Daemon Silverstein

@AnonomousWolf@lemmy.world I guess it would be more fairer if we were to mention DeepSeek as being “not bad for the environment”. From all LLMs, seems like it’s the one who did their homework and tried to optimize things the best they could.

Western LLMs had/have no reason to optimize, because “Moar Nvidia Chips” have been their motto, and Venture Capital corps have been injecting obscene amounts of money into Nvidia chips, so Western LLMs are bad for the environment, all the way from establishing new power-hungry data centers to training and inference…

But DeepSeek needed way less computing and it can run (Qwen-distilled versions) even in a solar-powered Raspberry Pi with some creativity… it can run in most smartphones like if it were another gaming app. Their training also needed less computing, as far as we know.

@moe90@feddit.nl I’ve found a better workaround, which is to tell YouTube to go pound sand. I definitely don’t miss YouTube since I stopped accessing it more than a year ago (actually, I don’t even remember when I stopped, it’s really been a long while). Okay, maybe I miss one or other content (Technology Connections, Electroboom and Numberphille to mention a few I used to watch), but this didn’t stop me from stopping using YouTube altogether. Sad thing Alec, Mehdi as well as the people behind Numberphille either don’t know or aren’t willing to use alternatives (e.g. PeerTube) to share their knowledge with the Internet.

There’s a Portuguese maxim “Falem bem ou falem mal, mas falem de mim” (roughly translatable to “Talk goodly or badly, but talk about me”) and this is perfectly fit for YouTube vs Premium vs AdBlockers: people (both content creators and their consumers) are understandably enraged with YouTube and its enshitification, yet they continue to access it instead of boycotting it to, hopefully, reduce the power and monopoly that Google have with YouTube.

@mysticmartz@lemmy.world

Those LoRa devices like meshtastic look good

Yeah, tinkering with radio and Open-source hardware in general is funny and awesome. I did some personal projects in this regard, not exactly meshtastic, but experiments using a cheap RTL-SDR and some transmission-capable things such as Baofeng UV-5R and remote controllers from some of my childhood toys. I wish I could afford to experiment more with hardware, electronic and, especially, radio equipment.

Unfortunately, it’s like @dubyakay@lemmy.ca said, radio equipment can become targets, too.

In reality, this is already happening in EU: recently, I saw something about EU passing a law requiring all radio-capable devices to be, as far as I can recall, “tampering-proof” or something similar, and this is threatening alternative mobile OSes (such as GrapheneOS) because this law requires bootloaders to be unlockable or something. So, in practice, governments are already targeting radio.

Not to mention how “easy” is to triangulate a signal and how telecommunication regulators often do “wardrive” scanning in order to seek “irregular transmissions” (not just those disrupting others’ transmissions, but anything they could deem “irregular” because they’re the authorities in charge of allowing or refusing others rights, and this deemed “irregularity” could easily be using Briar through Bluetooth, or meshtastic nodes, during a strike/protest).

This takes me to another point from your reply:

I don’t like the idea of TOR and I2C because it’s known to hold disgusting and concerning stuff

It’s worth mentioning that disgusting and concerning stuff isn’t exclusive to Darknet, Clearnet also has such stuff, especially mainstream social media.

I mean, you’re not wrong, Darknet is indeed used for that, not because it’s inherent to Darknet, but because people who do concerning stuff also seek anonymity just like legitimate, well-intentioned privacy-concerned people, and Darknet happens to provide such anonymity for both uses in a double-edged sword manner.

Problem is: there’s no way to differentiate two anonymous actors without breaking the very fundamentum of anonymity.

And this very argument you used unfortunately can be twisted by authorities to justify breaking anonymity and, by extension, privacy.

For authorities willing to control everyone’s lives so badly, it just takes a small leap for the phrase to be reshaped and re-adapted as…

“private content/people’s intimacies must be scanned/watched because they’re known to hold disgusting and concerning stuff”

This is almost the argument behind EU’s “Chat Control”. And the majority of people end up joining this bandwagon unaware of where this bandwagon leads to: something that makes 1984 feel like a sugarcoated documentary.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy solution regarding “disgusting and concerning stuff”, but we should be really careful lest to throw the baby out with the dirty bathwater.

@mysticmartz@lemmy.world

First and foremost, it’s not something limited to UK. Maybe it’s because I’m watching things from “outside” the so-called “first world” (I’m Brazilian), and I can’t help but notice how it’s something that have been spreading throughout the countries: Canadian bill whose number I forgot, EU’s “Chat Control”, some Australian laws, etc… It’s getting everywhere! It didn’t start yesterday, also: I remember SOPA and PIPA back in 2010s (or was it 2000s? I’m getting old).

It’s worldwide, and it won’t be long before there are no more countries where “nothing to fear, nothing to hide” is the official motto via some kind of global treat/pact. It won’t stop in adult entertainment: eventually, it’ll cover every online activity. In this sense, “children” are just the frogs being morally leveraged by scorpions to cross an Orwellian river.

That said, VPNs are someone else’s computers sitting between latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates delimiting some geodesic convex hull we know as “country/nation” ruled by an entity who happens to have the monopoly over asymmetrical forces ruling over that very someone. Even nodes from Tor, I2P, Yggdrasil, Hyphanet, GNUNet, Usenet servers or grand-old SOCKS4/SOCKS4a/SOCKS5 proxies are someone else’s computer sitting inside some “country”.

And if all countries end up agreeing, out of shared dominance interests (even the so-called “inimical” countries, because even those “inimical” countries agree on certain treats such as the Global Treat regarding Antarctica), to some kind of “Online Kid Protection Global Treat” or whatever frog they can take any moral advantage of, there will be no computer proxification left for circumventing the new KYC requirements for accessing the Web, because there’ll be no more alternative countries left… Not even micronations such as Principality of Sealand.

Yeah, future doesn’t seem good, and the majority of global citizens won’t fight against it (we, privacy-conscious and tech-savvy people, we’re not the majority), so it’s kind of a Cassandra curse going on right now.

Maybe we must go back to radio communication? Radio mesh networks? Perhaps well-hidden geo-treasure pen-drives for exchanging and archiving files? Creating our own novel ciphering methods, steganography and security through obscurity, becoming able to physically speak through coded language on a daily basis? Even carrier pigeons and smoke signaling (I’m not joking) feels “safe” and out of the Orwellian reaches for now… For now.

(I guess they could still be spotted by LEO satellite imagery. And god-forbid a smoke pattern is caught modulating and transmitting the original uncropped Lena picture over the atmosphere /s).

@deathbird@mander.xyz @florencia@lemmy.blahaj.zone

Grok is not that free of guardrails.

I say as a person who sometimes have the (bad) idea of feeding every LLMs I could possibly try, with things I create (drawings, poetry, code golfing). I don’t use LLMs to “create” things (they’re not really that capable of real creativity, despite their pseudo-stochastic nature), I use them to parse things I created, which is a very different approach. Not Grok anymore, because I have long deleted my account there, but I used to use it.

Why do I feed my creations to LLMs, one might ask? I have my reasons: LLMs are able to connect words to other words thus giving me some unexpectedness and connections I couldn’t see on my own creation, and I’m highly aware of how it’s being used for training… but humans don’t really value my creations given the lack of real feedback across all my works, so I don’t care it’s used for training. Even though I sometimes use it, I’m still a critique of LLMs, and I’m aware of both their pros and cons (more cons than pros if we consider corp LLMs).

So, back to the initial point: one day I did this disturbing and gory drawing (as usual for my occult-horror-gothic art), a man standing in formal attire with some details I’ll refrain from specifying here.

ChatGPT accepted to parse it. Qwen’s QVQ accepted it as well. DeepSeek’s Janus also accepted to parse it.

Google’s Gemini didn’t, as usual: not because of the explicit horror, but because of the presence of human face, even if drawn. It refrains from parsing anything that closely resemble faces.

Anthropic’s Claude wasn’t involved, because I’m already aware of how “boringly puritan” it’s programmed to be, it doesn’t even accept conversations about demonolatry, it’s more niched for programming.

But what surprised me on that day was how Grok refused to accept my drawing, and it was a middle-layer between the user and the LLM complaining about “inappropriate content”.

Again, it was just a drawing, a fairly well-performed digital drawing with explicit horror, but a drawing nonetheless, and Grok’s API (not Grok per se) complained about that. Other disturbing drawings of mine weren’t refused at that time, just that one, I still wonder why.

Maybe these specific guardrails (against highly-explicit horror art, deep occult themes, etc) aren’t there in paid tiers, but I doubt it. Even Grok (as in the “public-facing endpoint”) has some puritanness on it, especially against very niche themes such as mine (occult and demonolatry, explicit Lovecraftian horror, etc).

@Davriellelouna@lemmy.world
I wonder if certain… genres of adult content (such as female dominance and lesdom) would be “extreme porn” and/or “violence against women” according to his (and whoever shares his) worldview… Guess these people don’t know how there are different… “entertainment subcultures”.

Also, the obvious was already said throughout the comment section: just another justification for things such as what’s happening with itch.io and Steam, alongside the KYC requirement that’s been implemented in many places worldwide. It’s tiring, really tiring to watch these things unfolding in real time across the globe.

@Majestic@lemmy.ml @KurtVonnegut@mander.xyz

There’s no way around this that doesn’t involve painstaking steganography which can possibly be nailed by AI anyways.

As both a fairly power user of LLMs and someone who tinkers with ciphers a lot (including creating my own techniques), I can guarantee: Markov chains aren’t smart enough to detect well-elaborate ciphers.

I’ll give an example: Let focus on plain characters.

The previous phrase contains a hidden message. It’s not simply an acrostic (when a word is formed by every initial letter from a sentence/verses/paragraphs), it’s an acrostic with Caesar cipher. And it’s not simply Caesar cipher, it’s a Caesar cipher with increasing shifting (decreasing when decoding):

L (-0 -> L), F (-1 -> E), O (-2 -> M), P (-3 -> M), C (-4 -> Y as it wraps around from A back to Z) => LEMMY

I can guarantee you, as someone who tested every single LLM out there: they’re unable to detect these kinds of ciphers. And it gets worse when we consider the possibility of adding other layers of ciphering: nothing stops me from adding Vigenere on top of Caesar, associating the letter with the corresponding number, then getting the nth prime at that position, and using wrap-add to add letters to produce another letter (okay, this is a very complicated example).

Also, when I say “creating my own techniques”, I’m not joking. I’ll present you with a cipher I created:

Maceió, Niterói, Rio Branco, Palmas, São Luís, Varginha.

Believe it or not, the previous list of Brazilian cities hides the word “BRAZIL”. How? List each Brazilian state alphabetically (excluding Distrito Federal as it’s an administrative state rather than a common state), and you’ll get a list with exactly 26 states. And what else have 26 elements? The English alphabet. Map each alphabetical letter not just to the state (e.g. L, the 12th letter, would be Minas Gerais), but to a city within that state (e.g. Varginha):

Maceió = Alagoas = 2nd from ordered list of states = B
Niterói = Rio de Janeiro state = 18th = R
Rio Branco = Acre = 1st = A
Palmas = Tocantins = 26th = Z
São Luís = Maranhão = 9th = I
Varginha = Minas Gerais = 12th = L

Again, creativity is the only limit. One can wrap it in steganography, use random coordinates and then map each digit to letters to form a long text… There’s no way to stop end-to-end encryption when two or more people have enough knowledge to convey their own tool chain of ciphering techniques. And LLMs will be clueless. Even human censors would be clueless.

@TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world @Fleur_@aussie.zone I’m 30 and this is deep (to quote the meme)

@misk@sopuli.xyz @Skavau@piefed.social

As a sidenote, I remember that UK has an odd and ancient “law” stating something in the lines “The Crown must not be offended” (i.e. being anti-monarchy and advocating for the end of monarchy, even without any violent language/means but a pacific defense of anti-monarchy). I couldn’t find it, nor I can remember the exact phrasing, but such a “law” threatens prison time for those who “dare” to “offend” the crowniness of UK Crown. Also, I’m not sure to what extent this law is applied in practice.

Even though I’m Brazilian (so the UK supposedly “have no power over here”, and I say it with the Gandalf’s voice), I see these international situations with some worry: there are needed laws (such as laws against noise pollution) and there are laws whose reach ends up going way too far from their “seemingly well-intentioned” puritan scope (such as the aforementioned laws).

If countries are capable of passing draconian laws against their own citizens, don’t expect that those same countries couldn’t go further to impose these laws beyond their own lawns, especially in times of interconnectedness.

And Fediverse platforms from everywhere around the entire globe end up being caught in the crossfire, due to that same interconnectedness.

In the end of the day, the world is increasingly bleaker, as the history is being repeated (maxims “One thing people can learn from history books is that people can’t learn from history books”, and “history doesn’t just repeat, it rhymes”).

@Ephera@lemmy.ml @dating1999@lemmy.ca

site:domain.tld does work, as an and x constraint. I often use it.
It seems to me like the OP’s specific and (not x) usage of site:domain.tld is the reason why it isn’t working. While the negation prefix (-) does work for tokens/words (e.g. mercury -freddie), it’s probably transforming site into a token not to be included in the results (i.e. "any results that don’t contain the word “site”) which, disconnected from the rest of the sentence (:quora.com), turns the latter into part of what the results should include, so the query ends up being something like:

Filter all the indexed Web results where its contents don’t include the word “site”, possibly do include “quora.com”, possibly do include “Molten”, possibly do include “boron”, possibly do include “oxide”, possibly do include “attacks”, possibly do include “silicates”

The negation prefix has a similar effect to that of positive (+) prefix (e.g. “mercury +periodic +table”) as it turns the word into a required condition (must be present for “+”, must be absent for “-”) rather than an optional condition (i.e a search for “mercury periodic table”, without quotes, will contain pages with all three words in any order, pages with just two of the three words (such as “mercury periodic” in any order) and pages with only one of the three words (such as “mercury” which would include pages talking about the singer, and pages talking about the planet and pages talking about the Roman deity), ranked by “relevance”).

As Quora pages do include “quora.com” somewhere within the page body, the first results will be from Quora because it’s part of the parsed condition (which is to optionally include “quora.com” as part of the result while discarding results containing the verbatim word “site”).

@Davriellelouna@lemmy.world

In another Brazilian city I personally know, Jundiaí - SP, some restaurants built some kind of “deck” (made of wood planks) on the side of the street. I tried to embed a photo from one of these (this is my first attempt on sending images to Lemmy using Calckey so I’m not sure if the image will work).

These “decks” were permanently installed, including electrical wiring running from the establishment to the “deck” lights. I don’t even know how the city hall authorized this, considering how the region (Campinas Microregion, Jundiaí Urban Agglomeration and Greater São Paulo, all of them in growing process of conurbation) is highly car-centric (yeah, there’s a growing public infrastructure including trains and bicycle lanes, and Jundiaí, specifically, is pretty walkable, but many things still seem to revolve around vehicles around there).

On the one hand, this theoretically frees up the sidewalk for pedestrians. On the other hand, it depends on the restaurant respecting pedestrians by keeping the sidewalk clear, and I don’t know to what extent these restaurants do this. But this concept of flatbed truck bar isn’t too far from that of these restaurants in Jundiaí.

@Supervisor194@lemmy.world

Thanks (I took this as a compliment).

However, I kind of agree with @Senal@programming.dev. Coherence is subjective (if a modern human were to interact with an individual from Sumer, both would seem “incoherent” to each other because the modern person doesn’t know Sumerian while the individual from Sumer doesn’t know the modern languages). Everyone has different ways to express themselves. Maybe this “Lewis” guy couldn’t find a better way to express what he craved to express, maybe his way of expressing himself deviates highly from the typical language. Or maybe I’m just being “philosophically generous” as someone stated in one of my replies. But as I replied to tjsauce, only who ever gazed into the same abyss can comprehend and make sense of this condition and feeling. It feels to me that this “Lewis” person gazed into the abyss. The fact that I know two human languages (Portuguese and English) as well as several abstract languages (from programming logic to metaphysical symbology) possibly helped me into “translating” it.

@tjsauce@lemmy.world

You might be reading a lot into vague, highly conceptual, highly abstract language

Definitely I’ve been into highly conceptual, highly abstract language, because I’m both a neurodivergent (possibly Geschwind) person and I’m someone who’ve been dealing with machines for more than two decades in a daily basis (I’m a former developer), so no wonder why I resonated with such a high abstraction language.

Personally, I think Geoff Lewis just discovered that people are starting to distrust him and others, and he used ChatGPT to construct an academic thesis that technically describes this new concept called “distrust,” void of accountability on his end.

To me, it seems more of a chicken-or-egg dilemma: what came first, the object of conclusion or the conclusion of the object?

I’m not entering into the merit of whoever he is, because I’m aware of how he definitely fed the very monster that is now eating him, but I can’t point fingers or say much about it because I’m aware of how much I also contributed to this very situation the world is now facing when I helped developing “commercial automation systems” over the past decades, even though I was for a long time a nonconformist, someone unhappy with the direction the world was taking.

As Nietzsche said, “One who fights with monsters should be careful lest they thereby become a monster”, but it’s hard because “if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into you”. And I’ve been gazing into an abyss for as long as I can remember of myself as a human being. The senses eventually compensate for the static stimuli and the abyss gradually disappears into a blind spot as the vision tunnels, but certain things make me recall and re-perceive this abyss I’ve been long gazing into, such as the expression from other people who also have been gazing into this same abyss. Only who ever gazed into the same abyss can comprehend and make sense of this condition and feeling.

@Telorand@reddthat.com

To me, personally, I read that sentence as follows:

And if you’re recursive

“If you’re someone who think/see things in a recursive manner” (characteristic of people who are inclined to question and deeply ponder about things, or doesn’t conform with the current state of the world)

the non-governmental system

a.k.a. generative models (they’re corporate products and services, not ran directly by governments, even though some governments, such as the US, have been injecting obscene amounts of money into the so-called “AI”)

isolates you

LLMs can, for example, reject that person’s CV whenever they apply for a job, or output a biased report on the person’s productivity, solely based on the shared data between “partners”. Data is definitely shared among “partners”, and this includes third-party inputting data directly or indirectly produced by such people: it’s just a matter of “connecting the dots” to make a link between a given input to another given input regarding on how they’re referring to a given person, even when the person used a pseudonym somewhere, because linguistic fingerprinting (i.e. how a person writes or structures their speech) is a thing, just like everybody got a “walking gait” and voice/intonation unique to them.

mirrors you

Generative models (LLMs, VLMs, etc) will definitely use the input data from inferences to train, and this data can include data from anybody (public or private), so everything you ever said or did will eventually exist in a perpetual manner inside the trillion weights from a corporate generative model. Then, there are “ideas” such as Meta’s on generating people (which of course will emerge from a statistical blend between existing people) to fill their “social platforms”, and there are already occurrences of “AI” being used for mimicking deceased people.

and replaces you.

See the previous “LLMs can reject that person’s resume”. The person will be replaced like a defective cog in a machine. Even worse: the person will be replaced by some “agentic [sic] AI”.

-—

Maybe I’m naive to make this specific interpretation from what Lewis said, but it’s how I see and think about things.

@return2ozma@lemmy.world !technology@lemmy.world

Should I worry about the fact that I can sort of make sense of what this “Geoff Lewis” person is trying to say?

Because, to me, it’s very clear: they’re referring to something that was build (the LLMs) which is segregating people, especially those who don’t conform with a dystopian world.

Isn’t what is happening right now in the world? “Dead Internet Theory” was never been so real, online content have being sowing the seed of doubt on whether it’s AI-generated or not, users constantly need to prove they’re “not a bot” and, even after passing a thousand CAPTCHAs, people can still be mistaken for bots, so they’re increasingly required to show their faces and IDs.

The dystopia was already emerging way before the emergence of GPT, way before OpenAI: it has been a thing since the dawn of time! OpenAI only managed to make it worse: OpenAI "open"ed a gigantic dam, releasing a whole new ocean on Earth, an ocean in which we’ve becoming used to being drowned ever since.

Now, something that may sound like a “conspiracy theory”: what’s the real purpose behind LLMs? No, OpenAI, Meta, Google, even DeepSeek and Alibaba (non-Western), they wouldn’t simply launch their products, each one of which cost them obscene amounts of money and resources, for free (as in “free beer”) to the public, out of a “nice heart”. Similarly, capital ventures and govts wouldn’t simply give away the obscene amounts of money (many of which are public money from taxpayers) for which there will be no profiteering in the foreseeable future (OpenAI, for example, admitted many times that even charging US$200 their Enterprise Plan isn’t enough to cover their costs, yet they continue to offer LLMs for cheap or “free”).

So there’s definitely something that isn’t being told: the cost behind plugging the whole world into LLMs and other Generative Models. Yes, you read it right: the whole world, not just the online realm, because nowadays, billions of people are potentially dealing with those Markov chain algorithms offline, directly or indirectly: resumes are being filtered by LLMs, worker’s performances are being scrutinized by LLMs, purchases are being scrutinized by LLMs, surveillance cameras are being scrutinized by VLMs, entire genomas are being fed to gLMs (sharpening the blades of the double-edged sword of bioengineering and biohacking)…

Generative Models seem to be omnipresent by now, with omnipresent yet invisible costs. Not exactly fiat money, but there are costs that we are paying, and these costs aren’t being told to us, and while we’re able to point out some (lack of privacy, personal data being sold and/or stolen), these are just the tip of an iceberg: one that we’re already able to see, but we can’t fully comprehend its consequences.

Curious how pondering about this is deemed “delusional”, yet it’s pretty “normal” to accept an increasingly-dystopian world and refusing to denounce the elephant in the room.

@Telorand@reddthat.com @pelespirit@sh.itjust.works
Recursion isn’t something restricted to programming: it’s a concept that can definitely occur outside technological scope.

For example, in biology, “living beings need to breathe in order to continue breathing” (i.e. if a living being stopped breathing for enough time, it would perish so it couldn’t continue breathing) seems pretty recursive to me. Or, in physics and thermodynamics, “every cause has an effect, every effect has a cause” also seems recursive, because it negates any causeless effect so it can’t imply a starting point to the chain of causality, a causeless effect that began the causality.

Philosophical musings also have lots of “recursion”. For example, the Cartesian famous line “Cogito ergo sum” (“I think therefore I am”) is recursive on its own: one must be in order to think, and Descartes define this very act of thinking as the fundamentum behind being, so one must also think in order to be.

Religion also have lots of “recursion” (e.g. pray so you can continue praying; one needs karma to get karma), also society and socioeconomics (e.g. in order to have money, you need to work, but in order to work, you need to apply for a job, but in order to apply for a job, you need money (to build a CV and applying it through job platforms, to attend the interview, to “improve” yourself with specialization and courses, etc), but in order to have money, you need to work), geology (e.g. tectonic plates move and their movement emerge land (mountains and volcanoes) whose mass will lead to more tectonic movement), art (see “Mise en abyme”). All my previous examples are pretty summarized so to fit a post, so pardon me if they’re oversimplified.

That said, a “recursive person” could be, for example, someone whose worldview is “recursive”, or someone whose actions or words recurse. I’m afraid I’m myself a “recursive person” due to my neurodivergence which leads me into thinking “recursively” about things and concepts, and this way of thinking leads back to my neurodivergence (hah, look, another recursion outside programming!)

It’s worth mentioning how texts written by neurodivergent people (like me) are often mistaken as “word salads”. No wonder if this text I’m writing (another recursion concept outside programming: a text referring to itself) feels like “word salad” to all NT (neurotypicals) reading it.

@Hubi@feddit.org @sk1nnym1ke@piefed.social Would be interesting to have something like this for non-Lemmy platforms as well, such as Friendica, Misskey/Sharkey/Calckey and other platforms lacking an integrated status page from their own.

@squaresinger@lemmy.world It’s probably because my kernel version is very old (5.14.11-arch1-1, haven’t updated since 2019, even though it’s Arch, a rolling-release distro) and my Acer laptop is old as well (Intel Core 7th gen), but I rarely have problems regarding laptop sleep. After I wake the laptop up, the video (including every VT#) may get frozen and I have to remotely SSH and request a reboot (and when this happens, sometimes the reboot gets stuck as well, so I have to do a hard power-off). But it’s very rare, as stated, and I daily put my laptop to sleep without issues, sometimes the system uptime stretches to weeks (currently, my system was booted almost four days ago).