Like I said, social media. “It happened” in the kind of environment where people tend to get kinda deranged about politics.

For sure, most references to the phrase these days will get you leftists complaining about it, justifiably and otherwise. I checked and got the same results. But it was still a thing. I can’t tell you how much because I don’t have the time or energy to investigate that, but it wasn’t just leftists being sarcastic. It was real.

so we need to vote for a dead fish,

please dear god can we blame the metaphorical fish for committing suicide, please, this was a decision they consciously made. I’m so tired of infighting. I’m genuinely exhausted

This right here. I wish I’d thought of saying it like this before; you’ve made your understanding of your interlocutor’s position clear, while also explaining how withholding votes can be powerful and shouldn’t be thrown out as an option. Well said!

Important to remember that this kind of system can and will have problems of its own aplenty; unions can turn bad, too. Still, I agree it’d almost certainly be better than what we have now, low a bar as that is.

It happened a lot when Biden was the nominee, and again for Harris too. It’s probably not the kind of thing you’d hear from regular people though—most political sayings aren’t, because real people in real life touching grass together tend to be more normal than that. It’s more common on social media and the like, and can probably be traced back to political campaigns, honestly. Still important to push back against, because even if people don’t say it, that doesn’t mean they won’t believe it.

You were the only one here suggesting this required an explanation.

Alright, I think you’re being deliberately antagonistic now. Bye!

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.

In case anyone’s like me and was curious if such a claim might’ve had a conflict-of-interest in it, have a look at the site’s logo:

I’m gonna go with “yes.”

You didn’t stop reading? Then it’s a bit weird that you’d think I don’t know autistic people have empathy, unless you decided to arbitrarily take the most bad faith reading you could’ve done. If that’s the case, I recommend taking breathers before posting so that you don’t do that.

Did you stop reading the rest of the post when you saw that? Because it really looks like you did.

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.

Agreed. And this is why the Democrats need to change yesterday.

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There is absolutely anti-Newsom astroturfing going on right now.

I don’t trust that mail any more than you do. But you know what I also don’t like? Being compared to it.

I have a feeling that if we’d been complaining about this a few months back there’d have been a decent chance you’d have nodded your head and said “Yeah, Gavin has some serious problems.” But now that he’s being talked up as a presidential candidate, we get this. And it’s just as utterly ridiculous as the last n times I’ve heard it.

He’s getting criticized a lot now because there’s a push to have him go for the presidency. That’s a big deal! It gets attention! And it’s a serious goddamn concern for people who don’t want a fucking transphobe president! That’s not astroturfing, for God’s sake!

If there was ever a time to push for a less shit candidate, it’s NOW, way before the election. If you’re going to shit on us for demanding better now of all times, then it doesn’t sound to me like you want us to have better at all.

I do avoid LLMs on principle. I find the technology and the manner in which it is used repugnant for a variety of reasons, most but not all of which I’ve already elaborated on here. At this point, I hate it even in the very niche scenario where it is useful, precisely because I think it does too much harm to be deserving of acceptance in any field at all. The most I can say for it is that I might be willing to slowly change that stance once this horrid bubble pops and the world stops getting set aflame for the sake of stock options.

Given your befuddlement at my stance though, I feel I should highlight and restate the following:

Almost nobody actually wanted Proton to make this. They just went and did it to chase a trend, ignoring the many people who hate it all the while. The last thing I need is for the the company that my email depends on to start getting dragged around by tech bros. If they’re willing to make a decision as rash and irresponsible as that, it is a clear indicator that worse is to come.

The presence of an LLM on a site is indicative to me of the character of those running it. It speaks to trend-following, a lack of understanding, and disdain for the intricacies of human work. If they weren’t trend-followers, they’d understand that LLMs have utterly failed to prove themselves as actually useful and would hold off to see if they ever do before using them. If they understood what was going on, they’d know that what LLMs actually do is typically irrelevant to most businesses. If they had any respect for the depths of creativity or effort, they’d know that what modern-day “AI” creates is a hollow imitation; a series of black-boxes that vaguely approximate a thing without having the capacity to understand anything that makes it up. And they’d know that in so doing such software creates something broken that serves only to devalue the efforts of real artists and writers, both in how it convinces studios to ignorantly fire them to improve a number at the expense of quality, and in how its rampant use as a cheating tool engenders environments of serious distrust.

If someone’s got an LLM on their site, or if they’ve decided to offer an LLM of their own through their business, they communicate to me a serious deficit in their understanding of the world at large. That the only thing they’re interested in is a graph someone showed them at a marketing meeting. They want metrics for investors, not a good product—and if that’s the kind of goals they’ve got, what reason have I to believe they won’t step on me to accomplish them?

Proton is making an LLM, and from that I know that their leadership is failing and that their future is likely bleak. I can’t trust my email in those hands.

Because companies that chase LLMs tend not to give me a choice, that’s why. They inject it into everything they touch because they think it’s the Future™, and therefore I must obviously want it around every second of my life, every day, consequences be damned. The earth can burn, my privacy can erode, misinformation can run rampant, and the copyright of small artists can die, all for the sake of an overused, scarcely-functional “tool” that a bunch of MBAs think I can’t so much as breathe without.

Almost nobody actually wanted Proton to make this. They just went and did it to chase a trend, ignoring the many people who hate it all the while. The last thing I need is for the the company that my email depends on to start getting dragged around by tech bros. If they’re willing to make a decision as rash and irresponsible as that, it is a clear indicator that worse is to come.

its newly launched AI chatbot positioned as a privacy-friendly ChatGPT rival

Add another thing to the list of reasons I’m losing trust in Proton. Might start having to look at a new email provider soon, I guess.

I made a post about it for a more general discussion but I think it’s worth saying here too: Chris Hansen is an irresponsible hack at best and he is very likely to misinform. There are far better people around if you want to learn about the many harms to children caused by Roblox.