Skip Navigation

User banner

FaceDeer

@ FaceDeer @kbin.social

Posts
0
Comments
413
Joined
3 yr. ago

Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and is now exploring new vistas in social media.

  • AI Prompt Engineering Is Dead

    Jump

  • "Prompt engineering" is simply the skill of knowing how to correctly ask for the thing that you want. Given that this is something that is in rare supply even when interacting with other humans, I don't see this going away until we're well past AGI and into ASI.

  • Spotify, Epic Games, and others pen letter to EC, claiming Apple has made a 'mockery' of the DMA | TechCrunch

    Jump

  • You have misunderstood me. You said "Apple spent twenty years building the ecosystem Spotify and Epic want to exploit for free." I'm pointing out that the amount of effort Apple put into building the ecosystem is immaterial to whether they're doing illegal things with it.

  • Generative A.I - We Aren’t Ready.

    Jump

  • And while it's probably true that "we're not ready", we're never going to become ready until the tech actually arrives and forces us to do that.

  • Spotify, Epic Games, and others pen letter to EC, claiming Apple has made a 'mockery' of the DMA | TechCrunch

    Jump

  • "They broke the law fair and square" is an odd defence.

  • Pro-Palestinian firebrand Galloway wins Rochdale by-election in blow for UK Labour

    Jump

  • And replace it with what? The only two basic forms of democracy are representative and direct, and direct democracy has its own problems.

  • Pro-Palestinian firebrand Galloway wins Rochdale by-election in blow for UK Labour

    Jump

  • I can't imagine how a representative democracy would operate otherwise. In representative democracies you're picking some person to make decisions on your behalf, and that person is different from you so some of their decisions are not going be the ones you would have made if you were in their place.

    You may be wanting direct democracy, in which you would personally get to vote on the government's actions. Your "representative" would be perfect in that case because your representative would be you. But since you would only represent yourself, that's not what would normally be called "representative democracy."

  • Pro-Palestinian firebrand Galloway wins Rochdale by-election in blow for UK Labour

    Jump

  • This is how representative democracy works, none of the presented options are likely to be "perfect" for any given voter.

  • AI Determines Sex of Person From Brain Scans - Neuroscience News

    Jump

  • That just makes my point stronger, though. The basic gist of what I was saying is that even if there is a statistical clustering of data into two groups that seem correlated with some category, that doesn't mean that you can absolutely rely on that data to classify people into those categories.

  • Actor at Willy Wonka Disaster Says Even the Script Was AI-Generated

    Jump

  • No, we're describing a human endeavour. If the promotional flyers had been made by outsourcing it to Fiverr and they came back wonky it would have been the same basic problem. They outsourced this and then ether didn't have the resources or interest in checking the work that came back.

  • ‘Horrific massacre’: Deadly Israeli fire at Palestinians waiting for aid

    Jump

  • Boycott your votes for Biden until he stops this Genocide.

    Because Trump will be so much better for the Palestinians.

  • How Stupid Do They Think We Are: Media execs don’t want the sites, they just want the names

    Jump

  • You missed "techbro grifter scam" from your list of buzzwords.

  • Removed

    Fanfiction Community Rocked By Etsy Sellers Turning Their Work Into Bound Books

    Jump

  • Famously, "50 Shades of Grey" started out as a Twilight fanfic. The author later pulled out all of the Twilight-related stuff and then it was free and clear to publish as their own work. Given how much money 50 Shades raked in I would imagine there's been some legal scrutiny there from various sides.

  • Removed

    Fanfiction Community Rocked By Etsy Sellers Turning Their Work Into Bound Books

    Jump

  • I'm a big fan of fanfic, I support it and consider it a serious literary genre. It's basically the folklore of our modern times. I'm also not a fan of how extensive and restrictive copyright protection has become.

    That said, I do find it amusingly ironic when fanfic authors get in a big huff about their copyright being violated.

  • Removed

    Fanfiction Community Rocked By Etsy Sellers Turning Their Work Into Bound Books

    Jump

  • Indeed, this is a common misunderstanding of the status of fanworks. Most fanfics likely violate the copyright of the IP they're based on, but that doesn't mean that they aren't themselves original copyrighted works. The original IP's rightsholders can't simply claim the fanfic's copyright for themselves. It likely means that each party would need the other party's permission to make legal copies of the fanfic.

    This is why most studios or authors will refuse to even read unsolicited ideas that are sent to them, they don't want to end up in a bind if someone sends them a fanfic that's got elements in it that they already intended to use in future books or episodes and then sues them for "stealing" their work.

  • The AI feedback loop: Researchers warn of ‘model collapse’ as AI trains on AI-generated content

    Jump

  • This article is from June 12, 2023. That's practically stone-aged as far as AI technology has been progressing.

    The paper it's based on used a very simplistic approach, training AIs purely on the outputs of its previous "generation." Turns out that's not a realistic real-world scenario, though. In reality AIs can be trained on a mixture of human-generated and AI-generated content and it can actually turn out better than training on human-generated content alone. AI-generated content can be curated and custom-made to be better suited to training, and the human-generated stuff adds back in the edge cases that might disappear when doing repeated training generations.

  • Tumblr and Wordpress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools

    Jump

  • If it makes you feel better, the thing that annoys me most is not so much that this is happening but more how everybody is suddenly surprised by it and complaining about it. The data-harvesting itself doesn't really harm anyone.

  • Tumblr and Wordpress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools

    Jump

  • I'm just venting, really. I know it's not going to make a real difference.

    I suppose if you go waaaay back it was different, true. Back in the days of Usenet (as a discussion forum rather than as the piracy filesharing system it's mostly used for nowadays) there weren't these sorts of ToS on it and everything got freely archived in numerous different places because that's just how it was. It was the first Fediverse, I suppose.

    The ironic thing is that kbin.social's ToS has no "ownership" stuff in it either. For now, at least, the new ActivityPub-based Fediverse is in the same position that Usenet was - I assume a lot of the other instances also don't bother with much of a ToS and the posts get shared around beyond any one instance's control anyway. So maybe this grumpy old-timer may get to see a bit of the good old days return, for a little while. That'll be nice.

  • Tumblr and Wordpress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools

    Jump

  • Well, a large part of my frustration stems from the "I've seen this for decades" part - longer than many of the people who are now raising a ruckus have been alive. So IMO it's always been this way and the "social contract we've adapted to" is "the social contract that we imagined existed despite there being ample evidence there was no such thing." I'm so tired of the surprised-pikachu reactions.

    Combined with the selfish "wait a minute, the stuff I gave away for fun is worth money to someone else now? I want money too! Or I'm going to destroy my stuff so that nobody gets any value out of it!" Reactions, I find myself bizarrely ambivalent and not exactly on the side of the common man vs. the big evil corporations this time.

  • Tumblr and Wordpress to Sell Users’ Data to Train AI Tools

    Jump

  • Hardly. They earn money by being paid by their users, but they can earn more money by being paid by their users and also selling their users' data. The goal is more money, so it makes sense for them to do that. It's not crazy.

    From the WordPress Terms of Service:

    License. By uploading or sharing Content, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, and non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, adapt, publicly display, and publish the Content solely for the purpose of providing and improving our products and Services and promoting your website. This license also allows us to make any publicly-posted Content available to select third parties (through Firehose, for example) so that these third parties can analyze and distribute (but not publicly display) the Content through their services.

    Emphasis added. They told you what they could do with the content you gave them, you just didn't listen.

    I'm sorry if I'm coming across harsh here, but I'm seeing this same error being made over and over again. It's being made frequently right now thanks to the big shakeups happening in social media and the sudden rise of AI, but I've seen it sporadically over the decades that I've been online. So it bears driving home:

    • If you are about to give your content to a website, check their terms of service before you do to see if you're willing to agree to their terms, and if you don't agree to their terms then don't give your content to a website. It's true that some ToS clauses may not be legally enforceable, but are you willing to fight that in court? If you didn't consider your content valuable enough to spend the time checking the ToS when you posted it, that's not WordPress's fault.
    • If you give someone something and they later find a way to make the thing you gave them valuable, it's too late. You gave it to them. They don't owe you a "cut." Check the terms of service.

  • AI Determines Sex of Person From Brain Scans - Neuroscience News

    Jump

  • I'd be very interested in those results too, though I'd want everyone to bear in mind the possibility that the brain could have many different "masculine" and "feminine" attributes that could be present in all sorts of mixtures when you range afield from whatever statistical clusterings there might be. I wouldn't want to see a situation where a transgender person is denied care because an AI "read" them as cisgender.

    In another comment in this thread I mentioned how men and women have different average heights, that would be a good analogy. There are short men and tall women, so you shouldn't rely on just that.