Still processing something...
I'm recovering from the trauma of constantly being hyper-vigilant of how I might present as a threat, constantly focused on how to make others feel safe around me...
and now I've traded it for the trauma of being constantly hyper-vigilant of potential threats around me.
It sucks but honestly I prefer it to the intense sense of isolation and loneliness.
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Just reaching out for suggestions, it's not often I get people converted to the fediverse but when I do I'm a bit short on suggested instances, especially in variety.
As it stands I've got my own instance, which runs Friendica. But because I'm a nerd who craves all the options at once and will sacrifice some user-friendliness for it, it's good for me not for most users.
Aside from that, I've got lgbtqia.space which is a wonderful Mastodon server I started out on in the fediverse. But obviously leaves me fumbling when helping the rare few friends who aren't in the alphabet.
I'd like suggestions of other open instances (aside from the mega instances like mastodon.social) that I can direct people to, especially of different platforms so they have a little more choice in their experience.
Mist and fog clouds over this domain. The thoughts of raceme flowers and pinnated ferns hang over my minds eye as I walk with covered pupils. The hard dirt feels rock like, with an occasional trip over roots.
Pulling me down a pathway of cedar and pine, nesting in its canopy, birds orientated skywards to a plateau of limitless sky. Just out of reac- war̓n̼͚͜i̴͈ng,͈͑̌ l͓̀o̩͋ͬw̦͊ b̵̍a̶͋͂t̫tê̾̍r͉̔͠y
O̪͉p͎e̜̽n̡ ỳ̬o̲ur̘̥ e̫͌yē͌ͅs̵͗̿, O̪͉p͎e̜̽n̡ ỳ̬o̲ur̘̥ e̫͌yē͌ͅs̵͗̿, O̪͉p͎e̜̽n̡ ỳ̬o̲ur̘̥ e̫͌yē͌ͅs̵͗̿.
Getting tired of people pretending Jews can't possibly know the difference between Holocaust and "run of the mill" genocide (both are bad, one just is much more orchestrated).
But why should I be surprised? The pajamafication of the holocaust means most people don't even understand a damn thing about it anyways.
I'm so incredibly done with people being on a high-horse shitting on advances in AI for no other reason than to feel better about themselves.
Like if your issue is things like copyright and training data? Sure, go off, it's a philosophical argument there about rights, economy, etc. Likewise for arguments about ecological impact (it can be made reasonable there, the companies just don't want to).
But if you're just posting bullshit like "Hahaha, the language model can't do math" or "Look at how it was baited into saying something stupid" as proof that it's worthless: go fuck yourself.
Let alone the people who try to relate AI development to "NFT Bros"... NFTs literally don't do shit, AI actually has multiple proven and valid uses cases but if you think it's the same thing that just shows you have your head up your ass and refuse to look at the world around you.
All of that before getting to the fact that they have shown incredible usefulness for disability accommodations, but I guess it doesn't count if you prefer to be ableist and think we don't need or deserve accommodations?
So tired of people in general right now...
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> "Hahaha, the language model can't do math"
People don't say that, they say haha the **AI** can't do math.
This problem stems from the LLM owners/developers themselves, by calling their product "AI" -- Artificial *Intelligence* -- instead of just LLM, or "Language generator" or something similar, thus creating the expectation that it actually can think, reason, or compute things instead of just generating plausible-sounding text responses to prompts.
And that choice was apparently deliberate on their part, to hype up the product. IOW, don't advertise or imply with misleading buzzwords that your product can do things it can't and then get upset when people mock it for not being able to do what you wanted them to believe it can do.
@Lea or maybe just people always had a wrong idea of what early AI would look like?
People just expected it to jump out fully formed as a super-genius rather than baby steps of abilities...
Maybe, but only because they were taught to by its creators.
Before "generative AI" (creation of new images and text) came out, AI was associated more with things like detecting possible cancer in medical scans, exoplanets in telescope images, recognizing/describing objects in images, finding the structure of proteins, searching for possible new medicines, etc. (not to mention military applications 
).
So as I recall it was looked upon as something to help humans solve problems, having great potential in spite of some negative early experiences with things like automatic stock trading.
So IMO these new generative applications should never have been called "AI" because they are not. Even using terms like saying they were "trained" or "learned" from existing art and texts implies intelligent reasoning which is misleading.
Rather, it was the developers who learned how to make their statistical algorithms better able to extract, recombine, and generate similar, plausible-looking (but not true or accurate) output from the mass of data they collected.
IOW, it's those pre-existing AI applications that can at least on some level be said to have been "trained" and to have "learned" to recognize specific kinds of patterns in visual/spatial/textual data and mark it for *humans* to then interpret and judge for accuracy. And certainly not to make up new stuff.
Making up new stuff should be for entertainment purposes only.
@Lea yeah, that's a fundamental misunderstanding of how these came to be... your examples of non-generative AI are all the same basic technology. In crude terms it's an image enhancement/recognition ai run in reverse. (Then LLMs were cutting out the image part)
Their training process is nearly identical in fact.
My point is that it's the generative aspect that is the most fundamental and important difference, and that, along with allowing decision-making (as in the stock market example) is where the harm arises.
I haven't seen anything beneficial from generative models, other than as I said before, entertainment, or perhaps some strictly personal use that is not ever disseminated to others.
Generating anything with it for any serious purpose is harmful and with no positive benefit (unless you consider deep fake propaganda a "benefit").
Using it for research papers, legal briefs, class assignments, fake photos, etc. is harmful for so many reasons I don't have room to state them all here.
@Lea I've seen a whole bunch of practical beneficial uses:
- I use it personally as a coding assistant (great for repetitive code entry where it'll automatically fill in variable names in repetitive blocks of code, or help with debugging)
- I've used it time to time as a search aid (when used properly with a good system it can drastically cut down on complex searches, taking something that would have taken me anywhere from a half hour to 2 hours into something that takes 5-10 minutes)
- Once or twice I've made use of it as a sort of thesaurus to figure out terms when i didn't have enough to search off of (as in, with a normal thesaurus I would give similar words... but I didn't have similar words in these cases)
- As a disability aid for executive dysfunction (see goblin.tools that "magic to-do list" and "compiler" aren't just gimmicks, they're for people with executive dysfunction who struggle breaking down, separating, and sorting tasks)
- I've used it personally as an aid for communication. Being an autistic, when communicating with allistics, especially in a professional environment, it can help edit my message/email to maintain the correct tone as well as make sure I'm getting my point across (again see goblin.tools "Formalizer")
- I've also seen in the wild Amazon's got a great use now where it summarizes user reviews for a product (and this has been practically helpful, I saw some issues with products before buying them there and it gave me cause to look deeper into the reviews to figure out whether that issue mattered to me)
Yes, there are plenty of harmful uses, but if you don't see positive uses you're not looking at all.
There's also the upcoming uses that are still being ironed out but inevitable (as in these aren't just hypotheticals, it's just down to predictable progress):
* Dynamic dialogue in games: tech demos of this have been pretty cool, it's not there to replace writers but to allow NPCs to fluidly talk back to anything rather than purely scripted responses)
* Virtual assistants: you may or may not like them, but many people do like them and being able to handle fluid natural language is a huge step compared to before.
I'm not going to pretend that image generators have much use at the moment, there's technologies that come later that they lead to that can be useful (like dynamic generation of 3d models and environments, which can be good progress towards the goal of "holodecks" in the sense of being able to dynamically call up desired environments then tweaking them to be what you need).
Voice generators right now mostly are just good for nice computer voices and maybe in the future being used to splice in dynamic content (such as player character name) into games (right now games either avoid saying your name entirely, use a stand-in name, and/or have a handful of pre-recorded names that are really cool if they happen to be on the list)
I do admit there may be some beneficial uses of generative not-AI that I haven't been able to think of, or might be someday. Meanwhile the internet is being flooded with generated false or meaningless "content" that is in turn being re-ingested as fodder for even more of the same.
Other than coding assistant, most of your examples sound more like analysis (which is fine) than generation of new content (not fine):
- analyzing human-written prose and flagging possible tone or phrasing problems = analytical. Suggesting replacement text is generative but untrustworthy. You have to check that it isn't saying something you didn't mean to say, then trust that it's an improvement.
- summarizing reviews = analyzing: compiling stats in categories of what the reviews say. Not generating reviews or anything new.
- coding assistant: This *is* generating something: garbage. I've played with it and never gotten anything useful. It can only handle coding problems that have already been solved and included in the training data. Anything requiring it to actually solve a problem not already in its store of code fails. There's no logic or reasoning (as you've already pointed out), which would be required to do that. The main problem I found was it would call functions that don't even exist in the language--I assume it finds people's custom functions scraped from somewhere and just uses those function names as if they were built-in functions in the language.
@Lea I think you're quibbling over the term "generative" there, a non-generative version would be outputting just variables rather than raw text. Ie. non-generative analysis is just going to be "x% confident, x% aggressive, x% sympathetic..."
- analyzing prose and flagging tone or phrasing problems = like so many anti-ai people you just assume the person using it is somehow unable to read and understand the text. And frankly as I've already said this is a disability accommodation I'm a little bit pissed off at this response. We can understand these things when pointed out, we can understand whether the text it gives is trash, we're not idiots. What it does is consistently give us text that fixes our tonal issues, and we can recognize those fixes after the fact but can't reasonably do them on our own. So maybe get your head out of your ass when talking about a disability accommodation that someone has first hand experience on and has said so up front.
- summarizing reviews - again, you're just trying to throw away a point because you don't understand what "generative" or "large language model" means.
- coding assistant - and again clearly you made one half-assed attempt to make it do more than it's capable of, considered it trash, and then threw the whole thing away. I've used it plenty, I've used it to speed through refactoring a whole project to change database engines out, I've used it to speed through building UIs with a bunch of buttons. Does it create good code when I just ask it to write a whole application for me? Hell no. But it sure as hell can see me writing a list of buttons and go, "Oh, I recognize the pattern of the names I'm going to fill this in 20 more times with all variables names changed to meet the pattern".
@Lea like I said, you're attacking the definition of generative by ignoring the actual definition.
And I'm done with this conversation since all you're doing is looping back on points I've already called out. You've been an ass, just accept it and move on.
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@Charline yeah, these databases get huge and it becomes a lot harder to restore. a month or two ago I lost a few days to a database crash, this morning's database backup was 4GB. It takes like half an hour to start the database if it's not a clean shutdown (and about as much time to cleanly shut down).
It's kinda a nightmare lol
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Seriously, if you're not in the US it's important to recognize how catastrophically fucked everything is. Like I actively need to flee the country bad...
youtu.be/MXQ43yyJvgs?si=sTz4zy…
Trump Is Immune
This is one of the worst SCOTUS decisions ever. 📰 Get 40% off of Ground News: https://legaleagle.link/groundnews ⚖️⚖️⚖️ Do you need a great lawyer? I can h...YouTube
Jackie (aka Queen Antifa) 🌹:debian_logo::linux: reshared this.
Yeah. Like, if you feel so powerless or hopeless that your impulse is to flee, why not take a chance at redirecting that energy. Point it toward a problem that needs doing.
You can do whatever you want. That's what it means to be free. You can be whoever you want to be, that's the meaning of liberty. If you don't have any ideas, come to me and I'll lend you a hand.
@Ritz-Menardi ... yeah, I'm talking about imminent threat of the loss of freedom for existing.
I'm disabled, I can't do shit, communication and education is all I can offer and I'm doing all I can there.
I'm dependent on others even for my ability to flee...
This is like Germany just before the Holocaust, telling Jews (of which I am also) to fight isn't a great idea at that time.
Disability makes everything more difficult. I get it.
Communication and education are important.
You should do what your heart tells you to do.
@Ritz-Menardi and to be clear, it's not an impulse to flee... it's complete terror because I see the writing on the wall for Hitler 2.0 and it's going to get really really bad before it gets better and if I stick around I'm very unlikely to survive.
Pikuach nefesh, my first duty is to stay alive.
I know. Keep in mind, though, that the propagandic writing-on-the-wall cuts both ways. There are many more of us, than of them.
your first duty is to stay alive. plus, what you can do, you can do from anywhere, so long as the internet remains true. alas, has it ever been? but still it's up to you, what to do. no matter where you are, you'll find friends who will need your heart, your words, your kindness, and whatever other aid you may give.
I'm trans and relatively healthy and strong. in my legs at least. so my choice is a bit different than yours, mine becomes "die now, that others might live or die later, that others might die before me" and frankly that's not a choice at all.
I'm in shock...
An anime I'm watching has a love triangle and then actually had someone say "have you considered polyamory?" (paraphrased)
另类右翼、另类lite、另类左翼中的“另类”是什么？关于作为政治能指的“另类”
原文：journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/…
本文的翻译是笔记式翻译（概述原文，但不包含译者观点），并不完整
What Was the ‘Alt’ in Alt-Right, Alt-Lite, and Alt-Left? On ‘Alt’ as a Political Modifier
另类右翼、另类lite、另类左翼中的“另类”是什么？关于作为政治能指的“另类”
“另类”修饰语最好被理解为是关于政治该怎样进行的偏好的能指。“另类”主要被用来标示其与主流在遵守政治行为规范方面的决裂：也就是拒绝“礼貌”，拥抱下流、尖锐的“幽默”，对政治对手采用对抗的、经常是故意冒犯的方式。
在“另类右翼”一词被谁创造、何时出现的问题上存在着分歧。一些记述将其追溯到2008年11月，旧保守派人物Paul Gottfried在极右翼H.L. Mencken Club发布的演讲，《另类右翼的衰弱与崛起》。其它描述则认为是Richard Spencer创造了这个术语，Spencer本人也认为如此。2010年时Spencer用这个术语作为网站的域名，当时这个网站在语气上还偏好严肃、理智主义、受人尊敬的形象。后来他表示嫌这个词消极且相对主义，而且不想把自己的主意根基于传统左右划分。
尽管Spencer放弃了这个术语，接下来这个词继续偶尔出现在Reddit、4Chan等地方。在2015年，它出人意料地在社媒上爆发。这和早期的“另类右翼”之间存在着核心区别，早期的核心是Spencer，后期“另类右翼”的核心则是各种网络名人，而且没有披上体面、理智主义的外衣，拥抱网络巨魔文化的讽刺、挖苦、堕落幽默感，不像早期的“另类右翼”一样在伪知识分子网站上发布冗长严肃的文章，而是通过“政治正确”和故意冒犯模因来交流。另类右翼的顶峰是川普竞选时期。
Alt-lite（或Alt-light）则是另类右翼用来贬义地描述那些同情，或者与另类右翼有联系，但不表明民族主义或反犹观点的人。他们在仇恨女性主义者、移民等方面与另类右翼一致。他们会使用“言论自由”、“政治正确”等方式，声称自己的批评者过度敏感、不懂幽默，他们有更广泛的媒体影响力与更复杂的策略。它通常不是一个独立的运动，而是在另类右翼的旗下。
另类左翼则是个用来攻击的术语，试图通过声称左翼中也有同样糟糕的、极端主义的群体来攻击左翼。它由特朗普的随口一说和随后几天极右翼网站的专栏开始。最开始只是一种模糊的、哪里都可以用的攻击，后来采用了一种政治马蹄理论的现代版本，再后来用来指一些同样具有讽刺语气、频繁使用模因、反对任何不以阶级为中心的“身份政治”的左翼网络媒体。基本没有人用这个标签来描述自己，几乎是用来攻击一个不存在的运动。后来似乎几乎没什么人使用了。
对于liberals和中间派来说，另类右翼和另类左翼所蕴含的道德等价使他们能够把自己包装为进步政治价值真正的火炬手，不单单能对抗另类右翼，还能对抗另类左翼所谓的性别歧视、种族主义、年龄歧视和在身份政治上的装聋作哑。另外，这种一边是另类左翼，一边是另类右翼的二分框架使得liberals和中间派能够声称：
他们被夹在两种隐秘地有许多共同点的狂热分子之间。这将他们的自由主义，可能还包括一些“温和的共和党人”，的独特品牌，打造为唯一合理的立场，而且是被另类们围攻的那种。
liberals和中间派因此能够将自己描绘为政治房间里唯一的明智成年人。
Emsquared
in reply to Shiri Bailem • •Solidarity with your journey and hopefully dealing with your hyper vigilance and trauma issues.
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