The costs for responses are overblown, but the costs for training are not.

This is a wild take. You can get chatbots to vomit out entire paragraphs of published works verbatim. There is functionally no mechanism to a chatbot other than looking at a bunch existing texts, picking one randomly, and copying the next word from it. There’s no internal processing or logic that you could call creative, it’s just sticking one Lego at a time onto a tower, and every Lego is someone’s unpaid intellectual property.

There is no definition of plagiarism or copyright that LLMs don’t bite extremely hard. They’re just getting away with it because of the billions of dollars of capital pushing the tech. I am hypothetically very much for the complete abolition of copyright and free usage of information, but a) that means everyone can copy stuff freely, instead of just AI companies, and b) it first requires an actually functional society that provides for the needs of its citizens so they can have the time to do stuff like create art without needing to make a livable profit at it. And even if that were the case, I would still think the current implementation of AI is pretty shitty if it’s burning the same ludicrous amounts of energy to do its parlor tricks.

Okay so you could have just looked up one of dozens of resources on regex. The images you “need” are likely bad copies of images that already exist, or they’re weird collages of copied subject matter.

My point isn’t that there’s nothing they can do at all, it’s that nothing they can do is worth the energy cost. You’re spending tons of energy to effectively chew up information already on the web and have it vomited back to you in a slightly different form, when you could have just looked up the information directly. It doesn’t save time, because you have to double check everything. The images are also plagiarized, and you could be paying an artist if they’re something important, or improving your artistic abilities if they aren’t. I struggle to think of many cases where one of those options is unfeasible, it’s just the “easy” way out (because the energy costs are obfuscated) to have a machine crunch up some existing art to get a approximation of what you want.

Okay sure but in many cases the tech in question is actually useful for lots of other stuff besides repression. I don’t think that’s the case with LLMs. They have a tiny bit of actually usefulness that’s completely overshadowed by the insane skyscrapers of hype and lies that have been built up around their “capabilities”.

With “AI” I don’t see any reason to go through such gymnastics separating bad actors from neutral tech. The value in the tech is non-existent for anyone who isn’t either a researcher dealing with impractically large and unwieldy datasets, or of course a grifter looking to profit off of bigger idiots than themselves. It has never and will never be a useful tool for the average person, so why defend it?

I hate how fully leapfrogged the conversation about surveillance was. It’s so disgusting that it’s just assumed that all of your communications should be read by your teachers, parents, and school administration just because you’re a minor. Kids deserve privacy too.

You seem to be handwaving all concerns about the actual tech, but I think the fact that “training” is literally just plagiarism, and the absolutely bonkers energy costs for doing so, do squarely position LLMs as doing more harm than good in most cases.

The innocent tech here is the concept of the neural net itself, but unless they’re being trained on a constrained corpus of data and then used to analyze that or analogous data in a responsible and limited fashion then I think it’s somewhere on a spectrum between “irresponsible” and “actually evil”.

Not autistic but yeah I hate them. If they weren’t so sticky it’d be better…

Advertising should be illegal. Huge waste of money and everyone’s time.

Ahh well one day you’ll learn to apply the same critical thinking skills to intangibles.

Yes indeed, providing for all is basically the same as genocide.

I know that and you know that, but have you seen the sort of thing Trump and those who have his ear think is a good idea?

I don’t think they’d just ban using all open source software, it’d be something ridiculous like asserting that all FOSS licenses are null and void and those projects are now the intellectual property of the US. Likely propped up by the classic “security” justification.

I’m less worried about any specific targeting of Linux than I am about some random tech bro whispering in Trump’s ear and suddenly he bans Open Source or something similarly unenforceable and insane.

I would argue that a Ferris wheel is weirder than any of those lol. The raft is the only competitor.

Yeah I’ve been very happy here. Despite a reputation as a “tankie instance” I find that we mostly just don’t put up with fascists which is sick imo.

Stray was so mid… If it didn’t have cute cats it would have been forgotten instantly.

I was most flabbergasted by the fact that you never hunt anything!! What a miss! How do you make a game where you play as a cat without any stealth stalking of prey??

This does look a lot more faithful to the gameplay of the original than that weird mobile game they made a couple years ago. I’m sure the move to 3d means the precision won’t be quite as demanding, but hopefully the extra dimension will make up for that with interesting new challenges.

Okay do this for driving a car.

lol okay then I’m pretty mystified. Seems like all of the major features of Discord will either be directly replicated or have functional equivalents.

So it sounds like the lack of multiple text channels is the main missing feature? I haven’t used it myself yet so I’m assuming those don’t exist, but the concept of a server seems to be pretty one-to-one with a persistently hosted workspace.

From my understanding, currently the lack of a persistent superpeer makes a long-standing community unrealistic without someone remaining constantly connected, but once that’s implemented it would just be a persistent workspace. Publish the link in a centralized location for your project and bam, you’ve got the equivalent of an official discord server.

What functionality do you think is missing?