PupBiru

only sort of correct: the GDPR applies globally (see this comment: https://jlai.lu/comment/4089576), however if you don’t ever plan on visiting or doing business in the EU it’s probably one of those things that people would ignore because it’d be too difficult/impossible for the EU to actually follow up on

i think this is the perfect time for the phrase “thanks i hate it”

inhabiting a boston dynamics robot would probably be the best option

i’d say it could probably use airtasker to get people to unwittingly do assembly of some basic physical form which it could use to build more complex things… i’d probably not count that as “human assistance” per se

afaik activitypub/fediverse doesn’t have to be fully open… there’s private messages and followers only profiles on mastodon… sure, any server admins of your followed would be able to see anything you post (and thus in this case for threads for example, if you accept any follower from threads then meta can see your stuff) but this also doesn’t grant them a license to use the content

also, bluesky will eventually be the same: it only doesn’t have those issues now because they haven’t opened up their software… it’ll have federation in the future, which means it has to be somewhat programmatically open to others

i feel like i need to preface this comment with the fact that this is undeniably a bad thing and no amount of “but on the flip side” will change that, but it’s interesting to express regardless…

this could lead to a few interesting situations:

• more ubiquitous ML could lead to enforcement of laws more evenly… ML doesn’t make “oh sorry sir i didn’t know who you were” decisions, and if that’s coupled with transparency then maybe we will be left in less of a “laws for thee and not for me” situation as it becomes more difficult to break laws for people in power
• more ubiquitous ML, as long as it’s fairly openly available, will absolutely be used by media to piece together complex structures and do investigative journalism. it could help to hold people to account
• more ML in tax could mean less tax evasion? or setting it to task on suggesting fixes for tax loop holes if it can see a lot more invasive data?

i don’t agree with that definition of creative… there’s lots of engineering work that’s creative: writing code and designing systems can be a very creative process, but doesn’t involve feeling… it’s problem solving, and thats a creative process. you’re narrowly defining creativity as artistic expression of emotion, however there’s lots of ways to be creative

now, i think thats a bit of a strawman (so i’ll elaborate on the broader point), but i think its important to define terms

i agree we should be skeptical of marketing hype for sure: the type of creativity that i believe ML is currently capable of is directionless. it doesn’t understand what it’s creating… but the truth lies somewhere in the middle

ML is definitively creating something new that didn’t exist before (in fact i’d say that its trouble with hallucinations of language are a good example of that: it certainly didn’t copy those characters/words from anywhere!)… this fits the easiest definition of creative: marked by the ability or power to create

the far more difficult definition is: having the quality of something created rather than imitated

the key here being “rather than imitated” which is a really hard thing to prove, even for humans! which is why our copyright laws basically say that if you have evidence that you created something first, you pretty much win: we don’t really try to decide whether something was created or imitated

with things like transformative works or things that are similar, it’s a bit more of a grey area… but the argument isn’t about whether something is an imitation; rather it’s argued about how different the work is from the original

democrats almost always win the popular vote… the electoral college is part of the mechanism that gives smaller states that tend to be more republican greater voting power than larger states

and as far as FPTP, third party candidate votes tend toward more democratic candidates. given the spoiler effect (a 3rd party candidate draws the most votes from the 2 party candidate they’re closest to: if they didn’t run, most of their votes would have gone to their closest candidate. given they’re unlikely to win due to how the mathematics and sociology of voting systems work, a successful 3rd party candidate is always bad for their voters), that means that if RCV or similar were implemented, on balance those votes for 3rd parties would mean democrats get more votes

electoral college and first past the post helps republicans and hurts democrats… if you want systemic change, vote for the party that has the most to gain from the systemic change you’d like to see, and then work to make that systemic change happen

you can, but that’s a wasted vote… you have a 2 party system, vote republic or vote democrat are mathematically your only viable options

if you want different options, you first have to work to change the system

that’s a lack of understanding of concepts though, rather than a lack of creativity… curation requires that you understand the concept that you’re trying to curate: this looks more like a dog than this; this is a more attractive sunset than this

current LLMs and ML don’t understand concepts, which is their main issue

id argue that it kind of does “think about its own thoughts” to some degree: modern ML is layered, and each layer of the net feeds into the next… one layer of the net “thinks about” the “thoughts” of the previous layer. now, it doesn’t do this as a whole but neither do we: memories and neural connections are lossy; heck even creating a creative work isn’t going to turn out exactly like you thought it in your head (your muscle memory and skill level will effect the translation from brain to paper/canvas/screen)

but even we hallucinate in the same way. don’t look at a bike, and then try and draw a bike… you’ll get general things like pedals, wheels, seat, handlebars, but it’ll be all connected wrong. this is a common example people use to show how our brains aren’t as precise and we might like to think… drawing a bike requires a lot of very specific things to be in very specific places and that’s not how our brain remembers the concept of “bike”

it’s only qualitative because we don’t understand it

when an LLM “experiences” new data via training, that’s subjective too: it works its way through the network in a manner that’s different depending on what came before it… if different training data came before it, the network would look differently and the data would change the network as a whole in a different way

and experience is ongoing learning, so if an LLM were training on things after the pretraining period then that’d allow it to be creative in your definition?

but in that case, what’s the difference between doing that all at once, and doing it over a period of time?

experience is just tweaking your neurons to make new/different connections

yeah that’s also correct and a very valid criticism

wake up, time for some SYN 😈

ml doesn’t understand jokes very well, so honestly it’s not a shit example lol

the other important thing with all of this is that even if your girlfriend is taking care, THEY STILL KNOW

people around you (or “you”, in this case) using these services impacts your privacy

is there anything we can do about that? probably not

but it’s worth being aware of

i’ve seen the bullet points from that article riffed in different ways, but i think that’s the most important part:

• They know you rang a phone sex line at 2:24 am and spoke for 18 minutes. But they don’t know what you talked about.
• They know you called the suicide prevention hotline from the Golden Gate Bridge. But the topic of the call remains a secret.
• They know you got an email from an HIV testing service, then called your doctor, then visited an HIV support group website in the same hour. But they don’t know what was in the email or what you talked about on the phone.
• They know you received an email from a digital rights activist group with the subject line “Let’s Tell Congress: Stop SESTA/FOSTA” and then called your elected representative immediately after. But the content of those communications remains safe from government intrusion.
• They know you called a gynecologist, spoke for a half hour, and then called the local abortion clinic’s number later that day.

i can’t find a single reference to that. i think you’re confused

for clarity, i think that the worst thing anyone’s been able to decisively prove about telegrams encryption is that it’s vulnerable to replay attacks… which in the context of privacy rather than full security isn’t suuuuper problematic

that’s not to say that there aren’t other flaws; that’s kinda the point behind “rule number 1: DONT INVENT YOUR OWN CRYPTO”: you just don’t know what flaws there are… AES (etc) has had a LOT of eyes on it

but for the most part, the negativity with the crypto boils down to what-ifs

from what i understand, solid state batteries are legitimately about as revolutionary as lithium ion were because they are all of those things, and by their very nature they have a huge number of charge cycles

… whether this specific announcement results in a mass-production-capable battery is another story