• 7 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 20th, 2023

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  • A lot of people don’t understand how AI training and AI inference work, they are two completely separate processes.

    Yes, they are. Not sure why you are bringing that up.

    For those wondering what the actual difference is (possibly because they don’t seem to know):

    At a high level, training is when you ingest data to create a model based on characteristics of that data. Inference is when you then apply a model to (preferably new) data. So think of training as “teaching” a model what a cat is, and inference as having that model scan through images for cats.

    And a huge part of making a good model is providing good data. That is, generally speaking, done by labeling things ahead of time. Back in the day it was paying people to take an amazon survey where they said “hot dog or no hot dog”. These days… it is “anti-bot” technology that gets that for free (think about WHY every single website cares what is a fire hydrant or a bicycle…)

    But that is ALSO just simple metrics like “Did the user use what we suggested”. Instead of saying “not hot dog” it is “good reply” or “no reply” or “still read email” or “ignored email” and so forth.

    And once you know what your pain points are with TOTALLY anonymized user data, you can then “reproduce” said user data to add to your training set. Which is the kind of bullshit facebook, allegedly, has done for years where they’ll GLADLY delete your data if you request it… but not that picture of you at the McDonald’s down the street because that belongs to Ronjon Buck who worked there one summer. But they’ll gladly anonymize your user data so the picture of you actually just corresponds to “User 25156161616” that happens to be the sibling of your sister and so forth…

    in fact a lot of research is being done right now trying to make it possible to do both because it would be really handy to be able to do them together and it can’t really be done like that yet.

    That is literally just a feedback loop and is core to pretty much any “agentic” network/graph.

    Go ahead and do so, they will have separate sections specifically about the use of data for training. Data privacy is regulated by a lot of laws, even in the United States, and corporate users are extremely picky about that sort of stuff.

    There also tend to be laws about opting in and forced EULA agreements. It is almost like the megacorps have acknowledged that they’ll just do whatever and MAYBE pay a fee after they have made so much more money already.


  • Understand that basically ANYTHING that “uses AI” is using you for training data.

    At its simplest, it is the old fashioned A/B testing where you are used as part of a reinforcement/labeling pipeline. Sometimes it gets considerably more bullshit as your very queries and what would make you make them are used to “give you a better experience” and so forth.

    And if you read any of the EULAs (for the stuff that google opted users into…) you’ll see verbiage along those lines.

    Of course, the reality is that google is going to train off our data regardless. But that is why it is a good idea to decouple your life from google as much as possible. It takes a long ass time but… no better time than today.






  • SS lightning bolts and skulls are ridiculously prevalent in the US (actually most “Western”) military.

    At best? It is the allegorical nazi bar. The US Military (also, again, most “Western” militaries too) had no problem allowing nazis to take root and that inherently drives out everyone else until they are all jacking it to a facebook post about mein kampf.

    The sad reality?All that “A diverse military is a strong military” is just about how much they are dependent on people of color whether it is a poor kid from the inner city trying to get a new start or someone putting in a tour for citizenship. And as that melanin dries up because people are realizing “maybe it isn’t worth killing people who look like me to get a better life… Also all the sexual assault”, that just leaves the “my daddy’s daddy’s daddy was a marine and I am too” crackers.

    At which point… you kinda have to stop looking the other way on the “nazi corner” and just embrace it because nobody else is coming in.



  • Yes. Which is why I specifically mentioned the need for grants and incentive programs to allow those companies and research groups/universities to pivot.

    Because, yes, we very much need better social programs. But there are going to be a LOT of people out of jobs. And a LOT of early career/new grads who just spent the past 4-8 years of their life literally training themselves to do what the government et al demanded of them. And they’ll be shit out of luck.

    All of which will very much overwhelm whatever half-assed social programs we rapidly implement.

    Like… to be blunt, what you are suggesting is very comparable to the “trump healthcare plan” of giving every 2 grand and telling them to figure it out themselves. On the surface, maybe that sounds nice. But that is not much of an insurance premium and would get cleaned out the first time someone gets sick. It is not a solution.

    The reality is that we desperately need actual social safety nets and we have needed them for decades at this point. But “We’ll figure something out in a few years, for real this time” doesn’t help people in even the medium term.





  • I… actually disagree with this even though I don’t want to.

    Yes, fuck OpenAI and Meta.

    But the problem is that the government has been 500% enabling this “bubble”. Basically any governent grant for the past five or six years has more or less required “AI” to be front and center. The more senior folk have generally been good about “I am doing Machine Learning enhanced construction of that office building, sure, whatever” but this, in turn, has more or less gutted academia as more and more programs have essentially been built around providing what funding is literally asking for. Flipping NOBODY thinks “I am a prompt engineer” is worth anything but scorn and mockery. But when those grants and CFPs basically require a prompt engineer on the proposal to have any chance of being accepted…

    It’s easy to say “you should have known better and not lied to us” but… they were telling the lies that were demanded of them. And just cutting them free and letting capitalism sort it out is going to mean pretty much an entire generation lost and countless companies down the drain as well. Which… also won’t be all that useful for getting people healthcare.

    Similarly, Jensen is a prick (and always has been but…). But if the rug gets pulled and the “bubble pops”? nVidia is not a US company but it is essential to the US economy and capabilities. We can’t afford to let that go the way of Intel.

    Do I think giant checks should be written? No. But we need a LOT of transition grants and programs and possibly outright stimulus checks so that the entire tech and research and science industries can pivot to what is being asked of them now.


  • Ignoring the eugenics bullshit there:

    I wouldn’t get your hopes up. We saw similar with genx and millennials. Men are shit because they inherently favor toxic male role models*. Think of misogynists like Al Bundy or how much of rap AND country is “I smacked my bitch because she didn’t make me dinner”. And women, generally, tend to realize they want a better life.

    Then life gets in the way and you see a rise in people who just want to check out and become a “trad wife”. Stop working, let some asshole get five thrusts in once a week, and MAYBE have kids that you probably want anyway. A friend, who is very much opposed to the idea, HAS half-joked that just updating her linkedin profile makes it seem pretty appealing.

    Although the good news is that the high rates of illiteracy make it a lot less likely for most of those broccoli headed shits to have jobs that can support themselves, let alone a family.

    *: I’ve ranted on it before but more than ever I think Yu Yu Hakusho may have saved my life since the entire Dark Tournament/Younger Toguro arc is a weirdly mature takedown of toxic masculinity… from the early 90s.


  • A friend of a friend apparently used to be a huge “party girl” a decade ago and has been ridiculously hardcore orthodox since I met her. And… I am pretty sure I have had to deal with knights of columbus who are less psychotic.

    I’ve noticed especially since the most recent russian invasion of Ukraine that they have been on a recruiting spree in town. Lots of “We are the good orthodox church who supports Ukraine. Come to our picnics and bring your kids…”. And while I usually avoid anything religion related*, I was tricked into attending one and holy crap. Like… jehova’s witnesses have more chill.

    And… I’ve noticed on a few dates with people who seemed chill that they are probably taking the mormon route of having their young and hot cultists bang people into converting. Which… moving on.

    But yeah. Gonna be interesting if the tankie crowd got marching orders to defend orthodox christianity yet. Let’s wait and see.

    *: Fun fact. I apparently have a fairly bad allergy to one of the common incenses used by christian churches. So I ACTUALLY burn on hollowed ground. I will never get tired of pointing that out. Although it does suck since a lot of gorgeous European architecture is churches.


  • A LOT of this narrative reeks of “See, chuck schumer is actually a heroic genius”

    But the basic idea is that trump can still pocket veto this. I forget the specifics but essentially it is the idea that he can ignore the bill for 10 days which would expire it and punt it back to the House. And if The House is out of session (which they will be because it is thanksgiving and our politicians would NEVER dare inconvenience themselves for The American People) it basically kills the bill entirely and they have to re-pass it.

    By getting it through the Senate ridiculously quickly it makes it MUCH harder to argue that the white house ran out of time. And it does sound like House republicans may have been counting on that since johnson was talking about how the Senate would take forever to pass this.


    The other theories I have seen are all based around “investigating the Democrats”. Either insist that NO files can be released because they are part of an active investigation or insist the reason it is predominantly republicans and bill clinton is because all the Democrat files had to be held.

    Personally? I think both immediately trigger massive leaks because of just how widespread they are and how bipartisan the access has been in the past. And any token sacrificial republicans will IMMEDIATELY narc on everyone else before they can hang themselves in a jail cell.

    And if the big beautiful bill ever faces even a chance of consequences for his actions, you can bet that he (and mostly Hilary) would start blabbing about trump sucking him off.



  • As it stands? Cloudflare is still incredibly effective at protecting customers from those DDOS attacks. Which, depending on your hosting solution, can mean very noticeable monetary savings because YOUR hardware/connection didn’t spike. And, regardless, can mean noticeable monetary savings as your engineers didn’t need to recover a crashed system because your setup was just sitting there idle.

    That said: If you truly need high availability? You need to do what downdetector did and have alternatives ready in the event that Cloudflare falls over. Same as with your ISP… which should be ISPs plural.