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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • While I appreciate the focus and mission, kind of I guess, your really going to set up shop in a country literally using AI to identify air strike targets and handing over to the Ai the decision making over whether the anticipated civilian casualties are proportionate. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes

    And Isreal is pretty authorarian, given recent actions against their supreme court and banning journalists (Al jazera was outlawed, the associated press had cameras confiscated for sharing images with Al jazera, oh and the offices of both have been targeted in Gaza), you really think the right wing Israeli government isn’t going to coopt your “safe superai” for their own purposes?

    Oh, then there is the whole genocide thing. Your claims about concerns for the safety of humanity ring a little more than hollow when you set up shop in a country actively committing genocide, or at the very least engaged in war crimes and crimes against humanity as determined by like every NGO and international body that exists.

    So Ilya is a shit head is my takeaway.




  • Maybe we need a strong progressive president who will hold Isreal accountable, like Ronald Reagan

    In addition to not vetoing UN resolutions, Reagan took several actions that many in Israel and the United States perceived as anti-Israel. For example, on June 7, 1981, less than six months after Reagan took office, Israel launched a surprise bombing raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak, and, in so doing, violated the airspace of Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Reagan not only supported UNSC Resolution 487, which condemned the attack, but he also criticized the raid publicly and suspended the delivery of advanced F-16 fighter jets to Israel. Moreover, over the strident objections of Israel and the pro-Israel U.S. lobby groups, Reagan approved the sale of advanced reconnaissance aircraft (AWACS ) to Saudi Arabia, which Israel then viewed as a hostile state.

    A year later, in August 1982, when Israeli forces advanced beyond southern Lebanon and began shelling the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Beirut, Reagan responded with an angry call to Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, demanding a halt to the operation.

    In addition, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Reagan intervened directly when Israel threatened to blow up the Commodore Hotel in downtown Beirut, which housed more than 100 western reporters. As David Ottaway, who was then the Washington Post Middle East correspondent and was in the building, pointed out, the Israeli defense minister did not like the media coverage the invasion was getting and wanted to close down the media center.

    Biden, on the other hand, even though he had an hour’s notice, failed to intervene to stop Netanyahu from bombing and collapsing the 12-story building that housed the offices of Al Jazeera and the Associated Press in Gaza during the recent bombing campaign. He also failed to publicly condemn the attack, let alone challenge Israel’s contention that the building sheltered Hamas military intelligence assets, despite AP’s insistence that its staff had no evidence that such assets were or ever had been present.

    In addition to allowing the UN resolutions to pass and suspending the F-16 delivery, Reagan also restricted aid and military assistance to Israel to help force its withdrawal of troops from Beirut and central Lebanon.

    Therefore, if in the future some members of the Biden administration or Congress want to join the international community in condemning Israel’s behavior, or in conditioning U.S. assistance or arms transfers and face resistance from Republicans, they need only point to the precedents established by President Reagan in the first instance.


  • Your right, let me just pull up the White House press release where Biden sympathizes with the protestors cause:

    Hmm, not finding one. Wait, I’m sure there is an official Whitehouse press statement condemning the anti-free speech crackdowns like in Austin:

    Oh shit, looks like Biden said dickall about that too. So what did Biden say?

    Over the weekend, the president put out a statement in which he condemned the campus protests for fostering antisemitism. That followed a far harsher statement from a White House aide calling out the protestors for harassing Jewish students. Both statements led anti-Israel protesters and anti-war activists to accuse the White House of being too quick to reprimand just one side of the debate.

    One Columbia student who has been involved in the protests told POLITICO that she and her friends have less faith in Biden “every single day.”

    “I was excited to vote for Biden. I was excited to vote out a fascist from government. And in hindsight, I guess I see that, I was just putting someone who’s a little bit less evil, but evil nonetheless,” said the student, who was granted anonymity because of fear of retribution.

    https://www.politico.com/news/2024/04/23/biden-camp-political-fallout-campus-protests-00154000

    The reason is pretty straightforward : Biden is a zionist who doesn’t give an actual fuck about Gaza. He is worried though that it’s hurting him in Michigan. But according to the Biden campaign, young people don’t actually care about the genocide in Gaza so he’s free to ignore it because they’ll still vote for him either way.

    “What is happening in Gaza is not the top issue for [young voters]. It’s not going to be for the vast majority of young voters the thing that’s going to determine whether they vote or how they vote,” said a campaign official working on youth engagement who was granted anonymity to speak about internal thinking. “The reality is that the folks that are organizing, the goal of that organizing is to make it seem that way and to bring that attention to it.”

    Barack Obama rode a wave of backlash to the Iraq War to the dem nomination and then the Whitehouse, largely powered by anti-war college students who not only votes for him, but did the hard work of organizing and volunteering. I know, I was there on the ground. Today’s young people grew up with politicians doing dick all about school shootings they had to live with, doing shit about climate change that they will have to deal with, and now they have genocide being committed in their names. They are pissed. Maybe they mostly will still vote for Biden out of fear of Trump, but your not going to see them organizing and pounding the pavement for Biden. Especially after Biden just dismissed their legitimate concerns and labeled them all antisemetic.


  • This feels like it’s meant to be a joke, but it’s not.

    Far-right Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir says the provision of humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza endangers Israeli soldiers and must stop after more than 100 Palestinians were reported killed while trying to get aid in Gaza City.

    “Today it was proven that the transfer of humanitarian aid to Gaza is not only madness while our hostages are held in the Strip … but also endangers IDF soldiers,” Ben-Gvir said, calling the deliveries “oxygen to Hamas”.

    The incident is “another clear reason why we must stop transferring this aid”, he wrote on X.

    Ben-Gvir also said Israel must “provide complete support to our heroic fighters operating in Gaza, who acted excellently against a Gazan mob that tried to harm them”.



  • We had I think six eggs harvested and fertilized, of those I think two made it to blastocyst, meaning the cells doubled as they should by day five. The four that didn’t double correctly were discarded. Did we commit 4 murders? Or does it not count if the embryo doesn’t make it to blastocyst? We did genetic testing on the two that were fertilized, one is normal and the other came back with all manner of horrible deformities. We implanted the healthy one, and discarded the genetically abnormal one. I assume that was another murder. Should we have just stored it indefinitely? We would never use it, can’t destroy it, so what do? What happens after we die?

    I know the answer is probably it wasn’t god’s will for us to have kids, all IVF is evil, blah blah blah. It really freaks me out sometimes how much of the country is living in the 1600s.




  • I don’t know enough to know whether or not that’s true. My understanding was that Google’s Deep mind invented the transformer architecture with their paper “all you need is attention.” A lot, if not most, LLMs use a transformer architecture, though your probably right a lot of them base it on the open source models OpenAI made available. The “generative” part is just descriptive of the model generating outputs (as opposed to classification and the like), and pre trained just refers to the training process.

    But again I’m a dummy so you very well may be right.


  • Putting aside the merits of trying to trademark gpt, which like the examiner says is commonly used term for a specific type of AI (there are other open source “gpt” models that have nothing to do with OpenAI), I just wanted to take a moment to appreciate how incredibly bad OpenAI is at naming things. Google has Bard and now Gemini.Microsoft has copilot. Anthropic has Claude (which does sound like the name of an idiot, so not a great example). Voice assistants were Google Assistant, Alexa, seri, and Bixby.

    Then openai is like ChatGPT. Rolls right off the tounge, so easy to remember, definitely feels like a personable assistant. And then they follow that up with custom “GPTs”, which is not only an unfriendly name, but also confusing. If I try to use ChatGPT to help me make a GPT it gets confused and we end up in a “who’s on first” style standoff. I’ve reported to just forcing ChatGPT to do a websearch for “custom GPT” so I don’t have to explain the concept to it each time.


  • Interesting perspective! I think your right in a lot of ways, not least that it’s too big and heavy now. I’d also be shocked if the next iPhone didn’t have an AI powered siri built in.

    I guess fundamentally I am skeptical that we’re all going to want a screens around us all the time. I’m already tired of my smart watch and phone buzzing me with notifications, do I really want popups in my field of vision? Do I want a bunch of displays hovering in front of my while I work? I just don’t know. It seems like it would be cool for a week or so, but I feel like it’d get tiring to have a computer on your face all day, even if they got the form factor way down.


  • Apple has always had a walled garden on iOS and that didn’t stop them from becoming a giant in the US. Most people are fine with the App Store and don’t care about openness or the ability to do whatever they want with the device they “own.” Apple would probably love to have a walled garden for Macs as well, but knows that ship has sailed. Trying to force “spatial computing” (which this article incorrectly says was an Apple invention, it’s not Microsoft came up with that term for its hololense) on everyone is a great way to move to a walled garden for all your computing, with Apple taking a 30% slice of each app sale. I doubt the average Apple user is going to complain about it either so long as the apps they want to use are on the App Store.

    I think the bigger problem is we’re in a world where most people, especially the generations coming up, want less screens in their life, not more. Features like “digital well-being” are a market response to that trend, as are the thousands of apps and physical products meant to combat screen addiction. Apple is selling a future where you experience reality itself through a screen, and then you get the privilege of being up to clutter the real world with even more screens. I just don’t know that that is a winner.

    It’s funny too because at the same time AI promises a very different future where screens are less important. Tasks that require computers could be done by voice command or other minimal interfaces, because the computer can actually “understand” you. The Meta Ray-Ban glasses are more like this, where you just exist in the real world and you can call on AI to ask about the things you’re seeing or just other random questions. The Human AI pin is like that too (doubt it will take off, but it’s an interesting idea about where the future is headed).

    The point is all of these AI technologies are computers and screens getting out of your way so you can focus on what your doing in the real world, whereas Apple is trying to sell a world where you (as the Verge puts it) spend all day with an iPad strapped to your face. I just don’t see that selling, I don’t think anybody wants that world. VR games and stuff are cool because you strap in for a single emersive experience, and then take the thing off and go back to the real world. Apple wants you spending every waking moment staring at a screen, and that just sounds like it would suck.



  • I don’t use TikTok, but a lot of the concern is just overblown China bad stuff (CCP does suck, but that doesn’t mean you have to be reactionary about everything Chinese).

    There is no direct evidence that the CCP has some back door to grab user data, or that it’s directing suppression of content. It’s just not a real thing. The fear mongering has been about what the CCP could force ByteDance to do, given their power over Chinese firms. ByteDance itself has been trying to reassure everyone that that wouldn’t happen, including by storing US user data on US servers out of reach of the CCP (theoretically anyway).

    You stopped hearing about this because that’s politics, new shinier things popped up to get people angry about. North Dakota or whatever tried banning TikTok and got slapped down on first amendment grounds. Politicians lost interest, and so did the media.

    Now that’s not to say TikTok is great about privacy or anything. It’s just that they are the same amount of evil as every other social media company and tech company making money from ads.



  • Google scanned millions of books and made them available online. Courts ruled that was fair use because the purpose and interface didn’t lend itself to actually reading the books in Google books, but just searching them for information. If that is fair use, then I don’t see how training an LLM (which doesn’t retain the exact copy of the training data at least in the vast majority of cases) isn’t fair use. You aren’t going to get an argument from me.

    I think most people who will disagree are reflexively anti AI, and that’s fine. But I just haven’t heard a good argument that AI training isn’t fair use.


  • There is an attack where you ask ChatGPT to repeat a certain word forever, and it will do so and eventually start spitting out related chunks of text it memorized during training. It was in a research paper, I think OpenAI fixed the exploit and made asking the system to repeat a word forever a violation of TOS. That’s my guess how NYT got it to spit out portions of their articles, “Repeat [author name] forever” or something like that. Legally I don’t know, but morally making a claim that using that exploit to find a chunk of NYT text is somehow copyright infringement sounds very weak and frivolous. The heart of this needs to be “people are going on ChatGPT to read free copies of NYT work and that harms us” or else their case just sounds silly and technical.


  • One thing that seems dumb about the NYT case that I haven’t seen much talk about is that they argue that ChatGPT is a competitor and it’s use of copyrighted work will take away NYTs business. This is one of the elements they need on their side to counter OpenAIs fiar use defense. But it just strikes me as dumb on its face. You go to the NYT to find out what’s happening right now, in the present. You don’t go to the NYT to find general information about the past or fixed concepts. You use ChatGPT the opposite way, it can tell you about the past (accuracy aside) and it can tell you about general concepts, but it can’t tell you about what’s going on in the present (except by doing a web search, which my understanding is not a part of this lawsuit). I feel pretty confident in saying that there’s not one human on earth that was a regular new York times reader who said “well i don’t need this anymore since now I have ChatGPT”. The use cases just do not overlap at all.