AmbitiousProcess (they/them)

Here’s a few of the biggest concerns, at least from what I’ve read about from people’s experiences living near existing ones.

• Water usage (can drain local groundwater, drive up water prices)
• Power usage (can drive up electricity prices, burns more fossil fuels or shifts clean energy to itself making other people now reliant on fossil fuels)
• Noise (people even at fairly large distances away can often still hear the sounds from the datacenter, it never stops and runs 24/7, can often give people nonstop headaches)
• Pollution (many datacenters have generators they can use, and they pollute the local air. Even if not run regularly as part of primary operations, many datacenters do tests anywhere from every month to every year to make sure the generators and backup systems work as intended, can suddenly generate a lot of air pollution without warning)

And that’s not to mention secondary effects, like how it can do things like draw in crowds of temporary workers that then incentivizes short term rentals (i.e. Airbnb’s) in the local area over actual homeowners, and can drive up housing costs, or how it can attract local subsidies that would otherwise go to smaller businesses that actually really need it.

Same here. I get the nostalgia factor, and that tactile buttons can feel nice, but other than that I feel like it’s just a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn’t necessarily work well.

Instead of a quick tap, you have to actually press on each button, which slows down typing. You can’t resize, recolor, or reformat your keyboard to fit your needs better, there’s no split keyboard functionality for landscape mode, etc.

Plus it’s just more mechanical failure points and areas that dust and gunk can get stuck in.

It is literally just the bill that was introduced, directly from the site of the senator that introduced it.

Any news organization or third party source is gonna be pulling from this exact same source, because that’s how all bills are initially found out about.

Why couldn’t one argue that Nick Shirley commited libel/slander

They could. They being the individuals and organizations talked about. Not the community, bystanders, people affected by food stamps cuts, kids or their parents who go to the daycares, etc.

Their actions did in fact directly impact everyone involved?

“Directly” is doing the heavy lifting here, and that’s why this doesn’t work. Trump cutting food stamps and Nick Shirley’s claims against the daycares are entirely separate actions. Even if Nick Shirley had told Trump directly to cut food stamps, based on all the same lies, he wouldn’t be sued, Trump would be sued for being the one who actually did the cuts.

Did they claim you did something, yes

They claimed some daycares did, not every individual affected by the food stamp cuts, which is another reason why those people can’t sue.

Did they do it with the intention to cause harm, yes.

Unfortunately that’s something a court would have to debate for a very long time, and find hard evidence for. (e.g. messages saying “I know it’s not true but I just hate those people” would be damn near incriminating in their own right)

All harmed should be able to sue

Should? Probably, at least in this instance it seems like it’d be beneficial overall.

Will? That’s another story. The legal system just isn’t set up in a way for that type of thing to work, given what I’ve mentioned previously.

The article seems to be implying that this is a common problem that happens constantly and that the companies creating these AI models just don’t give a fuck.

Not only does the article not once state that this is a common problem, only explaining the technical details of how it works, and the possible legal ramifications of it, but they mention how, according to nearly any AI scholar/expert you can talk to, this is not some fixable problem. If you take data, and effectively do extremely lossy compression on it, there is still a way for that data to theoretically be recovered.

Advancing LLMs while claiming you’ll work on it doing this doesn’t change the fact that this is a problem inherent to LLMs. There are certainly ways to prevent it, reduce its likelihood, etc, but you can’t entirely remove the problem. The article is simply about how LLMs inherently memorize data, and while you can mask it with more varied training data, you still can’t avoid the fact that trained weights memorize inputs, and when combined together, can eventually reproduce those inputs.

To be very clear, again, I’m not saying it’s impossible to make this happen less, but it’s still an inherent part of how LLMs work, and isn’t some entirely fixable problem. Is it better now than it used to be? Sure. Is it fully fixable? Never.

Clearly nobody is distributing copyrighted images by asking AI to do its best to recreate them. When you do this, you end up with severely shitty hack images that nobody wants to look at

It’s actually a major problem for artists where people will pass their art through an AI model to reimagine it slightly differently so it can’t be copyright striked, but will still retain some of the more human choices, design elements, and overall composition.

Spend any amount of time on social platforms with artists and you’ll find many of them now don’t complain as much about people directly stealing their art and reposting it, but more people stealing their images and changing them a bit with AI, then reposting it so it’s just different enough they can feign innocence and tell their followers it’s all their work.

Basically, if no one is actually using these images except to say, “aha! My academic research uncovered this tiny flaw in your model that represents an obscure area of AI research!” why TF should anyone care?

The thing is, while these are isolated experiments meant to test for these behaviors as quickly as possible with a small set of researchers, when you look at the sheer scale of people using AI tools now, then statistically speaking, you will inevitably get people who put in a prompt that is similar enough to a work that was trained on, and it will output something almost identical to that work, without the prompter realizing.

Why do you need to point to absolutely, ridiculously obscure shit like finding a flaw in Stable Diffusion 1.4 (from years ago, before 99% of the world had even heard of generative image AI)?

Because they highlight the flaws that continue to plague existing models, but have been around for long enough that you can run long-term tests, run them more cheaply on current AI hardware at scale, and can repeat tests with the same conditions rather than starting over again every single time a new model is released.

Again, this memorization is inherent to how these AI models are trained, it gets better with new releases as more training data is used, and more alterations are made, but it cannot be removed, because removing the memorization removes all the training.

I’ll admit it’s less of a “smoking gun” against use of AI in itself than it used to be when the issue was more prevalent, but acting like it’s a non-issue isn’t right either.

Generative AI is just the latest way of giving instructions to computers. That’s it! That’s all it is.

It is not, unless you consider every single piece of software or code ever to be just “a way of giving instructions to computers” since code is just instructions for how a computer should operate, regardless of the actual tangible outcomes of those base-level instructions.

Generative AI is a type of computation that predicts the most likely sequence of text, or distribution of pixels in an image. That is all it is. It can be used to predict the most likely text, in a machine readable format, which can then control a computer, but that is not what it inherently is in its entirety.

It can also rip off artists and journalists, hallucinate plausible misinformation about current events, or delude you into believing you’re the smartest baby of 1996.

It’s like saying a kitchen knife is just a way to cut foods… when it can also be used to stab someone, make crafts, or open your packages. It can be “just a way of altering the size and quantity of pieces of food”, but it can also be a murder weapon or a letter opener.

Nobody gave a shit about this kind of thing when Star Trek was pretending to do generative AI in the Holodeck

That would be because it was a fictional series about a nonexistent future that didn’t affect anyone’s life today in a negative way if nonexistent job roles were replaced, and most people didn’t have to think about how it would affect them if it became reality today.

Do you want the cool shit from Star Trek’s imaginary future or not? This is literally what computer scientists have been dreaming of for decades. It’s here! Have some fun with it!

People also want flying cars without thinking of the noise pollution and traffic management. Fiction isn’t always what people think it could be.

Generative AI uses up less power/water than streaming YouTube or Netflix

But Generative AI is not replacing YouTube or Netflix, it’s primarily replacing web searches. So when someone goes to ChatGPT instead of Google, that uses anywhere from a few tens of times more energy to a couple hundreds more.

Yet they will still also use Netflix on top of that.

I expect you’re just as vocal about streaming video, yeah?

People generally aren’t, because streaming video tends to have a much more positive effect on their lives than AI.

Watching a new show or movie is fun and relaxing. If it isn’t, you just… stop watching. Nobody forces it down your throat.

Having LLMs pollute my search results with plausible sounding nonsense, and displace the jobs of artists I enjoy the art of, is not fun, nor relaxing. Talking with someone on social media just to find out they aren’t even a real human is annoying. Trying to troubleshoot an issue and finding made up solutions makes my problem even harder to solve.

We can’t necessarily all be focusing on every single possible thing that takes energy, but it’s easy to focus on the thing that most people have an overall negative association with the effects of.

Two birds, one stone.

I’m honestly not even sure it’s deliberate.

If you give a probability guessing machine like LLMs the ability to review content, it’s probably just gonna be more likely to rank things as you expect for your search specifically than an algorithm made to extremely quickly pull the most relevant links… based on only some of the page as keywords, with no understanding of how the context of your search relates to each page.

The downside is, of course, that LLMs use way more energy than regular search algorithms, take longer to provide all their citations, etc.

Unfortunately that just isn’t something you can really sue for.

You can sue the administration putting the rules in place, but you can’t sue someone for saying something that’s then picked up by another person, and another, and so on until the president happens to hear about it.

It’s why, for example, financial sites will always have the disclaimer “this is not financial advice, seek the advice of a licensed financial professional, etc, etc”, because financial harms are often covered, (while other things affected by lies are not in most circumstances) when that lie is something you took action on, and that action caused you harm (e.g. “this stock is going to double tomorrow”, you buy it, it crashes)

But you can’t sue when that lie caused someone else to do something that indirectly caused you harm. (e.g. “this stock will crash in a week”, billionaire sells a ton of the stock, your retirement portfolio drops in value) In that case, only the billionaire would be eligible to sue the person who lied to them.

You might be able to sue Nick Shirley if you ran a daycare business and his false claims about your daycare caused your daycare to get attacked, but you couldn’t sue him if he lied about a daycare down the road and mobs started attacking every daycare in town because they just assumed all of them were at fault, and you certainly couldn’t sue if the claims he made then got to the social media feeds of some locals, which then caused local food banks run by those locals to stop offering food because they thought there’s a chance it could be obtained by scammers instead of those in need.

don’t worry, they have concepts of a plan

Seconded on Framework. I’ve got the more performant (but more heavy, large, and expensive) 16, but for most people the 13 will be perfectly usable. The newer 12 model also seems pretty decent and is a bit cheaper.

They’ve kept their RAM prices relatively stable too, but if you already have other RAM lying around you can just bring your own and save yourself the money. Same for the SSD.

The main downside is they’re gonna be quite expensive upfront compared to alternatives, so I wouldn’t recommend them to someone price-sensitive, especially in the current economy.

The main benefit is that since they’re so modular and upgradable, you’ll save money down the line on repair services, replacement parts, or just the cost of buying a whole new device because one component broke that they don’t sell replacements for.

Honestly it’s probably just how easily accessible things that are normally hard to reach for humans becomes.

If I want the upcoming weather, I can access a distributed network of government satellites, local weather monitoring stations, and independently operated weather monitoring relays, all combined together into an alert saying “It’s gonna rain in 15 minutes” 3 seconds after I open the app.

If I want to talk to an expert on a subject, the author of my favorite books, a politician, or simply my friends, I can just send them an email or often a DM.

If I want to know about practically anything, there’s either gonna be a site out there with someone tirelessly writing a 20 paragraph article about it, or a Wikipedia page contributed to by thousands of volunteers to make sure people like me could quickly find the information.

And if I want to share information I know about with other people, I can also go to Wikipedia, not as a viewer, but as an editor, and keep other people informed the moment they go to Wikipedia trying to answer a question of their own, or just feed their general curiosity.

This type of thing is way slower through books, live broadcast stations on TV, (though I suppose that still counts as “technology”, just more legacy), having to meet up with your friends in person before you can talk to them, having to travel to a research institution and schedule a meeting just to talk to an expert, etc.

It just feels magical to have a question, look it up, and just get an answer. Just like that.

Not to mention that being Jewish is not inherently bad, and doesn’t require you to do anything bad to be that way, while choosing to extract surplus value from workers to hoard it for yourself absolutely is.

It depends.

Tiers based on age, disability, or ability to pay (e.g. child/senior tickets, lower prices for people who might not be able to fully enjoy an activity due to a disability, low-income people getting cheaper bus fares, etc) are all generally okay, because they expand access, tend to make things more affordable for those who actually need it, but don’t cause massive unjust increases in pricing for others.

Personalized pricing however should be illegal in most cases. (e.g. you order McDonald’s through the app and they charge you an extra $0.10 on every item compared to the in-store menu just because you got your paycheck recently.)

As for all the discount/reward/loyalty programs, I’d say it depends. If my small local grocery store gives me coupons in their email newsletter, that’s fine. Hell, even if larger chains do it, if the discounts are on a specific selection of items, and are probably designed to get you to spend money on stuff you otherwise wouldn’t have purchased, it doesn’t really matter to me if I can get them or not by giving my email, and isn’t that unfair.

If your rewards app is akin to a punch card like the one at my local ice cream place where if you buy 10 scoops, you get another one free, that’s also fine. It’s just a way to keep track of how loyal you are to the business so they know when you’re allowed a little bonus, and they benefit from you coming back to them instead of another place, because you’re betting on that free scoop.

If a place prices everything higher than they would normally do it should they not have an app, then requires you giving up sensitive personal details to lower it back down to a reasonable rate, that’s unfair, and should be banned.

If the place prices items down just a little lower than they would normally price items even if they didn’t have an app/newsletter, because apps/newsletters are generally just a good way to keep customers around and increase sales, that’s fine by me. (e.g. if my local grocery store just sends me an email saying “hey, we now have X item in stock” and it interests me, they’re gonna get a sale they otherwise would not have gotten had I not been signed up to their newsletter, and that offsets a small discount on everything else I buy there)

It’s like saying “I want everyone to be equal” and saying both men and women should be given a 10% pay raise to account for the gender pay gap.

Sure, you raised women’s wages to cover the gap… but now the gap remains because you also increased men’s by the same amount.

You don’t believe him? But he’s got the only squatter removal business with a Yelp account! /s

“I’d much rather make a squatter homeless than have a landlord lose property,” Jacobs added.

These are the pieces of shit your politicians listen to every time they increase funding for police enforcement against the homeless, and deny zoning changes, even if it would improve the housing crisis. “theft is always bad no matter what 🤓☝️”

You have to be genuinely mentally ill to believe that someone going homeless is better than someone with more properties than they need to live in losing one of those properties so someone has a place to live.

Executives are often the most smug, overconfident, easiest to bullshit individuals. You’re the easiest to fool when you believe you can’t be fooled, and you’re most likely to make a bad management decision when you’re put in a position that says “you’re allowed to decide stuff because you’re incredibly smart and correct.”

A company doesn’t have to convince everyone who works for a company, or even just the people who are going to get fired. They just have to convince one dude who has power at the organization, and suddenly 4,000 people get fucked.

The zip archive is protected by a password, and I’d appreciate being able to verify if my data is actually in this breach as I’m a WIRED subscriber. If anyone has the password to the breach file, please let me know. (the only other way to acquire the password is to quite literally just pay the forum user who posted the breach, and I’d rather not do that.)

My email doesn’t show as breached on common sites used to check for that, like Have I Been Pwned, but I’ve seen many instances of only some password managers/dark web scanners seeing someone’s data in a breach, while others won’t even with the same data on the user being checked.

I don’t believe card details are in there as they use a separate payment provider. (If I go to my account management page and attempt to modify my payment method, the page begins making many requests to Stripe)

But hey, it’s still got names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, all that jazz.

I have no clue. I usually watch a good bit of LTT but I don’t recall watching a video when they did this, though I’m sure I could have just missed it.

Does seem like something they’d do though.