Feel like this belongs in [email protected]
Think I should cross-post?
Go on, my brother.
Done.
When I imagine a future with AI ruining the world, I always thought it was going to be some Skynet/CABAL/HAL9000 type of thing
Not this sad, boring, depressing type shit
These fucking companies… downing a torrent of annas archive but crawling wikipedia scourge of mankind
Doesn’t make any sense. Why would you crawl wikipedia when you can just download a dump as a torrent ?
AI bros aren’t that smart.
To have the most recent data?
To just have the most recent data within reasonable time frame is one thing. AI companies are like “I must have every single article within 5 minutes they get updated, or I’ll throw my pacifier out of the pram”. No regard for the considerations of the source sites.
wikipedia should install ai mazes on their servers
Not in this case, to be fair. The only concern is cost - since Wiki wouldn’t be opposed to them getting their actual data - and AI mazes are designed to safeguard more sensitive data, not reducing cost
Nice analysis. Need more smart people like you in the world
I agree with that assessment!
Are there alternatives besides Cloudflare’s solution?
Nepenthes does about the same thing but isn’t managed by a corp.
We should stop using ai
I don’t know about stopping entirely. I built a pretty cool RAG system for internal use in my company, it very much facilitates navigating very large amounts of text data.
I still struggle with a use case for artificial intelligence in my own life. I play around with it all and I’m just like, it doesn’t do a good job. Also, I think humanity is missing the plot, you know? Like, we don’t need government. If government isn’t going to do government. Government serves the people, not corporations. Or at least it should. I don’t know, I think we’re entering in times. At some point, I think people will pray for nuclear war, because life will be so miserable. That it would be better than just to end it all.
AI has niches but they’re exactly that: Niches. Small duct tape tasks for fudging over “hard problems” where manual code would result in a worse outcome and take far more time. Little esoteric problem spaces, which notably don’t actually require you to use several states worth of electrical power training on a 50PB dataset of anime titties.
An example: I have a name generator in my game that strings together several consonant+vowel phoneme pairs into a name. This means that the names are always pronounceable, but often the spelling looks really unintuitive. Eg Joosiffe, which the player would likely pronounce as Joseph. However, the leap we do in our head between those two spellings is a process of declassifying phonemes and then re-classifying phonemes, and is actually a “hard problem” from a coding perspective due to the unintituive, multifarious complexities of written, spoken, and conceptualized human language. Adding this step to my name generator in code would be a project of it’s own, larger than the game itself, and wouldn’t ever work nearly as well as it needed to. But relatively small (30MB) AI models that do this with something like 99.8% satisfaction already exist. They didn’t require a data center’s worth of resources to train, and since they’re academic projects they have licenses that allow them to be used for free in a game.
Actual AI?
Imagine your phone knows that you have a business meeting downtown today. It’s already reserved a parking space for you, set your car to warm up before you leave and looped your contact in on your ETA, along with automatically notifying you of any delays. Then, your kid wakes up this morning in with a horrible toothache, you ask your phone what to do and it rings up your family dentist, who has a full schedule today, but makes you a referral nearby. You agree to try that other dentist today, and your AI books an appointment, checks your meeting today, coordinates with their AIs and approves a 15 minute delay so you can get to the dentist. It also notifies your kid’s school of their absence and has their teachers AI automatically queued up to send transcripts, notes and homework assignmenta from today’s classes.
That’s the kind of stuff actual AI can do. Overgrown autocorrect? It’s basically a multi-billion dollar Magic Eightball.
I’m dyslexic and basically a terrible writer. It has helped my professional communication develop. It really helps me speed up my issues with my disability and feel confident in my communications.
This is a cool use case. Just make sure you retain your own voice! If you read an AI-generated sentence out loud and think “I’d have said it this way instead”, IMO you should absolutely then change it to be that way.
At some point, I think people will pray for nuclear war, because life will be so miserable.
Reminds me of Roll out the Fallout by The Chalkeaters
Like, we don’t need government.
Welcome to the anarchist. Now you have to pick your flavor! Social Anarcho-syndicalism, Anarcho comunist, anarcho-capitalism, anarcho christianis, and the list goes on!
I found LLMs helpfuls to develop some scripts and answer some simple trivial questions (like how does house property work in China). I could have looked for that in a regular search engine though. But that’s it, I am still happy looking for things myself and investigating since you can’t really trust their answers.
even better stop joining major platforms like social media and then they won’t be able to create data sets. Be a leach, especially when they give it away for free, but don’t contribute to the project. Understand how it works, sure. But it seems like most of humanity says they don’t want something, yet they do the contrary. It’s like we choose to comply before we even ask to comply for the fear of missing out. But if you look at what is today, what are you really missing out on?
So, uh. What about Lemmy?
They can also crawl this publically-accessible social media source for their data sets.
I’m on board with abandoning mainstream social media, but my point is that your suggestion would not solve the problem just relocate it. A better solution to the AI conglomerates stealing everyone’s data from the open Internet is legislation and regulations - ie tackling the whole ‘stealing data’ component, along with stronger privacy regulations for everyone to make it harder for them to do the same in the future. It’s nice seeing the EU taking some positive steps, but we will not see the US take any steps in that direction anytime soon, due to corporate capture of their politicians and the AI companies all being in the top 10 most wealthy companies in the US.
They can also crawl this publically-accessible social media source for their data sets.
Crawling would be silly. They can simply setup a lemmy node and subscribe to every other server. Activitypub crawler would be much more efficient as they wouldn’t accidentally crawl things that haven’t changed, but instead can read the activitypub updates.
It’s nice seeing the EU taking some positive steps
Yet they helped introducing the super cookies and are trying to end encryption on communications.
This is an example of corporate terrorism sponsored by our own government. Elon Musk loves to see himself as the villain in Ready Player One. And this is not a joke you can look it up. Big tech is waging war against American citizens, and no longer do we have any control of our government, and the Democrats will not save us. The electoral processes will not save us. This is just hard for some people to accept, that’s why things have to fall apart before they get a clue. Unfortunately, those that are wiser are going to feel the flames first.
Life is “simpler” when you realize governments (and hence the State) are just bullies that exercise their power through physical violence or economical violence.
Governments aren’t fundamentally bad. Having a governing body along with laws and regulations is a good thing when done beneficently. For example, government is responsible for access to public education, libraries, banking, worker safety, and hospitals - all of which are objectively good things to have as a society. The problems usually occur when some individuals have more power/influence than others to choose what the government does, which is what’s happening in much of the world right now.
what assholes … just fucking download the full package and quit hitting the URL
The amount of stupid AI scraping behavior I see even on my small websites is ridiculous, they’ll endlessly pound identical pages as fast as possible over an entire week, apparently not even checking if the contents changed. Probably some vibe coded shit that barely functions.
Right‽ This is ridiculously stupid when you can download the entirety of Wikipedia in a single package and parse it to your hearts desire
Not only that, but we make it goddamn trivial for not just Wikipedia but for other Wikimedia projects. Doing this is just stealing without attribution and share-alike like the CC BY-SA 4.0 license demands and then on top of that kicking down the ladder for people who actually want to use Wikimedia and not the hallucinatory slop they’re trying to supplant it with. LLM companies have caused incalculable damage to critical thinking, the open web, the copyleft movement, and the climate.
Yay interrobang :D
If I was running infra for them, I’d just start blacklisting abusive IPs without warning
And the quality of the AI output sucks. I was recently looking for information about positive convention for yaw, pitch, and roll in aircraft. I was looking at az and yaw and got reasonable results from the AI, but when I looked at pitch and el all of the results were about elevator pitches. Even when I spelled out elevation it insisted on elevator pitches. I scroll past the AI results as a matter of principle, but I usually look at them so I have something specific to complain about when people ask why I am so virulently anti-AI.
The other day I tried to have it help me with a programming task on a personal project. I am an experienced programmer, but I only “get by” in Python (typically just by looking up the documentation for the standard library). I thought, “OK. This is it. I will ask Llama 3.3 and GPT4 for help.”
That shit literally set me back a weekend. It gave me such bad approaches and answers, that I could tell were bad (aforementioned experience in programming, degree in comp sci, etc) that I got confused about writing Python. Had I just done what I usually do, which is to look up the documentation and use my brain, I would have gotten my weekend task done a whole weekend sooner.
It scares me to think what people are doing to themselves by relying on this, especially if they’re novices.
It scares me to think what people are doing to themselves by relying on this, especially if they’re novices.
Same here. There’s a lot of denial going on but, LLMs are not good for anything that requires factual information. They likely will never be on account of just being statistical models for language. Summarizing long text where correctness isn’t an issue is really one of the only places where I still think that they are good.
Search? Not if you want anything factual with citations.
Code? Fuck no. They constantly produce code of poor quality that may depend on non-existent libraries or functionality. More time it’s spent debugging than writing code and it leaves the dev with a poor understanding of what the code actually does and ways to optimize/extend/etc.
Generating literary smut? Well, it’s not going to do as good of a job as a person who can create something completely novel but can be passable without likely harm to authors (I’d classify it as a tier below erotic fan fiction).
We’re going to be entering a golden age of hacks in the next 5 years, I’m calling it now. All this copy-pasted bad ChatGPT code is going to be used in ways that generate security holes the likes of which we’ve never seen before.
AI is useful for basic, mundane tasks and that’s about it. Trying to force it to be some sort of Uber search engine is such a bad idea.
I recently started as a graphic designer despite knowing absolutely nothing about it, so i am constantly searching how to do stuff in Adobe suite at work. Half the time Google’s AI can’t even keep “Cmnd” and “ctrl” straight, telling me to use’ “cmnd+shift+H” on Windows or “ctrl+shift+H” on Mac’. I don’t even know how it botches that, but it does it about 25% of the time.
Yea that’s a bad example of what to use ai for at least right now. You’re going to get bad results with that question.
It’s good for things, if you pay.
I don’t want to ask ai. Google automatically gives me ai search results that are piss poor. Those useless results still use energy to generate.
Google automatically gives me ai search results that are piss poor.
And these results are taken at face value by a shocking number of people. I’ve gotten into niche academic arguments where someone just copy and pasted the AIs completed hallucinated response as “evidence.”
I experimented with using AI to generate basic quizzes for students on concepts like atomic theory or conservation of energy, but maybe 2/20 questions it came up with were any form of accurate/useful. Even when it’s not making shit up entirely, the information is so shallow as to be useless.
Support Wikipedia! They’re awesome and are our backbone.
Laws should be passed in all countries that AI crawlers should request permission before crawling whatever target site. I haver no pity to AI “thiefs” that get their models poisoned. F…ing plague, wasn’t enough the adware and spyware…
i doubt the recent uptick in traffic is from “stealing data” for training but rather from agents scraping them for context, eg Edge Copilot, Google’s AI search, SearchGPT, etc.
poisoning the data will likely not help in this situation since there’s a human on the other side that will just do the same search again given unsatisfactory results. like how retries and timeouts can cause huge outages for web scale companies, poisoning search results will likely cause this type of traffic to increase and further increase the chances of DoS and higher bandwidth usage.
So? Break context scrapers till they give up, on your site or completely.
easily said
An HTTP request is a request. Servers are free to rate limit or deny access
Bots lie about who they are, ignore robots.txt, and come from a gazillion different IPs.
That’s what ddos protection is for.
Rate limiting in itself requires resources that are not always available. For one thing you can only rate limit individuals you can identify so you need to keep data about past requests in memory and attach counters to them and even then that won’t help if the requests come from IPs that are easily changed.
And Wikimedia, in particular, is all about publishing data under open licenses. They want the data to be downloaded and used by others. That’s what it’s for.
Even so I think it would be totally reasonable for them to block web scrapers, as they provide better ways to download all their data.
At the root of this comment chain is a proposal to have laws passed about this.
People can set up their web servers however they like. It’s on them to do that, it’s their web servers. I don’t think there should be legislation about whether you’re allowed to issue perfectly ordinary HTTP requests to a public server, let the server decide how to respond to them.
AI: The “pen that can write in zero gravity” when pencils exist.
Well I get the analogy, but also I think they didn’t use pencils because of the graphite and complications with filtering air or something.
Graphite is conductive. A short circuit and fire are Very Bad.
Couldn’t you just use a charcoal pencil or crayon instead?
Yes, but neither of those write as cleanly. And both are still prone to fragmenting, even if the fragments aren’t conductive.
You may be right. It’s just easier to get the sentiment across that way than expound about how it’s ridiculously complex and overbuilt to achieve menial results.
Also, all pens work in zero gravity. They don’t rely on gravity to feed ink to the point, try writing on a piece of paper that’s held against the ceiling and it works just fine.
Just tried it, and the ink stopped. There’s no wick in it and apparently any capillary action is stopped by gravity. It wrote for a little bit for as long as there was enough ink sticking to the ball, but that didn’t last more than a few sentences.
In zero gravity, since there’s no gravity pulling the ink in either direction, a typical ballpoint pen would likely write inconsistently as the ink shifts in the tube from inertial forces, like a pen that’s drying out.
Pedro Duque wrote a diary entry in orbit in a Soyuz capsule using an ordinary ballpoint pen specifically to disprove this. Don’t know what went wrong with your pen, cheap ballpoint pens fail sometimes regardless of what orientation they’re in.
Just for fun, I tried three more pens and writing in an inverted position (i.e. towards the ceiling):
- A Bic Crystal
- A Papermate Gel
- Some random pen from an auto shop with a nonstandard ballpoint tip (so probably some brand other than the first two).
All of them failed. Interestingly, the Crystal lasted the longest, but when it failed, it was almost immediate.
I’m not saying this is an especially scientific test, but I’ve now tried four different ballpoint pens, all from different manufacturers, and none could write upside down. Gravity is an important part of how they work on Earth.
It may be that you can still write in space, but I would hazard a guess that it has to do with whether you can keep ink on the ball. Since there’s no “down,” how you write or how you hold the pen when you take breaks might make things better or worse.
It’s cool, though, that he put it to the test. When I just put my pens to the side, they get refreshed and are able to write again, which is why my hypothesis is that it’s down to whether you can keep the ball continuously wet or not.
This pen / pencil thing has been corrected so many times for so many decades that it’s ludicrous people are still bringing it up.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-nasa-spen/
Random bits of pencil lead floating around in a high tech environment is such a poor idea that even the Soviet’s quit using pencils once Fisher’s Space Pen was available. A pen which Fisher itself paid to develop and then sold to both NASA and the Soviet Space Program.
Yeah, I know it’s not precisely correct, but it’s a fable that’s commonly understood as an example of over-engineering. I’m open to better and more factual examples, if you have any!
Pen, pencil. Both are dangerous in the wrong hands.
Artificial intelligence is really just a Swiss army, knife, version of a search engine. It serves the interest of the ruling elite and is a way the uber wealthy can make America stupid again or even dumber than dumb. Like we move forward fast but we always miss the point and we’re always putting out fires that once were easily manageable. The code base is growing we’re all saying a lot of nothing. It’s really just drowning out voices and good ideas just to centralize everything. It’s about power. It’s about control. It’s about the man behind the curtain in the wizard of Oz. I like technology a lot and I would like it to be in the hands of working people and not the uber wealthy. So I am no techno optimist at all, not until we fix that issue.
To be clear, network costs represent a tiny fraction of WMF’s expenses. Much of WMF’s budget goes to social programs, not technical upkeep.
