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 Pay-per-output? AI firms blindsided by beefed up robots.txt instructions. 2 days ago:
Nope, this was one of them. The case had two parts, one about the training and one about the downloading of pirated books. The judge issued a preliminary judgment about the training part, that was declared fair use without any further need to address it in trial. The downloading was what was proceeding to trial and what the settlement offer was about.
- Comment on Pay-per-output? AI firms blindsided by beefed up robots.txt instructions. 2 days ago:
And suddenly the Internet is gung-ho in favor of EULAs being enforceable simply by reading the content the website has already provided.
Recent major court cases have held that the training of an AI model is fair use and doesn't involve copyright violation, so I don't think licensing actually matters in this case. They'd have to put the content behind a paywall to stop the trainer from seeing it in the first place.
- Comment on Reddit is dropping subscriber counts on subreddits: Users will now see seven-day metrics that track active visitors and contributions instead. 2 days ago:
One of the rare changes Reddit has made in recent years that seems like a good idea.
They're also moving to limit the number of large subreddits that any individual moderator account can moderate, which seems like a good thing. Hopefully they'll be serious enough about it that they'll bother to catch the power moderators that simply set up a bunch of different alts for themselves.
- Comment on Holocaust Museum LA deletes post saying 'never again' applies to all people 4 days ago:
Insert the meme of the goose pursuing the Holocaust Museum angrily demanding "who doesn't it apply to, Holocaust Museum? WHO DOESN'T IT APPLY TO?" Here.
- Comment on New report blames Phison's pre-release firmware for SSD failures — not Microsoft’s August patch for Windows 4 days ago:
A random Fediverse commenter is claiming that a random facebook admin says it was verified by Phison engineers.
Nothing is real.
- Comment on New report blames Phison's pre-release firmware for SSD failures — not Microsoft’s August patch for Windows 4 days ago:
That's always the way. Publish the big splashy allegations of terrible things on the front page, publish the retraction weeks later down in a footnote somewhere deep inside. It's obvious which gets more views.
- Comment on New report blames Phison's pre-release firmware for SSD failures — not Microsoft’s August patch for Windows 4 days ago:
and additionally verified by Phison engineers
- Comment on A goodbye to kbin ... 6 days ago:
I, too, started out on kbin and ended up migrating to an mbin instance. I sent Ernest some money via that Koffi thing he had and I don't regret it - I hope he found the funds useful, whatever it is that happened to him in the end. He kicked off an alternative to Lemmy and that's super important for a distributed decentralized system like the Fediverse, you can't have just one client for it.
- Comment on Plot twist 1 week ago:
Force Lightning is a Sith technique, not a Jedi one. Unscientific!
- Comment on What If There’s No AGI? 1 week ago:
- Comment on What If There’s No AGI? 1 week ago:
If it's substrate dependent then that just means we'll build new kinds of hardware that includes whatever mysterious function biological wetware is performing.
Discovering that this is indeed required would involve some world-shaking discoveries about information theory, though, that are not currently in line with what's thought to be true. And yes, I'm aware of Roger Penrose's theories about non-computability and microtubules and whatnot. I attended a lecture he gave on the subject once. I get the vibe of Nobel disease from his work in that field, frankly.
If it really turns out to be the case though, microtubules can be laid out on a chip.
- Comment on US would control Gaza, displace all its people under new plan: report 1 week ago:
A 2% swing in the votes would have changed the election outcome.
- Comment on US would control Gaza, displace all its people under new plan: report 1 week ago:
That would require them to take some kind of action.
- Comment on US would control Gaza, displace all its people under new plan: report 1 week ago:
Good thing "Genocide Joe" isn't in charge any more, imagine how much worse that would have been!
(/s, since satire is dead)
- Comment on FTC chair Andrew Ferguson warns Google not to filter or suppress emails sent by Republicans over Gmail 2 weeks ago:
There's a pretty big divide between failing to stop something like this and being fine with it. Democracy is hard to preserve sometimes and that sucks. But being fine with it eroding is another matter entirely.
I'm not American so I can't do anything about the FTC by design. I'm doing volunteer work for political parties in my own country that are helping to insulate and distance us from America instead.
- Comment on FTC chair Andrew Ferguson warns Google not to filter or suppress emails sent by Republicans over Gmail 2 weeks ago:
"I got mine so screw everyone else" is a common Republican refrain.
- Comment on AI Killed My Job: Translators 2 weeks ago:
It really sounds like a "Let's go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this all to blow over" reaction.
Things will be different. Maybe AI won't replace humans entirely in this role, but it's still going to be a major tool in the toolbox.
- Comment on Trump threatens tariffs on countries that ‘discriminate’ against US tech 2 weeks ago:
What about the tariffs on countries that want to see what's in the Epstein files?
- Comment on Trump threatens tariffs on countries that ‘discriminate’ against US tech 2 weeks ago:
Don't tell Trump, but our effective tariff rate is actually quite low because the USMCA exempts a huge amount of goods from them. Shh. He probably has no idea that's in there, even though he's the guy who negotiated it last time he was in office.
- Comment on 80s Nostalgia AI Slop Is Boomerfying the Masses for a Past That Never Existed 2 weeks ago:
A perfectly cromulent word.
- Comment on Memory Alpha has an entry for "Slap" and it's tagged under Medicine 😂 2 weeks ago:
Both examples were administered by doctors so that checks out.
- Comment on THE NEXT CLANKER BETTER DO MY GODDAMN DISHES 2 weeks ago:
It's there so that all those humans who insist their lives will have no "meaning" without having to work for a living have something to work on for a living.
- Comment on THE NEXT CLANKER BETTER DO MY GODDAMN DISHES 2 weeks ago:
Always reminds me of this bit on the Conan O'Brien show.
- Comment on Is it realistic to hope that lemmy grows to the size of the bigger social media platforms? 2 weeks ago:
There are downsides to small-town life, though. Some of my views don't match the ones that are prevalent here, so I either end up getting hammered with downvotes or self-censoring when certain topics of discussion come up. And unlike Reddit it's not a big and diverse enough place that I can just go find a sub-community that is more tolerant.
- Comment on Is it realistic to hope that lemmy grows to the size of the bigger social media platforms? 2 weeks ago:
But surely if all those people join the Fediverse and see my insightful comments they'll change their views to align with mine, won't they?
- Comment on Microsoft asks customers for feedback on reported SSD failures 2 weeks ago:
Reminds me of the 2009 Toyota accelerator pedal incident.
- Comment on If copyright on a work expired immediately after death, would be that a bad or good idea? 2 weeks ago:
I think I'd prefer a flat timespan rather than a lifetime-dependent one. The two flaws I see with the lifetime-dependent one are:
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It can give wildly different opportunity to the rightsholder depending on how old they are and what their random life circumstances happen to be. A 20-year-old author could have 80 years' hold on their work whereas a 70-year-old one could have just 10. Unless Truck-kun randomly gets involved and sends that 20-year-old author into another world a day after he published.
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It creates an incentive to assassinate popular authors.
It also creates complexity for work-for-hire situations where a corporation owns a copyright, though that's already a special case so one could continue handling it separately.
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- Comment on If copyright on a work expired immediately after death, would be that a bad or good idea? 2 weeks ago:
So glad to see another reference to this guy's work in the wild.
As an amusing side note, the original term of copyright in the first law that established it (the British Copyright Act of 1710) was a flat 14 years, with a mechanism that allowed you to apply for only one extension of an additional 14 years. So most things would be 14 years, and whatever select things were particularly valuable or important could have 28 years. Under Pollock's analysis this is just about the perfect possible system. So by sheer coincidence this is something that we got right the first time and ever since then we've been "correcting" it to be less and less optimal.
- Comment on Do LLM modelers maintain a list of manual corrections fed by humans? 2 weeks ago:
I'm not a deep expert on LLMs, but I've been following their development and write code that uses them so I can think of two systemic approaches to "solving" the strawberry problem.
One is chain-of-thought reasoning, where the LLM does some preliminary note-taking (essentially talking to itself) before it gives a final answer. I've seen it tackle problems like this by saying "okay, how is strawberry spelled?", listing out the individual letters (presumably because somewhere in its training data was information that let it memorize the spellings of common tokens) and then counting them.
Another is the "agentic" approach, where it might be explicitly provided with functions that allow it to send the problem to specialized program code. Eg, there could be a count_letters(string, letter_to_count) function that it's able to call. I expect that sort of thing would only be present for an LLM that's working in a framework where that sort of question is known to be significant, though, and I'm not sure what that might be in the real world. Something helping users fill out forms, perhaps? Or a "language tutor" that's expected to be able to figure out whatever weird incorrect words a student might type?
There are also LLMs that don't tokenize and feed the literal string of characters into the neural network, but as far as I'm aware none of the commonly-used ones are like that. They're just research models for now.
- Comment on The AI vibe shift is upon us 2 weeks ago:
Now we're "vibe vibing?"