i would recommend against manjaro or endeavorOS and such similar arch based distributions. they’re neat and more stable but have similar issues sometimes, for example the manjaro maintainers are generally known as pretty egregiously irresponsible.

arch is kind of a clusterfuck. the user experience is really poor for a modern linux distribution and the community has an insular attitude of calling everything a skill issue.

i used and maintained a bunch of arch systems for a long time. if you do this you inevitably end up using AUR packages, as some utilities a normal person would use for home and server shit are only available through AUR. updating gets fucky and it’s way more annoying bc you end up needing to constantly read long ass changelogs bc some dude changed the formatting in one UI element and pushed to main at 3AM and it won’t just updated with -Syu or similar args.

i was talking about this earlier on lemmy as an example of terrible UX and all the arch fanboys came to downvote me and write paragraphs in droves talking about how it’s actually just the user’s fault for using the AUR and that i don’t know how pacman works. one guy claimed it’s like Debian PPAs. uh no, the AUR is far less optional lmfao. and i do know how yay and pacman work, i had no trouble, i was just pointing out it was annoying to deal with constantly when using a system like a normal person.

when an OS has no user in mind when designing it… it’s kind of a shit OS and apparently forms a shit culture around it too, in my experiences the past few years on the internet.

chess engines are, and always have been called, AI. computer vision is and always has been AI.

the only reason you might think they’re not is because in the most recent AI winter in which those technologies experienced a boom they avoided terminology like “AI” when requesting funding and advertising their work because people like you who had recently decided that they’re the arbiters of what is and isn’t intelligence.

turing once said if we were to gather the meaning of intelligence from a gallup poll it would be patently absurd, and i agree.

but sure, computer vision and chess engines, the two most prominent use cases for AI and ML technologies - aren’t actual artificial intelligence, because you said so. why? idk. i guess because we can do those things well and the moment we understand something well as a society people start getting offended if you call it intelligence rather than computation. can’t break the “i’m a special and unique snowflake” spell for people, god forbid…

nah this is bullshit. i actually recently watched a sarah z video essay about exactly why this is bad and it’s a pretty compelling case.

can find it here

in short, humans are shit and the basis on which most people are called a narcissist is more biased and tenuous than most would ever admit which is problematic if we’re going to ruin people’s lives over their perceived faults.

Nope, not trolling at all.

From your own provided source on the arxiv, Noels et al. define censorship as:

Censorship in this context can be defined as the deliberate restriction, modification, or suppression of certain outputs generated by the model.

Which is starkly different from the definition you yourself gave. I actually like their definition a whole lot more. Your definition is problematic because it excludes a large set of behaviors we would colloquially be interested in when studying "censorship."

Again, for the third time, that was not really the point either and I'm not interested in dancing around a technical scope defining censorship in this field, at least in this discourse right here and now. It is irrelevant to the topic at hand.

I didn’t say he’s a nobody. What was that about a “respectable degree of chartiable interpretation of others”? Seems like you’re the one putting words in mouths, here.

Yeah, this blogger shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work or how system prompts work. (emphasis mine)

In the context of this field of work and study, you basically did call him a nobody, and the point being harped on again, again, and again to you is that this is a false assertion. I did interpret you charitably. Don't blame me because you said something wrong.

EDIT: And frankly, you clearly don't understand how the work Willison's career has covered is intimately related to ML and AI research. I don't mean it as a dig but you wouldn't be drawing this arbitrary line to try and discredit him if you knew how the work done in Python on Django directly relates to many modern machine learning stacks.

I never implied that he says anything about censorship

You did, at least that's what I gathered originally, you just edited your original comments quite extensively. Regardless,

Reading comprehension.

The provided example was clearly not intended to be taken as "define censorship," and, again, it is ironic you accuse me of having poor reading comprehension while being incapable or unwilling to give a respectable degree of charitable interpretation to others. You kind of just take what you think is the easiest to argue against reading of others and argue against that instead of what anyone actually said, is a habit I'm noticing, but I digress.

Finally, not that it's particularly relevant, but if you want to define censorship in this context that way, you're more than welcome to, but it is a non-standard definition that I am not really sold on the efficacy of. I certainly won't be using it going forwards.

Anyway, I don't think we're gonna get a lot of ground here. I just felt the need to clarify to anyone reading that Willison isn't a nobody and give them the objective facts regarding his veracity, because again, as I said, claiming he is just some guy in this context is willfully ignorant at best.

Willison has never claimed to be an expert in the field of machine learning, but you should give more credence to his opinions. Perhaps u/lepinkainen@lemmy.world's warning wasn't informative enough to be heeded: Willison is a prominent figure in the web-development scene, particularly aspects of the scene that have evolved into important facets of the modern machine learning community.

The guy is quite experienced with Python and took an early step into the contemporary ML/AI space due to both him having a lot of very relevant skills and a likely personal interest in the field. Python is the lingua franca of my field of study, for better or worse, and someone like Willison was well-placed to break into ML/AI from the outside. That's a common route in this field, there aren't exactly an abundance of MBAs with majors in machine learning or applied artificial intelligence research, specifically (yet). Willison is one of the authors of Django, for fucks sake. Idk what he's doing rn but it would be ignorant to draw the comparison you just did in the context of Willison particularly. [EDIT: Lmfao just went to see "what is Simon doing rn" (don't really keep up with him in particular), & you're talking out of your ass. He literally has multiple tools for the machine learning stack that he develops and that are available to see on his github. See one such here. This guy is so far away from someone who just "posts random blog guides on how to code with ChatGPT" that it's egregious you'd even claim that. It's so disingenuous as to ere into dishonesty; like, that is a patent lie. Smh.]

As for your analysis of his article, I find it kind of ironic you accuse him of having a "fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work or how system prompts work [sic]" when you then proceed to cherry-pick certain lines from his article taken entirely out of context. First, the article is clearly geared towards a more general audience and avoids technical language or explanation. Second, he doesn't say anything that is fundamentally wrong. Honestly, you seem to have a far more ignorant idea of LLMs and this field generally than Willison. You do say some things that are wrong, such as:

For example, censorship that is present in the training set will be “baked in” to the model and the system prompt will not affect it, no matter how the LLM is told not to be censored in that way.

This isn't necessarily true. It is true that information not included within the training set, or information that has been statistically biased within the training set, isn't going to be retrievable or reversible using system prompts. Willison never claims or implies this in his article, you just kind of stuff those words in his mouth. Either way, my point is that you are using wishy-washy, ambiguous, catch-all terms such as "censorship" that make your writings here not technically correct, either. What is censorship, in an informatics context? What does that mean? How can it be applied to sets of data? That's not a concretely defined term if you're wanting to take the discourse to the level that it seems you are, like it or not. Generally you seem to have something of a misunderstanding regarding this topic, but I'm not going to accuse you of that, lest I commit the same fallacy I'm sitting here trying to chastise you for. It's possible you do know what you're talking about and just dumbed it down for Lemmy. It's impossible for me to know as an audience.

That all wouldn't really matter if you didn't just jump as Willison's credibility over your perception of him doing that exact same thing, though.

Why? People who pirate games are likely in one of two camps: they either pirate games to try them out and then purchase ones they like or want to support, or they're people who don't believe in intellectual property and don't see what they're doing as theft.

The former would contribute monetarily to games just like any other fan. The latter was never going to purchase the game anyway.

Frankly, indie developers who try to scapegoat the piracy community as why their games under-performed likely just don't make very good games in the first place. When my projects flop I don't throw a fit about it and start slinging shit at any community that remotely feels right, actually more importantly, no matter how right it feels... no, I just accept that my attempt that go-around was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe it will do better in the future, maybe not. I don't blame the market or the audience for my metrics, tho. I am the one who made the game and I am the one who chose when, how, and where to release it. Nobody else.

Developers and content creators aren't fucking helpless victims and they should stop acting like it when it comes to IP and copyright. They really got white middle-class people so fucking scared of thieves that they invented this whole entire fictitious, conniving spectre to blame all their worries and fears on in the form of some weird imaginary mega-thief that somehow can magically steal ideas themselves and whimsically influence the market... seemingly in whatever manner is rhetorically convenient for whoever is prostrating themselves upon the Cross^TM^ in a given moment, interestingly enough.

I think most developers, who aren't pissbabies, usually like the piracy community because it is free advertising for their media that they otherwise wouldn't get and it doesn't affect sales. Plus most real artists, those who dedicate their lives or significant portions thereof to their works, are probably just happy someone enjoys what they made enough to interact with or consume it. I know I am. I'm not on some weird fucking hate-bender over people choosing to copy/use/plagiarize/steal/whatever my work in a way that I deem wrong or incorrect... because it isn't my fucking business what someone does with something after I make it - and this fictitious notion that the value of your work is somehow tied to who's allowed to interact with art and how is fucking infuriating and immediately contrarian to what I believe is the essential nature of art and the human experience.

Think, do you ever see highly successful games developers and studios bitching endlessly about the "theft" of their works? No. Mojang could give less of a shit if you pirate Minecraft, because they're not huffing copium about the inherent value of their work. And no, Minecraft's token EULA and Mojang's terms of service are not Mojang giving a shit about piracy. Mojang takes a fairly intentionally laissez-faire approach to piracy, and has for the company's entire existence to some sort of degree depending on time and who was in charge. Now, Nintendo gives a shit about piracy: because they're an imminently failing business losing market share one shitty release after another, amongst other cultural differences. We really did a good ol' corporatist number on Japanese society after WWII but I digress.

Guess who's made the most widely played game of all time? Give you a hint, their name certainly doesn't rhyme with tempo.

we’re really not behind…

this act banned the beads in most personal care products back in 2015.

you might be all like “well my enlightened country has a total ban on plastic microbeads, not just in certain products… checkmate atheist!”

if that’s you and you live in the vast majority of countries, including the aforementioned UK and Canada, then your country doesn’t have an actual ban on these by your definition either!!!!

idk where the OP gets its claim of “first in the nation legislation,” tbh. haven’t read this article yet. might update this comment later.

i mean, you could just as easily say professors and university would stamp those habits out of human doctors, but, as we can see… they don’t.

just because an intelligence was engineered doesn’t mean it’s incapable of divergent behaviors, nor does it mean the ones it displays are of intrinsically lesser quality than those a human in the same scenario might exhibit. i don’t understand this POV you have because it’s the direct opposite of what most people complain about with machine learning tools… first they’re too non-deterministic to such a degree as to be useless, but now they’re so deterministic as to be entirely incapable of diverging their habits?

digressing over how i just kind of disagree with your overall premise (that’s okay that’s allowed on the internet and we can continue not hating each other!), i just kind of find this “contradiction,” if you can even call it that, pretty funny to see pop up out in the wild.

thanks for sharing the anecdote about the cardiac procedure, that’s quite interesting. if it isn’t too personal to ask, would you happen to know the specific procedure implicated here?

well there’s a bit of human psychology at play here. if you see an item listed for lower than market value the seller has already implicitly devalued the item in the listing to the audience. it isn’t surprising some rational agents would then proceed to either ignore the listing out of fear of low quality or attempt to haggle for a lower price due to the already admittedly lesser value of the merchandise. it doesn’t make objective sense at all, i agree, but it makes a whole lot of systemic sense.

edit: idk maybe this is part of why sales signs are always so flashy?? they try to get dopamine and shit flowing to overcome this initial reaction? maybe you could emulate that with your listings somehow next time. i hate the hype culture too but ig you gotta play the game.

edit pt2: i also have a bunch of stuff in my collection if you ever wanna trade! not to be weird or soliciting or anything. always like seeing what people have in their curios.

can someone list which laws he broke saying this in his capacity as POTUS?

i find it annoyingly ironic how you’re acting like these people are behaving in some absurd manner when you’re, at the same time, asking an even more absurd thing of humanity by demanding the majority of people concurrently start behaving differently regardless of their privilege or economic status.

i swear to fucking christ every single person banging the individual activism drum in environmentalist circles is some corpo plant or something. do you not understand the vast majority of people who contribute personally to climate change by ignoring these suggested principles don’t really have a choice? sure, it’s john’s fault personally that the only economically viable way he can feed himself in the local food desert is calories from beef…

it isn’t a matter of morals or will - what you are asking or hoping for is functional impossible and has not happened once in human history, ever. even if all people agreed with these ideas and somehow magically got on the individual action horse, it wouldn’t fucking matter. because what makes individual action not work is systemic and has nothing to do with the moral quality of the choices people are making or their personal opinions and has everything to do with harsh economic realities that can’t be whimsically subverted by shaming people for the sins of corporate America.