Russia already had an agreement with Ukraine to respect the 1994 boundaries of Ukraine - the Budapest Memorandum.

It’s like if someone promised not to burgle your house. Then they burgle your house anyway - but promise they’ll stop burgling for real if you promise to let them keep the stuff they already took, and throw in some more, and promise to never to lock your doors.

Stargate SG-1, Season 4, Episode 6 has a variant of the loop trope, but everyone (including most of the protagonists, and everyone else on earth) don’t remember what happens, while two protagonists remember every loop until they are able to stop the looping.

They debrief the others who don’t remember at the end (except for the things they did when they took a loop off anyway!) - but they didn’t miss too much since everyone else on earth missed it.

Another fictional work - a book, not a movie / TV show / anime - is Stephen Fry’s 1996 novel Making History. The time travel aspect is questionable - he sends things back in time to stop Hitler being born, but no people travel through time. However, he remembers the past before his change, and has to deal with the consequences of having the wrong memories relative to everyone else.

No point asking them to justify why they have to ask, they probably don’t even know. Just say “Sorry, I don’t give that out”. I’ve never had a store push back after that - they probably get it all the time.

TIOBE is meaningless - it is just search engine result numbers, which for many search engines are likely a wildly inaccurate estimate of how many results match in their index. Many of those matches will not be about the relevant language, and the numbers probably have very little correlation to who uses it (especially for languages that are single letter, include punctuation in the name, or are a common English word).

Modems also make noises when connected. However, the noise of them connecting is more distinctive because they go through a handshake where you can hear distinct tones, but then negotiate a higher baud rate involving modulation of many different frequencies, at which point to the human ear it is indistinguishable from white noise (a sort of loud hissing). If you pick up the phone while the modem is connected at a higher baud rate (post the handshake), you’ll hear the hissing, and then eventually you picking up the phone will have caused too many errors for the connection to be sustained (due to introducing noise on the line), causing both ends to hang up. You’ll then hear the normal tone you hear when the called party has hung up the line.

I believe it is what Americans call what might be called an Owners Corporation / Body Corporate / Apartment Owners Association / Management Company in other parts of the English-speaking world.

When people say Local AI, they mean things like the Free / Open Source Ollama (https://github.com/ollama/ollama/), which you can read the source code for and check it doesn’t have anything to phone home, and you can completely control when and if you upgrade it. If you don’t like something in the code base, you can also fork it and start your own version. The actual models (e.g. Mistral is a popular one) used with Ollama are commonly represented in GGML format, which doesn’t even carry executable code - only massive multi-dimensional arrays of numbers (tensors) that represent the parameters of the LLM.

Now not trusting that the output is correct is reasonable. But in terms of trusting the software not to spy on you when it is FOSS, it would be no different to whether you trust other FOSS software not to spy on you (e.g. the Linux kernel, etc…). Now that is a risk to an extent if there is an xz style attack on a code base, but I don’t think the risks are materially different for ‘AI’ compared to any other software.

Blockchain is great for when you need global consensus on the ordering of events (e.g. Alice gave all her 5 ETH to Bob first, so a later transaction to give 5 ETH to Charlie is invalid). It is an unnecessarily expensive solution just for archival, since it necessitates storing the data on every node forever.

Ethereum charges ‘gas’ fees per transaction which helps ensure it doesn’t collapse under the weight of excess usage. Blocks have transaction limits, and transactions have size limits. It is currently working out at about US$7,500 per MB of block data (which is stored forever, and replicated to every node in the network). The Internet Archive have apparently ~50 PB of data, which would cost US$371 trillion to put onto Ethereum (in practice, attempting this would push up the price of ETH further, and if they succeeded, most nodes would not be able to keep up with the network). Really, this is just telling us that blockchain is not appropriate for that use case, and the designers of real world blockchains have created mechanisms to make it financially unviable to attempt at that scale, because it would effectively destroy the ability to operate nodes.

The only real reason to use an existing blockchain anyway would be on the theory that you could argue it is too big to fail due to legitimate business use cases, and too hard to remove censorship resistant data. However, if it became used in the majority for censorship resistant data sharing, and transactions were the minority, I doubt that this would stop authorities going after node operators and so on.

The real problems that an archival project faces are:

• The cost of storing and retrieving large amounts of data. That could be decentralised using a solution where not all data is stored on a chain - for example, IPFS.
• The problem of curating data and deciding what is worth archiving, and what is a true-to-source archive vs fake copy. This probably requires either a centralised trusted party, or maybe a voting system.
• The problem of censorship. Anonymity and opaqueness about what is on a particular node can help - but they might in some cases undermine the other goals of archival.

This is absolutely because they pulled the emergency library stunt, and they were loud as hell about it. They literally broke the law and shouted about it.

I think that you are right as to why the publishers picked them specifically to go after in the first place. I don’t think they should have done the “emergency library”.

That said, the publishers arguments show they have an anti-library agenda that goes beyond just the emergency library.

Libraries are allowed to scan/digitize books they own physically. They are only allowed to lend out as many as they physically own though. Archive knew this and allowed infinite “lend outs”. They even openly acknowledged that this was against the law in their announcement post when they did this.

The trouble is that the publishers are not just going after them for infinite lend-outs. The publishers are arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to lend out any digital copies of a book they’ve scanned from a physical copy, even if they lock away the corresponding numbers of physical copies.

Worse, they got a court to agree with them on that, which is where the appeal comes in.

The publishers want it to be that physical copies can only be lent out as physical copies, and for digital copies the libraries have to purchase a subscription for a set number of library patrons and concurrent borrows, specifically for digital lending, and with a finite life. This is all about growing publisher revenue. The publishers are not stopping at saying the number of digital copies lent must be less than or equal to the number of physical copies, and are going after archive.org for their entire digital library programme.

No

On economic policy I am quite far left - I support a low Gini coefficient, achieved through a mixed economy, but with state provided options (with no ‘think of the businesses’ pricing strategy) for the essentials and state owned options for natural monopolies / utilities / media.

But on social policy, I support social liberties and democracy. I believe the government should intervene, with force if needed, to protect the rights of others from interference by others (including rights to bodily safety and autonomy, not to be discriminated against, the right to a clean and healthy environment, and the right not to be exploited or misled by profiteers) and to redistribute wealth from those with a surplus to those in need / to fund the legitimate functions of the state. Outside of that, people should have social and political liberties.

I consider being a ‘tankie’ to require both the leftist aspect (✅) and the authoritarian aspect (❌), so I don’t meet the definition.

The fears people who like to talk about the singularity like to propose is that there will be one ‘rogue’ misaligned ASI that progressively takes over everything - i.e. all the AI in the world works against all the people.

My point is that more likely is there will be lots of ASI or AGI systems, not aligned to each other, most on the side of the humans.

I think any prediction based on a ‘singularity’ neglects to consider the physical limitations, and just how long the journey towards significant amounts of AGI would be.

The human brain has an estimated 100 trillion neuronal connections - so probably a good order of magnitude estimation for the parameter count of an AGI model.

If we consider a current GPU, e.g. the 12 GB GFX 3060, it can hold about 24 billion parameters at 4 bit quantisation (in reality a fair few less), and uses 180 W of power. So that means an AGI might use 750 kW of power to operate. A super-intelligent machine might use more. That is a farm of 2500 300W solar panels, while the sun is shining, just for the equivalent of one person.

Now to pose a real threat against the billions of humans, you’d need more than one person’s worth of intelligence. Maybe an army equivalent to 1,000 people, powered by 8,333,333 GPUs and 2,500,000 solar panels.

That is not going to materialise out of the air too quickly.

In practice, as we get closer to an AGI or ASI, there will be multiple separate deployments of similar sizes (within an order of magnitude), and they won’t be aligned to each other - some systems will be adversaries of any system executing a plan to destroy humanity, and will be aligned to protect against harm (AI technologies are already widely used for threat analysis). So you’d have a bunch of malicious systems, and a bunch of defender systems, going head to head.

The real AI risks, which I think many of the people ranting about singularities want to obscure, are:

• An oligopoly of companies get dominance over the AI space, and perpetuates a ‘rich get richer’ cycle, accumulating wealth and power to the detriment of society. OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and AWS are probably all battling for that. Open models is the way to battle that.
• People can no longer trust their eyes when it comes to media; existing problems of fake news, deepfakes, and so on become so severe that they undermine any sense of truth. That might fundamentally shift society, but I think we’ll adjust.
• Doing bad stuff becomes easier. That might be scamming, but at the more extreme end it might be designing weapons of mass destruction. On the positive side, AI can help defenders too.
• Poor quality AI might be relied on to make decisions that affect people’s lives. Best handled through the same regulatory approaches that prevent companies and governments doing the same with simple flow charts / scripts.

I looked into this previously, and found that there is a major problem for most users in the Terms of Service at https://codeium.com/terms-of-service-individual.

Their agreement talks about “Autocomplete User Content” as meaning the context (i.e. the code you write, when you are using it to auto-complete, that the client sends to them) - so it is implied that this counts as “User Content”.

Then they have terms saying you licence them all your user content:

“By Posting User Content to or via the Service, you grant Exafunction a worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid right and license (with the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to host, store, reproduce, modify for the purpose of formatting for display and transfer User Content, as authorized in these Terms, in each instance whether now known or hereafter developed. You agree to pay all monies owing to any person or entity resulting from Posting your User Content and from Exafunction’s exercise of the license set forth in this Section.”

So in other words, let’s say you write a 1000 line piece of software, and release it under the GPL. Then you decide to trial Codeium, and autocomplete a few tiny things, sending your 1000 lines of code as context.

Then next week, a big corp wants to use your software in their closed source product, and don’t want to comply with the GPL. Exafunction can sell them a licence (“sublicence through multiple tiers”) to allow them to use the software you wrote without complying with the GPL. If it turns out that you used some GPLd code in your codebase (as the GPL allows), and the other developer sues Exafunction for violating the GPL, you have to pay any money owing.

I emailed them about this back in December, and they didn’t respond or change their terms - so they are aware that their terms allow this interpretation.

Votes on this comment:

1. Came from 14 different instances - many of them major. Of those instances, the instance with the most votes contributed was lemmy.world (i.e. your own instance), from which my instance has seen 14 votes for that comment.
2. Of the voters, I looked at the distribution of the person IDs assigned on my instance, which approximately represents the order they were seen by my instance (e.g. they voted on or interacted with another comment). If there was vote manipulation, I’d expect to see lots of IDs close together. However, there are not runs of IDs that are close together. To avoid this when manipulating votes, they’d need to have planned in advance, and made accounts and used them individually over time before finally deploying them to downvote you.

If there are instances that are a significant source of vote manipulation, and the local admins are unwilling to address it, there are options available to instance admins like defederation.

However - in the case of your comments, there is no meaningful evidence of vote manipulation.

The best option is to run them models locally. You’ll need a good enough GPU - I have an RTX 3060 with 12 GB of VRAM, which is enough to do a lot of local AI work.

I use Ollama, and my favourite model to use with it is Mistral-7b-Instruct. It’s a 7 billion parameter model optimised for instruction following, but usable with 4 bit quantisation, so the model takes about 4 GB of storage.

You can run it from the command line rather than a web interface - run the container for the server, and then something like docker exec -it ollama ollama run mistral, giving a command line interface. The model performs pretty well; not quite as well on some tasks as GPT-4, but also not brain-damaged from attempts to censor it.

By default it keeps a local history, but you can turn that off.

I think the most striking thing is that for outsiders (i.e. non repo members) the acceptance rates for gendered are lower by a large and significant amount compared to non-gendered, regardless of the gender on Google+.

The definition of gendered basically means including the name or photo. In other words, putting your name and/or photo as your GitHub username is significantly correlated with decreased chances of a PR being merged as an outsider.

I suspect this definition of gendered also correlates heavily with other forms of discrimination. For example, name or photo likely also reveals ethnicity or skin colour in many cases. So an alternative hypothesis is that there is racism at play in deciding which PRs people, on average, accept. This would be a significant confounding factor with gender if the gender split of Open Source contributors is different by skin colour or ethnicity (which is plausible if there are different gender roles in different nations, and obviously different percentages of skin colour / ethnicity in different nations).

To really prove this is a gender effect they could do an experiment: assign participants to submit PRs either as a gendered or non-gendered profile, and measure the results. If that is too hard, an alternative for future research might be to at least try harder to compensate for confounding effects.

I think (unless I misunderstood the paper), they only included people who had a Google+ profile with a gender specified in the study at all (this is from 2016 when Google were still trying to make Google+ a thing).

Note that VPN is just trusting a different network.

If you trust your VPN provider not to misuse your unencrypted traffic / inject exploits, but not your mobile phone provider (or any other network provider you might roam onto), then a VPN provider could help.

If you trust your VPN provider less than the mobile phone provider, the situation is reversed - you would be better not to use a VPN.

If you trust them equally, there is probably no point using a VPN (except for the roaming situation, which could be forced in certain circumstances).

The government just has to print for the money, and use it for that

Printing money means taxing those that have cash or assets valued directly in the units of the currency being measured. Those who mostly hold other assets (say, for example, the means of production, or land / buildings, or indirect equivalents of those, such as stock) are unaffected. This makes printing money a tax that disproportionately affects the poor.

What the government really needs to do is tax the rich. Many top one percenters of income fight that, and unfortunately despite the democratic principle of one person, one vote, in practice the one percenters find ways to capture the government in many countries (through their lobbying access, control of the media, exploitation of weaknesses of the electoral system such as non-proportional voting and gerrymandering).

instead of bailing out the capitalists over and over.

Bailing out large enterprises that are valuable to the public is fine, as long as the shareholders don’t get rewarded for investing in a mismanaged but ‘too big to fail’ business (i.e. they lose most of their investment), and the end result is that the public own it, and put in competent management who act in the public interest. Over time, the public could pay forward previous generations investments, and eventually the public would own a huge suite of public services.

Yes, but the information would need to be computationally verifiable for it to be meaningful - which basically means there is a chain of signatures and/or hashes leading back to a publicly known public key.

One of the seminal early papers on zero-knowledge cryptography, from 2001, by Rivest, Shamir and Tauman (two of the three letters in RSA!), actually used leaking secrets as the main example of an application of Ring Signatures: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/3-540-45682-1_32. Ring Signatures work as follows: there are n RSA public keys of members of a group known to the public (or the journalist). You want to prove that you have the private key corresponding to one of the public keys, without revealing which one. So you sign a message using a ring signature over the ‘ring’ made up of the n public keys, which only requires one of n private keys. The journalist (or anyone else receiving the secret) can verify the signature, but obtain zero knowledge over which private key out of the n was used.

However, the conditions for this might not exist. With more modern schemes, like zk-STARKs, more advanced things are possible. For example, emails these days are signed by mail servers with DKIM. Perhaps the leaker wants to prove to the journalist that they are authorised to send emails through the Boeing’s staff-only mail server, without allowing the journalist, even collaborating with Boeing, to identify which Boeing staff member did the leak. The journalist could provide the leaker with a large random number r1, and the leaker could come up with a secret large random number r2. The leaker computes a hash H(r1, r2), and encodes that hash in a pattern of space counts between full stops (e.g. “This is a sentence. I wrote this sentence.” encodes 3, 4 - the encoding would need to limit sentence sizes to allow encoding the hash while looking relatively natural), and sends a message that happens to contain that encoded hash - including to somewhere where it comes back to them. Boeing’s mail servers sign the message with DKIM - but leaking that message would obviously identify the leaker. So the leaker uses zk-STARKs to prove that there exists a message m that includes a valid DKIM signature that verifies to Boeing’s DKIM private key, and a random number r2, such that m contains the encoded form of the hash with r1 and r2. r1 or m are not revealed (that’s the zero-knowledge part). The proof might also need to prove the encoded hash occurred before “wrote:” in the body of the message to prevent an imposter tricking a real Boeing staff member including the encoded hash in a reply. Boeing and the journalist wouldn’t know r2, so would struggle to find a message with the hash (which they don’t know) in it - they might try to use statistical analysis to find messages with unusual distributions of number of spaces per sentence if the distribution forced by the encoding is too unusual.