Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and then some time on kbin.social.

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Joined 4 months ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • There was a politics subreddit I was on that had a “downvoting is not allowed” rule. There’s literally no way to tell who’s downvoting on Reddit, or even if downvoting is happening if it’s not enough to go below 0 or trigger the “controversial” indicator.

    I got permabanned from that subreddit when someone who’d said something offensive asked “why am I being downvoted???” And I tried to explain to them why that was the case. No trial, one million years dungeon, all modmail ignored. I guess they don’t get to enforce that rule often and so leapt at the opportunity to find an excuse.




  • Especially because seeing the same information in different contexts helps mapping the links between the different contexts and helps dispel incorrect assumptions.

    Yes, but this is exactly the point of deduplication - you don’t want identical inputs, you want variety. If you want the AI to understand the concept of cats you don’t keep showing it the same picture of a cat over and over, all that tells it is that you want exactly that picture. You show it a whole bunch of different pictures whose only commonality is that there’s a cat in it, and then the AI can figure out what “cat” means.

    They need to fundamentally change big parts of how learning happens and how the algorithm learns to fix this conflict.

    Why do you think this?


  • There actually isn’t a downside to de-duplicating data sets, overfitting is simply a flaw. Generative models aren’t supposed to “memorize” stuff - if you really want a copy of an existing picture there are far easier and more reliable ways to accomplish that than giant GPU server farms. These models don’t derive any benefit from drilling on the same subset of data over and over. It makes them less creative.

    I want to normalize the notion that copyright isn’t an all-powerful fundamental law of physics like so many people seem to assume these days, and if I can get big companies like Meta to throw their resources behind me in that argument then all the better.


  • Remember when piracy communities thought that the media companies were wrong to sue switch manufacturers because of that?

    It baffles me that there’s such an anti-AI sentiment going around that it would cause even folks here to go “you know, maybe those litigious copyright cartels had the right idea after all.”

    We should be cheering that we’ve got Meta on the side of fair use for once.

    look up sample recover attacks.

    Look up “overfitting.” It’s a flaw in generative AI training that modern AI trainers have done a great deal to resolve, and even in the cases of overfitting it’s not all of the training data that gets “memorized.” Only the stuff that got hammered into the AI thousands of times in error.









  • I once got permabanned from a politics subreddit (I think it was /r/canadapolitics) that had a “downvoting is not permitted” rule, because there was a guy getting downvotes and I offered him an explanation for why I thought he was getting them. That counted as evidence that I had downvoted him, I guess.

    My response: I sent one message to the mods that was essentially “really?” And then when there was no response I unsubbed from that subreddit and moved on. I see no point in participating in subreddits with ridiculous rules and ridiculous enforcement.

    Granted, unsubbing from politics subreddits is generally a good idea even when not banned. But eh.

    The only other subreddit I’m banned in is /r/artisthate, which I never visited in the first place. Apparently they scan other subreddits for signs of users who don’t hate artificial intelligence enough and preemptively ban them. That was kind of hilarious.

    Anyway, I guess my advice is don’t get too deeply “invested” in a community that can be so easily and arbitrarily taken away from you in the first place. And also manage your passwords better.


  • It’s not specifically oxygen that’s linked to life, it’s chemical disequilibrium. Oxygen is highly reactive, there are lots of minerals that will bind it up and there aren’t any natural geological processes that unbind it again in significant quantities. If you put an oxygen atmosphere on a lifeless planet then pretty soon all of the oxygen will be bound up in other compounds - carbon dioxide, silicon oxides, ferric oxides, and so forth. There has to be some process that’s constantly producing oxygen in vast quantities to keep Earth’s atmosphere in the state that it’s in.

    There are other chemicals that could also be taken as signs of life, depending on the conditions on a planet. Methane, for example, also has a short lifespan under Earthlike conditions. You may have seen headlines a little while back about the detection of “life signs” on Venus, in that case it was phosphine gas (PH3) that they thought they’d spotted (turns out it may have been a false alarm). These sorts of gasses can be detected in planetary atmospheres at interstellar distances, especially in the case of something like Earth where it’s quite flagrant.

    Even if these are sometimes false alarms, in a “Dark Forest” scenario it’d still be worth sending a probe to go and kill whatever planets exhibit signs like that. It’s a lot cheaper and quieter than trying to fight an actual civilization. That’s why I can’t see why we wouldn’t have already been wiped out aeons ago in this scenario.


  • But that’s not actually true. We’ve been “broadcasting” the fact that there’s life on Earth in the form of the spectrographic signature of an oxygen-rich atmosphere, which is a clear sign that photosynthesis is going on. There’s no geological process that could maintain that much oxygen in the atmosphere. The Great Oxidation Event is when that started.

    We have the technology to detect this kind of thing already, at our current level. Any civilization that could reach out and attack another solar system would be able to very easily see it.



  • Well, “relatively cheaply” is a hard standard to nail down. I would say “no”, though. Antimatter is very expensive to manufacture and store and you’re going to need a lot of it. All of the energy that comes out of an RKV hitting its target has to be put into it in the first place, probably several times over given the inefficiencies likely inherent in the process.