20, they/she, math+CS student

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • The technology is promising, it’s just not remotely ready for what they’re trying to use it for, and may never be in its current iteration (transformer-based LLMs). Like, yes, an AI will probably eventually be able to read many articles from search and integrate that information together in a useful way, but right now it’s almost as likely to just start making shit up halfway through and tell you to eat glue lmao.

    The problem is that AI is the new corporate buzzword like web was back during the dot com bubble. The web did end up being massively successful, but it just wasn’t ready for like 90% of what investors wanted from it back then.






  • I mean, LLaMA is open-source and it’s made by Facebook for profit, there’s grey areas. Imo tho, any service that claims to be anything more than a fancy wrapper for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. API calls is possibly a scam. Especially if they’re trying to sell you hardware, or the service costs more than like $10/month, LLM API calls are obscenely cheap. I use a local frontend as an AI assistant that works by making API calls through a service called openrouter (basically a unified service that makes API calls to all the major cloud LLM providers for you). I put like $5 in it 3 or 4 months ago and it still hasn’t run out.



  • If the social biases of the model put a hard limit on your ability to write a good woman character, I question how much it’s really you that’s “writing” the story. I’m not against using LLMs in writing, but it’s a tool, not a creative partner. They can be useful for brainstorming and as a sounding-board for ideas (potentially even editing), but imo you need to write the actual prose yourself to claim you’re writing something.



  • Imo a non-market-based socialist economy doesn’t require AI, it just requires extensively documenting inventory/production and a good mechanism for gauging consumer demand, in other words a good economic planning mechanism. Because if you break it down to its simplest function, the capitalist market is just an economic planning mechanism, it uses consumer purchases to judge demand and adjust production accordingly, but it’s more difficult to control since it can’t account for negative externalities (effects of production that don’t have a direct impact on sales), and when you introduce wage labor into a market, the incentive structure encourages those with more resources to spend those resources on labor and then exploit that labor to the maximum possible extent.

    To implement a non-market socialist planning system, you could have a broad plan that specifies large macroeconomic goals to be voted on democratically (e.g. increase investment in clean energy, increase investment in a certain popular sector of consumer goods like electronics, etc.) And then use data from the past to estimate future demand for consumer goods. Then you could calculate the demand for intermediate commodities (things used to produce consumer goods and accomplish larger state infrastructure projects) based on that. You could then put all of those into a really big matrix and then row-reduce that matrix to solve for any areas where the necessary resource allocation is uncertain and then use that to refine the initial estimates for production you started with, and iterate this process many times. At the end you end up with a table that shows exactly which resources need to be allocated where to meet production targets and consumer demand.

    Obviously consumer demand might differ from your prior estimates, so you also have a system for monitoring how much of each good is purchased at each storefront, and then make minor adjustments to the global production targets to meet the actual demand, which would help mitigate the recurring shortages that occurred in the USSR due to inefficient resource allocation from their oversimplified planning system.

    Basically, it’s all about having good-quality, real-time data on economic activity so that the planned economy can respond as dynamically as a capitalist market, but without the negative externalities and worker exploitation that come along with capitalism.

    I read a really good book that outlines in more detail how this would work and even gives the algorithm for efficiently manipulating the economy-wide resource allocation matrix, it’s called Towards a New Socialism. Apparently the guys who wrote it are weird transphobes now, so I don’t endorse them personally, but it’s the most well thought out, concrete plan for a workable socialist economy I’ve seen so it’s worth a read. Also look into project CyberSyn in Chile under Allende, it’s the closest attempt irl to do something like this.






  • I feel like the most likely sort of collapse would be a Roman empire style collapse where it takes centuries to reach completion and we see a period of increased governmental instability/local authoritarianism for a little bit. The most likely cause would be some sort of climate disaster. It probably wouldn’t happen everywhere either, the Byzantine empire lasted well into the middle ages, after all, going on the Rome metaphor. The best strategy would be to move somewhere less effected by the collapse with a hospitable enough climate to support local food production, and enough resources to ensure long-term maintenance of infrastructure. The Great Lakes area of the US/Canada fits this pretty well


  • Eh, open-sourcing is just good business, the only reason every big tech company doesn’t is that loads of executives are stuck in the past. Of course having random people on the internet do labor for you for free is something Google would want. They get the advantage of tens of thousands of extra eyes on their code pointing out potential security vulnerabilities and they can just put all the really shady shit in proprietary blobs like Google Play Services, they’re getting the best of both worlds as far as they’re concerned.

    Large publicly-traded companies do not do anything for the good of anyone but themselves, they are literally Legally Obligated to make the most profitable decisions for themselves at all times. If they’re open-sourcing things it’s to make money, not because they were “good guys”.


  • I think it’ll end up like Facebook (the social media platform, not the company). Eventually you’ll hit model collapse for new models trained off uncurated internet data once a critical portion of all online posts are made by AI, and it’ll become Much more expensive to create quality, up-to-date datasets for new models. Older/less tech literate people will stay on the big, AI-dominated platforms getting their brains melted by increasingly compelling, individually-tailored AI propaganda and everyone else will move to newer, less enshittified platforms until the cycle repeats.

    Maybe we’ll see an increase in discord/matrix style chatroom type social media, since it’s easier to curate those and be relatively confident everyone in a particular server is human. I also think most current fediverse platforms are also marginally more resistant to AI bots because individual servers can have an application process that verifies your humanity, and then defederate from instances that don’t do that.

    Basically anything that can segment the Unceasing Firehose of traffic on the big social media platforms into smaller chunks that can be more effectively moderated, ideally by volunteers because a large tech company would probably just automate moderation and then you’re back at square 1.