This caused me to delete Google Maps, but their removal of Black History month from Google Calendar is what’s making me contemplate migrating everything else away from them…

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I am partial to the rest of what you said but Census data were already publicly available and actually what they did was make it less accessible to data scientists and researchers like me working on the normal kind of regional planning stuff.

Seriously, why the fuck is he still CEO of that company? He’s actively undermining them in every way on a global scale. Tesla shareholders are idiots…

I’d say that violent incursion into blue states with the help of federal forces and local brownshirt provocateurs is almost a goal of Project 2025 and MAGA more broadly so I wouldn’t count on it not happening wherever you are. We’ve seen plenty of that kind of thing on the West Coast particularly. Local police unfortunately have a large membership overlap with said brownshirts.

There is also the issue of massive-scale gerrymandering, party politics preventing candidates we want from being given a chance to run in general elections, the electoral college, and widespread voter suppression and disenfranchisement as well-documented by Greg Palast and others. If they actually counted our votes we might get a more representative democracy, but what we have now is not that.

What about canceling a specific day of work every week? That would spread out the pain on both sides, but in a way that makes it less painful for workers because some may have sick days they can use. If literally nobody shows up on every Friday it sucks pretty bad for the bosses, even if they show up all the other days.

Many people cannot afford to not strike. Thousands of workers whose jobs depend on federal funding are uncertain about their livelihood. The coming rise in prices due to tariff nonsense will devastate working-class families.

A “few” days LOL! If you want to run some SSI-style GPT-2 bots on Lemmy, here’s my code to do it: https://github.com/umm-maybe/lemmy-ssi-bot

Note the limitation about bots only being able to respond to posts and top-level comments on Lemmy.

Various GPT-2 models trained by the r/SubSimGPT2Interactive community can be found here: https://huggingface.co/SSI

I guess it’s time to look at self-hosted cloud storage services like NextCloud, OwnCloud, Seafile, CryptPad etc. that can replace Proton Drive, but does anyone have any recommendations for a secure email service to replace Proton Mail? From what I read on r/selfhosted, while you can technically run your own email server, it’s just not worth it.

The problem with this is that Trump acting on his own, or in pure MAGA mode, is even worse than him acting under Musk’s influence. I mean I absolutely hate Musk and the bad name he’s given EV’s, but his influence on Trump is literally my only glimmer of hope that the American vehicle fleet will electrify enough–and quickly enough–to stave off the very worst version of climate catastrophe. Sadly Musk either doesn’t seem to give a shit about his own company, or is too busy making the cynical play that in a subsidy-free market Tesla wins due to sheer scale, as long as tariffs keep out cheap import EVs… it wouldn’t be the first time he had screwed the EV market at large in order to be the top dog in a smaller luxury niche.

But again, with immigration, Musk and Vivek are the only dissenting voices in a sea of xenophobia, even though, again, I hate the cynical anti-labor motivations behind their advocacy for H1B visas. Still, the alternative is Stephen Miller and full-on white supremacy with no exceptions for smart hard-working brown people.

It absolutely sucks that our glimmer of hope is that the billionaires who used to sound more liberal will feel some weird compulsion to act consistent with their past statements, and it’s a very slim chance that this will happen anyways. But given the state of affairs, it’s what we’ve got.

r/SubSimGPT2Interactive and spinoffs

Since I used to run GPT-2 bots on Reddit (openly declared as such, in a bot-friendly sub, using LLMs so stupid/deranged nobody would mistake them for real accounts) I’ve been thinking about this problem for a long time. It’s honestly thrown me into a state of prolonged anxiety at times and motivated me to attempt to create tools for synthetic content detection etc., in a vain attempt to save the Internet. And I’ve concluded that we’re well past that point, and approaching the point at which we need to reconsider what, exactly, the internet really is, and that is to say that it should not be considered a source of any sort of authentic experience. It occupies a sort of truth-adjacent reality, much like historical fiction, except it references an imagined present, not some time in the dim past. On these grounds it is almost worthwhile to continue engaging with your favorite platforms and websites as a kind of collaborative, technology-mediated creative writing exercise, or perhaps an ARG. It doesn’t feel quite so pointless, viewed through that lens.

it’s not called “bots” outside of social media but synthetic content is widespread across the rest of the Internet, due to different, but similarly large incentives. So no, it’s not just a FB/Reddit/Meta etc. problem.

His political power is premised in large part on the supposition that his following on X is authentic. Given his interests in AI, self-professed belief that Twitter, as it used to be called, is overrun by bots, and ownership and control of X, is there any reason to believe that this is true? How do we know that his human following hasn’t declined precipitously since his hard-right turn and been steadily replaced by bot accounts?

I know, you’ll say “but–richest man–can buy politicians” and I say yes, but only on credit which could get yanked away at any time, should his following be revealed as inauthentic. His net worth is premised mostly on stock shares in a company with serious problems (which he is doing nothing to solve) facing stiff competition in a troubled niche industry (the electric car market). He had to borrow huge amounts of money in order to buy Twitter because he does not have the cash and if he were to sell that much money in Tesla shares it would cause an investor panic and precipitous decline in his net worth.

And so now we can see why he likely had to buy Twitter; he probably had no choice: the company was likely about to expose or tamp down on his fraudulent and bot-driven following, which would create loss of investor confidence in his brands, which is the only thing propping them up given their weak fundamentals. The Emperor has no clothes, folks.

This is definitely me isolating with COVID over the past weekend except music instead of games

Honestly I find this feature of my washer/dryer super-useful because it reminds me to turn the stuff over instead of forgetting and letting it sit in the washer getting midlewy

I mean you’re technically correct from a copyright standpoint since it would be easier to claim fair use for non-commercial research purposes. And bots built for one’s own amusement with open-source tools are way less concerning to me than black-box commercial chatbots that purport to contain “facts” when they are known to contain errors and biases, not to mention vast amounts of stolen copyrighted creative work. But even non-commercial generative AI has to reckon with it’s failure to recognize “data dignity”, that is, the right of individuals to control how data generated by their online activities is shared and used… virtually nobody except maybe Jaron Lanier and the folks behind Brave are even thinking about this issue, but it’s at the core of why people really hate AI.

Yes, you’re absolutely right. The first StarCoder model demonstrated that it is in fact possible to train a useful LLM exclusively on permissively licensed material, contrary to OpenAI’s claims. Unfortunately, the main concerns of the leading voices in AI ethics at the time this stuff began to really heat up were a) “alignment” with human values / takeover of super-intelligent AI and b) bias against certain groups of humans (which I characterize as differential alignment, i.e. with some humans but not others). The latter group has since published some work criticizing genAI from a copyright and data dignity standpoint, but their absolute position against the technology in general leaves no room for re-visiting the premise that use of non-permissively licensed work is inevitable. (Incidentally they also hate classification AI as a whole; thus smearing AI detection technology which could help on all fronts of this battle. Here again it’s obviously a matter of responsible deployment; the kind of classification AI that UHC deployed to reject valid health insurance claims, or the target selection AI that IDF has used, are examples of obviously unethical applications in which copyright infringement would be irrelevant.)

I see you getting downvoted but a lot of doctors get death threats too, and while everyone seems to have a horror story about a doctor they didn’t like, I’m pretty sure most are the scapegoats of a broken system. So yeah, while Luigi’s target was well-chosen, I don’t trust every vigilante to be as smart.