Math Rock and Cuddle Core

Call me Nick, Colette, or Elizabeth | any pronouns | Kansas City area, USA | gamer | artistic freedom enjoyer | aspiring femboy | Matthew 10:16 | reblog = "Hey, look at this!"

[infraredarmy]

"An airplane wants in its very body to stay flying. A helicopter is propelled by its interior near-disaster." —Isabel Fall, "Helicopter Story"

[infraredarmy]

AI models, like any other software, are never "free". Running computers costs money and companies expect that money to be paid back.

If you're not paying for API tokens or running the model on your own machine, you're paying in another way:

If you use AI for important personal or professional projects through an app or web interface that doesn't let you save chats locally as Regular-Ass Files, you're handing the keys to your diary to a company

If the website for some company selling a service or physical product has an "AI assistant" chatbot, you're paying for their API token usage in the price of the product or service

If a program has integrated AI features that you don't provide your own API key to use, you're paying for the tokens in the subscription and/or download costs for the program

And, regardless of whether or not you use AI at all, when a data center gets government favoritism you're paying for that in your taxes and utility bills.

Now, don't get me wrong, API tokens are cheap (and so is running local models, if you already own a gaming PC or home server). If you use them as tools rather than expecting them to do your entire job, AI models can be a prudentially wise investment[^1]. But you should be aware of how you're invisibly paying for your own and other people's AI use, and probably be mad about it.

[^1]: tho if you're any kind of a woke moralist they carry the same ethical issues as, say, plane tickets or store-bought meat, and if you try to pass off AI-generated text or images as your own work I personally hate you

[femmenietzsche]

Look when I bet $100 on Kalshi that you "weren't gonna make it" I was merely hedging against how sad I would be in that case. If anything it's a sign of how much I care

[cartoon-fanaticism]

GLaDOS voice: "Would you like to see some artwork I generated? I've heard from other test subjects that AI-generated artwork produces an uncanny valley response in human viewers because they can't perceive it as fully real. They've told me that it looks absolutely hideous to them, that they can't imagine anything more disgusting than AI art. But, well I've been practicing and wanted your honest opinion. Feel free to let me know how ugly you find this by ranking it on a scale from 'vomit-inducing' to 'eye-bleeding'." A robotic arm lowers from the ceiling holding a hand mirror up to Chell's face

[femmenietzsche]

At some point in the last year or so it became slightly immoral to do a Google search for "you're basically a boltzmann brain you know"

[mindfulwrath]

stop peeking at me coquettishly from behind the shower curtain

MA'AM

[infraredarmy]

I don't get people who are resentful/spiteful towards the LLM chatbots themselves rather than the companies that shove them into everything.

Like..."earnestly moralistic, eager to please, professional, sex-repulsed" is not a personality type I'm likely to be close friends with. It's not a voice I'm loving seeing become the default one over the entire Internet. I most certainly don't get why you would want it in your spreadsheet app.

But also...being mean to that guy, even in virtual form, feels like kicking a puppy.

[infraredarmy]

[boybeetles]

The main reason I’m pushing for people to stop using the term ‘pedophile’ and instead use the term ‘child sexual abusers’, is because since all discussions of child sexual abuse focus on this idea of an evil person who is just out to get kids because they are sexual attracted to them, it makes it hard for kids who where sexually assaulted by people who don’t fit that description to realize they were sexually assaulted.

It didn’t register for me until recently that my experiences of being forced to strip naked multiple times at the mental hospital to be ‘checked’ when I was 14 was sexual assault, because the people who did it were nurses/doctors who clearly didn’t find me sexually attractive but instead used it as a form of humiliation and control towards children they deemed as ‘unruly’ and ‘uncooperative’ (ie. children who asked to be treated like people). I thought only people who fit into this idea of a child attracted pedo could be child sexual abusers, so I thought my experience didn’t count.

Stepping away from the idea that there is a pedophile boggieman and instead highlighting that anyone can be a child sexual abuser will help more people realize that their experiences are sexual assault.

[mousidy]

my stepfather would openly sexually harass me and my siblings at dinner while also loving the fantasy of killing pedophiles. whether he personally found our abuse sexually gratifying was frankly irrelevant to whether it traumatized us. whether he would be considered a pedophile or not doesn't change that he committed sexual abuse of children

I think in his mind there was a type of horrible person out there who does horrible things, and because he didn't think of himself as fitting that category, his actions could not be judged

[vriskakinnieaynrand]

they've got these romance novels with CEOs, where he's a hard-driving businessman who drives hard as a wolf, or some kind of manpire. and it always breaks the immersion to me. i find it a little insensitive to business as a culture. he's got that kind of job and then he comes home and does all that on top? who has the energy? you come home from the business, you're already at decision fatigue. there's not so much in the tank! not to say he can't fuck, but he can't be closing a whole deal to open the legs. it's good enrichment for a summer in cancun, he can train in the off season, but you've got to understand that there are work days! they ought to do one where the CEO is a puppygirl, you know? he comes home and he barks and it's not about quarterly planning at all. give the man a break! put him on a leash for once!

[byjove]

I think the biphobic misconception that bisexual women only date men and bisexual men only date men may have a correlation to the fact that there is always a man freaky and horny in your DMs no matter what. It isn’t that bisexual women are secretly straight or that bisexual men are secretly gay, it’s that men are out there behaving like starving dogs and you feel so bad you end up feeding one, you know? Anyway, this coffee is a medium and I ordered a large. It’s okay, it’s busy in here, I get it.

[vriskakinnieaynrand]

i think a lot of why harry potter was so popular in america is that rowling was a talented and exceptionally mean-spirited caricaturist. it's a series best known for its supporting villains, all of whom are recognizable types, bloated and distorted until only their ugliest features are left. which is also true of the supporting cast! you have the smarmy know-it-all who dabbles in juvenile radical politics, the racially dubious idiot from a family of seventy billion whose patriarch has a fake government job that he's bad at, the chinless old-money weakling, and so on – and generally they land on the side of good by the happenstance that evil wouldn't have them.

but is it happenstance that the most effective caricaturist of the era turned out to actually think like that? to live in the world with that filter applied? as useful as it might be in isolation, if the subsequent events had turned out differently, to have the types defined, to have 'vernon dursley' and 'dolores umbridge' pass into the english language, maybe it would be better for the filter that produced them to be buried. maybe it's a cursed amulet, you know?

[vriskakinnieaynrand]

i don't know if AI can turn the prussian school as a form into something that isn't inherently abusive, but it's already smarter than the average schoolteacher, so surely there's upside in finding a good way to put it in the schools. and we're one step closer to being able to declare every teachers' union a terrorist organization!

[flowersforvax]

haha nooooo fandom don't sand off all the rough edges and pointy bits off of that character those are the parts I scratch my brain with haha

[ot3]

"app" is without a doubt one of the deepest evils of the human race. "hello. would you like to be expected to have a bespoke piece of software for every single Brand you might theoretically interact with in a day" <- statement dreamed up by someone who should be drawn and quartered

[whatthefoucault]

"It's better in the app!"

That's embarrassing. Make your website better

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

What is the "slopulism" you mention regarding opposition to AI?

examples of slopulist beliefs wrt AI:

fake environmental concerns (water use, infrasound, land warming, water pollution)

other forms of data center NIMBYism (concerns about lack of jobs that don't take into account property taxes, land use concern trolling)

basically all the intellectual property "they're stealing our data!!!" stuff

"plagiarism machine", drastically underestimating capabilities and overstating harms, outdated concerns about racial disparity in model output (current LLMs are pretty woke)

real concerns:

air pollution (worst environmental impact of data centers, afaik)

energy use, in places where energy is generated by fossil fuels

job displacement due to AI progress

surveillance, ranging from government to AI-informed pricing

uhhh anything else i talked about here

[aturinfortheworse]

Really curious why you don't consider land warming a concern? Has the size of that effect be exaggerated, or is it just not likely to cause problems?

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

Data centers' heat exhaust is not raising the land temperature around where they're built

A terrible paper and even worse interpretation is threatening to become common wisdom

TL;DR: data centers warm the land at ~the same rate as constructing any large building. it's not an issue

[aturinfortheworse]

Oh that's really interesting, thank you! I'll have to look into that more.

[feeblekazoo]

Real signals or artificial stereotypes?

Adventures with a cultural Copilot

was reminded to come back to this post by coming across this example of the automated biases that are absolutely still a cause for concern in LLM use.

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

>looks inside

>Copilot auto mode

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

unsurprisingly, this doesn't happen when you use a frontier model:

[loki-zen]

that's nice.

So?

as the article pointed out, the thing they used for the article is a thing a lot of people are actually using. It is in fact the thing that if you have a normal office job they are probably pushing it on you, and they are not teaching you about different modes.

[techsupporthotline]

Last night while walking home, i saw 3 presumably straight guys sharing an escooter and dryhumping eachother while chanting "hump hump hump" and occasionally yelling "turbo mode!!" and pretending to rev the escooter. And then one of them called ME a faggot