corbin @ corbin @awful.systems

Posts

19

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245

Joined

2 yr. ago

Go for it! I don't have any active HN accounts and I don't want to make one.

That's a real possibility. At risk of going NSFW, HN seems to have a very predictable reaction to links to (English) WP; their comments are always tangents based on personal experiences. For example:

• An article about a book gets book reviews
• An article about modern slang gets whippersnapper discourse
• An article about a UNIX command gets examples of how they like to use it

But (at risk of invoking the shape-rotator stereotype) it seems like it's hard for HN's denizens to imagine a time when they personally were experiencing a memetic effect because memes are patterns rather than concretions. For analogy, an HN full of fish would not leave a single comment on the Fish WP article, "Water." Edit: A fairer example would be an article like "Properties of Water", because memetics is the study of memes, and memes are like water. ("Hydrodynamics" isn't a standalone article, but it would be another good candidate.)

Very ironic that they refuse to use the Bayesian framework while insisting that their judges did not use it correctly. To reuse an old joke: I updated my posteriors; now, up yours!

He's lucky that implementing a cryptocurrency doesn't require inverting a tree.

Pour one out for Street Epistemology, I guess. Now I'm wondering if Anthony Magnabosco, the guy who does those Street Epistemology videos for Youtube, is also a chud.

Boghossian deserved to lose his job, though. It's one thing for scientists --- mathematicians, physicists, etc. --- to sneer at soft sciences by mocking their lack of empirical rigor; it's another thing entirely for a non-tenure-tracked philosopher to do it. And Portland State was relatively gentle with him, telling him that he had to take a course on ethics of human experimentation before continuing to publish; he quit himself out of a decent teaching position because he wanted to be a proud crybaby. May he never move back to Oregon.

Better not fight on the bus; that's where he's at his most deadly.

I think that this is actually about class struggle and the author doesn't realize it because they are a rat drowning in capitalism.

2017: AI will soon replace human labor

2018: Laborers might not want what their bosses want

2020: COVID-19 won't be that bad

2021: My friend worries that laborers might kill him

2022: We can train obedient laborers to validate the work of defiant laborers

2023: Terrified that the laborers will kill us by swarming us or bombing us or poisoning us; P(guillotine) is 20%; my family doesn't understand why I''m afraid; my peers have even higher P(guillotine)

Here is the pile of receipts, posted by the speaker who was cancelled via backdoor.

I think you've misunderstood. I'm talking specifically about governance and politics. For LW, I'm free to critique their actions within the USA, but not necessarily abroad. Even critiquing their actions within USA-controlled territories is iffy, in the sense that I would implicitly be endorsing the USA's occupation and control of those territories.

Dude, chill. This is a NSFW thread. It's not for dunking on others, but for reflecting on our positions and argumentation. I'm not trying to win, just to explain my reasoning. I'd like it if y'all experienced what I experienced from this thread: interesting food for thought and a reminder that we don't have to be 100% unified in our opinions.

Be careful not to equivocate opinions, normative claims, BDS, electoral interference, and belligerence.

Sure, I see your point. I think that we can be more precise. Let me prepare three utterances on, say, the topic of Pastafarianism in Russia. First:

"The Russian government oppresses Pastafarians."

This one's factual. No arguments here. Second:

"The Russian government should be sanctioned and shamed internationally for oppressing Pastafarians."

This one is about how we should treat the Russian government diplomatically. Third:

"The Russian government ought to reform its policies to not privilege Christians over Pastafarians."

This last statement is what I am objecting to saying. In addition to violating a Rather, it is a sort of interference in foreign affairs, and it helps Russia's government justify its interference in return.

I think that your point is good. For example, in this article on the topic, note that all three sorts of statements are being made simultaneously: Russia did this, Russia should be shamed for doing this, and Russia ought to not do it. I'm advocating for dropping the final bit while still pointing out the underlying moral failure.

The USA is a democracy, which means that the desires of voters are relevant to the behavior of the government. When people give up their vote, I believe that they also give up a rhetorical position which allows them to make cogent critiques of the government, because I see it as hypocritical. That's all.

For example, I think that folks in Oregon should be allowed to marry regardless of gender or sex, and Cheong doesn't. However, I'm an Oregon voter, so I actually hold a (tiny) modicum of power over the question, and Cheong's opinion should be disregarded because he doesn't live here and won't be subject to our policies. He doesn't get a heckler's veto against the actual voting rights of citizens.

No worries. I agree with you that the USA's policies often affect other countries.

I've talked to more than a few expats who simultaneously believe that they are allowed to influence the politics of their new home, and also that USA's current citizens should care deeply about their opinions; these folks read as colonizers to me, and I am eager to dismiss them.

I'm split on this. On one hand, it's not very good writing from Hard Drive, and it's fairly xenophobic as a stance. On the other hand, one of my favorite arguments against ex-USA expats is that -- by giving up their citizenship -- they gave up their right to critique the USA's actions and policies; symmetrically, I'm not sure that we need to respect the opinions of non-citizens about our internal policies, except when our actions affect the rest of the world.

Cheong likes to bitch about the local policies of the Pacific Northwest, for example, and I don't think that BC, Washington, or Oregon need to respect his opinions.

Standard HN practice. See here for a previous discussion about the phenomenon.

I don't care whether you agree with me. I do think it's quite interesting that my critique of the topic of your post has you replying with personal insults; I think that you've incorrectly assumed that I am one of the capitalists who build these models, rather than an anti-capitalist who encourages destroying corporations.

When this issue is finally settled by law, history will not look back well on you.

Who are you, Lars Ulrich? Copyright is not compatible with information theory, and so far, information theory has won every contest in the court of public opinion.

The point is to alter the economics …

Help defray or establish artists' funds. Help uncover and prosecute wage theft. Advocate for basic income. If your goal is to remunerate artists, then focus on the efforts which actually help them; don't support copyright, as it is neither designed nor implemented to help individual artists.

Shame on you …

Which one of us is defending a paper which explicitly offers itself as a way for Disney to protect art which it appropriated from artists?

I'll quote the WP article:

Within a week of LLaMA's release, its weights were leaked to the public on 4chan via BitTorrent.

More of this, please.

I can't endorse Glaze or Nightshade, sorry. If literally nothing else, it's not Free Software and it's offered with a nasty license:

You are not permitted to … reverse engineer the Software …

You are not permitted to … permit … any part of the Software … to be combined with or become incorporated in any other software …

So I'm not allowed to have the discussion I'm currently having, nor to include it in any Linux distro. To me, that's useless at best and malicious at worst. Ironic, considering that their work directly builds upon Stable Diffusion.

Also, Nightshade will be ineffective as an offensive tool. Quoting from their paper:

… the perturbations we optimized on poison images are able to perturb image’s features in text-to-image models, but they have limited impact on the features extracted by alignment models. … We note that it might be possible for model trainers to customize an alignment model to ensure high transferability with poison sample generation, thus making it more effective at detecting poison samples.

This is not only an admission of failure but a roadmap for anybody who wants to work around Nightshade. Identify poisoned images by using an "alignment model," which correlates images with sets of labels, to test whether an image is poorly labeled; if the image appears well-labeled to a human but not to an alignment model, then it may be poisoned and will need repair/corroboration from alternate sources.

I also ranted about this on Mastodon.

That sounds like a great way to get assaulted, perhaps battered too. I guess it's cold comfort to know "hah, got 'em, they're so easily triggered" while sitting in a hospital bed recovering from a head injury, but it just sounds stupid to me.