Fawkes

u/Fawkes@lemmy.zip
12 posts · 220 comments

Recent posts

Recent comments

No, I don't think I will. Because I don't believe there is any answer I can give you that won't be merry with more insults and arrogance. I made the claim that sentience cannot exist in a purely mechanistic system, like a wrist watch. Because there is nothing there unexplained, unknown, or more nuanced than gears and springs.

The burden of proof lies on you to explain how a wristwatch could have any degree of sentience. And insulting me does nothing but show the emptiness of your claim, and the fragility of your pseudo-wisdom.

Denying ALL knowledge by taking a bong rip and saying "But how can we ever really know?" It's not wisdom or humility. It's pretending ignorance is wisdom.

on Do not use ai · c/programmer_humor · 4 pts · 3d

You're right. Anybody that is angry is allowed to condemn literally anything they want indescriminantly.

Somebody mugged me yesterday, so I'm going to demand shoes be outlawed, as they used shoes to run away.

If you tell me I'm being unreasonable, you're victim blaming.

Okay, so you actually take issue with internet scraping itself? Let me get things straight, do you have a problem with LLMs themselves, or the data used to train them? It seems like an obvious "Yeah, the data is the issue," to me but I want to clarify because I HAVE seen the other stance before.

And if it is just the data, does that mean your REAL issue is the act of internet scraping itself? Because then you're also going to have to condemn every search engine and indexing algorithm in the world and go back to pre-indexing days when we just typed in the URL as the only method.

Or is it the monetisation that you don't like? Because then the models I provided should be exempt because they're 100% free.

Okay, then you're upset about copywrite infringement and the resale of the models. I'm not talking about those. You made the universal claim that the technology itself is bad. I'm saying its the PEOPLE who are acting unethically that should get your hate.

You are actively antagonizing people who should be your allies because you've decided carte blanche to hate it all, convincing yourself there's no possible way any of it could be legitimate or ethical.

What about models trained on research papers? Those are LITERALLY designed to spread knowledge.

Are you really going to call me amoral and fracture the opposition to blind greed and destruction, just because I experiment with these local models? What about the scientists that use custom LLMs? Or the research teams?

on AI = Fascism · c/fuck_ai · 1 pts · 4d

Humans have always overestimated the power of tech. The reach of our imaginations has always exceeded our grasp. I don't think this tech will be replacing people any more than computers themselves replaced people. "Computers" once meant actual people that would sit at desks and compute equations. That job is gone, but its erasure opened up new possibilities that could not have been imagined before. When "modern" computers were first invented, it was assumed that they would replace all humans within a generation. he wrote on his pocket computer from his normal human job that used computers.

The issue is, I'd say the same applies to every model that produces useful outputs.

That you know of. Your lack of awareness is not an indication on the stance of the technology itself. If you have a problem with Grok, as I do, then condemn Grok, Twitter, and that pathetic man child that owns them.

If you tell somebody that the LLM they're using is unethical, they'll nust go use another convenient corporate model.

Yeah, so actively fight against these toxic corporate activities. Fuck OpenAI. Fuck Google. Fuck Twitter. But the instant negative reaction to their shared tool is getting quite a few additional people caught in the blast.

And "public data" is not enough for me, because that typically means scraping copyrighted content from public websites, I'm not aware of a model that uses only data with permission

Again, this is an expression of your ignorance, not reality.

OLMo 2 was trained on Wikipedia and other fully public forums. Its training sources and data is fully accessible and open.

GPT-NeoX is an untrained model that you can train yourself. It's literally just the foundations anybody could use.

Pythia is fully open source, and one of its training sources was GitHub. Which does genuinely bring in to question whether or not you can use GitHub to train AI. Personally, I don't see how branching a repository is any different than using the code to train a model. But the current anti-AI trend has people EXTREMELY sensitive to this concept.

on Do not use ai · c/programmer_humor · 2 pts · 4d

My wife is a materials science researcher, and works for a university here in Germany. She uses AI to drastically increase the speed that she programs calculations and simulations. Yes, it regularly spits out nonsense, and she's constantly having to refine and tweak it, which she can effectively do because she has a PhD in the field. She has repeatedly told me that the actual programming was always the least favourite part of her job. But now that she can get an LLM to write the actual code, all she has to do is go back to refine it, and spend more time thinking, and less time reading stack exchange.

Another group used Evo 1 and Evo 2 to create novel genomes for bacteriophages in the fight against antibiotic resistance. There is a nuanced debate on whether those models are technically LLMs, since their language is actual sequencing rather than written descriptions. But they are structurally nearly identical.

My personal project is iterally just for funsies, to see if I can mimick human learning and dreaming by combining an LLM with a more abstract NN. So the weights are never frozen, and it actively hallucinates and dreams scenarios between weight adjustments and re-initialization.

I don't know how to make it not lie, and I'm not sure if that's possible. But I see that akin to asking "But how can we make X-rays safe to be used in shoe stores again?" Maybe we can't, but that doesn't mean we should ban them entirely.

You and I seem to agree whole heartedly with the harms. Over use, abuse, misunderstanding, etc. are terrible and causing real harms.

But I see people pointing their ire at every instance of the word indiscriminately, actively antagonizing those who are actively trying to make the changes they supposedly support.

on Do not use ai · c/programmer_humor · -2 pts · 4d

Cool, then go after the corporations shoving tech in places we don't want it.

Go after the data centers that are displacing families and wasting resources.

Go after the media for misrepresenting reality and distorting truths.

Those are all real harms with real actors. Getting angry at the camera because someone took blackmail photos of you is nonsense.

on Do not use ai · c/programmer_humor · 2 pts · 4d

Yeah, except that's a complete shift from "This technology is bad," to "I don't like the way this technology is being used."

You could write a 5,000,000 word thesis on all the ways ANY technology could be abused, and it STILL would not be a refutation from its beneficial uses.

Explain to me why open source LLMs, trained on public data, so both the training data and the resulting model are both 100% free and open source, are bad. For something to be universally bad, it CANNOT have any positive uses. Otherwise the real assessment is that it shouldn't be abused, not that it shouldn't exist at all, which I 100% agree with.

Because that's the claim that needs to be defended. I am not defending OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, etc. at all, so suggesting I am would be dishonest. I am not saying it should replace teachers, or scientists, or programmers, or anything like that, so suggesting I am would be dishonest.

I am not defending the corporate practice of explosive expansion, which causes these major issues. As that is a product of psychopathic capitalism abusing a technology, not an inherent property of the technology itself.

If you want to justify how an emotionless, mindless, will-less technology is inherently bad, you need to address its BEST, most ethical uses. Not its worst. You're making a universal claim. I reject the universal claim. I don't need to explain the abuses, because I am not justifying or defending them. The responsibility is yours to explain how the ethical uses are somehow bad.

Because if you post a public message on a public forum that everybody can see, you don't get to decide how your words are used. That's the fair use license. It doesn't require additional consent.

And how precisely is it unethical to train an LLM on public data? You keep making that assertion, but it's built off of a supposed "Lack of consent." When the fair use license was brought up, you seemed to retreat to the concept that using fair use data to make fair use software freely available to everyone is somehow bad?

You need to explain how the process itself is bad, not just use guilt by association. It seems more like you're building an opinion based on vibes, not actual reason.

Good for you. Keep wielding that shield of ignorance indescriminantly. Do you also think cryptography itself is harmful, or are you focusing on the specific use and harm caused? Guess what, the technology that made the crypto stupidity possible was used for far more than just gambling on imaginary coins. Once again, you're conflating the worst implementation of a technology with its use as a general rule. Would you defend a small set of positive and ethical uses of LLMs? Or do you condemn the entire tech, on the assumption that it is inherently bad? Do you know precisely where and how the tech developed for crypto is helpful to you, and improves your privacy and safety?

Lol no. Actually cells are demonstrably NOT sentient. They have no capacity for choice. No capacity for emotion or experience. They are literally molecular machinery. And we(scientists) understand that machinery to a shocking degree.

If you think cells have any degree of sentience, then you must make a similar argument for advanced clockwork machines. Not robots, pure wind-up clockwork automata.

on Do not use ai · c/programmer_humor · 3 pts · 4d

Being a sarcastic ass does nothing to refute my point. I don't have to be an oracle to look back at history and see 100% of technologies finding an eventual use. I don't know how the problems will be solved, and I don't need to know what their uses will be in order for the trend that has continued for 1,500 years of recorded history to most likely be true.

You, on the other hand, have to somehow show that THIS technology is so wildly unique that none of the examples from the last 1,500 years are informative.

Edit: sorry, got some things mixed up in my brain. Just because you can't identify a use for a technology doesn't mean a technology is bad. Unless you are personally familiar with every single technology, profession, and process on the entire planet, and those that will be invented in the future, and can act as the ultimate arbiter of what is and isn't useful. Alcohol is very harmful. But also good at sterilisation. X-rays are very harmful, but also good at medical imaging. Gunpowder is very harmful, but also makes pretty fireworks.

on Do not use ai · c/programmer_humor · 0 pts · 4d

Cool, your personal experience doesn't dictate the global population. And you just reiterated my point. What about the people in your circles that don't talk about it at all?

on Do not use ai · c/programmer_humor · -2 pts · 4d

That's a gross overreach and obviously wrong. Selection bias at its finest. The people who act as you have described are loud and easy to spot. The people that treat it like a tool don't go around telling everyone about it. You're conflating improper use and corporate abuse with ANY use. By that logic we should outlaw X-rays entirely, since when they were first discovered they were used fuckin' EVERYWHERE, and quite a lot of people got sick because of it.

Humans are bad at moderation. When a shiny new toy is presented, we obsess to our own detriment. Over time, a balance is found. This has happened over, and over, and over, and over.