It’s all about tone. The original comment was incredibly combative and hyperbolic (“I utterly loathe Mass Effect. I consider it one of the worst pieces of science-fiction ever created.”) so much so that it would easily be mistaken for flamebait given the thread was likely to attract fans of the series.

It certainly didn’t strike me as the start of an open-minded conversation.

But in hindsight I should’ve just downvoted and moved on rather than commenting as I did, so that’s on me.

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Ahh yes, the old “sticks and stones” defense that completely ignores human nature and basic decency. I use the same logic when I tell other people their babies are ugly. “Look, if you ask me your kid is an eyesore but it’s just my opinion so I don’t know why you’re so mad right now…”

Funny, I feel the same way about Fallout and The Witcher. Just… don’t get the appeal. As always, to each their own. Hence why I generally try to avoid yucking other people’s yums.

I don’t. Played with it a bit but as a capable writer and coder I don’t find it fills a need and just shifts the effort from composition (which I enjoy) to editing and review (which I don’t).

Oh please. The anti-TikTok hysteria has been going on much longer than the Israeli invasion of Gaza, and the narrative has largely been about national security concerns, particularly as they relate to election misinformation.

Agree or not with the anti-China rhetoric about TikTok, but at least argue about the facts and not inane conspiracy theories.

Take it to an electronics recycling center. Seriously.

If you already have a homelab, you plan to replace it, you don’t want to repair it, and you don’t have an obvious use case for another machine (it’s just another computer; you either have the need for another computer or you don’t), then holding onto it is just hoarding.

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So laziness. Got it.

(They could easily move to an ipc mechanism that doesn’t require binding a port on a network interface but that’d require time and effort and why bother when the goal is to ship something fast and cheap while the AI hype is strong)

Sounds like a fun way to directly mess with their model though.

Wait… why the heck does it need to open a network port?

I do both, because people can do more than one thing. This is called a false dichotomy, and in this case with an unsubtle whiff of moralizing.

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A Short Hike, definitely. I just wish it was longer.

If you have an Android phone I can’t recommend Genius Scan enough. Fast, accurate, lots of features. I use it with syncthing by exporting the files to a folder that’s configured to sync the paperless input folder.

Just want to say thank you! Paperless is one of the first things I recommend to anyone considering self hosting their infra. Amazing piece of work!

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Hah I… think we’re on the same side?

The original comment was justifying unregulated and unmitigated research into AI on the premise that it’s so dangerous that we can’t allow adversaries to have the tech unless we have it too.

My claim is AI is not so existentially risky that holding back its development in our part of the world will somehow put us at risk if an adversarial nation charges ahead.

So no, it’s not harmless, but it’s also not “shit this is basically like nukes” harmful either. It’s just the usual, shitty SV kind of harmful: it will eliminate jobs, increase wealth inequality, destroy the livelihoods of artists, and make the internet a generally worse place to be. And it’s more important for us to mitigate those harms, now, than to worry about some future nation state threat that I don’t believe actually exists.

(It’ll also have lots of positive impact as well, but that’s not what we’re talking about here)

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Training new models is already the domain of large actors only, simply due to the GPU requirements, which serve as a massive moat. That ship has sailed. There isn’t a single open source model, today, that wasn’t trained by a corporate entity first, and then only fined tuned by the community later.

You don’t need AI for any of that. Determined state actors have been fabricating information and propagandizing the public, mechanical Turk style, for a long long time now. When you can recruit thousands of people as cheap labour to make shit up online, you don’t need an LLM.

So no, I don’t believe AI represents a new or unique risk at the hands of state actors, and therefore no, I’m not so worried about these technologies landing in the hands of adversaries that I think we should abandon our values or beliefs Just In Case. We’ve had enough of that already, thank you very much.

And that’s ignoring the fact that an adversarial state actor having access to advanced LLMs isn’t somehow negated or offset by us having them, too. There’s no MAD for generative AI.