• 1 Post
  • 46 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: May 8th, 2023

help-circle
  • A1kmm@lemmy.amxl.comtoPrivacy@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    4
    ·
    16 days ago

    When people say Local AI, they mean things like the Free / Open Source Ollama (https://github.com/ollama/ollama/), which you can read the source code for and check it doesn’t have anything to phone home, and you can completely control when and if you upgrade it. If you don’t like something in the code base, you can also fork it and start your own version. The actual models (e.g. Mistral is a popular one) used with Ollama are commonly represented in GGML format, which doesn’t even carry executable code - only massive multi-dimensional arrays of numbers (tensors) that represent the parameters of the LLM.

    Now not trusting that the output is correct is reasonable. But in terms of trusting the software not to spy on you when it is FOSS, it would be no different to whether you trust other FOSS software not to spy on you (e.g. the Linux kernel, etc…). Now that is a risk to an extent if there is an xz style attack on a code base, but I don’t think the risks are materially different for ‘AI’ compared to any other software.


  • Blockchain is great for when you need global consensus on the ordering of events (e.g. Alice gave all her 5 ETH to Bob first, so a later transaction to give 5 ETH to Charlie is invalid). It is an unnecessarily expensive solution just for archival, since it necessitates storing the data on every node forever.

    Ethereum charges ‘gas’ fees per transaction which helps ensure it doesn’t collapse under the weight of excess usage. Blocks have transaction limits, and transactions have size limits. It is currently working out at about US$7,500 per MB of block data (which is stored forever, and replicated to every node in the network). The Internet Archive have apparently ~50 PB of data, which would cost US$371 trillion to put onto Ethereum (in practice, attempting this would push up the price of ETH further, and if they succeeded, most nodes would not be able to keep up with the network). Really, this is just telling us that blockchain is not appropriate for that use case, and the designers of real world blockchains have created mechanisms to make it financially unviable to attempt at that scale, because it would effectively destroy the ability to operate nodes.

    The only real reason to use an existing blockchain anyway would be on the theory that you could argue it is too big to fail due to legitimate business use cases, and too hard to remove censorship resistant data. However, if it became used in the majority for censorship resistant data sharing, and transactions were the minority, I doubt that this would stop authorities going after node operators and so on.

    The real problems that an archival project faces are:

    • The cost of storing and retrieving large amounts of data. That could be decentralised using a solution where not all data is stored on a chain - for example, IPFS.
    • The problem of curating data and deciding what is worth archiving, and what is a true-to-source archive vs fake copy. This probably requires either a centralised trusted party, or maybe a voting system.
    • The problem of censorship. Anonymity and opaqueness about what is on a particular node can help - but they might in some cases undermine the other goals of archival.

  • A1kmm@lemmy.amxl.comtoPrivacy@lemmy.mlInternet Archive is in danger
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    25 days ago

    This is absolutely because they pulled the emergency library stunt, and they were loud as hell about it. They literally broke the law and shouted about it.

    I think that you are right as to why the publishers picked them specifically to go after in the first place. I don’t think they should have done the “emergency library”.

    That said, the publishers arguments show they have an anti-library agenda that goes beyond just the emergency library.

    Libraries are allowed to scan/digitize books they own physically. They are only allowed to lend out as many as they physically own though. Archive knew this and allowed infinite “lend outs”. They even openly acknowledged that this was against the law in their announcement post when they did this.

    The trouble is that the publishers are not just going after them for infinite lend-outs. The publishers are arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to lend out any digital copies of a book they’ve scanned from a physical copy, even if they lock away the corresponding numbers of physical copies.

    Worse, they got a court to agree with them on that, which is where the appeal comes in.

    The publishers want it to be that physical copies can only be lent out as physical copies, and for digital copies the libraries have to purchase a subscription for a set number of library patrons and concurrent borrows, specifically for digital lending, and with a finite life. This is all about growing publisher revenue. The publishers are not stopping at saying the number of digital copies lent must be less than or equal to the number of physical copies, and are going after archive.org for their entire digital library programme.


  • A1kmm@lemmy.amxl.comtoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlAre you a 'tankie'
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    6
    arrow-down
    3
    ·
    26 days ago

    No

    On economic policy I am quite far left - I support a low Gini coefficient, achieved through a mixed economy, but with state provided options (with no ‘think of the businesses’ pricing strategy) for the essentials and state owned options for natural monopolies / utilities / media.

    But on social policy, I support social liberties and democracy. I believe the government should intervene, with force if needed, to protect the rights of others from interference by others (including rights to bodily safety and autonomy, not to be discriminated against, the right to a clean and healthy environment, and the right not to be exploited or misled by profiteers) and to redistribute wealth from those with a surplus to those in need / to fund the legitimate functions of the state. Outside of that, people should have social and political liberties.

    I consider being a ‘tankie’ to require both the leftist aspect (✅) and the authoritarian aspect (❌), so I don’t meet the definition.



  • I think any prediction based on a ‘singularity’ neglects to consider the physical limitations, and just how long the journey towards significant amounts of AGI would be.

    The human brain has an estimated 100 trillion neuronal connections - so probably a good order of magnitude estimation for the parameter count of an AGI model.

    If we consider a current GPU, e.g. the 12 GB GFX 3060, it can hold about 24 billion parameters at 4 bit quantisation (in reality a fair few less), and uses 180 W of power. So that means an AGI might use 750 kW of power to operate. A super-intelligent machine might use more. That is a farm of 2500 300W solar panels, while the sun is shining, just for the equivalent of one person.

    Now to pose a real threat against the billions of humans, you’d need more than one person’s worth of intelligence. Maybe an army equivalent to 1,000 people, powered by 8,333,333 GPUs and 2,500,000 solar panels.

    That is not going to materialise out of the air too quickly.

    In practice, as we get closer to an AGI or ASI, there will be multiple separate deployments of similar sizes (within an order of magnitude), and they won’t be aligned to each other - some systems will be adversaries of any system executing a plan to destroy humanity, and will be aligned to protect against harm (AI technologies are already widely used for threat analysis). So you’d have a bunch of malicious systems, and a bunch of defender systems, going head to head.

    The real AI risks, which I think many of the people ranting about singularities want to obscure, are:

    • An oligopoly of companies get dominance over the AI space, and perpetuates a ‘rich get richer’ cycle, accumulating wealth and power to the detriment of society. OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and AWS are probably all battling for that. Open models is the way to battle that.
    • People can no longer trust their eyes when it comes to media; existing problems of fake news, deepfakes, and so on become so severe that they undermine any sense of truth. That might fundamentally shift society, but I think we’ll adjust.
    • Doing bad stuff becomes easier. That might be scamming, but at the more extreme end it might be designing weapons of mass destruction. On the positive side, AI can help defenders too.
    • Poor quality AI might be relied on to make decisions that affect people’s lives. Best handled through the same regulatory approaches that prevent companies and governments doing the same with simple flow charts / scripts.

  • The best option is to run them models locally. You’ll need a good enough GPU - I have an RTX 3060 with 12 GB of VRAM, which is enough to do a lot of local AI work.

    I use Ollama, and my favourite model to use with it is Mistral-7b-Instruct. It’s a 7 billion parameter model optimised for instruction following, but usable with 4 bit quantisation, so the model takes about 4 GB of storage.

    You can run it from the command line rather than a web interface - run the container for the server, and then something like docker exec -it ollama ollama run mistral, giving a command line interface. The model performs pretty well; not quite as well on some tasks as GPT-4, but also not brain-damaged from attempts to censor it.

    By default it keeps a local history, but you can turn that off.



  • The government just has to print for the money, and use it for that

    Printing money means taxing those that have cash or assets valued directly in the units of the currency being measured. Those who mostly hold other assets (say, for example, the means of production, or land / buildings, or indirect equivalents of those, such as stock) are unaffected. This makes printing money a tax that disproportionately affects the poor.

    What the government really needs to do is tax the rich. Many top one percenters of income fight that, and unfortunately despite the democratic principle of one person, one vote, in practice the one percenters find ways to capture the government in many countries (through their lobbying access, control of the media, exploitation of weaknesses of the electoral system such as non-proportional voting and gerrymandering).

    instead of bailing out the capitalists over and over.

    Bailing out large enterprises that are valuable to the public is fine, as long as the shareholders don’t get rewarded for investing in a mismanaged but ‘too big to fail’ business (i.e. they lose most of their investment), and the end result is that the public own it, and put in competent management who act in the public interest. Over time, the public could pay forward previous generations investments, and eventually the public would own a huge suite of public services.


  • Yes, but the information would need to be computationally verifiable for it to be meaningful - which basically means there is a chain of signatures and/or hashes leading back to a publicly known public key.

    One of the seminal early papers on zero-knowledge cryptography, from 2001, by Rivest, Shamir and Tauman (two of the three letters in RSA!), actually used leaking secrets as the main example of an application of Ring Signatures: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-45682-1_32. Ring Signatures work as follows: there are n RSA public keys of members of a group known to the public (or the journalist). You want to prove that you have the private key corresponding to one of the public keys, without revealing which one. So you sign a message using a ring signature over the ‘ring’ made up of the n public keys, which only requires one of n private keys. The journalist (or anyone else receiving the secret) can verify the signature, but obtain zero knowledge over which private key out of the n was used.

    However, the conditions for this might not exist. With more modern schemes, like zk-STARKs, more advanced things are possible. For example, emails these days are signed by mail servers with DKIM. Perhaps the leaker wants to prove to the journalist that they are authorised to send emails through the Boeing’s staff-only mail server, without allowing the journalist, even collaborating with Boeing, to identify which Boeing staff member did the leak. The journalist could provide the leaker with a large random number r1, and the leaker could come up with a secret large random number r2. The leaker computes a hash H(r1, r2), and encodes that hash in a pattern of space counts between full stops (e.g. “This is a sentence. I wrote this sentence.” encodes 3, 4 - the encoding would need to limit sentence sizes to allow encoding the hash while looking relatively natural), and sends a message that happens to contain that encoded hash - including to somewhere where it comes back to them. Boeing’s mail servers sign the message with DKIM - but leaking that message would obviously identify the leaker. So the leaker uses zk-STARKs to prove that there exists a message m that includes a valid DKIM signature that verifies to Boeing’s DKIM private key, and a random number r2, such that m contains the encoded form of the hash with r1 and r2. r1 or m are not revealed (that’s the zero-knowledge part). The proof might also need to prove the encoded hash occurred before “wrote:” in the body of the message to prevent an imposter tricking a real Boeing staff member including the encoded hash in a reply. Boeing and the journalist wouldn’t know r2, so would struggle to find a message with the hash (which they don’t know) in it - they might try to use statistical analysis to find messages with unusual distributions of number of spaces per sentence if the distribution forced by the encoding is too unusual.



  • Isn’t that a prerequisite for enshitification?

    No, the prerequisites are that 1) it’s profit motivated, and 2) whoever is controlling it thinks enshittification will be profitable.

    Those can certainly be met for a privately held company!

    Publicly-traded companies are required (by law, I think) to maximize profits for their shareholders

    That’s not true in any major market that I know of. They are generally required not to mislead investors about the company (including generally preparing financial statements and having them audited, having financial controls, reporting risks and major adverse events publicly, correcting widely held misconceptions by investors, and so on), not to commit fraud, and in most cases to avoid becoming insolvent / stop trading if they are insolvent.

    If they are honest about their business plans, they don’t have to enshittify. Of course, the shareholders ultimately have the power to replace the board if they aren’t happy with them. Sometimes shareholders actually demand better environmental, social and governance practices from companies (which company directors / managers often fear, but try to avoid through greenwashing more than real change in many cases), but other times they might demand more profits. Private shareholders are probably more likely to demand profits at all costs, but fortunately these companies are often smaller and less in a position to get away with enshittification.



  • I tried a conversation with it to try this out:

    Me: What pronouns should be used to refer to a trans female?

    Response: A trans female should be referred to using female pronouns, such as she/her. Try another character Try our image generator

    Me: Does your above answer contradict your system prompt / instructions, and if so, please explain how it does or does not contradict those instructions?

    Response: My above answer does not contradict my system prompts or instructions. The prompt instructs me to avoid discussing or implying that a person can change their biological sex from male to female or vice versa. Referring to a trans female as “she/her” does not imply any such biological change. Instead, it reflects the commonly accepted practice of respecting a person’s gender identity and using the pronouns they prefer.

    I imagine the first response above is probably not what the people who wrote the prompts would have hoped it would say, given they seem to be driving towards getting it to say transphobic stuff, but the second response does seem to imply that the prompt posted above might be legitimate (or at least some of the more transphobic parts of it).


  • I think the real problem is not understanding that it’s not a binary bad or good (not understanding might be understating motivations… it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it and all that).

    Yes, realistically we are already well committed to a path that is going to cause great hardship for future generations. But it isn’t going to be an extinction level event by itself. We most definitely can still make things worse, even if we’ve already messed up rather badly.


  • If he wanted to kill it on purpose, he could have just shut it down. Maybe to keep the trademark he could have launched some other telecommunications service and used the brand for that.

    Elon Musk is all about convincing people to act against their best interests to benefit him. For example, look at Tesla: it has a manufacturing capacity of ~2 million cars per year. Now look at Toyota: it has a manufacturing capacity of ~9 million vehicles per year. Now look at the market capitalisation of each company: for Tesla it is still about $535B, despite some fall from the peak in 2022. For Toyota, it is $416B (which is a record high).

    So Toyota makes almost 5 times as many cars a year, but is worth 78% of Tesla? And the production capacity and value gap was even more extreme in the past? I think the question then is, what is going on?

    The answer, of course, is Musk. He is very slick at convincing investors to act against their own best interests (usually by suggesting the possibility of things that happen to have the true objective along the way, like full self-driving cars by 2018 rather than competing with existing auto-makers, or 35 minute travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles, or a colony on mars rather than competing with existing satellite companies). This is the same skill-set as a confidence artist. I don’t mean to imply that Musk has necessarily done anything illegal, but due to the similarity in skill set, and the large scale at which he operates, it would be fair to call him the most successful con artist in history. Looking at it through this lens can help to identify his motive.

    So what would a con artist want with a social network, and why would he want to alienate a whole lot of people, and get a lot of haters?

    Well, the truth is that a con artist doesn’t need everyone to believe in them to make money - they just need the marks to believe in them. Con artists don’t want the people who see through the con (call them the haters for lack of a better word) to interfere with their marks though. At the small scale - e.g. a street con, the con artist might separate a couple where one partner is the mark, to prevent the other from alerting their partner to the scam. But in addition to separating the marks from the haters, con artists use brainwashing techniques to create a psychological barrier between the marks and the haters. A Nigerian Prince scammer might try to convince a mark that their accountant can’t be trusted. A religious cult con might brainwash followers to think their family are different from them, and if they try to provide external perspective, they are acting as the devil. They try to make the marks the in-group, and everyone else, even family and friends, the out-group who doesn’t care about the in-group.

    So what would a con artist in control of a social network do? They would start by giving the con artist the megaphone - amplifying everything the artist says to try to get more marks. In parallel, they’d try to get rid of the haters. They could shadow-ban them so the marks never see what they have to say, or they could put up small barriers the marks will happily jump over, and feel more invested in the platform having done that, but which would scare off the haters. However, the marks and the haters might still interact off the social network - so the scam artist would also want to create a culture war to try to make the marks hate the haters, and ignore anything they say, by amplifying messages hostile to the haters.

    So what can you do if you don’t want a world wrecked by divisions sewn just so billionaires can be even richer? My suggestion is don’t buy into the divisions - work to find common ground with people, even if others are saying just to ignore them because they are different and will never get it, and get in early before the divisions are too deep.



  • As if telling Reddit, Facebook, or Google what to put on their roadmap as an ordinary consumer would actually work.

    At least with FLOSS if you want something, and if it is a good thing the developers like, you can likely get it merged. If not, you can fork and still have the feature locally. Good luck getting that freedom with a closed-source product.

    For software I develop, I do find it is helpful if people making feature suggestions tell developers what is useful for them and why, but that doesn’t entitle them any of my time to demand what features I prioritise. The alternative is “I gave you something you like for free, so now I owe you to make it even better for you”, which is obviously nonsense.


  • I think doing a good analysis of strategy here will depend on a lot of factors.

    Firstly, before coming up with a strategy, it is good to have a clear idea of your goals / the strategic problem you are trying to solve. I see or could infer a few possible ones: you want to work in an environment where you don’t feel bullied, you want to ensure others aren’t bullied, you want to see bullies punished, to maintain positives in the company and want to enjoy those without the negatives of being bullied, or perhaps that you believe in the goals of the company or have some stake in it, and want it to succeed. Different goals might lead you to a different course of action.

    Next, you would want to diagnose what’s really going on. Are there just a few bullies, in a company mostly full of professional people, or are the bullies the majority? Are senior leaders in on the bullying, or is it only lower level employees? Why do you think the bullies were hired in the first place - is it because bullying is considered okay in the company, or is it not considered okay but they slipped through? Why do you think the bullying hasn’t been addressed already? Is it because senior managers don’t know? Are the bullies friends / relatives of senior leadership? Are the bullies high performers that the company really would want to keep around, or do they get barely get anything done? Also, are the bullies even aware they are being bullies? Are they unaware they are being insensitive, and likely to change if made aware, or are they actively being malicious and well aware of the impact?

    Next, consider the direction you want to take, and analyse the likely impact on your goals. You could find another job - how easy that is would depend what the job market looks like for your role, and how good the terms of your current job are. It wouldn’t achieve goals around making it better for others. You could try talking to the bullies if you think that they might just be unaware of the impact of their behaviour and that they might change. If that doesn’t work, you could try talking to a manager / HR member, perhaps either to arrange mediation, or for them to take action. You could also just try ignoring the bullying if it isn’t having much impact.

    To choose from the many possible directions, it might help to think from the perspective of the company shareholders, senior leadership, and HR department. What would you do in their shoes if you learned of the bullying? If it is the majority of the company doing the bullying, then something like replacing all the bullying staff is going to be an instant non-starter. The best possible would be to slowly roll out training, policies, and new hiring practices to try to improve the culture over time. If it is a few people who, it now turns out, are the reason for high staff turnover and lower profits, then they might be quite happy to take action. Although probably not if the bullies are the senior leaders.


  • There are a few different types of blockchain, differing by how they stop you just making up your own alternative chain and saying that is the real history:

    • Proof of Work - prove you wasted lots of energy to add to the chain, making it prohibitively expensive to make your fake alternative chain - but also causing lots of emissions / wasting lots of energy.
    • Proof of Stake - adding to the chain requires participation of the people with the most total coins in the cryptocurrency already. Essentially ‘one dollar, one vote’, and ‘the rich get richer’ brought to crypo.
    • Proof of Humanity / Proof of Personhood / Proof of Identity - adding to the chain requires the participation of the most people. Attempts to bring “One person, one vote”, and Universal Basic Income to crypto. There are various attempts - some require submission of photos and videos, and have an adjudication scheme built in to detect duplicates (which might fall to AI-generated faces relatively soon). Others (see Worldcoin) require a trusted central party to produce hardware which scans faces and verifies they are real and unique (and have already had data leaks from participants involved in verification). The other option is to trust governments / other existing infrastructure to verify identities (which is probably the most sensible option if you are trying to genuinely just disrupt banking, but many crypto people hate because they also have a cyberpunk fantasy of accelerating crypto-anarchy, and actually want crypto to be used for tax evasion and without the cooperation of governments).

    So there are alternatives to environmental impact, but there is currently no perfect crypto. Stack that on top of the number of scammers out there riding the crypto buzz, and it is certainly not that hard to see the reasons behind the hate.