Privacy means personal agency and freedom from people, whether individuals, companies, or the government, controlling you with direct or implied threats, or more subtle manipulation, which they can do because they have your dox and because information is power.

A lack of privacy adds fuel to the polycrisis because if we can’t act in relative secrecy that basically means we can’t act freely at all, and nothing can challenge whoever runs the panopticon.

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 are deterministic though, in a literal sense. Rather their behavior is undefined. And yes, a LLM is not a person and it’s not quite accurate to talk about them knowing or understanding things. So what though? Why would that be any sort of evidence that research efforts into AI safety are futile? This is at least as much of an engineering problem as a philosophy problem.

It’s important though because if that’s the real reason Google pays them, they could come up with some other excuse to give them the money.

Coyotes are pretty small though, I think cattle would still be more dangerous.

My thoughts on this are, humans are pattern propagation machines. If someone is infused with spite and misery to begin with, love which fails to acknowledge and process that spite comes off as hollow and meaningless. Seeing others express the same things you feel is cathartic and generates trust. There is a profound need for sharing in feelings like contempt, rage, and the desire to hurt others that isn’t fulfilled, and that gets exploited by people crafting those feelings to fit into their ideological narratives.

The funny thing is that those spaces are themselves very heavy on enforcing dogma through fear of social rejection. For example when the Christchurch massacre happened, I decided to go see what /pol/ was saying, and there were actually a few comments expressing mild disapproval, in a “I hate muslims too but cheering at people being brutally murdered as they try to get away is too far” kind of way. These people were of course shouted down and insulted and their sympathy painted as weakness. That validation is conditional.

The less leeway people are given by their community to explore and express their genuine thoughts and feelings, the more inaccurate and fucked up the popular consensus is free to get.

This one can do that stuff: https://github.com/huchenlei/ComfyUI-layerdiffuse?tab=readme-ov-file

Baked college bros driving to Taco Bell seems like more of a case for convenient delivery options imo, they should not be driving at all

I feel like the pattern of severe social isolation is itself getting to be a pretty normal life

So it is a way for Lemmy instances to let people log in with their Reddit accounts? Neat

From the article it sounds like they were already planning to make their next series of concerts their last

I did all my transportation and shopping with a mountain bike for a year and it’s kind of difficult on snow and ice, fell over some. The trick is to never turn at all when on that stuff, but it’s still hard. The cold makes the oil for the mechanisms work worse too, you need special oil. My hands got very cold holding on to the handlebars, you need to find some balance between gloves that hold warmth and resist the wind and gloves that let you have enough dexterity for the brakes and shifters.

Also, phone companies and phones keep records of what device pinged what tower and when, people have been convicted off of that data.

To me this is why that point is especially misleading, the movie trope is that as long as you hang up the phone soon enough they can’t find you, but that’s obviously not how it works at all.

The question was how to give it to friends, not how to invest it

Before paywalls became ubiquitous, there were less people commenting on only the headline. It’s not the only reason, but it’s pretty obvious why it would promote that kind of behavior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coprophagia

Lagomorphs (rabbits, hares, pikas) and some other mammals ferment fiber in their cecums, which is then expelled as cecotropes and eaten from the anus, a process called “cecotrophy”. Then their food is processed through the gastrointestinal tract a second time, which allows them to absorb more nutrition. While cecotropes are expelled from the anus, they are not feces and thus eating them is not called coprophagia.

Not technically poop, so the cereal should be totally safe to eat

So much awful stuff that both sides seem to be able to agree on

Fair, point is the fact someone doesn’t appeal doesn’t prove they are a bot

When I’m banned from things I don’t appeal because I don’t trust the intentions of moderators and making such a request to someone acting in bad faith is humiliating. I think anyone coming from Reddit will probably be reluctant to appeal a ban.