ricecake

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 days ago

Because of how the demographics are. The electoral college favors Republicans, and the popular vote favors Democrats.

A Democratic victory is expected to involve urban votes in typically contentious states, and urban votes take longer to count due to higher volume and more voters per polling location.

If the Republican candidate is getting enough votes from the quick to count low population density areas to win, it unfortunately means that the slow to count areas don't really matter in terms of what the outcome is.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

For the most part it's not useful, at least not the way people use it most of the time.
It's an engine for producing text that's most like the text it's seen before, or for telling you what text it's seen before is most like the text you just gave it.

When it comes to having a conversation, it can passibly engage in small talk, or present itself as having just skimmed the Wikipedia article on some topic.
This is kinda nifty and I've actually recently found it useful for giving me literally any insignificant mental stimulation to keep me awake while feeding a baby in the middle of the night.

Using it to replace thinking or interaction gives you a substandard result.
Using it as a language interface to something else can give better results.

I've seen it used as an interface to a set of data collection interfaces, where all it needed to know how to do was tell the user what things they could ask about, and then convert their responses into inputs for the API, and show them the resulting chart. Since it wasn't doing anything to actually interpret the data, it never came across as "wrong".

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 weeks ago

Oh, certainly. But common language has a term for high latency already, it's just not speed related. Everyone knows about a laggy connection on a phone or video call.

Fun fact: TCP has some implicit design considerations around the maximum cost of packet retransmission on a viable link that only works on roughly local planetary scale.
When NASA started to get out to Mars with the space Internet, they needed to tweak tcp to fit retransmission being proportionally much more expensive and let connections live longer before being "broken".

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 month ago (3 children)

When talking communication, most people think of the speed with which a unit quantity of information is transmitted, not the latency of that transmission.
Referring to bandwidth as the speed of a communication system is pretty normal, even for people who know how to use the term bandwidth.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yes, to a degree. A VPN protects you from an attacker on the same WiFi network as you and that's about it.

Most assaults on your privacy don't happen like that, and for the most part the attacks that do happen like that are stopped by the website using https and proper modern security.
The benefit of the VPN is that it puts some of that protection under your control, but only as far as your VPN provider.

A VPN is about as much protection from most cyber attacks as a gun is.

They're not a security tool, they're a networking tool. They let you do some network stuff securely, and done correctly they can protect from some things, but the point of them is "this looks like a small, simple LAN, but it's not".

It's much easier to package and sell network tools than security tools, and they're much more accepted by users, since security tools have a tendency to say "no" a lot, particularly when you might be doing something dumb,and users hate being told no, particularly when they're doing something dumb.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, it's definitely faster, but I'm not sure it's going to make too much of a difference for a Minecraft server.

With setting it up being a bit annoying by hand, I'd still rank the router option higher even if it's a worse VPN. Otherwise you risk ending up in that yak shaving situation where you're fighting with routing tables and DNS when you wanted a Minecraft server.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Oh for sure. What I meant was "check router for a built in VPN and use it if it has one, otherwise use wireguard because it's the easiest".

The specific VPN doesn't really matter so much. The built-in one would be the easiest, so checking for a solution that took a few clicks is worth it. :)

[–] [email protected] 30 points 2 months ago (5 children)

I would use something like wireguard, or another VPN service you can host yourself if your router supports it natively.

From the looks of it Minecraft servers seem to have dogshit authentication, so using some form of private network setup is going to be your best move.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

Eeeh, I still think diving into the weeds of the technical is the wrong way to approach it. Their argument is that training isn't copyright violation, not that sufficient training dilutes the violation.

Even if trained only on one source, it's quite unlikely that it would generate copyright infringing output. It would be vastly less intelligible, likely to the point of overtly garbled words and sentences lacking much in the way of grammar.

If what they're doing is technically an infringement or how it works is entirely aside from a discussion on if it should be infringement or permitted.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (4 children)

Basing your argument around how the model or training system works doesn't seem like the best way to frame your point to me. It invites a lot of mucking about in the details of how the systems do or don't work, how humans learn, and what "learning" and "knowledge" actually are.

I'm a human as far as I know, and it's trivial for me to regurgitate my training data. I regularly say things that are either directly references to things I've heard, or accidentally copy them, sometimes with errors.
Would you argue that I'm just a statistical collage of the things I've experienced, seen or read? My brain has as many copies of my training data in it as the AI model, namely zero, but "Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise sat down for a rousing game of chess with his friend Sherlock Holmes, and then Shakespeare came in dressed like Mickey mouse and said 'to be or not to be, that is the question, for tis nobler in the heart' or something". Direct copies of someone else's work, as well as multiple copyright infringements.
I'm also shit at drawing with perspective. It comes across like a drunk toddler trying their hand at cubism.

Arguing about how the model works or the deficiencies of it to justify treating it differently just invites fixing those issues and repeating the same conversation later. What if we make one that does work how humans do in your opinion? Or it properly actually extracts the information in a way that isn't just statistically inferred patterns, whatever the distinction there is? Does that suddenly make it different?

You don't need to get bogged down in the muck of the technical to say that even if you conceed every technical point, we can still say that a non-sentient machine learning system can be held to different standards with regards to copyright law than a sentient person. A person gets to buy a book, read it, and then carry around that information in their head and use it however they want. Not-A-Person does not get to read a book and hold that information without consent of the author.
Arguing why it's bad for society for machines to mechanise the production of works inspired by others is more to the point.

Computers think the same way boats swim. Arguing about the difference between hands and propellers misses the point that you don't want a shrimp boat in your swimming pool. I don't care why they're different, or that it technically did or didn't violate the "free swim" policy, I care that it ruins the whole thing for the people it exists for in the first place.

I think all the AI stuff is cool, fun and interesting. I also think that letting it train on everything regardless of the creators wishes has too much opportunity to make everything garbage. Same for letting it produce content that isn't labeled or cited.
If they can find a way to do and use the cool stuff without making things worse, they should focus on that.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Because the headline literally says "world's first all electric train", which it very much is not.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 months ago (1 children)

As written the headline is pretty bad, but it seems their argument is that they should be able to train from publicly available copywritten information, like blog posts and social media, and not from private copywritten information like movies or books.

You can certainly argue that "downloading public copywritten information for the purposes of model training" should be treated differently from "downloading public copywritten information for the intended use of the copyright holder", but it feels disingenuous to put this comment itself, to which someone has a copyright, into the same category as something not shared publicly like a paid article or a book.

Personally, I think it's a lot like search engines. If you make something public someone can analyze it, link to it, or derivative actions, but they can't copy it and share the copy with others.

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