M1ch431
@M1ch431@slrpnk.net
- Comment on Are you ready for a $1,000 Steam Machine? Some analysts think you should be. 1 day ago:
It’s likely in everybody’s best interest that this is a wild success. Not only will game developers be incentivized to actually optimize their games for reasonable setups; this will unseat Nvidia’s monopoly over gamers with their ridiculously overpriced graphics cards and also Microsoft’s monopoly of a gamer’s operating system.
Nvidia’s partnership with Palantir is incredibly concerning and any blow to Nvidia is a welcome one. Encourage these developments and hype this all up.
- Comment on Fediverse needs "instance health" badges: stop hiding moderation deserts behind decentralization 2 days ago:
The fediverse needs a button to report accounts to instance owners for being obvious bots, like OP.
- Comment on Humans BY DEFAULT do not want to commit violence towards other humans, otherwise things like Killer's Remorse and PTSD would not exist. 1 week ago:
If the truth is in between, it’s because we’re arguing different things.
Not necessarily! Sometimes truth can emerge from two or more seemingly paradoxical or conflicting statements or ideas - or in other words, through dialectical reasoning.
- Comment on Humans BY DEFAULT do not want to commit violence towards other humans, otherwise things like Killer's Remorse and PTSD would not exist. 1 week ago:
You make valid points, but I feel the truth lies in between your comment and the people in the chain that you are responding to.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
I just don’t think it’ll ever be anything close to 99% effective given that this is a website. I explained why previously.
Thanks for engaging though - I do understand and appreciate the necessity of bot prevention and I’ll be sure to keep an eye out as a user. As another user suggested to me, there could be government-run social media that requires ID at sign-up.
Maybe a service like that would appeal to you if our government (apologies if you aren’t US-based) wasn’t labeling certain speech as terrorism.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
I trust instance owners to sort this out - until I don’t. I don’t support violations of privacy and I appreciate some level of pseudonymity and anonymity in social media.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
If there was an actor behind a handful of accounts that are mostly run by LLMs that mimic human input and interaction or are in some form manually operated to avoid detection, it’d be easily viable for state-level/professional actors to pull such an operation off and successfully manipulate a small platform like the fediverse. Even taking believable selfies of real people that fit the profile is possible and can be anticipated.
I’m not entirely against instance-level detection that attempts to understand user patterns and prevent or flag abuse to mods and admins, but I do believe that humanized input and interaction can already be effectively emulated and will only advance as time passes.
I believe that increased scrutiny of users in a centralized manner is a privacy violation. I use my instance and I give some level of trust to the instance owners, but I wouldn’t consent to them (or the software they choose to use) handing over my PII or usage patterns to a third-party group that suspects me. I would discontinue using the service in such a scenario.
To support my point that bot detection is mostly futile on the fediverse, I’d like to your attention to a parallel to this situation in gaming with humanized aimbots - which are already incredibly viable and are implemented in a variety of ways. There are usually actual human actors guiding input to some degree, but the aimbot/etc. is designed to mimic human input to achieve believable results. I believe this could be advanced quite a bit and there are new methods popping up as every day passes.
Ultimately, I feel it boils down to just blocking instances that you disagree with the operation of to curate your experience.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
I disagree with the notion that we need to centralize such a list or that such a list is desirable. Again, I trust instances to sort this out, but people are free to scrutinize and investigate users to the best of their ability.
As LLMs and deepfaking technology advance, the likely result will be completely undetectable bots that effectively mimic human behavior, even with advanced and potentially automated defenses.
See: theintercept.com/…/pentagon-ai-deepfake-internet-…
I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to have to e.g. take a selfie in a specific way to be able to use the fediverse and have access to reaching a broad audience just because I am suspected. Such a list will also likely chill participation, as an unintended effect.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
None of that data proves anything besides identifying potential bots, and that’s the heart of the issue with your idea.
It’s just an exercise in group paranoia - and would likely be abused by actual state/professional actors attempting to silence users/create bubbles.
Myself? I trust that the mods and admins will sort the actual bots out. As for the bad actors, we can counter their propaganda with our good faith participation and our efforts to lead others to the truth.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
You’re suggesting a public blacklist with thorough vetting, I just thought it’d be fair for you to step forward in such a hypothetical scenario. But you’re right, it’s not feasible - nobody can prove definitively they are an independent actor.
- Comment on [deleted] 2 weeks ago:
Would you volunteer to be vetted first?
- Comment on Recommend that new users join geographically local instances 2 weeks ago:
Gotcha, I suppose I was reading into this a bit too much:
pick an instance that is located close to them geographically
Definitely agree with your idea in this case.
- Comment on Recommend that new users join geographically local instances 2 weeks ago:
As a US-based person, just no. It is not desirable to host anything here or to trust any US-based service for a number of reasons.
It’s not just the US being an undesirable country to host servers - plenty of people live in countries that are hostile to privacy.
- Comment on Sometimes I feel nothing will change for the better and I feel frustrated about it. 2 weeks ago:
Exactly, thank you for saying this.
- Comment on Sometimes I feel nothing will change for the better and I feel frustrated about it. 2 weeks ago:
It’s very important to understand that the people we are currently giving power want us to feel doomed, hopeless, powerless, disassociated, angry, hateful, and disconnected from the rest of humanity.
The people in power want to dominate every aspect of the human experience — putting us all into bubbles. They want us to be divided like how language once divided us in the past with their strategies and techniques (e.g. algorithms that dictate what we see, partisan media, anti-science denialism, and the use of religion and spirituality as a vehicle to manipulate broad groups of people).
The people in power aren’t winning, but they are convinced they will survive a societal collapse unscathed and in power — don’t let them believe this and rest easy with your defeat and doomerism or in other words: your passivity, and subservience.
- Comment on Apple becomes third company in history to crack $4 trillion market value 2 weeks ago:
Okay, now split into at least 4 different companies and compete with each other if we want the illusion of a free market and competition to exist in the minds of those living under capitalism.
- Comment on a16z-Backed Startup Sells Thousands of ‘Synthetic Influencers’ to Manipulate Social Media as a Service 3 weeks ago:
It would be wise to make openly manipulating social media with AI illegal, immediately.
- Comment on Banana 3 weeks ago:
name one bad thing about it.
Okay, the wages and working conditions of plantation workers. The cost of bananas in first-world countries is ridiculously low, and is demeaning to those who work hard to enable this privilege for us.
- Comment on Everyday AI looks more like the '08 housing bubble 5 weeks ago:
Are you personally invested in the AI/LLM space? I’m wondering why you are unable to engage with any of what I just said. Is your account a troll account?
I was pretty clear, there is no intelligence. AGI is an absolute pipe dream and it will also be a far cry from actual intelligence if you look into it.
The copyright issues are an extreme issue.
- Comment on Everyday AI looks more like the '08 housing bubble 5 weeks ago:
Except the technology, with current methodologies (at the very least), is flawed. That’s why people are warning of the bubble bursting: we can’t properly scale AI on our current grid in the same capacity as China. Our technologies are incredibly energy-intensive compared to their technologies.
The hallucinations are likely fundamental, the cases of people being given dangerous or harmful advice are rising, and the sycophancy/bias confirmation is still present.
- Comment on do you remember a time when societies were so polarized and shifted so much to the right like today? How long did it last? 5 weeks ago:
the way things are now is still better than they’ve ever been.
Untrue, and again, it’s whitewashing. You make a lot of big claims, but they don’t hold true in reality. The advancements you tout are as weighty as a corporate slogan for real people.
- Comment on do you remember a time when societies were so polarized and shifted so much to the right like today? How long did it last? 5 weeks ago:
For every pretend step taken, the actual reality is hidden and moved out of sight for those in the first-world.
People live in better conditions today
I see way too many poor, chronically ill, and visibly distressed people. This isn’t normal, not even a little bit.
even just considering social acceptance
Social acceptance has been nonexistent for me as a gay, autistic male - people frequently tell me about their similarly horrible experiences.
and not technology
Technology has advanced, sure, but it just serves to enslave, manipulate, and spy on us in increasingly dystopian ways as the years go by. Mass surveillance, centralized databases, and unregulated AI have been normalized.
or medicine
As a chronically ill person, medicine has significantly caused me more harm than good because doctors are too overworked to identify side effects and complications - and I have nearly died several times due to medical negligence/iatrogenic illness. No, I’m not exaggerating. There have been many key advancements in medicine, but our healthcare industry is very sick - even in countries with socialized healthcare. There are people experiencing relief that previously wasn’t possible - I’m not denying that.
Most societies are at least in theory democratic, where people get some input towards the ruler.
Democracy is largely illusory, especially here in the states. Consent of the ruled is not present in many “democratic” societies if you’ve been paying attention.
There are legal protections against slavery
Slavery has exploded overseas to support first-world needs (even child slavery), prison/slave labor is incredibly pervasive in the states, and before Trump became Führer an estimated 40%~ of US agricultural workers were undocumented immigrants - modern slaves.
misogyny, homophobia, racism, transphobia
The legal protections are effectively nonexistent to prevent discrimination in practice. Two-party consent laws for recording are really terrible for those subject to abuse.
Trade unions have successfully campaigned so that now people work less than they have since the start of the industrial revolution
Unions are largely nonexistent, people still work significantly more than they need to, productivity has risen but wages have largely stagnated, people are largely in significant debt and they cannot afford a house or a car, they cannot afford to reliably access healthcare (and even if they can “afford” it, it isn’t timely), higher education is inaccessible and college debt is unreal, etc.
in unprecedentedly better conditions.
Yes, and no. There are many careers that harm you in ways that only modern society can. Like plastics workers being exposed to a greater risk of cancer. I have known many people in various careers that have been denied access to necessary PPE in multiple fields.
Have we taken some steps? Sure. But we’ve taken many, many, many more backwards while people are oblivious in their bubbles. Pop your bubble, please. More people than ever before in history are suffering silently in ways that only can happen in modern times.
- Comment on do you remember a time when societies were so polarized and shifted so much to the right like today? How long did it last? 5 weeks ago:
In my opinion, it’s always been a pretend step forward while slowly walking backwards unbeknownst to everyone.
- Comment on A fediverse platform that lets you block whole topics, not just communities? 1 month ago:
Here’s hoping keyword blocking hits Lemmy/my instance is able to facilitate its planned switch to PieFed without a hitch in the future. I used to use that feature extensively on Reddit (with RES) to great success and minimal effort.
However, I’m not a fan of centralized crowdsourced tagging. Topic tagging is significantly more subjective than e.g. the functionality provided by crowdsourced extensions like SponsorBlock and will likely significantly reduce/fragment engagement if shared blocklists become widely adopted. Imagine somebody tagging something inappropriately to soft-censor certain posts to groups of users… there are many scenarios that this could be misused if improperly designed or implemented.
There is an argument to made towards making flairs a thing on a post/community-level and allow blocking from that. It’d be neat to filter memes, for example.
- Comment on America could have avoided all of this with a functional justice system 1 month ago:
Capitalism is the best economic system we’ve ever invented.
If you limit yourself to only seeing the first-world and not the exploited third-world countries that produce the majority of our goods and provide us with resources, sure if you ignore first-world class-based inequality.
Guess we also ignore that e.g. your cell phone was made in part with child slavery (unless you bought a product like the Fairphone). Out of sight, out of mind - am I right?
Democracy is the best political system we’ve ever invented.
Even in the best case scenarios, we’re still exploring how to implement democracy and have it actually reflect the spirit of the concept. Representative democracy in its current iterations is truly a farce and is far too corruptible. Increasing levels of direct democracy or decentralized governance would likely be desirable. Having the most-qualified experts empowered to solve our problems would be desirable, as well.
Problem being, both need serious guard rails.
Democracy needs less guard rails and capitalism needs more - if we can continue to justify its existence as the dominant economic system.
The electorate has to be educated as to systems and morals.
Indoctrinated would be a better way to put it. Indoctrinated that capitalism is the best system ever (so don’t hope for a system where people aren’t fundamentally exploited), indoctrinated to unquestionably accept fundamentally broken systems (and allow ourselves to be dominated by hierarchy), and identify with state-proscribed morals. Sounds like an amazingly free society that you are advocating for.
People are far less stupid than you let on - we need open and fair discourse, we need to ensure fair media, we need to cut out partisan tribalism, and we need to stop acting like anything we’re currently experiencing is desirable or even close to being “the best”.
- Comment on Reddit stock falls for second day as references to its content in ChatGPT responses plummet 1 month ago:
Meta/OpenAI openly pirating everything they can to train their LLMs is a good example of how data hungry these AI/etc. companies are.
Is it plausible for companies to request Reddit narrow down data e.g. by demographic or geographic location and request that data for purchase? Sure, but the LLMs seemingly require all data that exists that these companies can get their hands on - I highly doubt with the scale of data theft being committed do they care about Reddit data being tainted. If anything, it might even be desirable to them.
- Comment on Reddit stock falls for second day as references to its content in ChatGPT responses plummet 1 month ago:
Reddit is presumably the only party with the ability to determine which data/interaction is legitimate or isn’t.
I have a mostly neutral opinion on AI/LLMs, but I have a negative assessment of the companies driving it unsustainably. When these actors crash the economy with their hubris, write back to me.
- Comment on Reddit stock falls for second day as references to its content in ChatGPT responses plummet 1 month ago:
If you can land me a gig engaging with back end data from Reddit in a neutral capacity, it’d likely be pretty easy for a layman like me to confirm that it’s noise. The AI companies buying data are getting scammed and you are free to feign neutrality in the absence of concrete data.
No company is immune to bots, least of all Reddit.
- Comment on Reddit stock falls for second day as references to its content in ChatGPT responses plummet 1 month ago:
It’s noise, a very large part of it. Reddit is financially motivated to make the data appear as if is signal. It isn’t - they have taken extremely minimal steps to ensure actual human participation.
This doesn’t matter to AI companies, but it only warps that technology more and more. AI is a sinking ship with current methodologies. Reddit will die when the AI bubble bursts and those involved with Reddit already cashed out enough to be filthy rich (e.g. Steve Huffman sold 500,000 of his shares in the IPO, indicating he will make $17mn).
- Comment on Reddit stock falls for second day as references to its content in ChatGPT responses plummet 1 month ago:
Are you somebody invested in Reddit? Genuine question.