I wouldn’t be so eager to assume so - the vocally anti-AI people resemble a lot the “AGI is coming!” crowds:

• neither analyses rationally the [merits | demerits] of the technology
• both assume applications to be [bad | good] solely on their usage of AI, with no regards to why and how
• both flip from decent reading proficiency to “I dun unrurrstand, I is so confusion…” mode once someone voices an argument they can’t handle
• both assume that, if you say something that might be superficially understood as against their view, you must be among in the other group thus you must be a shitty person

And they’ll do it even if you casually mention to be running locally some LLM or diffusion model, with no ties to the GAFAM + “Open”“A”“I” slop.

I agree, this sort of AI pattern detection works really well: it is not a big deal if the AI misidentifies a few strokes of ink, but it is a big deal how fast it’s able to process the whole thing. And it’s likely trained locally, for a specific task so no unreasonably high usage of electricity. It has almost all the pros but none of the cons!

I hold out hope against hope that something similar will one day be possible with the rotted lumps of Maya codices, but I’m not exactly holding my breath.

I hope so, but just like you I’m not holding my breath. Biological activity is messier; the surviving ones are likely full of holes.

To complicate things further, most of the works are already gone. A good chunk because of the Aztecs going full 1984 and destroying stuff to control the subjugated Maya peoples; then the Spaniards mixing disdain and hostility towards the local cultures, plus “plebs don’t need to read, the only thing to read is the Bible, and unless you’re a priest you’ll read it wrong”.

If we (people in general) do it, we’re being filthy thieves and the reason why everything is bad. But when it’s a megacorpo, it’s suddenly a-OK?

Screw this shit. Information should be like the air, free for everyone. Not free for the GAFAM chaste and paid for us untouchables.

If that’s correct good for him. Seriously.

The same people who might cheer you up, when you’re creating drama, are the ones who silently avoid you when it comes to working together. Because drama is only fun when it affects other people, not you.

And going by what Simona Vetter said in the mailing list, this is not the first time:

[Vetter] And this isn’t the first time or the second, by now it’s a pretty clear pattern over some years. And with the first I could explain why you [Hector Martin] react like that and you had my full understanding, but eventually that runs a bit thin as an excuse. Now I’m left with the unlikely explanation that you just like thundering in as the cavalry, fashionably late, maximally destructive, because it entertains the masses on fedi [Mastodon?] or reddit or wherever.

And being off social media will both decrease the odds Martin creates drama, and reduce the visibility of the drama he creates.

To add to what @[email protected] said, I’ll use an example.

Alice and Bob are organising a party. Alice claims that they should serve cheap wine. Bob argues for cheap wine plus beer. Alice is rather stubborn on saying “no, we’ll get drunkards this way”; it’s a poor argument but it’s still about the drinks.

Then Charlie pops up out of nowhere. Charlie is not part of the party organisation, but he’s still planning to attend the party, and he’s a biiiig fan of beer. He picks a megaphone and says “Hey! Alice is calling every beer drinker a drunkard! As a beer drinker, I feel deeply offended by that. If I was Bob I’d simply buy lotsa beer and ignore Alice.”

Then you get a bunch of people, who’ll never attend the party, eating popcorn while they watch the “Alice vs. Bob+Charlie” fight. Except that there’s no fight; Alice and Bob are arguing about something, and Charlie is creating drama. And a few popcorn eaters are bound to exert pressure towards Alice to give beer an OK sign, without even bothering to hear her side of the matter.

That is brigading: regardless of his “intentions” Charlie is bringing random people into the discussion to exert pressure towards one side of the dispute. Including muppets that think that anyone trying to get what Alice says must be “illiterate beer haters”.

Now replace Alice, Bob, Charlie with Hellwig, Rust4Linux devs, Martin. Replace cheap wine with C and beer with Rust. It’s the same deal.

Yup, it does sound like him. But I genuinely believe that his goal is manufactories beelining to USA, and that doesn’t seem too likely for me.

I’ll go further. My headcanon is that Trump didn’t come up with this idea; someone else did, and carefully led Trump to it. That person knows that the manufactories won’t go to USA, but they don’t really care - they benefit from USA being economical and politically isolated, perhaps even at its population having decreased living standards.

Here’s the relevant kernel mailing list thread. There’s a lot of stuff going on before, mind you, but this part onwards is important.

If you didn’t read all of this (I don’t blame you), here’s how I am reading it:

• [Hector Martin] Rust devs, just submit the patch. Either Torvalds likes it or not. I assume that people against us are saboteurs. I know the future!
• [Simona Vetter] You can’t eat your cake and have it too; either call it quits or try to change things from the inside, not both. Also stop creating drama, it affects me, and I’ve seen you creating drama for years, just so social media platforms can have their popcorn.
• [Dave Arlie] Sima (Vetter) is right, stop creating drama. You are not helping [us? them?] this way.
• [Martin] I feel tired and this justifies my behaviour. I also got deeply offended with the word “cancer” being used to refer to the Rust4Linux project. The process is broken. If my brigading doesn’t work then say what else would.
• [Linus Torvalds] The process works dammit. Your brigading makes me not want to touch this shit. Patches matter, discussions matter, brigading doesn’t, you’re the problem here.

Martin’s toot (mentioned by Vetter was deleted, but still readable from an archive link.

Personally I think that Vetter, Arlie, Torvalds are being spot on. It’s relevant to note that, based on the mailing list plus this blog entry, Arlie is at the very least sympathetic towards the Rust4Linux project, if not part of it.

Yes and this might hurt China a bit, but it’ll hurt USA even more. It’s like shitting your own pants to make someone else smell it.

They were supposed to force those manufacturing plants to go to USA, but as the article shows it is not working:

[AsRock] “As for the 10% tariff applied to other products like GPU cards, we need some time to transfer the manufacturing to other countries.” [emphasis on the plural]

We already saw signs of this late last year, when PC Partner decided to relocate its headquarters from China to Singapore

And they likely won’t move into USA territory because USA might create some tax against the governments they import raw materials from, labour costs are high, and all that talk about expelling illegal immigrants will make labour costs even higher (lower labour supply = higher prices).

Thank you. Your and Blaze’s support make me feel genuinely happier ❤️

Discloser: I’m one of the mods there :)

Feel welcome to post everything language there!

I cross-posted this in the Linguistics comm ([email protected]), with a few additional comments. Might as well share them here:

There’s an earlier study from the Max Plank Society that estimates the family to be 8k years old (this one gives makes it 6kyo). That study was using a glottochronology technique; it gives you a decent guess about the age of a family/branch, but this one gives you actual data instead.

And yet both kind of mix the Caucasian and Steppes hypotheses - with Early PIE in the Caucasus, Late PIE in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe.

Our US government would consider it anti-semitic not to use a nazi salute twice on stage in front of millions of people.

I was almost going to mention Musk’s gesture as an example of how context dictates meaning, but removed it from my comment. Glad to see that someone else mentioned it though - that gesture can be only understood as a Nazi salute and as support to Nazism, nothing else.

[I’m neither from Australia nor USA, but it’s clear that Australia got it right. Musk and his puppet, on the other hand…]

Depending on how this is implemented*, that sounds sensible.

*the key here is that context should be always taken into account when interpreting symbols.

I mostly agree with you, I think that we’re disagreeing on details. And you’re being far, far more level-headed than most people who discuss this topic, who pretend that AI is either e-God or Satanic bytes. (So no, you aren’t an evil AI tech sis. Nor a Luddite.)

That said:

For clinical usage, just monitoring it isn’t enough - because when people know that there’s some automated system to catch their mistakes, or that they’re just catching the mistakes of that system, they get sloppier. You need really, really good accuracy.

Like, 95% accuracy might look like a lot, right? If it involves death or life, it means a death for each 20 cases, it’s rather high. In the meantime, if AlphaFold got it wrong 60% of the time instead of just 6%, it wouldn’t be a big deal.

Also, note that we’re both talking about “AI” as if it was a single thing. Under the hood it’s a bunch of completely different things; pattern recognition AI, predictive AI, generative AI, they work so differently from each other that we’d need huge walls of text to decide how good or bad each of them is.

A lot of those points boil down to the same thing: “what if the AI is wrong?”

If it’s something that you’ll need to check manually anyway, or where a mistake is not a big deal, that’s probably fine. But if it’s something where a mistake can affect someone’s well-being, that is bad.

Reusing an example from the pic:

• Predicting 3D structures of proteins, as in the example? OK! Worst hypothesis the researchers will notice that the predicted structure does not match the real one.
• Predicting if you have some medical problem? Not OK. A false negative can cost a life.

That’s of course for the usage. The creation of those systems is another can of worms, and it involves other ethical concerns.

There’s a similar one in Portuguese:

• [Original] Por que “tudo junto” é separado e “separado” é tudo junto?
• [Literal translation] Why is “everything together” separated (written as separated words) and “separated” is everything together (written as a single word)?

What a bunch of muppets. I bet that they don’t even know Fermat’s last theorem!

This is great stuff. I’ll add a few hints of my own.

There’s no such thing as “global Lemmy admins”; there are the admins of your home instance (where you’re registered to) and the admins of the instance where you’re posting. It’s messier because each group will enforce different rules, but it also means that no group of arseholes can kick you completely out of Lemmy.

If you’re a newcomer odds are that you don’t know which would be the best home instance for you. That’s completely OK - almost everyone was like this, including me. So if you don’t feel satisfied with your home instance, create a new account in another instance and migrate.

Desktop users might benefit from the extension “Instance Assistant for Lemmy & Kbin” (Firefox link, Chrome link).

App users: remember when Reddit had a whole rainbow of third party apps to choose from? Lemmy is like this: there’s Jerboa (the official one) but also Voyager, Mlem, Boost, and many others. Give this link a check, or just look for “Lemmy” in your app store.

I know. However my “time off” has been a bit too long.

I think that I’ll need to make it a daily duty - at least look for content to post in my comms. Specially for [email protected], I’ve been neglecting it even harder ;_;