@nottrobin@union.place avatar

nottrobin

@nottrobin@union.place

Devoted father, husband & member of the human race

#freesoftware · #humanrights · #pacifism · #migrantswelcome · #openeverything · #leftist · #freepalestine

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. For a complete list of posts, browse on the original instance.

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

The "scarcity" of Nvidia hardware has mad Nvidia the most valuable company in the world. At first this seemed like good news to me, since the economy needs to move in a new direction, the most valuable company should be a fresh name.

Unfortunately since this value is based on actions between Tesla and X of all companies I think it's ... perhaps a little artificial. Are "AI capable chips" really such hot items. Or has the very public performance to get them just made people think they are?

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@SweetAIBelle @futurebird @ariadne

Wow most AI is using PyTorch? That's incredible. I would have thought there'd be more language diversity than that, and that many would want to use compiled languages for greater performance.

Interesting to learn about NPUs. Does that threaten NVidia's dominance? Or are they in fact the leaders in that too?

It will presumably be a good thing not to have AI competing with gamers for chips. Are NPUs also better for bitcoin mining?

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@SweetAIBelle @futurebird @ariadne

This was really interesting:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/moorinsights/2024/04/29/at-the-heart-of-the-ai-pc-battle-lies-the-npu/

Key points:

  • Cloud AI compute is unsustainable, a shift to on-device compute is coming (the AI PC)
  • NPUs will be included in chips for standard PCs
  • NPU leader is Qualcomm; AMD and Intel are challengers
  • "most companies are not scaling NPU performance by product tier; NPU performance is the same across all platforms. So developers can target a single NPU per vendor"
faab64 , to palestine group

It seems like my new account will not last long on

It's just sad how strong the power of Israeli lobby is. All I posted was picture of a palestinian kid I posted here before.

@palestine

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@LukefromDC @faab64 @palestine I would imagine this hugely varies by instance. I've found some instances are much more heavily policed even than the big platforms. I've moved instances twice to find one that aligns better with my politics. But, of course, that's the huge strength of the fediverse. You don't have to leave the whole ecosystem to avoid specific admins.

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@faab64 @palestine what happened to China using TikTok to push the pro-palestine agenda as an attack on US democracy? 😂😂 They must be teeeerrible at it.

Oh, joking aside, as a user have you seen a significant change in moderation decisions following the US TikTok bill?

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

I think it would be a great opportunity for Prison Fellowship or other orgs that support people in prison to do a lil fund raiser where they will send the former president a care pack with some of their helpful pamphlets on surviving prison life. (But mostly it'd be about raising money for ordinary prisoners.)

Maybe the innocence project could get in on it too, whilst making it clear that "though innocent people sometimes go to prison, guilty people do too"

I'd donate.

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@futurebird now you got me wondering what a process for could probably look like...

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@futurebird oh yeah I agree.

But restorative justice is also about making amends for the people you've hurt, seeking forgiveness etc.

That could be fun

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@futurebird no that's true, it does absolutely rely on the person admitting and confronting what they've done.

But they also have an incentive to do that because the alternative is hard time. I think sometimes people go into it thinking it's the easy way out (which it sort of isn't), but then they actually get changed.

Still, I was mostly joking. I'm envisioning Trump knocking on every door in New York at least... 😂😂

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@futurebird Thanks for that. I'm literally chuckling to myself alone in the kitchen 😂

JSharp1436 , to random
@JSharp1436@mstdn.social avatar

🔴 ’s wife, Valeria Wasserman , says reports Tuesday that the famed linguist and activist had died are untrue

“No, it is false,” she wrote in response to an emailed query from The Associated . , 95, had been hospitalized in while recovering from a stroke suffered a year ago

The Beneficencia Portuguesa hospital in said in a statement that was discharged Tuesday to continue his treatment at home

https://thehill.com/homenews/ap/ap-entertainment/ap-noam-chomskys-wife-says-reports-of-famed-linguists-death-are-false/

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@JSharp1436 do you think someone misunderstood the word for "discharged"?

DemocracyMattersALot , (edited ) to random

Biden doesn't WANT to be president. He didn't WANT to run in 2020. He doesn't WANT to spend his golden years fighting fascist Republicans and judges. But he is. And that's WHY he's The Guy.

TRY TO REMEMBER: If Biden takes a hard-line stance against Israel, he hands the Presidency to Trump.

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@DemocracyMattersALot I count 4 cases of "citation needed"

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@DemocracyMattersALot a clear majority of Americans aren't huge fans of genocide...

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@DemocracyMattersALot uh huh...

So what's your evidence for "If Biden takes a hard-line stance against Israel, he hands the Presidency to trump."?

In my view, opposing genocide should come before political rivalries.

Oh and that's also international law.

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@DemocracyMattersALot

🎶 evidence🎶

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@DemocracyMattersALot

This is evidence that the GoP doesn't do what Biden wants. I don't understand how it's evidence that he would lose if he opposed Israel. It doesn't even speak to voting intention or electoral strategy or anything.

If this is the level of your political analysis, nobody should be taking voting advice from you.

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@DemocracyMattersALot

Sorry I'm not usually this condescending. But it genuinely hadn't occurred to me that anyone would look at that and think "well Biden did all he could". Now I realise it was clearly their intention to send that message 🤦

Sure, the commander in chief of the world's only hegemonic superpower, who can influence governments the world over with a phone call, who entirely pays for the Israeli military, did all he could. If you believe that you'll believe anything.

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@makeyourselfnew @DemocracyMattersALot

What's wrong with how I'm framing it?

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@makeyourselfnew @DemocracyMattersALot I'm not really interested in "sides", I don't need you to be on mine.

I'm interested in speaking truth as I see it, & showing how I position myself towards that truth.

People might hate me, but hopefully they might look into some of that truth themselves. They might think I'm obnoxious, but still it still might encourage them to find and strongly represent a morally consistent position for themselves.

Ultimately, I want fewer Palestinians to die.

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@makeyourselfnew @DemocracyMattersALot yeah of course that's right.

I'll do that other times. But I'm not always trying to build coalitions.

The above post annoyed me - the lie of "Biden can't be a decent human being or he'll lose to Trump", especially from an account called "democracy matters". It just looks like partisan whitewashing for a war criminal, a cynical lie to trick voters.

And I don't think I was super disrespectful. But still no justification for the statement is forthcoming.

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@makeyourselfnew @DemocracyMattersALot

Ok specifically the point I'm making is that the opposite is true. Biden's support for Israel is a huge liability for his campaign. The vast majority of potential democratic voters aren't on Israel's side, and especially the ones for whom it's their deciding issue.

If he really cared about "keeping a fascist out of the whitehouse", he'd stop the genocide with a phone call (which, yes, he could do)

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@DemocracyMattersALot @makeyourselfnew If I'm underestimating his power, it's his power over US foreign policy. But the commander in chief is supposed to be the boss, and Biden's always been rhetorically more pro Israel than much of the establishment.

The US has huge leverage over Israel. Israel owes everything it has to the US, and, of course, the US state is extremely well practiced in using its leverage over other states.

The only limits are on what the US is willing to put on the line.

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

What did Trump do in Detroit? First search result is New York Post with a very misleading headline "Donald Trump receives strong support from black voters in immigrant-weary Detroit: ‘Taking your jobs’" A photo of a black guy in a Trump hat and a photo of Trump.

But, this is what the crowd looked like at the "Black Church" It is a Black church but not much of the congregation showed up. Most black people there are regulars who go to events all over the country to provide "diversity."

A modern church interior. A crowd of maybe 200 people mostly white.

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@futurebird yeah I'm a bit worried about this blind drift into a world where every instruction we try to give our devices is run through a stochastic interpreter first. This is hardly new of course. Google has been ignoring the key word in my search terms for what feels like a decade 🤦

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

I decided to find out if any progress had been made on the science behind why some ants are attracted to electrical fields. After filtering out exterminators (it's so demoralizing to search for information on creatures you love and find nothing but people who know nothing about them boasting about how they will kill them all) I found what looked like a blog. But, who the heck is "James Brown"? Never heard of the dude. Maybe he could be my new friend if he likes ants enough to blog about them!

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@futurebird @BorisBarbour @medley56 @wmd @alexwild I assume you know about https://www.scihub.org/ ?

NotImpressed , to palestine group
@NotImpressed@mas.to avatar


@palestine

"Rather than seeking a long-term solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, the United States is prioritizing its longstanding goal of normalizing relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. With such a deal, which would require calm in Gaza to bring Saudi Arabia on board, the United States would further marginalize the Palestinians while more tightly integrating Israel into its regional network of alliances and partnerships"

Twisted but true

https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/biden-u-s-imperialism-palestine

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@NotImpressed @palestine can't they just get with the energy programme and stop being so horny for already?

futurebird , to random
@futurebird@sauropods.win avatar

If you see a new youTube channel with a plain sounding name like "NatureView" or "BrightScience" etc. and there is what looks like a tempting video on a specific education topic "Most Active Volcanoes" or "Incredible Carnivorous Plants"

There is a 50/50 chance it will be a generated voice with stock footage and a script written by GPT.

I am now avoiding videos if I don't recognize the creator, or don't see signs it was made by a person.

So much spam!

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@futurebird @Qybat @PTR_K @michaelgemar @mcc yes that's absolutely it!

I think the trouble is that, for us humans, language is our interface to the world. So much of our understanding of reality is communicated through language that it's kind of like our single point of failure, the perfect hack. We can't comprehend of something being able to say all those clever words, without actually being smart, because words are also the only way we have of telling if other people are smart.

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@shiri @futurebird

I'm afraid I just disagree.

LLMs aren't a "lower end of human" intelligence. It's completely different in kind.

Someone's written a complex formal model of language and run it over insanely huge amounts of text to calculate millions of statistical data points about what text comes next. Then they wrote a program to receive a blob of text input and use the statistical graph to generate a blob of text in response.

Intelligence means many things, but this is none of them.

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@shiri @futurebird There is nothing like "understanding". That's the language trick I was talking about.

When it says "I'm sorry that was my mistake", it's just regurgitating what some humans have said before in a slightly different order.

When you ask it what it's like to be an AI, it regurgitates an amalgam of the sci fi & fan fic people have written about what an AI might say.

It's what Timnit Gebru called a stochastic parrot.

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@futurebird @shiri Interesting. I might be one of those people. I do sort of have an internal monologue, but then on another level of course I'm thinking without words. It's so difficult to put accurate words to the psychological dimension.

You might be right, that might make a difference. I do feel like I have to make a rational effort to reject the idea that chatgpt is clever. Maybe for you it's more instinctive. But, of course, we'll never know. Not without Neurolink 😂

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@spacehobo @futurebird @shiri yeah I relate to this.

But from what @futurebird said, it sounds like she thinks in far fewer words than I do. Although it's impossible to be sure.

I actually sometimes think out loud (or talk to myself). I suspect @futurebird doesn't, but do let me know.

nottrobin ,
@nottrobin@union.place avatar

@futurebird @llewelly @shiri oh because if this thread, last night I went looking up that theory about the centrality of language to the development of human thought, and found this article about how that theory has basically been disproven.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/evidence-rebuts-chomsky-s-theory-of-language-learning/

(Although I'm of course no developmental psychologist or language theorist and I wouldn't implicitly trust a publication)

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