and the vibes around Trump were good? the dude is a shitstain on the very fabric of existence

The Man in the High Castle comes close… or at least, makes it clear that it’s not as though the Nazis and Japanese occupying America would actually live by the code they dictate for others.

OMG a conspiracy by the DNC to elect an actual registered Democrat instead of an independent, how shocking /s

seriously, what did you expect?

the bernie bros have been out in force since the election shouting down anyone who disagrees with their vision of a populist party run by an old, out of touch white man. why does that sound familiar /s

I hate to say this, but it’s too fucking late for any sort of electoral solution, at least on a national level. At this point we need to develop local capacity to secure our progressive enclaves in liberal states and big metropolitan areas. This means rooting out the conservative factions within our police and firing bad actors, as well as training community-based self-defense forces. We also need to build more effective local resilience and mutual aid networks so that the Federal government can’t dangle emergency aid over us when pandemics and climate-related disasters recur, as they frequently will. We need politicians who will defend our territory, boundaries and values, and fight to discontinue the tremendous subsidy we pay to MAGA territories. We need more self-sufficient economies that trade primarily with healthy, rights-respecting economies in Canada and Europe. It’s a heavy lift and unfortunately I don’t see anyone up to the task right now, as even Bernie, Warren, and AOC are stubborn institutionalists who will continue trying to work within the system even as it works against them and their constituents.

this is learning completely the wrong lesson. it has been well-known for a long time and very well demonstrated that smaller models trained on better-curated data can outperform larger ones trained using brute force “scaling”. this idea that “bigger is better” needs to die, quickly, or else we’re headed towards not only an AI winter but an even worse climate catastrophe as the energy requirements of AI inference on huge models obliterate progress on decarbonization overall.

those are all classification problems, which is a fundamentally different kind of problem with less open-ended solutions, so it’s not surprising that they are easier to train and deploy.

I really wish it were easier to fine-tune and run inference on GPT-J-6B as well… that was a gem of a base model for research purposes, and for a hot minute circa Dolly there were finally some signs it would become more feasible to run locally. But all the effort going into llama.cpp and GGUF kinda left GPT-J behind. GPT4All used to support it, I think, but last I checked the documentation had huge holes as to how exactly that’s done.

One of the reasons I love StarCoder, even for non-coding tasks. Trained only on Github means no “instruction finetuning” bullshit ChatGPT-speak.

oh great, so we can look forward to another horrifyingly mismanaged pandemic!

absolutely batshit crazy how nobody at all mentioned that not laid it at Trump’s doorstep during the campaign

The Internet in general, but especially social media, is a cesspool of AI slop, bots, algorithm manipulation, and less exotic/high-tech forms of disinformation. How about instead of telling our politicians to meet us there we get the fuck off of it and meet each other in the streets. They can join our party if they want but we’re starting it.

Walz losing the VP debate to Vance was the start of the Trump ticket comeback.

If you look at the election prediction history graph on Nate Silver’s substack, you see an upwards trajectory for Trump/Vance ever since the vice-presidential debate. That was also when the “Republicans are weird” narrative that was working so well for Harris/Walz abruptly left the discourse. And I believe that what happened was that Republicans who were embarrassed by Vance as well as Trump had a moment like you describe where he suddenly didn’t seem so unrelatable and that right there sunk the Dems… as much as it pains me to admit it, because I’d much rather have a party that wins on the issues and communicates clearly how insane and risky it was to vote for literal autocracy, the Harris campaign probably made the wrong choice with Walz and never should have stopped mocking Republicans for being “weird.”

The problem, I believe, is that most Democrats are institutionalists who will defend the rule of law even when it means handing the reigns over to a group who have openly declared hostility towards it. They are also afraid that using any kind of force to stop Trump and his cronies will trigger violent rebellion and they know who owns most of the guns in this country. They’re playing a trolley problem game but because they don’t really have progressive values they aren’t putting, say, Ukraine, Palestine and the entire fucking climate on the “peaceful transfer of power” track.

We need a party with higher values than just “defending institutions.”

I would go so far as to say that this has always ben the plan, at least this time around. I find it highly suspicious that Trump has been the target of assassination attempts by republicans twice (plus a foreign attempt on his life) already. We’re being prepared to accept this as expected when it finally happens, and it has to happen in order to give Vance the pretext to implement martial law and usher in the high-tech Handmaid’s Tale scenario his patrons want. Trump is their useful idiot; but useful only because he is populist and charismatic enough to get them in power via ordinary electoral process. Once they suspend that process entirely they no longer need him and in fact he becomes a liability; offing him kills two birds with one stone.

I know that most progressives are just crying in their beer and looking for someone in their party or an adjacent political group to blame, but why isn’t more attention being brought to the many many efforts by Republicans and their overseas allies to corrupt the election and disenfranchise Democrats? I’m disgusted by the institutionalism that leads our leaders to call and congratulate the fascists rather than holding our own rallies to demand accountability for election irregularities.

this; every time the ublock origin absolutists insist that everyone must use Firefox or die I just wonder if they never open more than one or two tabs anyway. hell, a sufficiently complex web app running in a single tab can make FF choke

There are a bunch of reasons why this could happen. First, it’s possible to “attack” some simpler image classification models; if you get a large enough sample of their outputs, you can mathematically derive a way to process any image such that it won’t be correctly identified. There have also been reports that even simpler processing, such as blending a real photo of a wall with a synthetic image at very low percent, can trip up detectors that haven’t been trained to be more discerning. But it’s all in how you construct the training dataset, and I don’t think any of this is a good enough reason to give up on using machine learning for synthetic media detection in general; in fact this example gives me the idea of using autogenerated captions as an additional input to the classification model. The challenge there, as in general, is trying to keep such a model from assuming that all anime is synthetic, since “AI artists” seem to be overly focused on anime and related styles…

Serious question, is it likely that comedians who he brings on Kill Tony are also conservative racist POS assholes? I hope not because I actually kind of enjoyed Casey Rocket for a bit when he came up through that show. Definitely got a weird vibe from the host that made me wonder who they were and what the show really was (now I know).

Well, maybe we need a movement to make physical copies of these games and the consoles needed to play them available in actual public libraries, then? That doesn’t seem to be affected by this ruling and there’s lots of precedent for it in current practice, which includes lending of things like musical instruments and DVD players. There’s a business near me that does something similar, but they restrict access by age to high schoolers and older, and you have to play the games there; you can’t rent them out.