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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • xor@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoAsklemmy@lemmy.mlAny tips for a new user?
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    6 days ago

    As a more serious aside to the above, it is generally worth paying a bit of attention to which instance other users you interact with. There’s obviously no blanket statement you can make about the users of particular instances, but there are definitely certain instances that are more appealing to… certain groups of users.

    lemmy.ml in particular has a bit of a reputation for having tankies on it, but there’s lots of very interesting and reasonable people there (or here, I suppose, given this is an ml community), also.


  • I think 3) is a really interesting point, and probably the primary reason why a model like that may be less viable for e.g. the Guardian. I think having that parasocial relationship is key to having people take interest enough to be willing to pay for the extra content around the main news output. My concern is that a model like that might incentivise being intentionally divisive and/or making the main content be more like entertainment than information.


  • Sure, personalised ads can be seen as a form of an invasion of privacy, and everybody has a right to not engage with any organisation for any reason they like. But ads are an imperfect solution to the fact that it’s impossible to run a news organisation at that scale on voluntary donations and un-personalised ads alone, and it’s definitely preferable (in my view, at least) to having a total paywall.

    Unless you have an innovative alternative income source to propose, I’m not sure I see what alternative there is.


  • Respectfully, your argument seems to simultaneously be that they:

    a) need a better source of income, because ads and subscriptions aren’t raising enough revenue

    b) are acting unreasonably by asking you to allow them to use one of those revenue sources

    “Would you rather pay for this service, or have ads on it?” Doesn’t seem like an unreasonable ask, frankly. Especially given that it can be trivially avoided with an ad blocker, anyway, and will not prohibit you from reading the article if you do so (this, to me, is the key difference compared to other outlets that have similar requirements).

    As far as I can tell, their statement was that they will always make the content available for free. Serving that content with some ads alongside it doesn’t violate that policy.

    Edit: as an aside, having “my one news source” is a bad way to engage with the media. Every source will have their own priority, biases, errors and blind spots that will change over time; you should have a diverse set of sources, ideally with different mediums.

    Per the above, here’s some of the sources in my media diet, in no particular order: The Guardian, Byline Times, TLDR News, BBC News (digital & radio), Al Jazeera, Le Monde, the UN, Novara Media, PoliticsJOE, New York Times, Reuters, AP, Financial Times, Bellingcat

    Edit: wrt “Centralist [sic] bore me”, yeah, sometimes a reasonable take on the news is boring, but important nonetheless. Sorry 🤷





  • I’m not necessarily saying they’re conflicting goals, merely that they’re not the same goal.

    The incentive for the generator becomes “generate propaganda that doesn’t have the language chatacteristics of typical LLMs”, so the incentive is split between those goals. As a simplified example, if the additional incentive were “include the word bamboo in every response”, I think we would both agree that it would do a worse job at its original goal, since the constraint means that outputs that would have been optimal previously are now considered poor responses.

    Meanwhile, the detector network has a far simpler task - given some input string, give back a value representing the confidence it was output by a system rather than a person.

    I think it’s also worth considering that LLMs don’t “think” in the same way people do - where people construct an abstract thought, then find the best combinations of words to express that thought, an LLM generates words that are likely to follow the preceding ones (including prompts). This does leave some space for detecting these different approaches better than at random, even though it’s impossible to do so reliably.

    But I guess really the important thing is that people running these bots don’t really care if it’s possible to find that the content is likely generated, just so long as it’s not so obvious that the content gets removed. This means they’re not really incentivised to spend money training models to avoid detection.



  • believe that hierarchical violence was invented in the 20th century

    Well that’s just not what I said - you specifically said fascism, which was invented in the 20th century. It has more specific characteristics than just hierarchical violence; ethno-nationalism, militarisation of the state, flexible suppression of opposition and centralised autocracy.

    Just because you’re mad about being corrected doesn’t mean you need to be a dick about it.



  • Democracy isn’t a magic anti-fascist spell, sorry to break it to you. If someone can convince enough of the population to elect them, then they get into power, fascist or not.

    By your definition, there really hasn’t been a “real” democracy ever, frankly, since it depends on there being a state with no imbalance of wealth whatsoever. If that’s how you want to define it, sure, go ahead, but I’m going to keep using a definition of democracy that’s based on how the institutions of elections and the state are built, because that’s a useful way to discuss political systems, and “democracy is when only leaders I like are elected” is not.

    Brazil’s leaders are elected through universal suffrage, its speech and media are (relatively) free, that’s a democracy by any reasonably useful definition. There’s plenty to criticise in how that democracy functions, especially how money and power can influence those outcomes, but there is no perfect democracy, just the best attempts at what people can build within their existing social systems.

    Democracy is a political system, while capitalism is an economic system - understanding how they interact with each other is useful and important, but pretending they’re mutually exclusive is unnecessarily reductive, and closes the space to actually discuss those things.

    Edit: the mere fact that Bolsonaro attempted to retain power by force, but was unable to do so in the face of losing the election is direct evidence that there are functional democratic institutions in Brazil



  • Oh yeah, Russia is real good at keeping those tech oligarchs in check /s

    BRICS is such a loosely linked group that generalising like that is just never going to be accurate; Indian and South African, for example, policy on tech regulation couldn’t be more different if they tried.

    Don’t get me wrong, I think BRICS is a good organisation for economic cooperation between these very diverse countries, but there’s really no common political, social or economic characteristics.

    Brazil is a good example of that, because under Bolsonaro, it couldn’t have been more different - regulations on big tech and banning X would never have happened under his tenure (well, at least not with the same goals)



  • Let’s go look at your comment history and check, shall we?

    Defending yourself and launching invasions or orchestrating soldiers are two different things

    It’s not defending yourself if you have an army! What a great take 👍

    it sounds like the government is giving out plans and commanding the army. The government of ukraine and people from ukraine are two different things. When people ask what’s the alternative to send billions to the ukrainian government what they need to understand is that people can defend themself even without an authority on top of them playing war games with soldiers and possibly forcing conscript to go on missions

    Oh, why did Ukraine never consider magically winning the war by sheer willpower instead of this “having an army” nonsense, smart!

    I’m not twisting anything. Context matters, and the context of your post was you throwing a tantrum after around 10 different Lemmy users calling out your bad takes.

    If you believe not being drafted blah blah blah

    That’s not what I said at all, mere moments after you accused me of “twisting” what you said. What I said, louder for the people in the back is BEING UNABLE TO FIGHT BACK IN THE ENEMY’S TERRITORY, BEING DISALLOWED TO RECEIVE FOREIGN AID AND BEING DISALLOWED TO FORM AN ACTUAL ARMY is the equivalent of rolling over and dying.


  • The issue, from what I can tell, is that the question you’ve asked here doesn’t match the argument you just had in comments of a post about about the Ukraine war. The argument you were trying to make is not “war bad”, but specifically that Ukraine’s counteroffensive is bad. You were additionally arguing that it is morally reprehensible for other countries to provide economic support to Ukraine rather than leaving them to “defend themselves”.

    There’s a few important details that such an argument (intentionally) ignores.

    • This invasion was not a choice between war or no war. It was simply a decision between locations that battles take place. It is entirely legitimate for Ukraine to pursue a counteroffensive strategy into russian territory if it believes it to be a more effective military strategy than defensive attritional warfare within their own borders.
    • The fact that combat is taking place in Russian territory doesn’t change the fact that the war itself is a defensive war against an aggressor with overtly territorial/imperialist goals.
    • As far as I am aware, the units involved in the counteroffensive are exclusively non-drafted volunteer units.
    • Cessation of funding to Ukraine would lead to their imminent loss. The fact that they have been able to innovate cheaper strategies like domestic drone usage doesn’t change the fact that war is extremely expensive and technology dependent, and their economy is dwarfed by that of Russia’s.

    The combination of your proposals that Ukraine should not proactively fight back, and that they should lose access to the resources that would allow them to continue to defend their territory end us meaning that Ukraine would not be able to effectively defend itself.

    From reading your comments alongside this post, it seems that the title should actually be “how do you make someone understand that rolling over and dying is good”, to which the answer is “oh fuck off mate”