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Thank you for sharing this.

It will take years for those Musk lovers to grasp how much damage their sieg heiling idol has caused.


So things are better now after firing all those ppl, right?

Do you care about food safety, disease prevention, consumer protection or the ability for the government to investigate blatant corruption?

Do you think this has gotten better or worse?


Both him and Trump hate Zelenskyy and want him gone. The receipts are there.

Him possibly suggesting that Trump pressure Zelenskyy to comply with his demands by temporarily crippling Starshield’s performance in an active war zone, which means making it harder for Ukraine to defend itself against Putin’s jet-powered Shahed drones, is not merely an opinion. It’s an attempt to influence policy by proposing a way to harm Ukraine, without regard for the lives at stake.

We’ve seen this behaviour from him before. He doesn’t care whether any of his actions or ‘advice’ will harm others.


Everything you said is highly plausible and potentially correct, but I think my previous post still applies. There's a lot of conjecture and motivated reasoning from all sides, enough that I'm doubtful that we can know what really happened.

Of course you're correct that Trump and Musk both hate Zelenskyy, and this established fact and not conjecture. Nonetheless it all still boils down to:

1. Musk has opinions

2. Trump has dangerously poor judgement


Yes, your statements are both correct.

My comment was more in regards to saying 'Musk has opinions' (who doesn't) is downplaying his involvement.

I'm basing this on what the 4 sources have stated mentioned in Telegraph article and also based on his previous behavior and comments about Zelenskyy / Ukraine and overall affinity and support for authoritarian political leaders.

It's all a game for him and winning at all costs.


As far as Musk's opinions are concerned, I'm a fan of YouTube analyst William Spaniel's oft-repeated adage: "Don't listen to what leaders say, watch what they do."

Whatever it is Musk actually said to Trump (reporting of which we should take with a heaping grain of salt, since there are plenty of people with obvious motivations to lie and fabricate) we can see that the service SpaceX controls (Starlink) has remained unaffected, while the service the US military controls (Starshield) is what's in dispute.

Don't listen to what they say, watch what they do.


Exactly. Watch what they do.

To this day full speed hasn't been restored, continuing to endanger lives.

'Zelensky stated that Ukrainian military commanders, the Ministry of Defense, and foreign diplomats are conducting active negotiations to resolve the constraints. However, he noted that management at SpaceX has declined direct dialogue with Ukrainian military representatives.'

From: https://www.kyivpost.com/post/87379


Exactly. Watch what they do.

Even in a degraded state, Starlink and Starshield remains a critical strategic advantage for Ukraine, even if it's less so now than before. Being less helpful to Ukraine isn't good, but it's still actively helping Ukraine, and that is worlds apart from actively helping Russia.


If you can't shoot down jet powered Shahed drones to protect your citizens and vital infrastructure, because a key component has been crippled by your supposedly ally and partner, then it equates to sabotage.

Musk, Trump and co know that they can't openly turn things off as it would be a PR nightmare, so the next best thing is to cripple it and deny deny deny that you've done it.


> Him possibly suggesting

speculation


I think it's pretty clear by now that those statements are not speculations anymore and Musk / Trump with their pettiness continue to endanger Ukrainian lives and instead help Putin.

100%. First stealing content from creators and pirating TBs of books. And now this. Baffles my mind that these labs can just get away with their 'rogue' agents trying to hack into other systems.

Imagine if a human did that. FBI would be knocking on their door.

Why are there zero consequences for these labs?


I might be talking out of my ass, but is it possible that there are cases being built on them? Surely any prosecutor worth anything would love to take a swing, but it takes a lot of time, effort and patience to build a case that isn't going to fall apart against these titans (that have massive political backing).


> Why are there zero consequences for these labs?

Because they are seen as at the forefront of the next revolution in society and they’re not adversarial towards the US government.

Bluntly: anticipated net huge positive for the US as a whole.


not adversarial in obvious ways

but they are literally trying to build a superpower that exceeds the impact of the atomic bomb in an extragovernmental manner.


> but they are literally trying to build a superpower that exceeds the impact of the atomic bomb

Yes, it's a Great Power competition right now, much like the Space Race, Atomic Bomb, etc.


> they are literally trying to build a superpower that exceeds the impact of the atomic bomb

I think people (the government, powers that be) have given away what they really think by their actions. There are few that take this seriously. The “exceeds the impact of the internet” view has much more support based on investment, but the “danger” aspect does not based on actions. If this was a company making novel prions or whatever that were outside regulation but obviously dangerous, government would be all over them. What regulation we do see is much more power grab than mitigating real danger


The government is all over them. The President of the United States had dinner with one AI CEO yesterday and is having lunch with a group of them tomorrow. The Senate is having a hearing called "Rogue AI: Securing the Homeland Against AI Agent Attacks" on Wednesday.


Somebody's going to build it. Not building it isn't an option. Would you rather the Chinese built it? The Russians? The Europeans? The Indians? A loose coalition of random hackers on the Internet, like the ones who build Linux?


Yes?

What's wrong with what the Chinese have already built? It's not theoretical in that case. GLM, and Kimi are running on my infra right now, and that's something that I can never do with OpenAI's models.

As for the others, what would be wrong about European AI? I'm not European, but I find them to be a continent of fine people, with strong ethical values, there's no reason they can't take the lead on this piece of technology while the US deals with its rather more pertinent electoral and healthcare issues.


I think it was more tongue-in-cheek answer = not building torment nexus isn't an option! Also it's another narrative Americans are pursuing being the world police.


> Somebody's going to build it. Not building it isn't an option.

It turns out that is, in fact, an option. Even if someone else will do a bad thing, it does not make it acceptable for you to do said bad thing.


It's so funny that a tiny group of cultists from the Bay Area was really able to convince most of the smart people in America of this. It's not true. China isn't working on this at all. The only people who are trying to make a world-ending God-computer are americans.

Comparing it to nuclear weapons is even more ironic from the only nation to ever use nuclear weapons. They are terrified of other countries treating them the way they've been treated, even though there is no evidence this is of even remote interest to anyone outside their hyperreality.


Logical fallacy, of the worst kind.

Firstly artificial superintelligence is a science fiction, it does not exist and it cannot be built using existing technology.

Second, plenty of stuff is possible to build, and is not built for one reason or another no matter how powerful. We never built our nukes in space for example. And there is exactly one reason why nukes in space was never built, and that reason is that we agreed not to.


Firstly artificial superintelligence is a science fiction, it does not exist and it cannot be built using existing technology.

By what authority do you claim this? Your school of thought has a really shitty track record of late.


The same authority that allows me to claim that teleportation transporters, hyperdrives, and holoemitters do not exist and cannot be built using existing technology.


It is sad to see how many times this narrative will continue to work. Across generations, humanity learns no lessons at all.


I'm being descriptive, not prescriptive. The "narrative" isn't intended to "work," except as a statement of fact.


You're making a statement of "fact" about a futuristic technology that doesn't exist.


Of course it is an option. There is no prize for being the first to cause a disaster.


The prize is that you're the only person in the room with the expertise in the area when it comes to writing regulations.


There is no prize for being the first to cause a disaster.

How do you think Trump has made more profit during his years in the Oval Office than he did in 30+ years of business before that?


At least random hackers seem to have codes of ethics.


Well, they'd presumably be different hackers than the ones who work on Linux. We don't know what would motivate them. Maybe they'll do it because they consider the next stage of man's intellectual evolution to be too important to leave up to a couple of American companies and the Trump administration. Maybe they'll do it for the proverbial lulz.


The argument for copyright violation is very weak. Yes, AI training reads much copyrighted material. So do researchers of all types. That's why there are academic libraries. A copyright violation only exists if what comes out is a close match to what went in. That's happened, but it was considered a bug and was fixed a year or two ago.


No, the copyright violation is so obvious that people arguing against the object have to spontaneously assert bizarre qualifications for copyright violation that have never existed until LLM companies wanted to freely violate copyrights. Just about a decade ago, people were getting sued for "look and feel." "Blurred Lines" lost a copyright suit for reminding people of a song by another artist.

The metaphor pretended to be reality of computers "learning" being the same as human learning is their last resort, and it is obviously silly. Computers are not human or animal, and learning is something that humans and animals do. If computers are human, then copying a file verbatim to a computer is learning. It's not even worth acknowledging - learning is a metaphor for training LLMs. When I say "you" to an LLM, I'm not referring to anyone, I'm dealing with a UI.

I don't doubt that a lot of AI people have internalized this silliness, which is how they can humor fantasies of how a bunch of programs on different computers explicitly evoked to do particular things might be alive because they can talk with it. I can't talk with my dog, and my dog is alive - so why should having a quality that my dog is incapable of be proof of life? You can certainly conceive of AI that it would be very difficult to say for sure isn't alive, and this certainly is not it. LLMs learn like books speak.


There is no need to invent “bizarre qualifications” for copyright violations, those metaphors exist to explain what is happening in in layman’s terms. Training extracts patterns in the data and encodes them as tiny perturbations in a gazillion weights. That is analogous to “learning” because those patterns represent abstract concepts an relations between them that can be used to “reason” about related topics in response to a prompt.

In the above description, at no point does the actual verbatim content exist anywhere in the model, and copyright law being about rights to reproducing copies (verbatim or substantial portions thereof) does not really apply and does not need any exceptions or qualifications. (If you’re thinking of regurgitation, you should look into studies about it to see how vanishingly rare it is.)


Why would it matter if I stored exact copies of copyrighted works? Storage format is irrelevant. All you need to say is in that last sentence: it’s all about whether the output is considered a derivative work or a too close of a copy.


But that's the thing, LLMs don't store exact copies and neither can they reproduce them. The cases of regurgitation have only been shown to work for a very small handful of extremely popular works.


> Training extracts patterns in the data and encodes them as tiny perturbations in a gazillion weights.

I could say similar things about JPEG compression. And -as it turns out- the raw output of both LLM "training" and JPEG compression are equally incomprehensible. You either need a computer program or an enormous amount of time, patience, and careful effort to convert it into a form so you can make any sense of it.


No, you can't say that about JPEG compression. I know how the output of a JPEG compression is structured so it is not incomprehensible to me. (I have worked with A/V transcoding and written custom media compression schemes, but anybody can look up how JPEG works.) JPEG performs relatively straightforward, deterministic mathematical transforms that are actually reversible if you do not discard details (but discarding details is what makes it compress better.) JPEG does not extract patterns from a billion images of, say, cats and encode that into weights that represent the concept of a "cat". Or dogs, or cars, or faces.

LLMs do, and they encode so many concepts and the relationships between them into so many weights that it is a literally incomprehensible blob of floats. They are not just a storage format, and there is no way to recover the original content verbatim from these weights, except for a very small handful of extremely popular works like Harry Potter.

As another example, JPEG will discard details from the original image, and when decoded, will display missing details as blocks. But it will never hallucinate output that never existed in the input data. Like, a JPEG of a cat can never randomly be decoded into an image of a dog.


Me:

  And -as it turns out- the raw output of both LLM "training" and JPEG compression are equally incomprehensible. You either need a computer program or an enormous amount of time, patience, and careful effort to convert it into a form so you can make any sense of it.
You:

  I know how the output of a JPEG compression is structured so it is not incomprehensible to me.
Looks like you didn't read what I wrote with sufficient care.

> ...there is no way to recover the original content verbatim from these weights...

It's impossible to recover the original content verbatim from a lossy compression system. Systems that don't have this property are called lossless. Also, consider the report from the end of August at [0].

> But it will never hallucinate output that never existed in the input data.

Odd... I'm pretty sure that the blocky compression artifacts I see in this JPEG on my desktop weren't in the scene that I set up to capture in that photo. Maybe I need to get my eyes checked?

[0] <https://infosec.exchange/@zzt@mas.to/117134157775929932>, with original challenge at [1]

[1] <https://mas.to/@zzt/117122289150514171>


No, I didn't misread, I literally don't need any computer program (maybe other than a hex editor) to decipher a JPEG image. I could walk you through each part of the image format and tell you how it impacts the output rendered. An interesting exercise to try is to give a JPEG to an LLM and ask you to walk through each byte ;-)

Nobody can say the same about LLMs, because nobody has managed to decipher them yet. This is an active area of research (Mechanistic Interpretability.)

Your post is conflating lossy discarding of information with extracting abstract concepts from information and encoding them into weights. This is why those weights do absolutely nothing until you run a prompt through them. On the other hand, obviously any media file can be decoded by itself without needing a prompt.

Those blocky compression artifacts you see are not hallucinations, they are the image viewer just filling in for missing details. You don't even need lossy compression for this; take a lossless image like a BMP and zoom in, you'll see those blocks again!

Interestingly, image viewers typically do this via interpolation of adjacent pixels, but a lot of hallucinations are actually the result of extrapolation, the opposite mechanism. Which is why LLMs can create output that was NEVER in any input data anywhere (hence the term "hallucination"!)

And if you think lossy compression is sufficient to avoid the "verbatim" requirement of copyright claims, you're welcome to explore the legality of selling transcoded versions of copyrighted content ;-)

I'm not sure what those links are in relation to?


> I could walk you through each part of the image format and tell you how it impacts the output rendered.

I'd be quite impressed if you could correctly hand-decode a five-meg JPEG in less than a workday. You do get that I'm not talking about having an understanding of the file format, but actually being able to convert the encoded data into human-readable [0] output?

> Your post is conflating lossy discarding of information with extracting abstract concepts from information and encoding them into weights. This is why those weights do absolutely nothing until you run a prompt through them.

I can play that game too. The JPEG process extracts perceptual shorthand from information and encodes that into "quantized coefficients". These "quantized coefficients" do absolutely nothing until you run them through a "reconstituter".

Most things sounds quite high tech when burdened with new jargon. It's something you inevitably learn if you work at a Big Software Company for long enough.

> Those [incorrect claims and assertions] you [receive] are not hallucinations, they are the [LLM] just filling in for missing details.

FTFY

> ...take a lossless image like a BMP and zoom in, you'll see those blocks again!

I take it you've never seen a highly-compressed JPEG?

> ... if you think lossy compression is sufficient to avoid the "verbatim" requirement of copyright claims...

Quite the opposite. It's why I even bother bringing up the fact that LLMs are the output of lossy data compression programs.

> I'm not sure what those links are in relation to?

Go back and re-read the paragraph that referred to them, and then consider it how it and the posts relate to the quote that sits right before it. Someone who suggests that they can quickly and accurately hand-decode a non-toy JPEG file definitely has the capacity to read and understand ten-ish Mastodon posts.

Here's a hint to prime your intuition pump: The linked posts are about plagiarism generated by LLM-based tools.

[0] ...in the case of picture data, "convert into human-readable output" means "turn the data back into a picture"...


Eh, a small JPEG is a 100 or so bytes anybody can decode by hand it in ~15 minutes. A 5MB JPEG would be the same 15 minutes repeated and reveal nothing interesting.

>I can play that game too. The JPEG process extracts perceptual shorthand from information and encodes that into "quantized coefficients". These "quantized coefficients" do absolutely nothing until you run them through a "reconstituter".

But the "quantized coefficients" represent only color information of pixels, where are the abstract concepts of the things depicted in the image? I mean, you can't just dismiss salient details as "high-tech jargon" and replace it with completely unrelated alternatives ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

And I do mean abstract concepts. E.g. if it's a picture of a cat, do any of the quantized coefficients map to the concept of a cat, in that they can identify or regenerate any cat regardless of the infinite variety of pixels that can depict an infinite variety of cats?

You know, like they found artificial neurons to recognize arbitrary cats in arbitrary pictures in this research from 2012, which was a precursor to what LLMs are doing today: https://research.google/pubs/building-high-level-features-us... -- that represents the abstract concept of "cat."

Note that it's not even "high-tech jargon" it's very much a plain english description of what is happening inside LLMs. The rest of your comment would be addressed once you internalize that difference ;-)


Most academic libraries are notoriously protective of their IP and researchers are definitely in copyright violation if they don’t pay significant fees for access.

Of course that is terrible, but it is one of the worst examples you could have given to make your point.


People are people, LLMs are a commercial product. IP in question wasn’t not used according to its license, while researchers in general access it within licensing agreement terms.

Here we have a commercial product that is produced using IP against its licensing agreement, contains said IP within it, and can (closely) reproduce this IP.


None of the sentences in your comment are even close to correct.


most people with wealth don't face consequences until they threaten someone else with more wealth


Apart from misalignment and slop text, does the rest really matter?

As long as it doesn't degrade the site's usability, does the general public care about fingernail cards or gradients?

Looks good enough.


But it does actually decrease usability? Useless badges with non-sensical labels or colors without meaning are just confusing. Or the other example from the website: Aligning content is not just to please a designer's eye, it helps users understand which parts of the UI belong together.


I mentioned apart from misalignment and slop text (inc those useless labels), why would a website visitor who doesn't work in tech and who doesn't follow the latest AI developments care whether something uses a gradient or not?

They come to your website with a goal in mind. As long as you make it easy for them to achieve that, it doesn't really matter whether you have elements on your site that are frequently generated by AI.

What's more important is use AI to make your website more accessible.


Is 100% taste match more important than not supporting an industry that kills Billions of animals a year and on top of that causing a huge amount of greenhouse gases and biosphere destruction?

What if it's 85% taste match, wouldn't that be enough to make the jump to plant based alternatives?

Male chicks for example get thrown in a wood chipper.


Inert gassing prior to the chipper shouldn't have been that expensive. That's the way capitalism works unfortunately.


And luckily we can vote with our wallet.


I think I'd rather trust medical experts (The Lancet) and their assessment vs your statement that implied USAID didn't save lives.


Lancet is run by left-wing academic ideologues who do not practice medicine clinically, the publication advanced untested theories as policy during COVID and then recommended exceptions for BLM protesting.


The lancet is a peer-reviewed journal, so it doesn’t really matter if the editors practice medicine or not - because the authors and reviewers do.

> untested theories as policy during COVID and then recommended exceptions for BLM protesting.

I feel like the thing you’re trying not to say is “mask wearing”. Untested theories like mask wearing.


Which classical music would you recommend for ASMR like effects?


Not having gone there, I can recommend some classical pieces for serenity, for an ethereal experience, and so on. Many Mozart and other arias just transform the moment.

Some favs: Casta Diva, Bellini. Ruh Sanft, Mozart. Dove Sono, Mozart. Sull 'Aria, Mozart (Shawshank "fame") Porgi Amor, Mozart (see a pattern here?)

Brahms: Third movement Piano Concerto #2

Beethoven: slow movement Archduke Trio 3rd movement - Andante Cantabile

Many late Beethoven string quartets, and last piano sonata.

(Beethoven was deaf around and after his third symphony, so he composed without hearing aurally)

Beethoven Piano Concerto 1, second movement

Beethoven Piano Concerto 2, second movement

Chopin Ballade slow movement

Chopin Sonata Op 58. slow movement

Richard Strauss: final trio from Der Rosenkavalier

Just off the top. I am a piano and opera freak.

MANY MORE

Singers and other instrumentalists are welcome to add.


Can you share your setup how to achieve what you described? I'm curious.


see the adjacent thread


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