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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • this will force us humans to go actually outside, make friends, form deep social relationship, and build lasting, resilient communities

    There is no chance it goes that way, how is talking to people outside even an option for someone used to just being on the internet? Even if the content gets worse, the basic mechanisms to keep people scrolling still function, while the physical and social infrastructure necessary for in person community building is nonexistent.








  • There are less coercive ways to remove barriers to voting. Some US states send everyone ballots in the mail and you have a long time to fill them out, which removes the need to go to a specific place on a specific day; all you have to do is fill it out and put it back in the mailbox. I think that kind of thing is a better option. There are situations where there are strong reasons civic participation has to be mandatory, like jury duty, but if the only real problem mandatory voting is meant to solve is life circumstances leading people to not bother voting, there are a lot of other plausibly effective steps that can be taken instead and it isn’t clearly necessary to do something that invasive.





  • I don’t understand this attitude. If an argument is good, why wouldn’t it be valuable or matter? I think it would benefit people a lot if everyone put more thought and consideration into their arguments, especially in the direction of conveying some original thought that isn’t just a remix of the same tired propaganda style rhetoric everyone’s heard a million times before. “Winning” doesn’t matter, but collaboratively thinking about things with other people matters, and a good way to do that is through argument.


  • It’s unfortunate that SSN has come to be used as a form of proof of existence as a person, but I’m glad at least that more effective means of formally tracking and quantifying us have been successfully fought back. Banks, governments, service providers and employers having some friction and uncertainty in whether their database entry accurately corresponds to you is itself a valuable form of privacy.

    I’ve been reading the book Seeing Like A State and I think it has some pretty good points about how civic legibility and record keeping is established as a tool of centralized control and can be a dangerous double edged sword.


  • The output for a given input cannot be independently calculated as far as I know, particularly when random seeds are part of the input.

    The system gives a probability distribution for the next word based on the prompt, which will always be the same for a given input. That meets the definition of deterministic. You might choose to add non-deterministic rng to the input or output, but that would be a choice and not something inherent to how LLMs work. Random ‘seeds’ are normally used as part of deterministically repeatable rng. I’m not sure what you mean by “independently” calculated, you can calculate the output if you have the model weights, you likely can’t if you don’t, but that doesn’t affect how deterministic it is.

    The so what means trying to prevent certain outputs based on moral judgements isn’t possible. It wouldn’t really be possible if you could get in there with code and change things unless you could write code for morality, but it’s doubly impossible given you can’t.

    The impossibility of defining morality in precise terms, or even coming to an agreement on what correct moral judgment even is, obviously doesn’t preclude all potentially useful efforts to apply it. For instance since there is a general consensus that people being electrocuted is bad, electrical cables normally are made with their conductive parts encased in non-conductive material, a practice that is successful in reducing how often people get electrocuted. Why would that sort of thing be uniquely impossible for LLMs? Just because they are logic processing systems that are more grown than engineered? Because they are sort of anthropomorphic but aren’t really people? The reasoning doesn’t follow. What people are complaining about here is that AI companies are not making these efforts a priority, and it’s a valid complaint because it isn’t the case that these systems are going to be the same amount of dangerous no matter how they are made or used.




  • “They can come down on you for a lot of things. They seized up the bank accounts for people who were protesting, the truckers. People who were donating to the truckers, they seized their bank accounts,” Rogan said.

    I don’t know what “a lot of things” is gesturing at, maybe he doesn’t either. Use of payments censorship to shut down protests without legal proceedings is legitimately worrying, though this is something right wing commentators tend to fixate on to the exclusion of the same stuff when used against people who aren’t their audience. Here’s an article that I think has a good perspective on this.

    All these cases happen somewhere distant to a person in the US or Canada, so could it be that the Truckers struck a nerve because this was the first time that citizens of a democratic Western nation were subject to payments oppression? The answer is no. Cashless payments censorship has a long and established tradition in Western countries. It’s just that it’s not recognized because it’s been focussed on marginalized groups such as welfare recipients.