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Zaktor

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Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else” - Workers stayed remote even when told they could no longer be promoted. (arstechnica.com)

Big tech companies are still trying to rally workers back into physical offices, and many workers are still not having it. Based on a recent report, computer-maker Dell has stumbled even more than most....

Zaktor ,

They’ve got plenty of time to make the jump since they can just coast along with their Dell salary until them. Quitting starts a clock until you have to just accept whatever is available, but staying employed and knowing you have to leave eventually let’s you start looking without the pressure.

Zaktor , (edited )

Fascist thought is perfectly compatible between countries of different races. The philosophy is the “right” type of people should expel (or murder) undesirable minorities and take the resources they need. If those minorities go somewhere else and oppress some other people, that’s just how the world is supposed to work when it’s not corrupted by things like equal rights or respect for personal freedom. It’s how Aryan-supremacist Germany had no issues allying with Japan. They both believed in a world order where it was the natural state of things for racially homogeneous states to dominate lesser races and claim the resources for their people. Because they’re just better, and all the problems are from race-mixing and kowtowing to the undeserving.

One of the early anti-Jewish efforts by the Nazis (promoted now by some Israeli politicians for Palestinians) was encouraging Jews migrate somewhere else, Israel being one of the common destinations.

Zaktor , (edited )

There are not no black people there, but they didn’t seem to even care enough to give them all spots in the front.

Zaktor ,

This is unhinged. Someone building the mainline of an interoperable communication service should absolutely be helping others making software trying to interoperate with it. Complaints can be made about Rochko rejecting PRs, but complaining that other people’s time is going towards a thing they don’t want is insane.

“So they reached out to us and we had conversations about what they want to do, how they can do it, and we had more detailed conversations about how to do X, how to do Y protocol-wise. We helped them resolve some issues when they launched their first test of the federation because we want to see them succeed with this plan, so we help them debug and troubleshoot some of the stuff that they’re doing. Basically, we’re talking with each other about whatever issues come up.”

But from the perspective of hundreds of instances have signed the anti-Meta FediPact, and hundreds more are blocking Threads without signing the pact, any resources devoted to to improving the Threads/Mastodon integration are wasted.

Zaktor ,

Worse, this was targeted in part against the people of the Philippines, an ally.

Zaktor ,

General Jonathan Braga was promoted to Lieutenant General in August 2021, months after the new Biden administration was informed about and canceled the program.

Zaktor ,

He should have, but members of the armed forces are heroes, regardless of their actual actions, and slighting them in any way is an attack on American patriotism.

The general in charge of this was promoted in August of 2021.

Zaktor ,

I’m 100% willing to claim that. The expected end result of this is fewer civilians taking the Chinese vaccine (with likely spillover for other vaccine efforts) and thus more disease deaths. That’s a pretty solid justification for war crimes.

Just like “shooting a gun” isn’t a war crime. It’s not the act that’s a crime, it’s the expected results and the victims.

Zaktor ,

You’re sanitizing this as a “disinformation campaign”, stripping away that the target was civilians and the likely result deaths. If the president ordered a general (this isn’t some nobody private with no agency) to implement a plan of bombings against civilian targets, that isn’t just “a bombing campaign” and following orders is not correct.

Zaktor ,

You could just read the article.

Zaktor ,

Especially against a friendly country with a lot of back and forth migration.

Zaktor ,

Read the article. It’s the Philippines.

Zaktor ,

And giving a giant payday is very likely to inspire him to look for new things to buy. That’s a full Twitter in bonus shares and I think Musk looks at his vast paper wealth and tends to always want a new project rather than for the numbers to just steadily go up.

Making a bad bet on Twitter which actually left him meaningfully poorer meant he’d be more likely to devote time to Tesla. Giving him a bunch of money to burn a hole in his pocket makes him more likely to try something else because it’s effectively free.

Zaktor ,

Yes, it’s a billion dollar company, not a cherished family farm. Separate from the wealth hoarding it’s probably a good policy in general for companies of that size to not be under the control of a single person. Why is this even a question?

Zaktor ,

But in many cases their vote/say would decline to insignificance

Their vote would decrease to roughly $1B / total company value. That’s not irrelevance unless you’re talking about businesses so large they’ve become major shapers or our culture and economy. And if the founder’s decisions are just amazingly awesome the new board can hire them as CEO. And then fire them when they’re an idiot. Twitter shows us the cost of autocratic control by a bad owner.

Saying ‘why is this even a question’ when someone inquired for more information after you present a radical change to a worldwide economic concept, is just rude and thought terminating. Instead of encouraging discussion, you want to shut people down so you can get feel good points.

If you think there is only one good way to run a business and it happens to be the way you thought up, I encourage you to self reflect.

Lol. Yeah, it wasn’t intended to be (apparently) an attack on you and your personal belief system, but getting worked up about people being mean to literal tycoons makes me totally ok with having caused offense.

'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement (www.theatlantic.com)

As soon as Apple announced its plans to inject generative AI into the iPhone, it was as good as official: The technology is now all but unavoidable. Large language models will soon lurk on most of the world’s smartphones, generating images and text in messaging and email apps. AI has already colonized web search, appearing in...

Zaktor ,

Sometimes. Sometimes it’s more accurate than anyone in the village. And it’ll be reliably getting better. People relying on “AI is wrong sometimes” as the core plank of opposition aren’t going to have a lot of runway before it’s so much less error prone than people the complaint is irrelevant.

The jobs and the plagiarism aspects are real and damaging and won’t be solved with innovation. The “AI is dumb” is already only selectively true and almost all the technical effort is going toward reducing that. ChatGPT launched a year and a half ago.

Zaktor ,

You’re lovely. Don’t think I need to see anything you write ever again.

Zaktor ,

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.

Zaktor ,

Except those things didn’t really solve any problems. Well, dotcom did, but that actually changed our society.

AI isn’t vaporware. A lot of it is premature (so maybe overblown right now) or just lies, but ChatGPT is 18 months old and look where it is. The core goal of AI is replacing human effort, which IS a problem wealthy people would very much like to solve and has a real monetary benefit whenever they can. It’s not going to just go away.

Zaktor , (edited )

Yes? AI is a lot of things, and most have well-defined accuracy metrics that regularly exceed human performance. You’re likely already experiencing it as a mundane tool you don’t really think about.

If you’re referring specifically to generative AI, that’s still premature, but as I pointed out, the interactive chat form most people worry about is 18 months old and making shocking levels of performance gains. That’s not the perpetual “10 years away” it’s been for the last 50 years, that’s something that’s actually happening in the near term. Jobs are already being lost.

People are scared about AI taking over because they recognize it (rightfully) as a threat. That’s not because they’re worthless. If that were the case you’d have nothing to fear.

Zaktor ,

This is a post on the Beehaw server. They don’t propagate downvotes.

Zaktor ,

Bonus trivia, sometimes you may see a downvote on a Beehaw post. As far as I understand the system, that’s because someone on your server downvoted the thing. The system then sends it off to Beehaw to be recorded on the “real” post and Beehaw just doesn’t apply it.

Zaktor ,

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.

Zaktor ,

I’m referencing ChatGPT’s initial benchmarks to its capabilities to today. Observable improvements have been made in less than two years. Even if you just want to track time from the development of modern LLM transformers (All You Need is Attention/BERT), it’s still a short history with major gains (alexnet isn’t really meaningfully related). These haven’t been incremental changes on a slow and steady march to AI sometime in the scifi scale future.

Zaktor , (edited )

The problem is that shit art is what employs a lot of artists. Like, in a post-scarcity society no one needing to spend any of their limited human lifespan producing corporate art would be awesome, but right now that’s one of the few reliable ways an artist can actually get paid.

I’m most familiar with photography as I know several professional photographers. It’s not like they love shooting weddings and clothing ads, but they do that stuff anyway because the alternative is not using their actual expertise and just being a warm body at a random unrelated job.

Zaktor ,

GameStop also went up. It doesn’t mean GameStop is a good company that’s valuable to own, it just means that dumb people will buy things without value if they think they can eventually pass the bag to someone else. If someone purchased every share of Amazon they’d own a massive asset that would continually produce value for them. If someone bought every outstanding Bitcoin, it both wouldn’t produce ongoing value, but the value would actually go to zero.

Zaktor ,

Is a photographer an artist? They need to have some technical skill to capture sharp photos with good lighting, but a lot of the process is designing a scene and later selecting among the photos from a shoot for which one had the right look.

Or to step even further from the actual act of creation, is a creative director an artist? There’s certainly some skill involved in designing and recognizing a compelling image, even if you were not the one who actually produced it.

Zaktor ,

No, both of those examples involve both design and selection, which is reminiscent to the AI art process. They’re not just typing in “make me a pretty image” and then refreshing a lot.

Zaktor ,

I don’t disagree, just pointing out that it’s not “good riddance” for a lot of artists that depend on that to have any job in art.

Zaktor ,

It isn’t. People design a scene and then change and refine the prompt to add elements. Some part of it could be refreshing the same prompt, but that’s just like a photographer taking multiple photos of a scene they’ve directed to catch the right flutter of hair or a dress or a creative director saying “give me three versions of X”.

Ready to get back to my original questions?

Zaktor ,

No, not even remotely. And that’s kind of like citing “the first program to run on a CPU” as the start of development for any new algorithm.

Zaktor , (edited )

None of these appeals to relative complexity, low level structure, or training corpuses relates to whether a human or NN “know” the meaning of a word in some special way. A lot of your description of what “know” means could be confused to be a description of how Word2Vec encodes words. This just indicates ignorance of how ML language processing works. It’s not remotely on the same level as a human brain, but your view on how things work and what its failings are is just wrong.

Zaktor ,

What? Alexnet wasn’t a breakthrough in that it used GPUs, it was a breakthrough for its depth and performance on image recognition benchmarks.

We knew GPUs could speed up neural networks in 2004. And I’m not sure that was even the first.

Zaktor ,

All of my artist friends also found it soul sucking, they just needed to make (real) money. Friends of friends with the occasional $20 to spare for a commission just don’t pay the bills. I think the only artist friends I have that make a living off their chosen medium and don’t hate their job are lifestyle photojournalists.

Zaktor ,

Why stop there? The digital computer was introduced in 1942 and methods for solving linear equations were developed in the 1600s.

Zaktor ,

But in this case it seems like an entirely good thing? The offer was made by an actual friend, the guy himself wanted this, his wife too, and they’re both pretty cognizant about what this is and isn’t.

Zaktor ,

This is a very patronizing view of people who all seem to be well informed about what this is and isn’t and who have already acknowledged that they will put it aside if it scares them. No one is foisting this on the bereaved wife and the husband has preemptively said it’s ok if her or her children never use it.

This might fail in all the ways you think it will. That’s a very small dataset of information, so it’s likely to be either be an overcomplicated recording or to need to incorporate training other than what he personally said, but it’s not your place to tell her what’s best for her personal grieving process.

Zaktor , (edited )

This is speculation of corporate action completely divorced from the specifics of this technology and particulars of this story. The result of this could be a simple purchase either of hardware or software to be used as chosen by the person owning it. And the person commissioning it can specify exactly who such a simulacrum is presented to. None of this has to be under the power of the company that builds the simulacrums, and if it is structured that way, then that’s the problem that should be rejected or disallowed, not that this particular form of memento exists.

Zaktor ,

This is a weirdly “you should only do things the natural way” comment section for a Tech-based community.

Humans also weren’t “meant” to be on social media, or recording videos of themselves, or even building shrines or gravesites for their loved ones. They’re just practices that have sprung up as technology and culture change. This very well could be an impediment to her moving on without him, but that’s her choice to make, and all this appeal to tradition is patronizing and doesn’t actually mean tradition is the right path for any given individual. The only right way to process death is:

  • Burn their body and possessions so that no trace remains
  • Pump their body full of chemicals so they won’t be decomposing when people ceremonially visit their corpse weeks later
  • Entomb them with their cats, slaves, and riches
  • Plant a tree nourished by their decomposing corpse
  • Turn their ashes into a piece of jewelry to be carried with you always
  • Make a shrine to the dead in your home to be prayed at regularly
  • Cast a death mask to more accurately sculpt their bust
  • Freeze their head so they may be resurrected later
Zaktor , (edited )

So just more patronizing. It’s their life, you don’t know better than them how to live it, grief or no.

Zaktor ,

Sure, and that point is being made in multiple other places in these comments. I find it patronizing, but that’s neither here nor there as it’s not what this comment thread is about.

Zaktor ,

Now he’s calling Latimer racist, and for what reason?

thehill.com/…/4662856-jamaal-bowman-accuses-georg…

yonkerstimes.com/ny-working-families-party-latime…

Zaktor ,

Hillary Clinton helped deal another blow to vulnerable Rep. Jamaal Bowman on Wednesday

Did she? Is a Hillary Clinton endorsement valuable? Or even positive? Every time she shows up in the news to talk about politics it feels like she’s doing more harm than good.

Zaktor ,

If that was the first questionable race-related comment he made I’d be inclined to believe it’s no big deal, but it’s not.

Here’s one of the controversies, a donor made an explicitly racist statement on camera, and the candidate never disavowed it (at least by two weeks later when the second article was written).

x.com/sunrisemvmt/status/1791533603433648188

And there are certainly stereotypes you just need to be careful about implying when pursuing a Democratic nomination. If your opponent is greedy and happens to be Jewish, spend some extra time thinking about how it’s going to be heard by people who have been working under that stereotype their whole life. That line of attack could have been framed as uninterested in reaching across the aisle or smooth talking other representatives, but he chose “argues too much” and “scream at”, then said he should talk “like normal people”. He’s not lighting up crosses, but he probably would have “voted for Obama a third time”.

Like this isn’t just a random off-hand comment where he didn’t have time to think and said something inartfully, this was a core line of attack on the first black representative of the district, something he must have realized would resonate with bigoted voters. And Bowman isn’t a particularly angry representative. Like “more firebrand” is true, but not in a sense where you’d think he’s really out of line. Making statements of principles on the steps of the capitol is something politicians do, especially when they’re in the minority.

Zaktor ,

The same reason Republicans should be disavowing the Nazis that support them. Because they’ve been publicly identified as being associated with his campaign. That wasn’t “not focused grouped”, that was racist. “The black congressman is only interested in his people.”

This is a common argument against progressives from moderates, of whatever race or gender or religion. You can not like that argument, but the fact that it’s used commonly against the populist left kinda detracts from the “oh, this is a dog whistle”

I literally just explained why this was a problem, and it’s not a matter of whether you can ever attack a black politician for not doing low key deal making. Take a half second to consider the larger cultural context for how you’re framing the attack and you wouldn’t have a problem.

But I am once again shocked at how empty the social justice ethics of moderates are.

Zaktor ,

Oh, I’m sorry she’s just racist rather than actually ready for pogroms, guess it’s no big deal then. And to double down in describing very blatant racism as an “awkward statement” is… wow.

Zaktor ,

I don’t care that a random racist woman exists, I care about the people, like you, who are doing everything in their power to ignore and minimize her racism. It would be so easy for you, and him, to simply say her comment was racist, completely inappropriate, and is not welcome in your political movement, but you apparently think “Black politicians only care about black people” is just an awkwardly expressed, but completely valid, viewpoint.

Zaktor ,

An article with more information about the fliers at the PA UN office, including witnesses to protesters (or “protesters”?).

abcnews.go.com/US/…/story?id=111050043

The U-Haul of protesters feels alt-right [1][2] and some have done false flag operations at protests to try to escalate conflict, but it’s certainly possible for disparate groups to use the same transportation methods. Just feels fishy.

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