Is this a joke about the EU’s desire to curb misinformation? Like, I’m 90% sure that you can’t be serious.

Everything you wrote is factually wrong.

Europe has a lot less social resistance to this stuff. You can see it here. Watching the watchmen turns out to be one of the best tools for defending democracy. And still the call is for more censorship. It’s insane.

Did you pick up, like 2 weeks ago, when Italy fined Cloudflare for not censoring hard enough? Italy is literally ruled by a fascist party. They literally present themselves as being in the tradition of Benito Mussolini. No one bats a fucking eye.

Of course, the censorship is about copyright; protecting the Italian media industry. Maybe people here are too young or unpolitical to remember Italian media billionaire Silvio Berlusconi. In the 1990s, he used his media empire to get himself elected prime minister and escape prosecution for corruption. At one point, he used his office and some lies to get an underage prostitute, he’d been fucking at one of his sex parties, released from police custody. That guy was Italy’s longest serving prime minister since WW2. He then was an MEP until 2022.

Italian intellectuals, identified Trump as a Berlusconi-type populist 10 years ago, when Berlusconi was fading out and Trump rising. Maybe something could be learned from that experienced.

So it’s not like Europeans believe that “It can’t happen here.” It is happening all the time. I think the pro-censorship people are simply so privileged that they can’t conceive of the state ever not being on their side. They seem to feel that being harassed or doxed on the net is the worst that could ever happen to them, personally, and they might be right.

Right. Merely making the recording may already be criminal; not only sharing it. I didn’t want to sound too alarmist. But when we’re ad it. Pixelating the faces means processing personal data which may already be illegal.

What it boils down to is this: If some lawless government goons arrest anyone recording their deeds and seized their phones, no honest, law-abiding judge or police officer would see a problem with that. Anyone live-streaming, just in case, would be guilty of violating fundamental rights in the eyes of all defenders of European values. The government could rely on the technical and organizational infrastructure to enforce GDPR to suppress inconvenient videos without bending the law.

But no problem. Freedom of information is in the constitution. So you just go to court and insist on your right. Of course, a far right government will have packed the highest courts with its people, and so you lose. Well, everyone has rights. Freedom of information isn’t everything. No problem there.

Just bear in mind that many Fediverse instances are in Europe and Europe has no free speech culture. EG In Germany, people who upload videos of police are commonly prosecuted for GDPR violations. It violates the fundamental rights of the police officers. When European activists oppose Big Tech in the name of democracy, they want more censorship; more government control.

Yeah, one would think so. And those were the hobbyists that Gates was addressing in that open letter.

“They” is the copyright industry. The same people, who are suing AI companies for money, want the Internet Archive gone for more money.

I share the fear that the copyrightists reach a happy compromise with the bigger AI companies and monopolize knowledge. But for now, AI companies are fighting for Fair Use. The Internet Archive is already benefitting from those precedents.

In the US, copyright is limited by Fair Use. It is still IP. Eventually, you’d just be changing how Fair Use works. Not all for the better, I think.

Maybe one could compare it to a right of way over someone’s physical property. The public may use it for a certain purpose, in a limited way, which lowers its value. But what value it has, belongs to the owner.

What kind of person owned a computer as a hobby in 1976?

That’s true in the same way that Trump’s tariffs are paid by other countries. Which is to say: Not at all.

Bill Gates was no billionaire at the time. His background was probably shared by almost all computer hobbyists at the time.

“Property is theft.”

the caveats that commercializing someone else’s work or taking credit for someone else’s work should be illegal.

So, not actually abolishing IP, then.

It’s a bit of a split among libertarians. Some very notable figures like Ayn Rand were strong believers in IP. In fact, Ayn Rand’s dogmas very much align with what is falsely represented as left-wing thought in the context of AI.

It’s really irritating for me how much conservative capitalist ideals are passed off as left-wing. Like, attitudes on corporations channel Adam Smith. I think of myself as pragmatic and find that Smith or even Hayek had some good points (not Rand, though). But it’s absolutely grating how uneducated that all is. Worst of all, it makes me realize that for all the anti-capitalist rhetoric, the favored policies are all about making everything worse.

I really don’t get how opinions on intellectual property and its “theft” turn 180 whenever AI is mentioned.

I find it very unexpected. It used to be understood that IP laws favor monopolies. EG I don’t remember the OS community being on the side of Oracle in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_Inc.

Maybe it just passed me by.

For fastest inference, you want to fit the entire model in VRAM. Plus, you need a few GB extra for context.

Context means the text (+images, etc) it works on. That’s the chat log, in the case of a chatbot, plus any texts you might want summarized/translated/ask questions about.

Models can be quantized, which is a kind of lossy compression. They get smaller but also dumber. As with JPGs, the quality loss is insignificant at first and absolutely worth it.

Inference can be split between GPU and CPU, substituting VRAM with normal RAM. Makes it slower, but you’ll probably will still feel that it’s smooth.

Basically, it’s all trade-offs between quality, context size, and speed.

It’s also funny how Lemmy is buying up this narrative.

The entire US economy is currently being propped up by growth in the AI/tech sector.

What’s happening is that Dementia Don is curb-stomping the US economy. AI investments, mainly in data centers, are the only thing that still seems promising. When you are on a trek and someone leads you through Death Valley, while pouring out all the water, you shouldn’t blame the last horse that still keeps going.

Putting the blame in the right place would certainly help, with a view toward the mid-terms.

Financially: Diversify. Make sure that you are not completely dependent on what happens in the US. But mind that Europe comes with its own imponderable risks (ie Putin). Same with China. Maybe some old leader dies and the new crew runs everything into the ground; they go to war with Taiwan, that sort of thing.

Ethical meaning : “private”, "anonymous, “not training with your data”, “no censured”, “open source”…

Yes. You have to be careful with the meaning of “ethical”. Most often, people write about “ethical AI” to demand money for copyright owners.

Case in point: Some people say that AI is only open source if the training data can also be shared freely. That means the training data has to be public domain or that permission by the copyright owner was obtained. If that’s what you mean by “open source”, then your options are extremely limited. EG some offerings from AllenAI.

Uncensored is also tricky. Many say that ethical AI does not output bad content. Of course, what bad content is depends very much on who you ask. The EU or China have strict legal requirements but not the same, of course. In any case, when you train an AI, you steer it to generate a certain kind of output. Respectable businesses don’t want NSFW stuff. Some horny individuals out there want exactly that. So it depends on what you want.

Check out the SillyTavernAI subreddit (and also LocalLlama). There you find people who value private, uncensored LLMs, though not necessarily copyright. It’s also where the above-mentioned horny individuals hang out for related reasons.

Duckduckgo offers free, anonymous access to major Chatbots. Maybe worth checking out.

Only if the medication doesn’t work. The evidence is that placebos don’t work. Mostly, the placebo effect is a statistical illusion.

It is plausible that the body will expend more energy to combat a disease if you are (sub-)consciously convinced that you are cared for and don’t need to stress. Stress hormones down-regulate the immune response. Cortisol, used for treatment of autoimmune disorders like asthma and allergies, is a stress hormone.

But a sham treatment could also have the opposite effect. If your subconscious understands that as a signal that you must get back into action, you may end up releasing stress hormones. These psychological effects are just too idiosyncratic and fickle to be used reliably.

Stuff like broken bones or cancer doesn’t respond to psychology at all. The body is already doing all it can.

ETA: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7156905/