gravitas_deficiency

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gravitas_deficiency ,

“Turf” (as in territory) is the word you’re looking for.

“TERF” (as in JK Rowling) is (presumably) not.

gravitas_deficiency ,

I’m pretty sure T-54s don’t have autoloaders, and that’s a significant (and likely deeply un-economical) retrofit.

gravitas_deficiency ,

Frankly, it would be more useful to just use them as short-range artillery than that. Single-shot RC tanks sound like they’d be a complete waste.

gravitas_deficiency ,

Some foundational questions:

  • budget?
  • rough desired capacity?
  • desired level of resiliency?
gravitas_deficiency ,

Engineers:

we made a thing that tells you what it thinks you want to hear, and sometimes what it thinks you want to hear is absolutely insane

Tech CEOs:

let’s put it in fucking everything

gravitas_deficiency ,

Fool me 14 times, shame on me, I guess?

gravitas_deficiency ,

Magnum, times two

gravitas_deficiency ,

Why do I feel like this is making me Recall another recent awful idea?

gravitas_deficiency ,

An LLM has no comprehension of what it says. It’s just a puppy that is really good at performing for treats. This will always yield nonsense a meaningful proportion of the time.

I don’t care how statistically good your model can be under certain constraints and inputs. At the end of the day, all you’ve done is classically condition your computer.

gravitas_deficiency , (edited )

But now it’s on your iPhone.

I agree that it’s dumb.

It will still make stock go up.

gravitas_deficiency , (edited )

That’s great. But that’s not how it’s being marketed and sold to the public. It’s being sold as an oracle (as in crystal ball, not database). And it’s misleading and hurting people as a result.

I’ll reiterate: An LLM has no comprehension of what it says.

It’s a matter of engineering ethics, on multiple levels:

  • the training data in the vast majority of cases is outright stolen
  • it’s being sold as something that it’s not, and the result is causing real damage to people and society in a ton of ways we’re still discovering
  • most people deeply involved in developing LLMs, and basically all of the technical leadership, are categorically ignoring and abrogating any and all responsibility around this “magical” new system they’ve made. We’ve seen this before with social networking. We know where this road leads.

I’m not saying the tech should be banned. That’s obviously idiotic. Neural nets can - and are - used for tons of fascinating and excellent applications. It’s just that my staunch opinion is that LLMs are a terrible application of that the tech at this stage of development, and it’s particularly terrible that OpenAI/Microsoft/etc are aggressively foisting this technology on the public, and simultaneously refusing to take any ethical responsibility for it.

gravitas_deficiency ,

I’m saying that I wish that more people involved with the core development of the technology took the ethical considerations seriously, and communicated those concerns as a first-order issue when they talk about applications like this.

It’s fascinating tech, but the way it’s being employed these days is deeply irresponsible.

gravitas_deficiency , (edited )

Nope, because I drive an 03 Jetta lol

Edit: I’m also quite selective about the stuff I install on my phone, and nothing has “always on” location data.

Some company heads hoped return-to-office mandates would make people quit, survey says ( arstechnica.com )

Nearly two in five (37 percent) managers, directors, and executives believe their organization enacted layoffs in the last year because fewer employees than they expected quit during their RTO. And their beliefs are well-founded: One in four (25 percent) VP and C-suite executives and one in five (18 percent) HR pros admit they...

gravitas_deficiency ,

That much is obvious

gravitas_deficiency ,

Oooh, I didn’t realize the Northern Fleet was scheduled to commission another water-permeable submarine! I hope the fish enjoy it :)

gravitas_deficiency ,

I once knew a man from Nantucket

gravitas_deficiency ,

For my next trick, I will be teaching crabs to read

gravitas_deficiency ,

Yeah, my bet is that they’ll start a huge resupply operation using the rail lines, and intentionally slow the civilian evacuation traffic on the bridge (perhaps using both sides of the road) to a crawl, thus using their own citizens as human shields.

gravitas_deficiency ,

This is the natural state of the vatnik

gravitas_deficiency ,

If you bring a black light at night, it looks like the surface of the moon in direct sunlight

gravitas_deficiency ,

Well, you know, there’s a type of “immigration” that fascists love, and the wage cost is zero. You just have to keep the “prisoners with jobs” alive.

gravitas_deficiency ,

I would recommend reading the whole article. I’m familiar with the vast majority of the historical parallels they lay out, and I agree. If you’re less of a history nerd than I am, it’s an excellent brief on the high-level geopolitical and economic lead-in to WW2, and how disturbingly similar it is to what’s going on since 2022 (or really, since 2014) Ukraine.

gravitas_deficiency ,

He’s probably grumpy because of the time difference in wherever the Russians run Fancy Bear out of these days

gravitas_deficiency ,

You 😘

gravitas_deficiency ,

They also do psyops, social network influence/astroturfing, blackmail, etc

Israel’s obstruction of investigation into 7 October rape allegations risks truth never being found, advocates warn ( www.middleeastmonitor.com )

Israel’s leadership is pushing the allegations that Hamas fighters raped Israeli women during the October 7 attacks for its own political objectives while the government’s ongoing refusal to allow the United Nations to conduct a full investigation into the matter threatens to hinder any evidence, advocates have warned.

gravitas_deficiency ,

And that is, in fact, the point.

For Bibi, the propaganda value is far higher - and far more important - than actually seeking any sort of meaningful and rational justice for his citizens.

gravitas_deficiency ,

I mean… it’s not, really. For a lot of reasons.

But none of those reasons actually matter here, because any plane is easy to destroy if you don’t properly secure your airbase, and Russia demonstrably kinda sucks at securing their airbases. They tend to rely on the fact that Russia is huge. Which doesn’t help if the people gunning for your shit are highly motivated and can blend relatively effortlessly into your own society.

gravitas_deficiency ,

It could have been OSINT, or it could have been data from a KH-whatever-we’re-up-to-now; either way, good kill.

gravitas_deficiency ,

It’s unbelievably frustrating, because most people at the outset of the conflict were horrified and strongly against just letting Russia do what they wanted.

Instead of capitalizing on that fairly universal public outrage and doing the right thing, the ossified thought processes of pretty much everyone in charge of anything in the west made them hem and haw and delay and prevaricate and play right into Putin’s hand.

It’s pretty clear that Putin’s geopolitical tactics, while completely malevolent and fairly transparent to a HUGE number of people, clearly work incredibly well on our political leaders - in fact, that’s ultimately the only audience he’s ever been playing for.

gravitas_deficiency ,

Oh, yeah, I 100% agree. That was the time to step in if anyone actually gave a shit about nuclear non-proliferation.

I consider the complete lack of meaningful response to the 2014 invasion to be both Obama and Merkel’s single most egregious foreign policy failure. Merkel also rapidly thawed relations with Russia after that, and continued to aggressively push for closer ties with Russia, and this is the result. She continues to insist that her approach at the time was correct; she’s going to be remembered alongside the likes of Neville Chamberlain because of it.

gravitas_deficiency ,

Seriously.

Biden and the rest of NATO should have said something along these lines:

If you intend to proceed with your invasion of Ukraine, it will fail. If you send transports or helicopters to capture strategic objectives, they will be shot down. If you send ground forces across the border, they will be destroyed with prejudice. If you fire missiles into Ukraine, they will be destroyed, as will their launch platforms, where feasible. We did it to Iraq twice; we can do it to you.

We will restrict our actions to Ukrainian territorial boundaries at the outset, but be warned: any attack on NATO or allied assets outside of Ukraine will be met with immediate lethal response.

This is not a negotiation. This is a statement of policy going forward.

So fuckin tired of limpdick neoliberal geopolitical leadership.

gravitas_deficiency ,

The point I’m making is that a strong response out of the gate would have made what’s now turning into a massive conflict a lot shorter and far less catastrophic.

gravitas_deficiency ,

I’m in this picture and I don’t like it

gravitas_deficiency ,

Like, the vast majority of the less interesting, non-cutting-edge stuff. The PRC does have fabs and everything; it’s just that they are several generations back from cutting edge. And nobody wants to stick their really cutting edge tech into a mainland Chinese factory, because they’ve got an established pattern and practice of outright stealing and reverse-engineering anything interesting they can get their hands on. They don’t give a shit about any IP rules unless it’s their rules.

gravitas_deficiency ,

Chip fabs simply do not work at a small scale, if you want to sell them at anything resembling a reasonable cost. Modern chip lithography takes a truly titanic amount of capital to set up, and it takes years. And by then the industry has moved on.

gravitas_deficiency ,

The primary difference is that we, and our allies, do make cutting edge lithography equipment, and we’re building factories with that stuff in it.

gravitas_deficiency ,

That’s not how FAA regs work. There is no such thing as standing room on a plane.

gravitas_deficiency ,

A human can only do bad or dumb things so quickly.

A human writing code can do bad or dumb things at scale, as well as orders of magnitude more quickly.

US to send new $225 million military aid package to Ukraine, officials say ( apnews.com )

The U.S. will send about $225 million in military aid to Ukraine, U.S. officials said Thursday, in a new package that includes ammunition Kyiv’s forces could use to strike threats inside Russia to defend the city of Kharkiv from a heavy Russian assault....

gravitas_deficiency ,

I’m glad he signed off on more aid, but holy fuck it is so goddamn depressing watching him micromanage Ukraine at the level of Kissinger micromanaging the Vietnam War.

gravitas_deficiency ,

Except in today’s geopolitical climate, a Polish soldier on border guard duty next to Belarus or Kaliningrad really should be keeping his head on a swivel.

Putin’s “little green men” and weaponization of migrants (as well as “migrants” - i.e. not actually migrants, and possibly just people from prison told to “go here and make problems, and you get a pardon in Russia”) are well established and known tactics at this point.

gravitas_deficiency ,

https://media4.giphy.com/media/s239QJIh56sRW/giphy.gif

gravitas_deficiency ,

Yes, though it should be mentioned that Obama was putting things on track to normalize relations… and then Trump summarily ruined that, largely just because it was a thing that Obama did, and he fuckin HATES Obama.

gravitas_deficiency ,

It’s like the Israelis watched us do both Iraq round 2 and Afghanistan, and instead of seeing it as a cautionary tale, they were like “hmmm yes this is excellent”

gravitas_deficiency ,

Don’t have to win any hearts and minds if there aren’t any hearts or minds left taps forehead

gravitas_deficiency ,

If Trump wins in November, you can be sure that Trump will send squadrons of B-52s to carpet bomb Gaza and the West Bank into dust and call it “assisting Israel with their territorial security”.

gravitas_deficiency ,

Man, the last threat the author received was absolutely BEGGING for the navy seal copypasta lololol

Lemmy.ml tankie censorship problem

I feel like we need to talk about Lemmy's massive tankie censorship problem. A lot of popular lemmy communities are hosted on lemmy.ml. It's been well known for a while that the admins/mods of that instance have, let's say, rather extremist and onesided political views. In short, they're what's colloquially referred to as...

gravitas_deficiency ,

Inaccurate - the tankie pulling the switch would be smiling

gravitas_deficiency ,

Yeah but that doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as nicely

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