If you want a preview, look to how they’re lying about ballot initiatives in other states, such as Ohio after the failure of Issue 1, which again was misrepresented by Republicans.

Or just look back to Prop8.

I’d like to think we’ve gotten smarter than we were then, but current polling makes me worried.

That’s not eugenics unless you buy into the Nazi based Nazi=genetic argument. Haha

The monument, in a Montgomery County community known for its synagogues, is dedicated to the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the Schutzstaffel — the Nazi military branch often referred to simply as “the SS.”

Fuck them and fuck whitewashing.

That’s exactly the kind of bug I’ve come to expect from their games. It’s usually a couple of patches in where they figure out that you bumping into your companion should get them to move, or you having the ability to tell your companion to move.

I couldn’t count the thousands of hours I’ve logged on Bethesda games, but they’re the reason I have 200 gigs of save files every time I play an RPG.

You actually did pretty well. Buddhism teaches that suffering exists, but also that it has a cause. Once that cause is perceived and understood, it will cease. It then goes on about how to do that. It’s pretty much how an angry software developer version of the Buddha would react, I imagine.

The ironic bit is that none of the religions/philosophies mentioned are particularly god-oriented. Some forms of Buddhism have various concepts for other beings that are like gods in some ways, but they’re not generally considered the main focus of the belief system. Not only can one be completely atheistic and materialist and still be a great Buddhist, it’s not even really necessary to believe that a historical Buddha existed if you want to get technical.

I’m waiting until a patch comes along that addresses performance on the steam deck. I am pretty flexible when it comes to graphics quality and frame rates and such, but the current reviews are not looking playable.

As a point of reference, I played hundreds of hours of Daggerfall with all the joys of getting stuck in a wall only to be killed by guards, and jumping over a pit in a dungeon only to fall into the Abyss Between Worlds. I’m a TES fan from the early days and I know how bad they can be on release. I just have a lot more to do in BG3 before I feel pressure to try something new.

It’s generally not taught by default in US schools, but some schools offer it as an elective and/or as a competitive sport. Maintaining a swimming pool is an expense that many schools, especially in poorer districts, cannot afford. Outside of schools, there are sometimes community swim classes at places like the YMCA, but those require the parents to be actively involved (like with many extracurricular activities) and usually are an additional expense.

Physical education is usually a mandatory part of US schools through high school (where students graduate at around age 18), and schools often offer students a selection of sports for PE - I did fencing one year and wrestling, gymnastics, and archery other years - but swimming requires more infrastructure than a basketball court and some padded mats.

This bit, with which they bottom lines their 2022 report showing the decline in religiosity, is interesting:

And while belief in God has declined in recent years, Gallup has documented steeper drops in church attendance, church membership and confidence in organized religion, suggesting that the practice of religious faith may be changing more than basic faith in God.

They observe that church attendance is falling faster than belief per se, but I wonder if there’s a causal inference to be made. Are people stopping church attendance (say, because they’re turned off by the politics of the church) and eventually stop believing in god once they don’t have that weekly injection of opinion and the social pressures that go with it? You’d need a different kind of poll to look at that.

That is exactly how LLMs work. LOMs embed semantic concepts in metric spaces. That is what we’re talking about.

I think you have a mental model and that it is analogous to the model created in an LLM in that it is representable by a semantic graph/n-dimensional matrix relating concepts that are realized via terms.

You have never in your life encountered a dodo. You know what a dodo is (using the present these because I’m talking about a concept). It is a bird, so it relates evolutionarily and ecologically to “bird.” It’s flightless, so it relates to “patriarch” and “emu.” It is extinct, so it relates to all of the species extinction ideas you have. Humans perhaps contributed to the extinction, so it links to human-caused ecological change, which in turn links to human-caused climate change. Human-introduced invasive species are are causing ecological change in Australia, and that may have been a major factor in driving the dodo to extinction. People ate them, so maybe in your head it has a relation to wild turkeys. And so on. That’s how minds work. That’s how the human cognitive model of the world works. That’s how LLMs work.

Visualize an n-dimensional space in which these semantic topics are embedded. The interpretation of the dimensions don’t matter. Instead, we’re just worried about the distances between concepts. Dodo is closer to turkey than it is to snake. Dodo is closer to snake than it is to rock. Dodo is closer to rock than it is to the feeling of melancholy I get when listening to Tori Amos. We can grasp this intuitively. We can mathematize it by formally placing the various concepts in a metric space.

There’s a lot more to unpack, from neural correlates of consciousness to cognitive linguistics and embodied learning using metaphorical reasoning, but that’s kind of the gist of it boiled down to an overly long post.

I have absolutely no idea what your model is for how humans understand, relate, and communicate concepts.

Describe it. Imagine I’ve never encountered a cat, because I’m from Mars.

Could you outline what you think a human cognitive model of “cat” looks like without referring to anything non-cat?

No, I disagree. Human knowledge is semantic in nature. “A cat walks across a room” is very close, in semantic space, to “The dog walked through the bedroom” even though they’re not sharing any individual words in common. Cat maps to dog, across maps to through, bedroom maps to room, and walks maps to walked. We can draw a semantic network showing how “volcano” maps onto “migraine” using a semantic network derived from human subject survey results.

LLMs absolutely have a model of “cats.” “Cat” is a region in an N dimensional semantic vector space that can be measured against every other concept for proximity, which is a metric space measure of relatedness. This idea has been leveraged since the days of latent semantic analysis and all of the work that went into that research.

For context, I’m thinking in terms of cognitive linguistics as described by researchers like Fauconnier and Lakoff who explore how conceptual bundling and metaphor define and constrain human thought. Those concepts imply that a realization can be made in a metric space such that the distance between ideas is related to how different those ideas are, which can in turn be inferred by contextual usage observed over many occurrences. 

The biggest difference between a large model (as primitive as they are, but we’re talking about model-building as a concept here) and human modeling is that human knowledge is embodied. At the end of the day we exist in a physical, social, and informational universe that a model trained on the artifacts can only reproduce as a secondary phenomenon.

But that’s world apart from saying that the cross-linking and mutual dependencies in a metric concept-space is not remotely analogous between humans and large models.

It’s actually because they do know things in a way that’s analogous to how people know things.

Let’s say you wanted to forget that cats exist. You’d have to forget every cat meme you’ve ever seen, of course, but your entire knowledge of memes would also have to change. You’d have to forget that you knew how a huge part of the trend started with “i can haz cheeseburger.”

You’d have to forget that you owned a cat, which will change your entire memory of your life history about adopting the cat, getting home in time to feed it, and how it interacted with your other animals or family. Almost every aspect of your life is affected when you own an animal, and all of those would have to somehow be remembered in a no-cat context. Depending on how broadly we define “cat,” you might even need to radically change your understanding of African ecosystems, the history of sailing, evolutionary biology, and so on. Your understanding of mice and rats would have to change. Your understanding of dogs would have to change. Your memory of cartoons would have to change - can you even remember Jerry without Tom? Those are just off the top of my head at 8 in the morning. The ramifications would be huge.

Concepts are all interconnected, and that’s how this class of AI works. I’ve owned cars most of my life, so it’s a huge part of my personal memory and self-definition. They’re also ubiquitous in culture. Hundreds of thousands to millions of concepts relate to cats in some way, and each one of them would need to change, as would each concept that relates to those concepts. Pretty much everything is connected to everything else and as new data are added, they’re added in such a way that they relate to virtually everything that’s already there. Removing cats might not seem to change your knowledge of quarks, but there’s some very very small linkage between the two.

Smaller impact memories are also difficult. That guy with the weird mustache you saw during your vacation to Madrid ten years ago probably doesn’t have that much of a cascading effect, but because Esteban (you never knew his name) has such a tiny impact, it’s also very difficult to detect and remove. His removal won’t affect much of anything in terms of your memory or recall, but if you’re suddenly legally obligated to demonstrate you’ve successfully removed him from your memory, it will be tough.

Basically, the laws were written at a time when people were records in a database and each had their own row. Forgetting a person just meant deleting that row. That’s not the case with these systems.

The thing is that we don’t compel researchers to re-train their models on a data set if someone requests their removal. If you have traditional research on obesity, for instance, and you have a regression model that’s looking at various contributing factors, you do not have to start all over again if someone requests their data be deleted. It should mean that the person’s data are removed from your data set it it doesn’t mean that you can’t continue to use that model - at least it never has, to my knowledge. Your right to be forgotten doesn’t translate to you being allowed to invalidate the scientific models generated that glom together your data with that of tens of thousands of others. You can be left out of the next round of research on that dataset, but I have never heard of people being legally compelled to regenerate a model based on that.

There are absolutely novel legal questions that are going to be involved here, but I just wanted to clarify that it’s really not a simple answer from any perspective.

Yeah, my client crashed when I was trying to edit it. Thanks for the reminder!

There should be a full write up from a lawyer - or, better yet, an organization like the EFF. Because lemmy.world is such a prominent instance, it would probably garner some attention if the people who run it were to approach them.

People would still have to decide what their own risk tolerances are. Some might think that even if safe harbor applies, getting swatted or doxxed just isn’t worth the risk.

Others might look at it, weigh their rights under the current laws, and decide it’s important to be part of the project. A solid communication on the specific application of S230 to a host of a federated service would go a long way.

I worked as a sys admin for a while in college in the mid-90s, and it was a time when ISPs were trying to get considered common carriers. Common carrier covers phone companies from liability if people use their service to commit crimes. The key provision of common carrier status was that the company exercised no control whatsoever over what went across their wires.

In order to make the same argument, the systems I helped manage had a policy of no policing. You could remove a newsgroup from usenet, but you couldn’t any other kind of content oriented filtering. The argument went that as soon as you start moderating, you’re now responsible for moderating it all. True or not, that’s the argument made and policy adopted on multiple university networks and private ISPs. And to be clear, we’re not talking about a company like facebook or reddit which have full control over their content. We’re talking things like the web in general, such as it was, and usenet.

Usenet is probably the best example, and I knew some BBS operators who hosted usenet content. The only BBS owners that got arrested (as far as I know) were arrested for being the primary host of illegal material.

S230 or otherwise, someone should try to get a pro bono from a lawyer (or lawyers) who know the subject.

Edit: Looks like EFF already did a write up. With the amount of concerned people posting on this optic, this link should be in every official reply and as a post in the topic.

I think it’s exactly as big a deal as the article makes it out to be. Think of abusive partners. Transphobic parents. Waiters or bartenders who want to stalk the pretty girl they just checked out.

I know that the Apple credit card doesn’t have a number printed on it (iirc), and I think some of the payment systems essentially use a unique credit card number per purchase. I’m not sure if those kinds of things would help here.

But this is both dangerous and absolutely idiotic. Someone came up with an idea, so robe’s manager ram with it without talking to legal or security, and it got pushed live. It should absolutely be pulled.

Factory reset restores them to infant mode, so in several months he will be delighted to discover that he has hands, even if he can’t really control them yet.

Senators are among the most powerful politicians in the US, as well as on the planet, and they know it. They don’t stand there befuddled because they’re socially awkward. If they’re befuddled, it’s because they’re befuddled.

We are seeing the human version of the Mac’s spinning beach ball. I have a cat with the same problem. I would not nominate her for a seat in the Senate.