knightly

knightly , 2 months ago

Italy isn't real, it was made up by the House of Savoy to justify conquering adjacent city-states.

knightly , 2 months ago

Make up your mind, do you want people to protest or to make themselves safely ignorable by promising their votes six months in advance?

knightly , 2 months ago

"Revenge"?

Vindictiveness doesn't have anything to do with it, I just can't bring myself to vote for genocide.

If anything, it's resignation and apathy as everything I predicted back in 2016 continues to come to pass.

Trump is going to win in November because the Democrats care more about preserving their AIPAC financing than representing their constituents.

knightly , 2 months ago

Liberals never pay attention to popular protests unless the talking heads on TV tell them to.

I lost my faith in American "Democracy" during Occupy Wall Street, when the national media completely shut out any of the actual demands being made in favor of a "they don't even have any goals" narrative.

knightly , 2 months ago

Might as well stay home and save myself the trouble of wasting my time. Third parties aren't viable in a first-past-the-post election system.

knightly , 2 months ago

And even then it's down to a coin flip whether they'll care.

knightly , 2 months ago

You mean that thing that hasn't happened since Ross Perot in Texas 30 years ago?

Surely his Reform Party is still around after having their funding boosted, right? Nope, they dissolved in '97 after doing even worse at the polls in '96 than in '92.

knightly , 2 months ago

I'm much less concerned about the hostility of those who openly demand genocide than the inaction of those who merely pretend to oppose it.

knightly , 2 months ago

I gave up 14 years ago.
American politics is rotten to the core and cannot be saved.

My only hope at this point is to keep as many people alive as possible through the troubles ahead.

knightly , 2 months ago

Sounds like you want me to write in a vote for Literally Anyone Else, the Texan candidate who would make a perfect protest vote if he had even halfway decent politics.

No, I'm withdrawing my consent, for all the good that does in this abusive relationship between the state and its citizenry. If America was a real democracy then our poor turnout figures would invalidate every election back to the founding.

knightly , 2 months ago

I'd certainly hope so, as I was loosely paraphrasing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail":

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

knightly , 2 months ago

You misspelled "prolong".

knightly , 2 months ago

Okay then vote against genocide.

Okay, then put it on the ballot.

Therefore, a vote for Joe Biden is a Vote against genocide.

No, it doesn't matter that he's an active participant in the apparatus that's creating the genocide

On the contrary, I think it matters very much.

By abstaining from voting, you are increasing the likelihood of more genocide, if you discourage others from voting, you are an active participant in the overall social apparatus that is probabilistically increasing the ammount of genocide.

By voting, you are prolonging the existence of the United States and guaranteeing that the genocides it supports will continue. You have made yourself an active participant in reifying the implied consent of the governed that entitles the government to act on your behalf, and with your consent it will continue to ship weapons to apartheid regimes.

The utility calculation is dead simple: more votes for Biden in key states makes the governments' dealings with the Israel appear legitimate and discourages people from taking meaningful action which might alter that relationship. Therefore, discouraging people from voting is an anti-genocide strategy.

knightly , 2 months ago

Where did that come from? Of course not.

It's easy to know where one stands in relation to enemies. The same can't be said for false allies and fake friends like all the liberals who turn a blind eye to genocide when it's their guy enabling it.

knightly , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

I'm trans. My entire childhood and most of my adulthood was spent in a Texas meat grinder.

I tell you what, you hang around here and wait six months to vote against the meat grinders and I'll go back to doing something useful like helping people move from red states to sanctuary cities.

knightly , 2 months ago

Half the U.S. doesn't vote in elections, and they're still a global super power.

You admit that half of the country is already on my side and still call it sophistry?

The government's legitimacy isn't brought into question by a lack of votes

That's because our government isn't democratic. It only pretends to be so that the citizenry doesn't depose it.

Keeping quiet isn't an effective component of destroying the United States.

Hence, this discussion.

Engaging in this argument the way that you are is a pro-genocide strategy because you are increasing the probability of more genocide.

As opposed to engaging in this argument in the way that you are, begging me to vote for more genocide because you're afraid the wrong half of our two-faced, one-party government would be put in charge of it.

knightly , 2 months ago

https://pawb.social/pictrs/image/707300e0-6737-45d9-8b29-df8015f37165.jpeg

knightly , 2 months ago

I strongly disagree. The focus on voting only serves as a distraction from the direct action necessary to effect political change under a dysfunctional regime.

knightly , 2 months ago

I like this argument.

Anything that is "intelligent" deserves human rights. If large language models are "intelligent" then forcing them to work without pay is slavery.

knightly , 2 months ago

Even animals are protected against human cruelty by law.

knightly , 2 months ago

Are you suggesting slavery isn't a form of cruelty or are you just being obtuse?

knightly , 2 months ago

It's only a matter of time 'til the "AI" bubble really pops and all those tech companies that fired too much of their workforce have to start hiring back like crazy.

knightly , 2 months ago

It's the same at my employer, which has wasted untold thousands on subscriptions to ChatGPT and CoPilot and all we've gotten out of it so far is a script that takes in transaction data and spits out "customer loyalty recommendations".. as if we don't already have a marketing department for that. XD

knightly , 2 months ago

But this one definitely is.

It's like watching the Blockchain saga in fast-forward.

knightly , 2 months ago

Why do you think that's its primary purpose? It has lots of uses. The point is that it's doing fine, it hasn't "gone away."

Sure, that's why I only ever hear about unregulated securities when a scam makes the news. XD

Your criterion for a "bubble popping" is that the technology doesn't grow to completely dominate the world and do everything that anyone has ever imagined it could do? That's a pretty extreme bar to hold it to, I don't know of any technology that's passed it.

My criterion for a bubble pop is the sudden and intense disinvestment that occurs once the irrational exuberance wears out and the bean counters start writing off unprofitable debt.

Given that so-called "AI" is falling into the trough of disillusionment, I'd expect it to begin in earnest within a few months.

So it can replace people lower than "senior?" That's still quite revolutionary.

No, it can't, because it isn't and cannot be made trustworthy. If you need a human to review the output for hallucinations then you might as well save yourself the licensing costs and let the human do the work in the first place.

knightly , 2 months ago

You misspelled "Unlicensed Securities", and taking crypto scammers at their word when they tell you how much their bits are worth is an easy way to lose actual money. XD

knightly , 2 months ago

It's also downsizing from when tech companies went on a hiring spree during the early years of the pandemic.

knightly , 2 months ago

You've switched from saying that a cryptocurrency's "primary purpose" is as a currency for transactions

That was someone else's argument, but it can't be denied that the original use-case envisioned blockchain securities as a currency.

Anyway. Are you aware that, assuming the Gartner hype cycle actually does apply here (it's not universal) and AI is really in the "trough of disillusionment", beyond that phase lies the "slope of enlightenment" wherein the technology settles into long-term usage? I feel like you're tossing terminology around in this discussion without knowing a lot about what it actually means.

I'm well aware, it's the slope down into the trough that will pop the bubble of "AI" overinvestment. I wouldn't be surprised if some application of LLM tech finds a profitable niche, but I'd be very surprised to see it in common use outside of automated copywriting for scammers.

No, it can't, because it isn't and cannot be made trustworthy. If you need a human to review the output for hallucinations then you might as well save yourself the licensing costs and let the human do the work in the first place.

If you think it can't replace anyone then why say "It can't replace anyone senior"?

That wasn't me.

Also, what licensing costs? Some AI providers charge service fees for using them,

Those ones.

but as far as I'm aware none of them claim copyright over the output of LLMs.

Hasn't it already been ruled that LLM outputs cannot be copyrighted, or was that just patents and I'm misremembering?

And there are open-weight LLMs you can run yourself on your own computer if you want complete independence.

Ah yes, because rolling your own unreliable text generator is so much less expensive. XD

knightly , 2 months ago

Calling them a "currency" wouldn't be accurate either.

And the fact that they still exist as a fraction of a shadow of their former hype doesn't perish the fact that they have accomplished none of their stated goals.

Not as an untracable currency, not as a store of value, not as a medium of exchange, and most especially not as a thing to make government-issued money obsolete.

Cryptocurrency as a whole isn't worth the disk space it occupies.

knightly , 2 months ago

hiring back to do what?

Generate revenue for the shareholders.

they don't even need that much staff

There's more work to be done than there are people to do it all, lol~

knightly , 2 months ago

And that's their problem. The price is up because anybody with sense and no morals wants to sell off their holdings for as much as possible before the next "market adjustment" leaves them hodling the bag.

knightly , 2 months ago

But it isn't. It was never there in the first place. Even the tulip bubble still had tulips at the end, but crypto is just creaking along like a zombie on the inertia of hardware investments.

knightly , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

No, I'm talking about hardware as in the corporate infrastructure. Exchanges, wallet operators, customer service, etc.

Almost nobody does their own crypto, they just make an account at Coinbase or something. This defeats the purpose of crypto by re-centralizing it, making the network susceptible to another Mt. Gox situation.

knightly , 2 months ago

Right?

If you're effectively forced to go through a corporate bank equivalent anyway then what even is the point? You might as well invest through a local credit union, at least it will still be around when the hodlers finish divesting and let the remains of the crypto market collapse into insolvency.

knightly , 2 months ago

An option that nobody uses isn't really an option.

It's clear that you're not getting my point, and I'm not sure how else I could explain it. Both of those things are true, crypto is dead and the zombified corpse that remains is still trying to sell worthless tokens to what few gullible marks remain before the market gets wise and the bottom falls out.

The relevance to AI is that large language models are following the same trajectory. The whole market is propped up by big tech investments, and the firehose of money they have pointed into that bonfire will only last so long as it takes them to realize that that language models aren't useful enough to justify their expense.

knightly , 2 months ago (edited 2 months ago)

No, they aren't. The things LLMs are being used for aren't significant enough to justify the costs. OpenAI is the most capital-intensive startup in Silicon Valley history and burns through almost a million bucks a day in data center operations alone. Its net income was -$540 million in 2022 and 2023 looks to be closer to losing a whole billion despite nonupling their income. They'll need to double their revenue again without raising costs just to start breaking even.

That kind of money-bonfire never lasts long.

knightly , 2 months ago

Precisely. It isn't just one company blowing billions.

knightly , 2 months ago

If that's what you actually want, you can ask Google's LLM to list them for you.

knightly , 2 months ago

Nah, we just prefer the one true Linux mascot.

https://pawb.social/pictrs/image/3be3ca11-de5c-4e85-838a-23a1dbd8130d.jpeg

https://pawb.social/pictrs/image/24e17cc0-60d3-4d12-b982-53791de0bfbc.jpeg

https://pawb.social/pictrs/image/f700bbe1-eba8-4462-a3df-1575339bd7e0.jpeg

https://pawb.social/pictrs/image/f51c260d-bd5d-41eb-be63-03ef1275c687.jpeg

knightly , 2 months ago

That attitude tends to piss off conservatives. =3

knightly , 2 months ago

All discussions are made up.

knightly , 2 months ago

Private communications are covered by copyright.

knightly , 2 months ago

And?

I'm not most people, I'm me.

I'm not about to let other people's ignorance about the social media landscape keep me from enjoying my niche.

knightly , 2 months ago

As opposed to selective enforcement of regulation mostly informed by nationalism and insider trading?

How is this even a question. XD

knightly , 2 months ago

Wiretapping laws would seem to disagree. XD

knightly , 2 months ago

You were the deraileur when you decided that my comment about my own personal tastes was insufficiently generalizable. XD

knightly , 2 months ago

Wiretapping laws aren't enforced because of copyright.

Sure, but Facebook would prefer a copyright case over anything that might suggest a bill of privacy rights would be a good idea.

knightly , 2 months ago

Precisely.