But it does hurt since it equates anti-racism with meaningless nonsense therefore directly undermining the purported cause.
Unless of course the real motivation isn't to help but instead to demonstrate power and status...
260 karma · joined December 24, 2020
Unless of course the real motivation isn't to help but instead to demonstrate power and status...
And acquiescing meekly to absurd demands is a much worse behavior for a team.
Even worse behavior in a teammate would be trying to browbeat their coworkers into wasting energy on performative nonsense to score social status points.
In a just world anyone who suggested this would be fired immediately.
This is literal Luddism.
He's certainly right about this. I can't wrap my head around why anyone wouldn't want types in their program*
The types still exist you just didn't write them down! Why won't you just write them down!?
*short scripts excepted
50% of children died before their 5th birthday
Why would you oppose technological solutions in favor of ideological ones? Unless of course you don't care about solving the problem...
There are a lot of primary sources, for example, off the top of my head the pamphlets by Rusticus.
It seems like you have a fixed view of history and assume that because you don't know about something it isn't true.
It's obviously not the singular cause but it was also very realistic. If you can manage it, try to think from their perspective: the Crown is preventing you from expanding westward to limit your power, you are hearing (distorted) reports of unimaginable atrocities being committed in the name of profit by the EIC in India, at the same time the EIC is being granted extraordinary privileges in your colonies. Fear of the Crown re-organizing your governmental structure along the lines to move to an extractive form of colonization were well founded.
Furthermore, and returning to the original topic of this thread, the colonists were very averse to monopolies on trade since the few examples they had lead to disastrous behavior by the monopolists.
> the level of control the East India Company had over India back in the 70s was quite limited and relatively indirect.
Completely false, after the battle of Plassey in 1757 led to the EIC gaining direct control over all of Bengal (the largest and richest kingdom of India at that time) and they had installed puppet governments in other kingdoms and provinces.
By the time of the American revolution their power had only grown, surpassing any of the remaining independent kingdoms.
As an aside, When the British public (and hence the American public) found out about the full extent of the atrocities committed by the EIC in India there was a very large public backlash including putting the director on trial for what we would now term Crimes against Humanity. These people were not angels, but they were not only rampaging colonial brutes. History is complex, historical people doubly so.
Interesting and makes sense. I guess the best comparison I can think of is a random number generated with Math.random() is not copyrightable. But including that random number is a program is copyrightable.
I'd say that a corollary to this is that if the images/words generated by the machine are not copyrightable then they cannot also be _copyright violations_
One of the major concerns leading to the revolution was the behavior of the EIC towards the inhabitants of India and the worry that a similar institution would be unleashed upon American colonists.
The EIC was only able to grow so powerful because of the monopoly granted by the Crown.
What we think of monopolies now are a product of the gilded age and not the same as what the Founding Fathers were thinking of.
They were thinking of monopoly as "legally empowered corporation that then becomes an oppresively dominant quasi-government institution"
This is not correct. AI models are tools that humans use.
This is like saying "it was typed on a computer therefore it doesn't enjoy copyright protections"
Privacy conscious segment of the US market is a rounding error, despite what HN would have you believe.
1. The human growth explosion already happened. We're dealing with the end stage of it over the next 50-100 years. There will never be a world of "a hundred billion people on Earth" since it turns out people don't want to reproduce that much. We'll hit peak human this century which means that we actually do have a shot at giving all people a decent lifestyle if we develop our technology and have abundant energy. Exponential growth is just not required. The Ehrlichian doomsday was never going to happen.
2. The past was actually really bad, even for the wealthiest. Disease, starvation, and violence were actually rampant. Rewinding the development clock in rich areas, or pausing it in developing areas, would be equivalent to the largest crimes against humanity ever perpetrated.
I find your rejection of this basic fact of history by writing things like: "if native peoples lives (over hundreds of thousands of years, indeed) are such utter trash that they need to be rescued from it by technology" or "Incredibly tone deaf, frankly, when most past humans had none of those things and yet dealt with it, living actual full lives. We've basically forgotten what we are, what we came from, and believe we deserve Saturday morning cartoons." to be wildly ignorant. These people suffered, for millions of years, and still they suffer today. Alleviating this suffering is not optional. Frankly only someone who grew up in the utterly privilege western culture could ever think or write something like this.
3. Humans are not separate from nature. This one is counter-intuitive and hard to swallow but the truth is all human activity is natural, Lowes and Burger Kings are just a natural as forests. Nature is utterly impersonal. It has no morality or opinion. Sometimes one species gets a lot of adaptions that let it dominate and reshape the rest of nature into the way it sees fit. Then other species evolve to fill the new niches that are created. We make a lot of plastic now, but bacteria are starting to evolve to eat it, is plastic bad for nature? It's a nonsensical question. Plastic is nature.
It's fine to not like this and prefer some parts of nature over others, I certainly do, but no part of it is "better" or "worse" it just IS. Any morality you assign to it is purely your own opinion. You're right that keeping 8 billion humans fed and happy has a big impact on the rest of nature. But the only moral dimension that impact has is: will it cause more or less human suffering?
Sometimes the answer is yes, and we should stop. Sometimes is no and we have a moral duty to reconfigure nature to our liking. Most of the time the answer is: "it's not clear" and then people argue about it and sometimes pass laws.
But crucially it's all about humanity.
> And if you take my opinion for advocating any fascist-sounding, eugenics-sounding, kill-the-baddies-sounding recommendation, then you're reading something in I didn't write
But surely you must realize that the malthusian collapse that you anticipate will be characterized by authoritarian violence. Times of resource scarcity always are. So by embracing a defeatist philosophy you implicitly endorse it.
Further, even if what you advocate isn't exactly harmful, just neutral (ie eating local vegetables instead of imported, nevermind that the carbon footprint difference is negligible) wasting valuable political capital on useless gestures is objectively wrong.
That doesn't make any sense why would we make sacrifices that are not important.
This is reproducible across time, geography and culture. It is the basic condition of humanity.
> I invite you to visit basically any place on Earth that is not Europe or North America. It's frankly a white/western superiority complex and technology is just a fig leaf over it, a fundamental belief that today's way of life is the only one worth living
I invite you to do the same, and ask the people you'd meet if they'd prefer if half their children died in their arms or if they'd prefer to live without electricity, or antibiotics, or fertilizer, or telecommunications, or vaccines, or, or, or....
> But under no configuration is modern life sustainable for 8 billion people, energy, living space, and raw materials wise, so this situation is going to keep drawing down the reservoir until there is a brutal correction.
If billions are going to die either way then instead of just giving up we should be trying everything in our power to improve our technology to increase the carrying capacity of the earth and escape another malthusian trap as we've done so many times in the past.
Unless of course you want billions to die.
As an aside, I'm very disturbed to realize this screed is coming from someone of your stature in the tech community.
You're just following what feels like it would be good for the environment (and maybe it is good for your local environment) but isn't actually impactful at a large scale.
You write eloquently, but futilely.
That's exactly my point, if someone wants to use a foundation model they won't use one that they aren't convinced works for their purpose. There is no need for a regulation here. If I open source a model on github but don't document it people won't use it relative to one that is documented.
> E.g. you claim your model is good for using in court proceedings. Somehow you want no responsibility for the outcome of your training even if all you did was train it on screenplays from court dramas. We just have to take your word at face value.
Again, exactly my point. If you are building a lawyer AI bot and use a crappy foundation model as a base the problem is not in the foundation model but in your application. If something bad happens the you the application developer should be held responsible. Which the EU regulation does a good job of regulating and no one is arguing against that part.
The issue with the EU regulation, and your arguments, is that they effect a level too low.
If you take it and then do something harmful with it then that should be regulated.
I'm shocked that anyone could think otherwise. Do you have provide documentation on the development process for any other software? Of course not! This is is no different.
If some company uses those tools to create a some kind of product that breaks the law or causes social harm then the law should regulate that specifically. The proposed regulation does a good job of this actually.
But from the way you write, with grand sweeping "we" statements and gesturing vaguely at potential harms and eventual doom, you seem pretty close minded. Perhaps you just don't like that people like these kinds of products and instead of accepting that other people might think differently than you you're self-righteously moralizing about it.
Do you really think they're only motivated by profits? If so they must be very dumb since trying to invent a novel artificial intelligence and releasing it as open source is about the worst way I can think of to try to make a buck.
Do you really think they aren't worried about the "harms" (1 year in and still no harm has occurred; weirdly large amount of people using this word online as an excuse to regulate though...) their product could unleash? Then why is for example OpenAI lobotmizing their flagship product to try to avoid any possible controversial text from being generated.
Isn't it possible that these are good and decent people trying to provide something to the world, doing so in a safe and reasonable way, diligently trying to comply with the law and regulations? Seems to fit their actions a lot better than your caricature of "greedy American capitalists bulldozing the world".
This is far from clear, it's obvious to me that training is fair use.
But even so, if copyright prevents these tools from existing it needs to be abolished.
Also not possible to steal a digital good, that's industry propaganda that they lobbied corrupt governments (US included) into codifying into law to the detriment of all humanity.
> Overnight? Is this proposal not known ahead of time? Is it being kept a secret until enters into force suddenly, at midnight?
"Sorry I haven't been closely playing attention to the minutiae of politics on a continent I don't live on, what do you mean I am being fined for my GPT-2 clone I trained years ago for fun and uploaded?"
Falls into the typical European cognitive trap of thinking that what is most important is to follow procedure regardless of where the it leads, and completely ignores the fact that the AI tools that are about to be regulated out of the EU are wildly useful.
These companies are not trying to take something from you but are in fact trying to give something to you.
> This means that, yes, GitHub and other code repositories are still allowed to host AI model code. Hosting providers don’t have any additional liability under the AI Act, only the providers of the models themselves and those who deploy them.
This is technically correct but ignores that overnight an unknown set of existing github repositories will become illegal in the EU, meaning that github will have to provide tools for users to block their repository from being pulled by EU users in order to prevent the users from accidentally committing crimes. This is wildly disruptive and will be an absolute negative for European technology. All in the name of nebulous "safety" concerns, "data protection", and protecting copyright.
That refined pretty well but ultimately got blown out of the water by desktop skeuomorphism once the underlying platform could support it. Now they're completely integrated via smartphone, but that's getting ahead of ourselves here.
Whoever can push beyond a refinement on "tab complete" or "chat with a minor god" interfaces will win big like Apple and Microsoft did.
Sometimes I go for a while without reading any books and I can feel the difference in myself. Yet, I spend almost all my waking life reading text. I think the difference is that this is all just information.
There is profound loneliness in only reading information, I compare it to the flattening of human interaction to zoom calls in the pandemic. Practical, but qualitatively worse.
The culture that produced the novel as its primary information artifact is gone forever, tragic that our cultures artifacts do reach its heights.