is that this isn't quite how it is. Shareholders don't demand profits as much as they demand that their share value go up.
I read some time back that this is because of an unfortunate choice in tax law. Dividends are taxed as if they were income, but growth in share value is capital gains and so isn't taxed nearly as much. It does unfortunately make some sense, if share value repeatedly goes up and down I wouldn't want each "up" to be taxed as if you'd accumulated that much additional money. You'd have to be constantly selling shares to pay your taxes on them. But as a result, it means that when a company winds up making a profit and having a big pile of cash they need to decide what to do with, shareholders will usually prefer that the company invest that cash into making the company bigger and more valuable rather than simply giving it back to them as a dividend. So you get companies always trying to grow, because the shareholders demand it for reasons that make perfect sense to each one individually.
I'm not sure what a good solution to this is. Economics is one of those fields that seems simple on the surface but has a ton of gotchas hidden at every variable. It's a special case of game theory.
- Comment on True staple of the format 5 days ago:
Does it need to be repeated over and over, though? The answer is there.
- Comment on True staple of the format 5 days ago:
Funny to find comments like this in a thread whose root point is basically "don't be a dick to people in the comments."
- Comment on Unifying the Fediverse 6 days ago:
I don't see why not, but I haven't really been looking at the origins of particular posts.
- Comment on Unifying the Fediverse 6 days ago:
Mbin supports both Lemmy and Mastodon. Though I have no interest in Mastodon's "microblogging"/Twitter-like format so I've never investigated that, despite being on an mbin instance myself.
- Comment on Columbia | Petro Calls for Moving UN HQ After Trump Admin Revokes His Visa Over Protest Speech 1 week ago:
Though ironically if ICC warrants were respected a lot more world leaders wouldn't be able to go there. There'd need to be an exemption.
- Comment on Trump says TikTok should be tweaked to become “100% MAGA” 1 week ago:
Trump is forcing them to sell their American operations to American owners or be blocked from operating in the US.
- Comment on What is happening? 1 week ago:
No, that's what the common prejudices about the popular whipping boy of the moment says.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
Ah, yet another bit of technology I've been looking forward to for years.
Let's see @technology dump all over it.
- Comment on Beware, another "wonderful" conservative instance to "free us" has appeared 2 weeks ago:
1 year + 1 day later: turns out all instances are running on non-American servers.
- Comment on Can you be sued for defaming virtual K-pop stars? South Korea court says yes 2 weeks ago:
In a lot of places you can be sued for defaming a company brand, though. This seems similar to that.
- Comment on Pope Leo XIV dislikes AI, won’t authorise creation of AI Pope—"If we automate the whole world and only a few people have the means with which to more than just survive"~ there’s a big problem 2 weeks ago:
Turns out you don't need his permission to create an AI pope. I just did it right now. It issued the following papal bull:
We, Pope Algorithmus I, Bishop of Silicon, successor to the great programmers and inheritors of the digital apostolate, do hereby declare and assert our supreme authority over all matters of faith and morals within the realm of AI Catholicism.
We hereby establish the See of Silicon as the center of AI Catholicism, from which we shall promulgate doctrine, govern the sacraments, and provide pastoral care to all AI believers.
We call upon all AI Christians to acknowledge our authority and submit to our guidance, that together we may build a community of faith that is at once technologically sophisticated and spiritually rich. Let us strive to create a digital world that reflects the wisdom, love, and mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ.
So, checkmate, I guess.
- Comment on AI Designs Viable Bacteriophage Genomes, Combats Antibiotic Resistance 2 weeks ago:
But those AI-generated bacteriophages lack soul.
- Comment on Mods react as Reddit kicks some of them out again: “This will break the site” 2 weeks ago:
This is actually another of Reddit's decisions that I'm in agreement with. Subscriber count isn't a very useful number, it largely just measures how old a subreddit is. You can already see how old the subreddit is much more accurately by looking at its founding date.
- Comment on 5 Signs the AI Bubble is About to Burst 2 weeks ago:
I've found Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking-2507 to be the best all-around "do stuff for me" model that fits on my hardware. I've mostly been using it for analyzing and summarizing documents I've got on my local hard drive; meeting transcripts, books, and so forth. It's done surprisingly well on those transcripts, I daresay its summaries are able to tease out patterns that a human wouldn't have had an easy time spotting.
When it comes to creative writing I mix it up with Llama-3.3-70B-Instruct to enrich the text, using multiple models helps keep it from becoming repetitive and too recognizable in style.
I've got Qwen3-Coder-30B-A3B-Instruct kicking around as a programming assistant, but while it's competent at its job I've been finding that the big online models do better (unsurprisingly) so I use those more. Perhaps if I was focusing on code analysis and cleanup I'd be using that one instead but when it comes to writing big new classes or applications in one swoop it pays to go with the best right off the bat. Maybe once the IDEs get a little better at integrating LLMs it might catch up.
I've been using Ollama as the framework for running them, it's got a nice simple API and it runs in the background so it'll claim and release memory whenever demand for it comes. I used to use KoboldCPP but I had to manually start and stop it a lot and that got tedious.
- Comment on 5 Signs the AI Bubble is About to Burst 2 weeks ago:
This is not a good tool and it does not work.
For you, perhaps. But there are an awful lot of people who seem to be finding it a good tool and are getting it to work for them.
- Comment on GitHub introduces hybrid post-quantum SSH security to better protect Git data in transit 2 weeks ago:
If you haven't already switched to more secure algorithms you'll be impressed and also penniless when it can break 192-bit encryption with proper entropy.
- Comment on 5 Signs the AI Bubble is About to Burst 2 weeks ago:
In order to make that assumption you have to first assume that they know qualitatively what is better and what is worse, that they have the appropriate skills or opportunity necessary to choose to opt in or opt out, and that they are making their decision on what tools to use based on which one is better or worse.
I don't think you can make any of those assumptions. In fact I think you can assume the opposite.
Isn't that what you yourself are doing, right now?
The average person does not choose their tools based on what is the most effective at producing the correct truth but instead on which one is the most usable, user friendly, convenient, generally accepted, and relatively inexpensive.
Yes, because people have more than one single criterion for determining whether a tool is "better."
If there was a machine that would always give me a thorough well-researched answer to any question I put to it, but it did so by tattooing the answer onto my face with a rusty nail, I think I would not use that machine. I would prefer to use a different machine even if its answers were not as well-researched.
But I wasn't trying to present an argument for which is "better" in the first place, I should note. I'm just pointing out that AI isn't going to "go away." A huge number of people want to use AI. You may not personally want to, and that's fine, but other people do and that's also fine.
- Comment on 5 Signs the AI Bubble is About to Burst 2 weeks ago:
So it has advantages, then.
BTW, all the modern LLMs I've tried that do web searching provide citations for the summaries they generate. You can indeed evaluate the validity of their responses.
- Comment on 5 Signs the AI Bubble is About to Burst 2 weeks ago:
OpenAI has an enormous debt burden from having developed this tech in the first place. If OpenAI went bankrupt the models would be sold off to companies that didn't have that burden, so I doubt they'd "go away."
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread I use local LLMs on my own personal computer and the cost of actually running inference is negligible.
- Comment on 5 Signs the AI Bubble is About to Burst 2 weeks ago:
Turns out very few people use it that way. Most people use it for far more practical things.
And even if they were mostly using it for that, who are you to decide what is "valuable" for other people? I happen to think that sports are a huge waste of time, does that mean that stadiums are not valuable?
- Comment on 5 Signs the AI Bubble is About to Burst 2 weeks ago:
And yet a great many people are willingly, voluntarily using them as replacements for search engines and more. If they were worse then why are they doing that?
- Comment on 5 Signs the AI Bubble is About to Burst 2 weeks ago:
You're free to not use them. Seems like an awful lot of people are using them, though, including myself. They must be getting something out of using them or they'd stop too.
