• 5 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • I’m not ragging on this particular post - this one’s obviously important - but I’ll be honest, I really wish I could spend less time hearing about what Trump is doing and more time hearing about what’s being done about it.

    Getting constant doom-o-grams about the current administration’s latest horror-show is particularly exhausting when you almost never hear about people working to fix it, and frankly I doubt I’m alone in that. It’s pretty counterproductive for us to be spending so much time fixating on what the fascists are doing. Helps them a lot more than us.

    I just wish this site had a healthier evil-to-good-news mix, you know? Prevents doomerism.



  • The fundamental issue is and has always been that automation is being used to replace people, when it should be used to free up their time. Productivity increases could’ve meant shorter work weeks. But that didn’t generate as much money for the shareholders, so it didn’t get pursued. And now we’ve got LLMs and generative AI, which could’ve been a (admittedly rather shitty and niche) tool, but for the same reasons as before, companies would rather throw people under the bus instead.

    Artists aren’t telling you that people washing dishes don’t matter. They’re telling you they might be getting fired just like those dishwashers were. If you care about either, I suggest standing up for the artists here. And once that’s done, they can stand up for everyone else right back. I think you’ll find they’d be happy to return the favor.








  • I was suggesting that no one else needs it explained to them either.

    You’d hope so! But alas, some idiots exist. And when a title like this appears, it becomes difficult to tell if such an idiot wrote it at first glance, and more to point, a title like that tends to create more idiots (and it’s also just kinda offensive). That’s why it’s important not to write headlines like this.

    Sidenote: If you want people to not take things personally, avoid personal pronouns. “Is that something that you need explained?” → “Is that something that people need explained?” It makes a world of difference and I’m confident I’ve avoided several arguments that could’ve spawned from my own posts thanks to making that kind of change. Not foolproof, sure – we are on the internet – but it helps.





  • You can read that from the article text, but a) the text doesn’t appear to actually suggest autistic people do have empathy, which is a problem since b) the title absolutely implies they don’t.

    At best, this is a terrible headline. But if I’m being honest, I don’t have much respect for an article that seems to be all too eager to tout the erstwhile benefits of an LLM, let alone one that is in all likelihood teaching people how to act more like an LLM. So I’m not inclined to take a charitable interpretation.


  • The changelog lists 30 significant changes, of which the top new feature is integrating Whisper. This means whisper.cpp, which is Georgi Gerganov’s entirely local and offline version of OpenAI’s Whisper automatic speech recognition model. The bottom line is that FFmpeg can now automatically subtitle videos for you.

    Yeah hey, can anyone chime in if this is at all based off LLMs? Because my problems with the incorrect plagiarism machine don’t end just because it’s now the offline incorrect plagiarism machine. Making OpenAI’s garbage hockey open source doesn’t make it okay. Or should I just start calling this shit FOSSwashing?

    I dug around for a bit and couldn’t find much of anything, but judging by a look at the Github pages for both versions of Whisper, it’s looking very related. If that’s the case, fuck right off. I don’t want AI in FFmpeg, either.


  • A lot of us held our noses and voted for Kamala anyway, and yet…

    Y’all said that last election.

    …something strange appears to have happened that election.

    Vote Blue No Matter Who is, as a voting strategy, insane. You call people single-issue, but this strategy cares for no issue; if the Democratic nominee shot someone in the lungs on video in cold blood, you’d suggest we vote for them anyway because the Republican shot someone else twice. Trans people are expendable, homeless people are expendable, immigrants are expendable. Everyone is expendable so long as Team Blue wins. Or for that matter, when they don’t—it’s not like the strategy seems to be working, after all.

    At what point do you admit that Democrat politicians have agency and can choose to change their policies? How badly do they have to hurt you before you demand that they do better? Why do you blame us for their decision to have fucking awful policy?

    We have a two-party system, but that does not limit us to two options. We can have better candidates, but that requires us to stand together rather than letting ourselves be held hostage by a party that hates us and assuming that democracy exists only within a voting booth. Stop giving up.