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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • exocortex@discuss.tchncs.detomemes@lemmy.worldSwift? more like Supersonic
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    2 months ago

    True.

    I’m very much opposed to and sad about an international pop star and apparent progressive taking a private jet all the time.

    But there’s two things at play that should be differentiated.

    1. The role model aspect. She has millions of fans that look up to her. She could lead by example and use different means of transportation.
    2. She’s obviously a unique figure. She’s not replaceable or generic in the position she’s at. Her “position” cannot be replaced by someone else as would be possible with the Starbucks CEO. She’s not “some CEO” taking a Jet to work and thereby normalizing this as a habit for CEOs". Right now there are few if any other celebrities with her status l, so she stands for herself.

    The precedent of Starbucks CEO commuting by jet is much more of a blueprint that might be applied to other CEOs. Or already is. I don’t even know his name FFS. So he’s making a precedent that a lot of other people could readily adapt.

    I don’t want to excuse anything. I just think that it would be more beneficial to attack CEOs for taking private jets. There’s a lot more of them. They areuch more susceptible to the pressure if the companies is seen as a polluter than Taylor Swift might be. She’s much more independent than any CEO. She doesn’t have to worry if the board of directors or the shareholders are going to replace her if her if her habits are becoming a PR problem. So our energy might be more productively applied elsewhere.

    I’m still sad about a seemingly progressive and apparently Intelligent pop star like her flying that much.



  • It cannot “analyze” it. It’s fundamentally not how LLM’s work. The LLM has a finite set of “tokens”: words and word-pieces like “dog”, “house”, but also like “berry” and “straw” or “rasp”. When it reads the input it splits the words into the recognized tokens. It’s like a lookup table. The input becomes “token15, token20043, token1923, token984, token1234, …” and so on. The LLM “thinks” of these tokens as coordinates in a very high dimensional space. But it cannot go back and examine the actual contents (letters) in each token. It has to get the information about the number or “r” from somewhere else. So it has likely ingested some texts where the number of "r"s in strawberry is discussed. But it can never actually “test” it.

    A completely new architecture or paradigm is needed to make these LLM’s capable of reading letter by letter and keep some kind of count-memory.


  • We long left the era where we “own” things that we buy. As everything is a computer now it has become very simple to control stuff that remotely that was working on its own before.

    So the answer to “why would <CORPORATION> do this” is simply: “Because they can”.

    Every tiny decision is guided by increasing profit. No matter the side effects (short or long term ). Because with many shareholders administering pressure to maximize profits there’s only one way to go (even if it’s a dumb and shortsighted decision) maximizing profits NOW. If you are not doing that because you can see that increasing profits now will hurt profits in the future then you are hindering the project. You have to increase profits now, because if you are not then your competitor is doing it and that is a problem. If you are not going with the project you will be out of a job sooner or later. Then someone will take over that will make the decision you couldn’t do.

    This is a race to the bottom. Morals, integrity, honesty, responsibility and foresight are only obstacles in this logic (because the competition is not bound by them which gains them an advantage).

    It’s simply cheaper now to build everything in the car always and run an operating system that manages all these things and can control what you are doing in your car.

    Cory Doctorow held a great keynote about this some ~10-ish years (?) ago with the title “The coming war on general computation” where he explained the side effects of putting DRM in every stupid appliance. The side effect here is that we cannot hack our cars to switch on the heated seats (or whatever other feature BMW is not allowing us to use for free) because of DRM. It is not “our” car, even though we bought it.


  • I agree, but as long as we still have capitalism I support measures that at least slow down the destructiveness of capitalism. AI is like a new powertool in capitalism’s arsenal to dismantle our humanity. Sure we can use it for cool things as well. But right now it’s used mostly to automate stuff that makes us human - art, music and so on. Not useful stuff like loading the dishwasher for me. More like writing a letter for me to invite my friends to my birthday. Very cool. But maybe the work I put in doing this myself is making my friends feel appreciated?

    Edit: It’s also nice to at least have an app that takes this maximalist approach. Then people can choose. If they’re half-assing it there will be more and more ai-features creeping in over time. One compromise after the next until it’s like all the other apps. It’s also important to have such a maximalist stand in order to gauge the scale in a way.




  • It’s also a great example why these mega corps should be broken up into smaller pieces.

    If forced arbitration persists (and this argumentation from Disney is successful and then used as precedence) any service used from one company can be used to forever ban you from taking legal action against that company again even if the service and the reason for the legal action have nothing to do with each other.

    Am I right in understanding that this case is about someone dying from eating in a Disney owned restaurant that by accident was a Disney+ subscriber?

    If one company owns everything like Amazon, Google, Apple and in the future maybe even water supply, garbage collection, operates my car and is my insurer or bank account (and owner of one of the 4 remaining fast food chains in the country) how can people actually sue a company then ?




  • I have no idea how to fix the problem, but I’ve read somewhere that burn (a relatively new machine learning framework in Rust) is capable of loading models like stable diffusion. As Burn is built with webGPU and all the shader transpiler-stuff that comes with it doesn’t that mean that it can also run easily on (even older) AMD cards? I think what’s lacking is equal performance as nvidia drivers are heavily optimized already.

    Maybe someone knows more here?



  • It’s really a pile of garbage. And I’m angry at myself for watching so much of it. It’s clearly not written by anybody interested in the star trek universe.

    My go-to example is also this one episode where one young character decides to from now on go by the pronouns “they/them”. I’m all for the inclusion of nonbinary characters - that’s what star trek always stood for - inclusion and the shared humanity that we all have. But that episode had basically nothing else going for it and the pronouns were the plot.

    The new, great series “strange new worlds” on the other hand had a great episode with a very interesting non binary character (that BTW never was explicitly pointed out as one) who helped spock deal with his own problems of navigating his own two identities (human/vulcan). It was so clever and the nonbinaryness was integral, to the plot, but it wasn’t the plot. The actual plot was that the non binary character basically fooled everyone and turned out the villain. It’s such a great comparison between those two series. One makes a compelling show and the other one has nothing to say other than ticking a list of “woke” virtue signalling points.