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JohnBrownsBussy2 [she/her, they/them]
JohnBrownsBussy2 [she/her, they/them] @ JohnBrownsBussy2 @hexbear.net

Sequel to JohnBrownsBussy

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2 yr. ago
  • Erdogan is not going to do shit about the zionist project, at least voluntarily, but it would be something if the zionists gets too carried away in their invasion/occupation of Syria (like bombing Turkish troops) that forces Erdogan to actually do something material.

  • My cats wake me up in the morning around the same time, regardless of when I go to bed.

  • It would also ban the transfer of any AI models to China, so it would effectively criminalize the entire open-weight AI field in the US. This would effectively kill AI research in universities (it might even ban the release of academic papers on AI) and would wipe out most AI startups as well (as they rely on open weight releases to garner investment interest).

  • Weight leaks for semi-open models have been fairly common in the past. Meta's LLaMa1.0 model was originally closed source, but the weights were leaked and spread pretty rapidly (effectively laundered through finetunes and merges), leading to Meta embracing quasi-open source post-hoc. Similarly, most of the anime-style Stable Diffusion 1.5 models were based on NovelAI's custom finetune, and the weights were similarly laundered and became ubiquitous.

    Those incidents were both in 2023. Aside from some of the biggest players (OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, and I guess Apple kinda), open weight releases (usually not open source) have been become the norm (even for frontier models like DeepSeek-V3, Qwen 2.5 and Llama 3.1), so piracy in that case is moot (although it's easy to assume that use non-compliant with licenses is also ubiquitous). Leakage of currently closed frontier models would be interesting from an academic and journalistic perspective, for being able to dig into the architecture and assess things like safety and regurgitation outside of the online service shell, but those frontier models would require so much compute that they'd be unusable by individual actors.

  • The point wasn't that this work culture was good, but rather it doesn't make sense to single out China when it's endemic to the tech industry worldwide.

  • I don't know what tech companies you worked for, but when I was working for a software company, I was averaging 45 hours in a client IT position, and all the software devs/engineers were definitely working at least 55-60 hours. And that was during normal periods: things definitely went into crunch mode around version releases and client go-lives. As far as I can tell, this is true across the broader industry.

  • If you're a top engineer (or any similar senior position) for a western company, you ain't working 40 hr/week. 50-70 hours a week is going to be the norm for that type of position in the west as well.

  • Based. The west has long relied on international brain drain (caused by imperial wars and neo-colonialism) to accumulate the "best and the brightest" and put a stranglehold on the tertiary/quaternary sectors. It's amusing to see the shoe on the other foot, especially after the western tech giants have worked so hard to suppress tech worker wages.

  • I know the article is a threadbare simile, but it more than misses the whole point of Galadriel's character in the books/movie. For even someone like Galadriel who meets this beyond-human ideal of beauty, purity and "goodness", the power of the One Ring to dominate life is so corrupting that it would simply turn her into a new Sauron. Which is why after failing to resist temptation, Galadriel leaves Middle Earth and goes into the West. If there's one point that is hammered in repeatedly throughout the Lord of the Rings, it's that such absolute power cannot be used for good, despite anyone's best intentions, and the only recourse is for it to be destroyed.

  • The intrusion of capitalism into sleep is a final frontier of absolute exploitation. Why work 8 hours a day when you can work 24 hours a day? Why use vast banks of computer servers to run AI models when you can capture the most efficient and powerful 'computer' to ever exist: the human brain. Why provide for housing and recreation when you can lock people in permanent dream states, where they can provide intellectual labor and live in dreamworlds while their physical brain is kept alive through an IV drip.

    I am skeptical that any technology trying to directly interface with the slumbering subconscious could work, but I have no doubt that such attempts would be damaging to human health, and would be used to push material imiseration to impossible heights.

  • Looking at this International Crisis Group's list of donors:

    BP

    Chevron

    ENI

    Open Society Foundation

    Rockerfeller Brothers Trust

    As well as various Western European & gulf state governments, billionaires and billionaire-founded NGOs. Of course they're coping: their backers were hoping to get a piece of PDVSA.

  • I'm not saying it shouldn't be legalized or that those other benefits aren't present, I'm saying that cure-alls/panaceas don't exist and that legalization advocates in the past have indulged in that sort of myth-making.

  • Hemp/cannabis certainly has benefits, but a lot of those benefits have been exaggerated to support decriminalization/legalization. When it comes to medicine, cannabis has benefits as a non-opioid analgesiac/painkiller, so that's obviously a huge boon for chronic pain where the risk of opioid addiction and another side-effects are a major concern. However, I would be skeptical of claims of healing properties of cannabis or any other proposed panacea.

  • Outside an atmosphere like Earth's, everything is already exposed to intense ionizing radiation from the sun/stars. A bit more from an RTG, even a big one, is a drop in the ocean. If we found signs of extraterrestrial life, then we'd want to be extra cautious about not sterilizing by accident, but that's not currently a major concern. And of course, any sort of nuclear rocket propulsion would need to be handed with utmost care, but it's also not a major issue once it's outside the atmosphere.

  • The proposal is for a globally-levied tax. Where exactly is capital going to fly to?

  • It's been an absurd mishandling of the IP by Take Two. Will probably be permanently stuck in early access with only maintenance development at best.

  • A lot of people (myself included) had the update installed automatically by Steam with no option for rollback, so it caught people off guard.