BraveSirZaphod

If something is possible, and this simply indeed is, someone is going to develop it regardless of how we feel about it, so it’s important for non-malicious actors to make people aware of the potential negative impacts so we can start to develop ways to handle them before actively malicious actors start deploying it.

Critical businesses and governments need to know that identity verification via video and voice is much less trustworthy than it used to be, and so if you’re currently doing that, you need to mitigate these risks. There are tools, namely public-private key cryptography, that can be used to verify identity in a much tighter way, and we’re probably going to need to start implementing them in more places.

That is not at all what right to work means.

I get the frustration, but if you’re going to criticize a thing, it’s a lot more effective if you actually know what the thing is.

Meta will probably be pretty cautious and strict about what inbound content is allowed, since they have a global quagmire of laws and regulations to comply with and cannot just open up the firehose without significant legal risk. I’d imagine they’d only accept content from vetted instances that agree to some amount of common policy.

In which case you essentially return to the status quo right now, where the Fediverse is a small group of somewhat-ideological tech enthusiasts.

To compare forced labor camps where the alternative is being murdered to people making the active choice to volunteer to serve as moderators is a comparison so lacking in perspective that I’d expect to only find it on Reddit, but I guess Lemmy has managed to foster the same kind of behavior.

Are you going to compare Reddit killing the API to the Holocaust next?

This is just exposing that you don’t actually read the New York Times.

Here’s an article on the plight of Gazans in Rafah in the face of a potential Israeli invasion.

Here’s an overview on the gang situation in Haiti as the government is functionally collapsing.

And here’s an article discussing the increasingly common practice of restaurants charging significant cancellation fees.

Meanwhile, the NY Post has such great stories as:

• Kate Middleton officially hits rock bottom
• Rudy Giuliani’s ex engaged to Palm Beach energy exec after six months of dating in ‘whirlwind romance’ (Exclusive!)
• Unions want full control of schools and our kids — we can’t let Albany allow it
• Activists lobbying to ‘morally’ allow trans kids to change their bodies are only doing more harm

You should know that on Instacart, workers can see your tip before accepting the order. It’s functionally a bid, not a tip. I’m sure they have some algorithm for what value they recommend, but to some extent, this is the workers setting the price of their own labor. If you tip too low, you run the risk of the order not being accepted.

The fundamental situation is that delivery work is not actually that cheap, and especially given that these are lower paid workers, they’re also more sensitive to inflation and so you’d expect their cost to rise more steeply than other things.

One big thing I’d mention is that, shockingly, housing costs have a massive impact on homeless rates, independent of other factors that you might think would be more relevant. West Virginia and Mississippi are hardly bastions of economic prosperity or developed social services, and yet, they have some of the lowest rates of homelessness in the country, while California and New York are giant economies with huge social safety nets, and also huge homeless populations.

Why? Because the core reason someone becomes homeless is that they can’t afford a home, and even if someone’s life is completely unraveling, rummaging up $500 for an apartment in West Virginia is still much much easier than getting the $3000 that the same apartment would cost in New York City. As we’ve seen rent prices explode in HCOL cities, you see subsequent increases in homelessness. This isn’t complicated.

More direct interventions have their place for sure, but the single biggest thing we could do is actually build some god damn housing and not let Karen and Steve veto it because they think the parking lot it’d be replacing has historic significance as a pretense for not liking change or “urban” renters around.

The political problem is that voters who are paying rent tend to be annoyed by the government giving people apartments for free.

Housing first as a model is legitimate and works (at least more than doing nothing or maintaining terrible shelters forever), but the political resentment it builds is a real problem that no amount of finger-wagging makes go away.

If the people in charge have the ability to end democracy, how can democracy be claimed to exist in the first place? Democracy is supposed to be our capability as individual citizens to regulate the people in power, but if they can turn that switch on or off, we don’t actually have that capability except as they choose to allow us to.

The simple answer to your question is by the people taking a person who very overtly says that he has no desire to preserve democracy and in fact has already sought to overturn it once before and then proceeding to return that person to office in order to do just that.

We do have the ability to regulate the people in power by not voting for them in the first place. If we take the ability and use it to give power to someone who wants to do away with democracy, that’s pretty much on us.

Ultimately, any frustration with Biden - and I acknowledge that valid ones absolutely do exist - must be squared against the fact that we have to put a candidate up against Trump. Whether Biden is the person with the best odds against him is an objective and empirical one, though also one that’s hard to accurately study and answer. Disapproval polls are certainly one source of info, but they do not necessarily mean that any other potential alternative would do better. It is very possible for large amounts of people to disapprove of Biden but ultimately disapprove of Trump even more. We can’t actually personify “broadly generic and popular Democrat” into a real human, and even if we could, that’s basically Biden, so unless there exists an actual specific person who is both broadly popular and with more political clout than Biden who’s also interested in running, the practical choice is Biden against Trump, no matter how much ink people want to spill on the matter.

Edit: On a more pragmatic matter, I absolutely agree that telling progressives to shut up, stop complaining, and vote for Biden is not a particularly effective style of messaging.

“just make them do X” carries an implication that the relevant party actually has the ability to do the thing.

It’s like taking the legal cases against Trump and simplifying them to “just put him in prison lol”

Gonna take it you didn’t read the article, because this literally is the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau:

Under the proposal, banks could continue to charge fees when a customer’s account falls below zero, but either at a price in line with the bank’s actual costs to administer the overdraft or at an established benchmark created by the new rule.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) proposed potential fees of $3, $6, $7 or $14 and is seeking feedback from banks and the public on what would be appropriate. Current overdraft fees often push $30 or more, taking a significant bite out of low-income accounts.

You’re vastly overestimating the powers of the executive branch.

Just because it hasn’t been said yet, this already exists in bodybuilding. The professional league, the IFBB, which hosts the Mr. Olympia competition, does not prohibit drugs and they are de facto required. Essentially every IFBB bodybuilder uses steroids, and it’s a very open secret.

Something that does need to be considered here is that not all sports necessarily benefit from steroids, at least not nearly as much as bodybuilding. More muscle isn’t necessarily always a good thing if it makes you heavier or less mobile, so there’s already some limited regulatory effect from that as well.

If you want to stay private, probably avoid a networking protocol like ActivityPub that inherently relies on essentially everything being public

The key element here is that an LLM does not actually have access to its training data, and at least as of now, I’m skeptical that it’s technologically feasible to search through the entire training corpus, which is an absolutely enormous amount of data, for every query, in order to determine potential copyright violations, especially when you don’t know exactly which portions of the response you need to use in your search. Even then, that only catches verbatim (or near verbatim) violations, and plenty of copyright questions are a lot fuzzier.

For instance, say you tell GPT to generate a fan fiction story involving a romance between Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter. This would unquestionably violate JK Rowling’s copyright on the characters if you published the output for commercial gain, but you might be okay if you just plop it on a fan fic site for free. You’re unquestionably okay if you never publish it at all and just keep it to yourself (well, a lawyer might still argue that this harms JK Rowling by damaging her profit if she were to publish a Malfoy-Harry romance, since people can just generate their own instead of buying hers, but that’s a messier question). But, it’s also possible that, in the process of generating this story, GPT might unwittingly directly copy chunks of renowned fan fiction masterpiece My Immortal. Should GPT allow this, or would the copyright-management AI strike it? Legally, it’s something of a murky question.

For yet another angle, there is of course a whole host of public domain text out there. GPT probably knows the text of the Lord’s Prayer, for instance, and so even though that output would perfectly match some training material, it’s legally perfectly okay. So, a copyright police AI would need to know the copyright status of all its training material, which is not something you can super easily determine by just ingesting the broad internet.

AI haters are not applying the same standards to humans that they do to generative AI

I don’t think it should go unquestioned that the same standards should apply. No human is able to look at billions of creative works and then create a million new works in an hour. There’s a meaningfully different level of scale here, and so it’s not necessarily obvious that the same standards should apply.

If it’s spitting out sentences that are direct quotes from an article someone wrote before and doesn’t disclose the source then yeah that is an issue.

A fundamental issue is that LLMs simply cannot do this. They can query a webpage, find a relevant chunk, and spit that back at you with a citation, but it is simply impossible for them to actually generate a response to a query, realize that they’ve generated a meaningful amount of copyrighted material, and disclose its source, because it literally does not know its source. This is not a fixable issue unless the fundamental approach to these models changes.

There is literally no resemblance between the training works and the model.

This is way too strong a statement when some LLMs can spit out copyrighted works verbatim.

https://www.404media.co/google-researchers-attack-convinces-chatgpt-to-reveal-its-training-data/

A team of researchers primarily from Google’s DeepMind systematically convinced ChatGPT to reveal snippets of the data it was trained on using a new type of attack prompt which asked a production model of the chatbot to repeat specific words forever.

Often, that “random content” is long passages of text scraped directly from the internet. I was able to find verbatim passages the researchers published from ChatGPT on the open internet: Notably, even the number of times it repeats the word “book” shows up in a Google Books search for a children’s book of math problems. Some of the specific content published by these researchers is scraped directly from CNN, Goodreads, WordPress blogs, on fandom wikis, and which contain verbatim passages from Terms of Service agreements, Stack Overflow source code, copyrighted legal disclaimers, Wikipedia pages, a casino wholesaling website, news blogs, and random internet comments.

Beyond that, copyright law was designed under the circumstances where creative works are only ever produced by humans, with all the inherent limitations of time, scale, and ability that come with that. Those circumstances have now fundamentally changed, and while I won’t be so bold as to pretend to know what the ideal legal framework is going forward, I think it’s also a much bolder statement than people think to say that fair use as currently applied to humans should apply equally to AI and that this should be accepted without question.

In basic terms, ignoring certain situations like being significantly overweight or being completely untrained, you build muscle (and add some fat) during a caloric surplus, and you lose fat (and a bit of muscle) while being in a caloric deficit.

Naturally, it’s logically impossible to simultaneously be in a caloric surplus and deficit. It’s not possible to build a large amount of muscle while also being in a caloric deficit, and you won’t ever lose a meaningful amount of fat without being in a deficit.

It’s very funny how effectively you can turn “a statistically average person” into some ominous sounding elite other by just dressing it up in class language.