Sir Arthur V Quackington

Actually a disturbing amount of those have basically come true.

Every transaction you make on your card is tracked and is sold to advertisers by your credit card company.

Your phone’s GPS is not mandatory to send to the government, but once again your OS reports that back and that data is then grouped and sold and then de-anonymized through identity brokers.

Walking is not illegal, but letting your children walk places is. You, honest to God, will run into trouble with police if you allow your small child of, let’s say, four to eight years old walk two blocks down the road to the park that you live near. And notoriously, pedestrians are absolutely second class citizens in the US.

They are attempting to make ID mandatory to vote, which is one of the rights you have in the United States from birth. Many states also have stop and identify laws that require you to turn this over to officers even if they have no reason to suspect you and you’ve committed no crime. This is inconsistent across the U.S. but has been ticking up.

And as for the gays getting married, the exact argument they used to fear-monger about the gays is the same argument they are using to fear-monger against trans people very successfully right now, and there is rampant talk of undoing gay marriage as part of the next year’s objectives for the GOP. But this one is not really like the other ones. This is an obvious red herring that was made in bad faith even at the time, not really founded on any of the behavior or history of the group in question like the other statements you made.

The sad part about most of this is not that there is a slippery slope, so to speak, but that rights and privacy are eroded so omniscientally through contracts and terms of service today that you may not think you’re giving up very much when you say yes to check out using Stripe or to manage something in cashapp. But the truth is that these services are then de-anonymized by industries whose entire job is to collect these profiles together, tie them back to the identifiable user metrics and IDs, and build a profile on you that can be sold, and the buyer can be the US government, which is a legal loophole that they technically did not spy on you, but just bought a complete dossier from an information broker.

This isn’t tin foil hatchet. Cops do this regularly now. And it is insanely unethical and should be illegal. But as of this date, it is not. And famously, this also applies to the private camera systems that run the license plate reading across state lines, and officers have clearly used these systems for other tracking purposes, including stalking exs and attempting to track down people for actions that may be a crime in their state but are not a crime in the state in which they live.

“If”

They will. Once the age check at an OS level is implemented, the next level is to enforce that this check then use a verification service. And then to make this information available to sites upon access.

Ingesting all the artwork you ever created by obtaining it illegally and feeding it into my plagarism remix machine is theft of your work, because I did not pay for it.

Separately, keeping a copy of this work so I can do this repeatedly is also stealing your work.

The judge ruled the first was okay but the second was not because the first is “transformative”, which sadly means to me that the judge despite best efforts does not understand how a weighted matrix of tokens works and that while they may have some prevention steps in place now, early models showed the tech for what it was as it regurgitated text with only minor differences in word choice here and there.

Current models have layers on top to try and prevent this user input, but escaping those safeguards is common, and it’s also only masking the fact that the entire model is built off of the theft of other’s work.

There is nothing intelligent about “AI” as we call it. It parrots based on probability. If you remove the randomness value from the model, it parrots the same thing every time based on it’s weights, and if the weights were trained on Harry Potter, it will consistently give you giant chunks of harry potter verbatim when prompted.

Most of the LLM services attempt to avoid this by adding arbitrary randomness values to churn the soup. But this is also inherently part of the cause of hallucinations, as the model cannot preserve a single correct response as always the right way to respond to a certain query.

LLMs are insanely “dumb”, they’re just lightspeed parrots. The fact that Meta and these other giant tech companies claim it’s not theft because they sprinkle in some randomness is just obscuring the reality and the fact that their models are derivative of the work of organizations like the BBC and Wikipedia, while also dependent on the works of tens of thousands of authors to develop their corpus of language.

In short, there was a ethical way to train these models. But that would have been slower. And the court just basically gave them a pass on theft. Facebook would have been entirely in the clear had it not stored the books in a dataset, which in itself is insane.

I wish I knew when I was younger that stealing is wrong, unless you steal at scale. Then it’s just clever business.

Terrible judgement.

Turn the K value down on the model and it reproduces text near verbatim.

I’m not worried about me. I can manage. But I had to intervene and make it a Project for my immediate family. Which is always unfun, because who wants to expose all their personal data that way, especially photos.

Crazy that Google just screwed over GrapheneOS like this.

Great link, and I fully agree. If it’s possible anyways.

Yes, but that shouldn’t explicitly opt in, and they shouldn’t marry that product to Gmail and Google Drive if they are going to push it to enable by default.

Again, it’s really insidious. They push it so aggressively I had to disable it on my personal device twice, and I can’t just not use Google Photos app because it’s tied to the camera itself on pixel phones.

The absolutely criminal dark patterns that they pull on people via Google photos auto backup is insane.

Just in my own orbit 2 of my friends wives, my parents, and my in-laws all wound up paying Google because they thought they had to or lose all their photos. We helped most of them disconnect the autobackup (that they didn’t even know was activated) and move it to offline safely. But that was the most downright evil shit Google has ever done and literally a fire in me for manipulating the elderly and less tech savvy so blatantly.

I responded above, but my point kind of was that it doesn’t work that way, but as we rethinking content delivery we should also rethinking hosting distribution. What I was saying is not a “well gee we should just do this…” type of suggestion, but more a extremely high level idea for server orchestration from a public private swarm that may or may not ever be feasible, but definitely doesn’t really exist today.

Imagine if it were somewhat akin to BitTorrent, only the user could voluntarily give remote control to the instance for orchestration management. The orchestration server toggles the nodes contents so that, lets say, 100% of them carry the most accessed data (hot content, <100gb), and the rest is sharded so they each carry 10% of the archived data, making each node require <1tb total. And the node client is given X number of pinned CPUs that can be used for additional server compute tasks to offload various queries.

See, I’m fully aware this doesn’t really exist on this form. But thinking of it like a Kubernetes cluster or a HA webclient it seems like it should be possible somehow to build this in a way where the client really only needs to install, and say yes to contribute. If we could cut it down to that level, then you can start serving the site like a P2P bittorrent swarm, and these power user clients can become nodes.

I realize that is not how the fediverse works. I’m not speaking about the content delivery as much as the sever orchestration.

That’s why I’m saying if somehow it could work that way, it would be one way to offset the compute and delivery burdens. But it is a very different paradigm from normal hosting. There would have to be some kind of swarmanagement layer that the main instance nodes controlled.

My point was only that, should such a proposal be feasible one day, if you lower the barriers you could have more resources.

I myself have no interest in hosting a full blown private instance of Lemmy or mastodon, but I would happily contribute 1tb of storage and a ton of idle compute to serving the content for my instance if I could. That’s where this thinking stemmed from. Many users like me could donate their “free” idle power and space. But currently it is not feasible.

Provided there is an “upper limit” on what scale we are talking, Ive often wondered, couldn’t private users also host a sharded copy of a server instance to offset load and bandwidth? Like Folding@Home, but for site support.

I realize this isn’t exactly feasible today for most infra, but if we’re trying to “solve” the problem, imagine if you were able to voluntarily, give up like 100gb HDD space and have your PC host 2-3% of an instance’s server load for a month or something. Or maybe just be a CDN node for the media and bandwidth heavy parts to ease server load, while the server code is on different machines.

This kind of distributed “load balancing” on private hardware may be a complete pipe dream today, but it think if might be the way federated services need to head. I can tell you if we could get it to be as simple as volunteers spinning up a docker, and dropping the generated wireguard key and their IP in a “federate” form to give the mini-node over to an instance, it would be a lot easier to support sites in this way.

Speaking for myself, I have enough bandwidth and space I could lend some compute and offset a small amount of traffic. But the full load of a popular instance would be more than my simple home setup is equipped for. If contributing hosting was as easy as contributing compute, it could have a chance to catch on.

True, in a broad sense. I am speaking moreso to enshittification and the degradation of both experience and control.

If this was just “now everything has Siri, it’s private and it works 100x better than before” it would be amazing. That would be like cars vs horses. A change, but a perceived value and advantage.

But it’s not. Not right now anyways. Right now it’s like replacing a car with a pod that runs on direct wind. If there is any wind over say, 3mph it works, and steers 95% as well as existing cars. But 5% of the time it’s uncontrollable and the steering or brakes won’t respond. And when there is no wind over 3mph it just doesn’t work.

In this hypothetical, the product is a clear innovation, offers potential benefits long term in terms of emissions and fuel, but it doesn’t do the core task well, and sometimes it just fucks it up.

The television, cars, social media, all fulfilled a very real niche. But nearly everyone using AI, even those using it as a tool for coding (arguably its best use case) often don’t want to use it in search or in many of these other “forced” applications because of how unreliable it is. Hence why companies have tried (and failed at great expense) to replace their customer service teams with LLMs.

This push is much more top down.

Now drink your New Coke and Crystal Pepsi.

Tech companies don’t really give a damn what customers want anymore. They have decided this is the path of the future because it gives them the most control of your data, your purchasing habits and your online behavior. Since they control the back end, the software, the tech stack, the hardware, all of it, they just decided this is how it shall be. And frankly, there’s nothing you can do to resist it, aside from just eschewing using a phone at all. and divorcing yourself from all modern technology, which isn’t really reasonable for most people. That or legislation, but LOL United States.

People have to eat.

Fundamentally the US is broken, and people don’t have themselves to support themselves very long.

Medical debt can wipe out your meager gains incredibly fast. The stock market tanking erases your only real savings you may have had.

Under those circumstances, it’s hard to take action when your hustling to survive.

These kinds of questions are best discussed with a therapist if you can see one, but yes, you can improve, and it doesn’t mean you have to be solo to do it. But try not to let the relationship define you. You need to be a whole, complete person without the external validation. Taking pride in your appearance is good, but feeling like you cannot show your most intimate partner your bare face is some regressive thinking from older generations we should leave behind.

In time I hope you feel happier and more comfortable just being you, regardless of being with someone. Being able to find self worth solo makes you much, much more rounded as a person, healthier, and ultimately a better partner too. Good luck.

The comment above is a half serious joke, but you do seem rather desperate for the approval of your partner and their validation. This isn’t totally healthy, and on one hand can be suffocating potentially, but can also be abused by a bad actor if you happen to date one. And those kinds of partners can sense and prey on that part of you.

I hope you have some positive friendships and relationships to help offset whatever is driving this feeling in you. In a perfect world, I’d say speak with a therapist but who can afford healthcare nowadays.

This is a hard thing to just say, but I hope you can understand that some of your fear and jealousy here is probably stemming from a lack of self confidence.

I say this, because I hope you can reflect on that, and be aware that some partners will understand and exploit that if you are not careful. This guy doesn’t sound like that, but maybe your next relationship is.

As others have said, try to have open communication, and accept sometimes if your values are fundamentally different. Sometimes people just are. Some can have open relationships happily, some thing looking at porn is cheating. Without judgement, both can be valid as long as both partners communicate and agree on that.

My feeling is generally the more secure you are in yourself and your sexuality, the less jealous and the less concerned you will be come with these things, and the more confidence you will have to cut off shitty partners who violate the norms you set. If your relationship is okay with porn, but not dating apps, then fuck them of they are browsing Tinder, even “just to look”.

Communicate, but also value yourself. This guy may be perfect, but maybe he’s not perfect for you. And that’s okay. Your chances of meeting someone gold are far better than you think if you keep your head up and go in eyes wide open than try and ignore issues.

Anyways, I hope some of this is moderately helpful to you. I hope you and him can work out, but I also hope you don’t compare yourself to camgirls or porn, ever. Fantasies are just that, we all have them. And they should never hurt your self worth.

Be well.

I didn’t even know raccoon existed.

But I love that Lemmy has so many options.