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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • America not being a dictatorship doesn’t a matter to anyone else besides it’s citizens.

    Most American allies depend on the US for defense, the US is the largest economy in the world, and the US is the largest ideological counterpart to countries like Russia - who want to use force to annihilate both dissent and opposition.

    It absolutely matters to most well-informed citizens of any country the world over how we conduct ourselves because it does directly impact them. That’s part of the reason we should be better than we are.

    The… world want [sic]… for America to not…

    I mean, you’re preaching to the choir. Most folk here didn’t want to send their kids to die in 'Nam or Afghanistan. Vets didn’t sign up to risk their lives for opium fields. American citizens were duped too.

    We’re on the same side here.

    Do you really think the gouvernement doesn’t inject propaganda on social media ?

    I didn’t say that, but they take out ad campaigns and use PR firms like a normal company. Twitter does not work for the US government and the US government does not rig the algorithm it uses for feeds. The Washington Post is not controlled by the US government. Amazon is not controlled by the US government.

    The distinction between that and what China or Russia does is important. They own the media. They own the companies. They own every method of communication and every interaction between their people. And they leverage that direct power to control narratives to say things like “Taiwan belongs to China” and “Ukraine belongs to Russia” and “Tianemen Square never happened”.

    Meanwhile, you can see all the atrocities the US government did on Wikipedia. Sometimes even on the websites of the state itself. Reparations are discussed, sometimes won. Protesters fight with, yes, the risk of state violence, but not of tanks turning them into pudding that’s washed down the gutters. And with that knowledge, we can shape our own future democratically. Putin and Xi cannot be voted out.

    All this is a long-winded way to say:

    • The US government engages in propaganda.
    • The US government’s propaganda, compared to authoritarian states, is heavily restricted and far more reliant on consensual participation. It’s also widely criticized and (almost) universally hated.
    • The propaganda used by authoritarian states like China is actively leveraged to commit outright genocide and deny atrocities. It cannot be publicly criticized or opposed.
    • Therefore, the scale and impact of propaganda is different and that difference must be considered.



  • Everytime Firefox updates I have to restart the entire browser or it won’t let me open a new tab. This has been going on for years. As a dev, I can’t dynamically edit source during runtime ever since the Quantum update. It’s noticeably slower these days, which is especialy bad on mobile/laptops due to battery life. If you’re on Windows, you don’t get video super sampling (NVIDIA) or HDR videos.

    I wouldn’t call it a buggy mess that crashes frequently, but it’s certainly constantly getting on my nerves.



  • Not really, though it’s hard to know what exactly is or is not encoded in the network. It likely has more salient and highly referenced content, since those aspects would come up in it’s training set more often. But entire works is basically impossible just because of the sheer ratio between the size of the training data and the size of the resulting model. Not to mention that GPT’s mode of operation mostly discourages long-form wrote memorization. It’s a statistical model, after all, and the enemy of “objective” state.

    Furthermore, GPT isn’t coherent enough for long-form content. With it’s small context window, it just has trouble remembering big things like books. And since it doesn’t have access to any “senses” but text broken into words, concepts like pages or “how many” give it issues.

    None of the leaked prompts really mention “don’t reveal copyrighted information” either, so it seems the creators really aren’t concerned — which you think they would be if it did have this tendency. It’s more likely to make up entire pieces of content from the summaries it does remember.





  • Come on, let’s be adults about it. Beehaw has always had stricter registration requirements, but didn’t defederate until just now. The problem was that they simply don’t have the tools needed to moderate such a huge influx of people from uncurated instances and it was interfering with the culture they prided themselves on.

    I’m not a member of Beehaw, but I can respect them knowing both what they want to be and when their limited ability to enforce it meant drastic measures to preserve the community. This is one of the good things about federation: they’re allowed to do that and we don’t need to switch platforms entirely!

    Wish everyone luck going forward.