Hi, I'm new here. I mean, I've been reading but I haven't commented before.
I'm sure you all know about how cheap labour is used for labelling data for training "AI" systems, but I just came across this video and wanted to share. Apologies if it has already been posted: Training AI takes heavy toll on Kenyans working for $2 an hour.
Welcome! The situation these people find themselves in is dire, since they're both literally and emotionally as far as possible from the people making decisions about their labor. The modern economy doesn't function without exploitation, and generative AI is the latest innovation in expanding that exploitation and pushing it farther away from the people who benefit and who make the decisions that require it. It does to modern knowledge workers what automation and outsourcing did to manufacturing, and the distance is sufficient that I don't expect to see even the kind of lukewarm pushback that sweatshops got in the 90s actually manifest for them.
In the aftermath of an LGBT hate incident, the then-CEO of cloud computing giant Digital Ocean told upset staff his mentor was a member of the KKK as an attempt to explain why they must bend their values because "we love the company"
presented without comment
Asking employees to "bend" their perfectly sensible values like "I don't like homophobes" or "members of the KKK suck" is insane to me, but exactly the sort of thing a tech CEO would think would resonate with his workers.
I stay at my job not because I have molded my soul into a perfect vessel for my companies values (which, TBH, kind of suck), but because I have a mortgage payment.
(Also as the header graphic points out, "love is at our core" and "inclusive environment" are apparently some of their values so maybe it's Digital Ocean which needs to bend to Digital Ocean's values).
At least there's a happy ending:
A month after the all-hands meeting, in August 2023, DigitalOcean announced that it was conducting a search for a new CEO, but did not say why.
It somehow gets worse. These people think values are interchangeable with value.
My hands are requesting the CEO's home address (in ~~Minecraft~~ real life):
Quick bonus I found in the replies:
And a quick sidenote from me:
This is sorta repeating a previous prediction of mine, but I expect this AI bubble's gonna utterly tank the public image of tech as a whole. When you develop a tech whose primary use case boils down to "make the world worse so the line can go up", its gonna be virtually impossible for the public to forgive you.
Being more specific, I expect artists/musicians/creatives in general to be utterly hostile to AI, if not tech as a whole - AI has made their lives significantly harder in a variety of ways, and all signs pointing to the tech industry having done so willingly.
in real life
Careful not to post things that could get you into trouble with a judge without a sense of humor, or just cops/secret service. Wouldn't be the first time I hear of a home visit because the cops got confused at a joke.
Esp if it turns out the conspiracy theory about the murder being crypto related and they confuse this place for being a pro cryptocurrency place.
E: on topic just not LLMs and artists but also the idea that Musk got Trump elected will cause a backlash. (Which I find dubious, more despite the man, they made the election be about a gay onlyfans support squirrel ffs)
An update, a user stated, "with all love and respect": "people will not starting hating Brave but they will start to hate the mod who blocked Brave".
2 hours later they'd removed their account.
edit: context https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/chatgpt-david-mayer-name-glitch-ai-b2657197.html
Time for another round of Rothschild nutso's to come around now that ChatGPT can't say one of their names.
At first I was thinking, you know, if this was because of the GDPR's right to be forgotten laws or something that might be a nice precedent. I would love to see a bunch of people hit AI companies with GDPR complaints and have them actually do something instead of denying their consent-violator-at-scale machine has any PII in it.
But honestly it's probably just because he has money
I think Sam Altman's sister accused him of doing this to her name awhile ago too (semi-recent example). I don't think she was on a "don't generate these words ever" blacklist, but it seemed like she was erased from the training data and would only come up after a web search.
Being erased from the training data is frankly even more galling than the kind of brute force GDPR compliance they seem to have been using. It puts the lie to any claim that they're just "moving fast and breaking things" without mind to the consequences, because clearly there was some reason to prune the training data and make sure that the model didn't have certain information when it was to the company's (or the founder's) liking.
Older article, but relevant in light of current events:
UnitedHealth uses faulty AI to deny elderly patients medically necessary coverage, lawsuit claims
I wonder if we'll see a new edition of the Shinzo Abe Effect.
also, tech billionaires terrified of a peasant uprising can turn their homes into fucking military bases with a home security system named (of course) Sauron
Fuckers like Thiel make me want to start stuffing guys who take too much interest in speculative fiction into lockers again, just to be safe. And I was that kid, right down to the STEM focus and disrespect for the liberal arts.
It's never wrong to gatekeep fascists.
LOTR fans stay losing
Sorry about more insta content. Saw this today and it tickled me:
Left: pinker
Right: Yeonmi Park, who is known for defecting from north korea and speaking about it. That should be enough if she just told the truth, but for one reason or another (grifting dosh) she has started just making shit up, which I recommend you research for yourself if you are interested.
Anyway the above picture probably doesn’t come as a surprise when you consider her current tack: saying that “woke” and “cancel culture” are the first steps in a country becoming like North Korea. She’s been on JRE (where she memeably claimed that there is only one train in NK that often requires people to push it). She has a book with her anti-woke thesis with opening shit-volley by old mate JBP.
That's what she said? That's literally so much funnier than any of the memes
really into this whole far right coup and far right right hegemony thing a lot of countries are trying out rn. really cool
As resources get scarcer the lurch back to fascism is going to get worse. People always turn to the simple (but categorically wrong) answers when times get hard, and blaming people who come from other places has historically been a winner for simple and wrong answers. Refugees are a symptom but they'll be targeted as the cause because their numbers will swell with increasing "natural" disaster frequency and severity.
And I have no idea what I can do about it that wouldn't amount to pissing in the wind.
Sometimes I wonder what future generations will think looking back on the content of today's internet and humanity's total inability to demonstrate the humane.
Looks like SK gave the bastards a hard nope, at least.
this was the most half-assed coup in recent memory, hands down
hey army do a coup for me
parliament said no
ok
no fanatical loyalists in army, no militia or PMC, zero planning at all, even Prigozhin got that sorted out. very similar thing happened just two years ago in Peru, and this year in Bolivia. and same thing will happen this time, impeachment is already written as we speak. army also exactly knew what was going on and didn't participate for a reason
by the way, south korean presidents don't have a habit of leaving office peacefully, so it all tracks. it's either impeachment or coup or long prison term just after leaving office
Wonder if he did the rightwing thing and just went 'the silent majority agrees with my statements'(*) and just assumed the militaries would be all part of the incel crew and fall in line behind him.
*: On that note there was some cringe thanksgiving video of one of those weird Trump aligned culture war freaks (the daily wire perhaps?) where the freak strides into the thanksgiving event and starts slapping everybody around as some sort of victorious conquerer (at least that is what I imagined was the intended feeling. Not the deranged crazy weirdo vibe it gave off). And this video had a scene which baffled some people, there was a normal guy who was given a big cigar or something and some people were confused why that was a thing. I think that was the imagined '"normal" silent majority guys all secretly agree with me but they are ashamed to act' thing.
I really don't know what was he thinking, looks like army did the bare legal minimum so that they won't be prosecuted for refusing orders. There's a couple of things that can be done with minimal number of loyalists that would make coup easier that weren't done, like cutting power to parliament. This makes me guess that military didn't want a part in this at all
I've seen a take that this was an attempt to get entrenched in power before trump admin begins, as in for foreign relations purposes, but like, it's pretty clear that a couple of people from his family and trusted party people were under investigation so him trying to not allow that sounds more likely. Now that won't work because as far as i understand by the end of the week there will be impeachment vote
I've seen people in the gun nuttier circles saying that the weapons the army had were configured for training rounds, sort of like airsoft rather than live ammo. It sounds like they were thoroughly uninterested in going along with this and were trying to avoid adding a mutiny to the situation? And yes, SK apparently has an explicit law that allows the legislation to overrule a declaration of martial law, which is the kind of law you don't get unless you've had several occasions to think about it.
i haven't seen it but i've seen it mentioned too. these are training rifles that use ammunition incompatible with normal 5.56 (simunition), they also had no ammo in sidearms and someone spotted blue (training) magazine. This is not something you can do on accident, they must have been specifically ordered so
Such law makes sense considering SK recent-ish history
from what i understand there was only one small unit slightly loyal to president, that one that was sent (+ MP, + regular police), and even they called quits pretty much immediately (and lost NVG, that's a beating). looks like they did bare minimum so that they can't be prosecuted and left just after the vote. defense minister was already dismissed so in retrospect they could slack even harder. 707th (that unit) blocked representatives but police let them in
Didn't they at least try to block parliament with buses or something? (A thing easily circumvented with the parliamentarians going 'whereever enough of us gather is parliament, the building has no magical qualities'
i read the title and was like damn we're dunking on game engines now?
a good follow on insta if you use it
That guy must be a communist. Cause that is a big red flag.
Sundar Pichai says Google Search will ‘enshittify profoundly’ in 2025 [paraphrasing]
We will say absolutely nothing about what kind of changes we mean, and the reporting of these comments won't even speculate, much less ask. But you should definitely buy our stock now in anticipation.
What does Jerry at Android Trends think Pichai's job is if not making number go up? Trying to act like there's any substance here is laughable.
for a post from an AI company this is surprisingly honest about the general helplessness in defeating so called hallucinations
https://www.kapa.ai/blog/ai-hallucination
probably a good sign for even boosters to be talking this way
The first half was OK, but then they cited this paper.
LLMs encode much more information about truthfulness than previously recognized. We first discover that the truthfulness information is concentrated in specific tokens, and leveraging this property significantly enhances error detection performance. Yet, we show that such error detectors fail to generalize across datasets, implying that—contrary to prior claims—truthfulness encoding is not universal but rather multifaceted.
I haven't read the paper, and probably won't, but what the shit is this?
gave it a quick skim. I lack any relevant background. the bit they push most seems to be that you can improve the performance of error detection tools by determining the most important tokens in an answer and running your tools on the tokens near those. this seems to be in contrast to absurdly naive approaches like averaging the tokens (???) or just looking at the last token of the response (????).
what are the most important tokens? they're the ones that change the factuality of the answer if you change them. how do you determine that? you don't, lmao. you just ask an LLM what the most important words are
what are the error detection tools? you will never guess
It turns out if you can just make the machine know what the truth is and say that you don't get hallucinations. Unfortunately the truth isn't emergent from pure language models and expressing Truth through language alone has been something challenging the human race since Krog try to teach Torg how make stick but pointy.
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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