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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • Diversity of thought is very important

    So she’s going to appoint a Democratic Socialist? No? Someone from Sunrise then? No? A Palestinian-American Democrat? They couldn’t even get 2 minutes at the convention. How about a BLM activist? She marched for that cause, surely that’s some diversity she’d want to have represented. Not that either? Hm.

    Maybe this isn’t about diversity of thought and instead about the doomed Democratic instinct to try to coopt the center-right, which according to the theory of centrism will make them win forever! Just not any of the times they’ve already tried it.







  • It’s interesting how the most open instances aren’t the biggest ones with no user restrictions, but the smaller instances that no one has issues with. I moved away from LW because of performance issues, but I’m happy to be able to see both LW posts and BH posts. Sopuli has defederated from some instances, but I’m happy with their choices so it’s as unrestricted as I want it to be. Others would choose an even less restrictive/restricted small instance, or like yourself just run your own to have complete freedom.



  • Except when it comes to LLM, the fact that the technology fundamentally operates by probabilisticly stringing together the next most likely word to appear in the sentence based on the frequency said words appeared in the training data is a fundamental limitation of the technology.

    So long as a model has no regard for the actual you know, meaning of the word, it definitionally cannot create a truly meaningful sentence.

    This is a misunderstanding of what “probabilistic word choice” can actually accomplish and the non-probabilistic systems that are incorporated into these systems. People also make mistakes and don’t actually “know” the meaning of words.

    The belief system that humans have special cognizance unlearnable by observation is just mysticism.


  • Yeah. AI making images with six fingers was amusing, but people glommed onto it like it was the savior of the art world. “Human artists are superior because they can count fingers!” Except then the models updated and it wasn’t as much of a problem anymore. It felt good, but it was just a pleasant illusion for people with very real reasons to fear the tech.

    None of these errors are inherent to the technology, they’re just bugs to correct, and there’s plenty of money and attention focused on fixing bugs. What we need is more attention focused on either preparing our economies to handle this shock or greatly strengthen enforcement on copyright (to stall development). A label like this post is about is a good step, but given how artistic professions already weren’t particularly safe and “organic” labeling only has modest impacts on consumer choice, we’re going to need more.









  • If an instance defederates from another instance there’s nothing stopping a user who liked that instance that was defederated with from moving to, making an account on or just using (in the broadest sense) another instance which hasn’t defederated with the instance they like or that instance itself.

    This functional consequence of defederation is telling their users they shouldn’t be allowed to interact with an instance. That they can just leave if they don’t like it doesn’t make the choice not coercive. Moving servers is certainly a viable option, but it’s a pain and doesn’t transfer content, so that’s still locked under the former server’s federation choice.

    That’s one reason I moved to the fediverse: so I could get rid of all of the content I didn’t want to see before I saw it. More typical social media like Meta, Twitter and Reddit all have a long history of failing to moderate against anti-trans hate, as with other types of hate, so I moved to the fediverse.

    On Mastodon, which is the place Threads is trying to federate with and which Katy was comparing it to, you can block instances. You no longer need your instance to make those decisions for you. Your desire to have Threads blocked at the instance level is at odds with Katy’s desire to follow trans people on it. You can do a simple thing to implement your desires without forcing anything on the other person.