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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’ll be the guy who suggests the unusual options, then:

    • a steam controller; they take some getting used to, but they have some really nice quality of life features that nothing else has (mouse control via the joystick pads, and the paddles on the back!) and are ideal for bigger hands as it’s nice and chunky. They’re built specifically for PC use, so the support is as good as it gets. I think they don’t feel as “premium” as they’re quite lightweight plastic as opposed to the heavy metal of e.g. Xbox elite

    • the Nintendo Switch Pro controller; this one wins on the durability front imo, all Nintendo’s stuff is built to survive children, so they do a lot of drop testing, pouring drinks over it, basically all those fun things kids like to do to your expensive toys


  • 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)