jaschop

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

whatever minor body of irrelevant five-follower internet loons might bother trying to argue the literal uselessness of a predictive text generator

/c/techtakes mention!?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Yeah, the same thing struck me. I'd guess they were jumping on the buzzword, but x-risk just was deemed gaudy and unserious.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Might be semi-related: the german aerospace/automotive/industrial research agency has an "AI Safety" institute (institute = top level department).

I got a rough impression from their website. They don't seem to be doing anything that successful. Mostly fighting the unwinnable battles of putting AI in everything without sucking and twiddling machine learning models to make them resilient against malicous data. Besides trying to keep the torch of self-driving cars alive for the german car industry. Oh, and they're doing the quantum AI bit.

They're a fairly new institute, and I heard rumors they're not doing great. Maybe the organization resists the necessary insanity to generate new AI FOMO at this point. One can dream.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (6 children)

I was going to shitpost that Trump is the least neo-colonial president cuz he cut all foreign aid, but I realized I kinda believe that unironically. I'm in the anti-death-and-suffering camp of course, but a hundred kinda self-serving national aid programs might just not cut it.

(This might be inspired by the Merz government planning to roll the special development aid office into the foreign affairs ministry, partly to tie it more strongly to national interest.)

Maybe we need to bring back the UN bigly.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (6 children)

The comment section seems to be 50% that dude by word count. He must be a perfectly healthy amount online.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

I'm interpreting your phrasing as you believing that the non-profit "taking over" is somehow good, because profit motive bad presumably. But regardless of incentives, everyone involved is trying to flood the world with slop by incinerating cash and processors on industrial scales.

But so far the cash incinerator has been running on speculative financial products issued by a club of esoteric computer scientists trying to awaken the robot god. Investors are slightly uncomfortable with this, so Sammy boy is trying to offer them a more traditional vehicle to incinerate their cash (while indulging in his personal profit motive a bit).

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

You're certainly hitting some nails on their heads here. The normalisation of AI is absolutely happening, mostly because the buttons start showing up on Google/Microsoft/etc. products with massive market share.

Also the manlyman blogs bitching about beaver hair brushes. I was looking up safety razors in german ("Rasierhobel" btw, totally unaware of that until now), and Wikipedia was referencing one such archived blog, bitching about pig bristle brushes being "drug store" garbage. I might still get one. (The razor that is, not the brush. Spray on foam will do for me.)

Not so sure about the scythe/mower thing. My battery powered mower & motor scythe slap. (Stihl btw)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

While browsing some german news media outside my usual territorry (DW and tagesschau), and was fooled by this chameleon of an ad on the front page of WELT (trying for classy, but obvious conservative bias).

The heading means "Bitcoin could protect from inflation". If you want to check out some retail investor shilling in the wild, here you go!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

I can see tante's point. Besides AI datacenters being used for surveillance tech, I can also see LLM tech itself used nefariously post-bubble. Maybe maintaining an up-to-date LLM as a product is not viable, but a custom-trained model to snipe public online discourse around a crucial election could remain affordable for a wealthy fascist.

On the bright side, I am hoping for a brief period of powerful yet affordable gaming PCs thanks to retrofitted, slightly singed Blackwells.

 

I haven't watched it. I don't know how well she will cover the subject or how deep the rabbit hole she will venture.

All I know is she's delightful and I sure as hell won't read that bilge myself, so I'm looking forward to an entertaining summary.

Edit: I watched it. I had a good time.

 
 

archive of the mentioned NYT article

 

So I recently got an excuse rant about my opinions on federated tech. I think it's pretty much the best we can hope for in terms of liberating tech, with very few niches where fully distributed tech is preferable.

Needing a server places users under the power of the server administrator. Why do we bother? "No gods, no masters, no admins!' I hear you shout. Well, there's a couple reasons...

Maybe using software is just an intrinsically centralized activity. One or a few people design and code it, and an unlimited number of people can digitally replicate and use it. Sure, it may be free software that everyone can inspect and modify... but how many people will really bother? (Nevermind that most people don't even have the skills necessary.)

Okay, so we always kind of rely on a central-ish dev team when we use tech. Why rely on admins on top of that? I believe the vast vast majority of people doesn't have the skills and time to operate a truly independent node of a fully distributed tech. Let's take Jami as an example:

"With the default name server (ns.jami.net), the usernames are registered on an Ethereum blockchain."

So a feature of Jami is (for most users) implemented as a centralized service. Yikes. You could build and run your own name server (with less embarrassing tech choices hopefully), but who will really bother?

But say you bothered, wouldn't it be nice if your friends could use that name server too, and gain a little independence? That sounds a lot like decentralized/federated tech.

Keeping a decent service online is a pain in the butt. Installing SW updates, managing backups, paying for hardware and name services... nevermind just the general bothering to understand all that mess. And moderation, don't forget moderation. I'm saying it's not for everyone (and we should appreciate the fuck out of [local admin]).

I believe that servers and admins are our best bet for actual non-centralized tech. A tech-literate person tending a service for a small- to medium-size community is much more feasible than every person running their independent node (which will probably still depend on something centralized).

And maybe that's just the way we bring good ol' division of labour to the Internet. You have your shoemaker, your baker, your social media admin. A respectable and useful position in society. And they lived happily ever after.

 

Apparently a senior SW engineer got fired for questioning readiness of the product, dude must still be chuckling to himself.

Found the story here https://hachyderm.io/@wesley83/112572728237770554

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