If youβre planning on using the iOS app to support your favorite author on Patreon, please reconsider. From this November, a significant portion (30%) of your pledge will go to Apple. Letβs make sure your support reaches the author directly! #SupportAuthors #Patreon
smh at all these windows users for having a hard time choosing one debloated windows iso over another. there's way too many! who needs this much variety? one day people will see the light of linux, and they'll never ever ever have to pick and choose again. ever
Housing situation has been a pain, still on the temporary server environment and been hitting major resources bottlenecks.
I'm hoping to get a place sooner, but I've hit some roadblocks that very likely will push it drastically further out... in which case I'll need to spend more money on this environment to return things to stable.
Reminder that I'm covering this entirely out of my own pocket and these constraints are because I'm between homes and can't use my own much cheaper hardware. If you appreciate this instance I would very much appreciate a donation.
Iβm at the retirement party for a friend of my wifeβs and I donβt know anybody and she asks me about an old picture so I look it up and she says, βI need to show this to someone!β and grabs my phone and scurries off.
And Iβm left at the table _without my phone_.
I could go to the bathroom but _I donβt have my phone_.
#Progressive Congresswoman #CoriBush of #Missouri gave a fiery concession speech hours ago after losing the Democratic primary to her #AIPAC supported challenger Wesley Bell in one of the most expensive U.S. House races in history.
For all the times Republicans used "you need a man and a woman to reproduce" as a talking-point, you might think they'd understand that Vice President Harris has two parents.
I think a lot of transandrophobia denialism comes from a place of misunderstanding intersectionality. Like, people think itβs βmarginalisation 1 + marginalisation 2 = double oppressionβ, and then they end up thinking βwell trans people are oppressed, but men arenβt, so trans men and trans mascs only experience regular transphobiaβ. But itβs not really like that. You canβt just add up the vectors on the axes of marginalisation, you have to account for the unique ways they interact.
What actually happens is that trans men are oppressed for being men in a trans way, trans mascs are oppressed for being masc in a trans way, and also trans men are oppressed for being trans in a male way and trans mascs are oppressed for being trans in a masc way. Itβs not just βregular transphobiaβ, because βregular transphobiaβ doesnβt really mean anything.
Central to all of this is the fact that you can't just theorycraft marginalised experiences, you have to actually look at what's going on and listen to marginalised people. And if you listen to trans mascs, you'll learn very quickly that transandrophobia is very, very real.
You can't just read theory by trans fems and cis women and extrapolate what trans masc experiences "should" look like. You need to actually deal with the reality of trans masc experiences, both in the form of statistical data and in the form of us talking about what we go through.
ime it's more like "yeah, you are oppressed, but you also refuse to see the oppresion you're causing" and it's frustrating to have a trans man justify misogyny using his transness
I have experience with a couple transmasc people and they were disappointing I have had less experience with other transmasc people that were much better, but shallower
There's a certain kind of leftist that goes absolutely apeshit if they get wind of someone who's working at a job facing any kind of consequences, however minor, for any kind of misconduct, however major.
It's interesting when that group is "workers", though, because the logical endpoint is that nobody could possibly do anything wrong while at work, which covers almost everyone at least some of the time.
That's entirely true. On the flip side, it doesn't help that in many companies, leadership/executives aren't held accountable for anything at all - any failed decisions they make are just due to changes out of their control that they couldn't predict - while those lower in the hierarchy are held accountable in every way, even for a lapse in "performance" over a short period. I get that you're talking more about misconduct than "performance", though. But as usual, everything is just so damned polarised now.
LOL, someone reported me to, err, me... The first report I have ever had!
Seems I have to clarify.
All junk calls I get, are either not legal under PECR, or actually fraudulent. I am assuming this is the nature of this call. If not, then not so funny.
I have zero sympathy for someone that works for criminals. Arguing that the only job you can get is working for criminals does not justify it. Sorry. But that is my free speech opinion.
they're knowingly harboring an infamous techbro transphobe, bryan lunduke, and refused to do anything about it when people pointed that out. in addition to not having any instance rules against transphobia period. so it's clear the admin doesn't give a fuck and this is a dangerous instance worth defederating
@electricweave it's when your instance/home says "actually, we won't interact with these people anymore"
so in your case that'd be mstdn.social blocking an instance that spreads content which mstdn.social does not want their users seeing, e.g things that go against their rules.
Dentist Update, Financial Help Needed (Boosts OK!)
Sensitive content
Just got back from the initial consultation with the dentist. They referred me out for a possible root canal on one tooth and replacement crowns on that tooth and another one near it. Basically, I've been grinding my teeth in my sleep and they're quite damaged as a result.
I'm meeting with the endodontist on Monday to see if that one tooth does indeed need a root canal.
The cost for the root canal and both crowns will be $2,100 after insurance. It's money I absolutely, completely don't have, and thanks to my bankruptcy from 2019, financing options are limited for me as well.
I already have a GoFundMe for my summer health and living expenses, but I'll have to expand it to include these new ones. I also have a Ko-fi and a PayPal.
If you can help, it would be much appreciated. I also appreciate any signal boosting of this toot. Thank you!
Now I'm cranky because I had to ban a user for genocide denial bullshit...
How the hell do you come onto a blatantly anti-Zionist server and think you're going to get a chill response at claiming the palestinian genocide isn't real?
The fact that open source exists makes the extent of the burnout dumbfounding
What I mean is, you can read open source as "you can't stop developers from writing code"--we have some of the most prized skills in the world, and we'll give it away because we love computers.
How does the collective business world take that and fuck it up so bad that we never want to look at another computer again?
This makes me so sad. The #library was a haven from my miserable, white trash childhood. I walked there nearly every day in summer, sometimes spending all day exploring every aisle. No one hassled me, I learned so much, it opened so many doors. #lgbtq #media #civilrights #freedom #idaho reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1dtβ¦
As you know Iβve been saving money for giggles dental, but as prices soar and her heβ¦ Sarah Dearing needs your support for Help Giggles Get Urgent Dental Care
no no, not a teams meeting, it's a meet meeting. on google meet. it might be called duo for you? i sent you a hangouts to the drive link on messages. no no not your gmail inbox, it's under "all mail", not every email goes to the inbox, haha. or if you're using the classic mode it might be under meetups or promotions. yeah where the chats used to be, before they made google voice an RCS thing. have you got it from google play? no not the green one, the new one with the multicoloured icon. you can only use the green one with legacy members. ok so the problem is you're on workspace for business, it's under google one basic now. did you try quick sharing it? no see you can't use it on a tablet, only a phone or laptop, unless you want the plus features, that only works on phones of course. honestly the easiest way from here is through the docs plugin, unless you wanna family share if you can do vowifi
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.
@Shiri Bailem Much empathy as somebody on their own trauma recovery journey and an lgbtqia background and ally. It's tough out there for many in the trans community with so much ill founded backlash scapegoating in some countries and online. Solidarity with your journey and hopefully dealing with your hyper vigilance and trauma issues.
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.
Registrations are more-or-less open upon request for existing fediverse users.
But that's to deter randos who find my instance through my GitHub or similar from requesting to join (which has been an issue in the past). If there's someone who's on the fediverse willing to vouch for new users, the existing account requirement can easily be waived. I will still need a DM prior to allowing someone to sign up because I'll have to generate an invite, but yeah.
As far as other general-purpose instances, there's also tech.lgbt, which is very much open to allies and the like, last I checked, and ones like shonk.social, which is the flagship Sharkey instance (aside from transfem.social).
Honestly I feel like I can potentially convert some people to the fediverse by just telling them they can be @eepy.moe because it's the most adorable domain name ever
@πΈDreamy Miaπ³οΈββ§οΈπΈ shout out to you for giving me a great place to get started in the fediverse and always being my go-to suggestion of a server to start with
I vote we try to convince conservatives that liberal elites have infected their computer software based on this, see if we can get them to throw everything out and self-isolate.
I didn't think Americans knew the word socialist... every time I see where it should be used in uh, 'robust' online discussions, the slightly more far-right people always call the slight-less-far-right people "communists" instead.
It all looks kinda weird from Europe anyway, where we have actual left-wing parties in some countries. Although not much in the UK lately, more's the pity.
Ah yes the two wings of MSM politics, conservative and fiscally reckless, mad socialist eco-terrorist. Sample sentence: the conservative-leaning Italian leader, Mussolini, is said by critics to have <whatever>.
I also like how βantifaβ has come to mean something sinister. Anti-Fascism is a good thing; Anarchists are another story. It just seems convenient to describe βthemβ (whoever they are) as antifa and make them the enemy.
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?
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).
@anubis2814 The core issue is that they're trying to cram it in everywhere for fear of being left behind on the "next big thing" and they all insist on using the absolute highest performance, latest, and most powerful AIs for everything.
I can run a reasonable model for most use cases offline on my phone, spinning it up just as needed (ironically my phone is more powerful in this regards than my desktop... so I'm stuck with online models there, but even then I typically use the lower power models)
I have an .mp3 of my voice saying things I never said because I fed about 12 minutes of my voice into a cloud based software that can do that extremely well.
I can see all sorts of applications for this, purely for comedy purposes but doubt I will use it for anything (speech synthesizer will do for what I need).
I was taken aback by this episode though. It was my voice (well, one of them) and hearing it from something else was odd.
There is an awful lot of bullshit and nonsense surrounding the subject.
My interaction with AI has been quite limited. If I feel a YouTube video is read by AI or generated by such then I click off, and I find the constant chat bots in the corners of commercial websites to be unwelcome (or if you get one on the telephone).
As with anything you're going to get a mountain of shit (a content avalanche that will render the internet useless if the pundits are to be believed) but I'm impressed by its capabilities.
I mean, relatively impressed.
The most impressive thing computer related thing I've ever seen was in the 80's where I saw an Acorn Archimedes playing video footage of a race car event.
@Air Quotes Comedian Yeah, bulk of the places I've seen it have been misplaced and majority of them I could have told people how it'd go before they even started...
Chat Bots in the corners of commercial websites are going to fall apart as they increasingly realize that it'll say shit that they're now liable for. The god forsaken AI voiceover videos and content farms, every one of which is truly awful and I wonder how they're even seeing returns on it in the first place. And don't even get me started on Google's "Let's cram an AI answer into search results randomly because there's no way it will say awful shit that people will take at face value".
I've mostly used it for skimming on my behalf (I use big-agi.com for that especially, but in general for most of my AI uses), code assistance, and the occasional editing.
@anubis2814 but again please acknowledge I addressed that in my post and you've brought no new information... because I'm also sick of people thinking they "one-upped" me because they didn't pay attention to what I said.
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.
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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Juliet Merida, Dum Tran Elf π³οΈββ§οΈ
in reply to Juliet Merida, Dum Tran Elf π³οΈββ§οΈ • • •