I’m glad to see it at least, though maybe it would also make sense to be posted on !reddit@lemmy.world

I’m still on Reddit too, and I bet a lot of people who came here from there are. Lemmy just isn’t a fully viable replacement yet.

That’s the thing about that sort of censorship though, you can only guess what it might have been. Your guess seems plausible, but it’s just a guess, and when the guess that Reddit mods were acting in good faith turns out to have been wrong, they don’t want you to know about it.

Googling “Luce porn” immediately surfaced sites where people are posting what appears to be handmade images of exactly that (click at your own risk), but searching Civitai specifically, a site which makes AI-generating porn of anyone and anything extremely easy, turned up the real motherlode.

I gotta say, the choice to write this article itself is questionable. It’s obvious this stuff would exist to anyone familiar with the internet, but describing the images in lurid detail and saying exactly how to get them complete with direct links, kinda sus.

But I think the point is, the OP meme is wrong to try painting this as some kind of society-wide psychological pathology, when it’s rather business people coming up with simple reliable formulas to make money. The space of possible products people could want is large, and this choice isn’t only about what people want, but what will get attention. People will readily pay attention to and discuss with others something they already have a connection to in a way they wouldn’t with some new thing, even if they would rather have something new.

that is not the … available outcome.

It demonstrably is already though. Paste a document in, then ask questions about its contents; the answer will typically take what’s written there into account. Ask about something you know is in a Wikipedia article that would have been part of its training data, same deal. If you think it can’t do this sort of thing, you can just try it yourself.

Obviously it can handle simple sums, this is an illustrative example

I am well aware that LLMs can struggle especially with reasoning tasks, and have a bad habit of making up answers in some situations. That’s not the same as being unable to correlate and recall information, which is the relevant task here. Search engines also use machine learning technology and have been able to do that to some extent for years. But with a search engine, even if it’s smart enough to figure out what you wanted and give you the correct link, that’s useless if the content behind the link is only available to institutions that pay thousands a year for the privilege.

Think about these three things in terms of what information they contain and their capacity to convey it:

• A search engine

• Dataset of pirated contents from behind academic paywalls

• A LLM model file that has been trained on said pirated data

The latter two each have their pros and cons and would likely work better in combination with each other, but they both have an advantage over the search engine: they can tell you about the locked up data, and they can be used to combine the locked up data in novel ways.

Ok, but I would say that these concerns are all small potatoes compared to the potential for the general public gaining the ability to query a system with synthesized expert knowledge obtained from scraping all academically relevant documents. If you’re wondering about something and don’t know what you don’t know, or have any idea where to start looking to learn what you want to know, a LLM is an incredible resource even with caveats and limitations.

Of course, it would be better if it could also directly reference and provide the copyrighted/paywalled sources it draws its information from at runtime, in the interest of verifiably accurate information. Fortunately, local models are becoming increasingly powerful and lower barrier of entry to work with, so the legal barriers to such a thing existing might not be able to stop it for long in practice.

The OP tweet seems to be leaning pretty hard on the “AI bad” sentiment. If LLMs make academic knowledge more accessible to people that’s a good thing for the same reason what Aaron Swartz was doing was a good thing.

A text message app with a keyword blocking feature is very useful to have

I have an Index also, one thing I find frustrating is that because the Quest has such a dominant marketshare and packages games differently, some smaller VR games and experiences I see seem to be only available as an apk file for Quest sideloading and there is no straightforward way for me to play them.

The main reason I don’t use it more though is I never got past the physical discomfort, I still feel nausea playing most games for more than a few minutes, and headaches from the pressure on my scalp/face if going longer than that, ie. trying to watch a movie with the headset. So that basically means I’m not going to just spend a lot of time passively chilling out in VR, it has to be some specific thing I want to do that feels worth it to push through the discomfort involved and can be gotten through relatively quickly. Mostly that ends up being just Beat Saber.

thepiratebay still exists but is regarded as untrustworthy and infested with malware. I’d say knowing you’re getting something from a trustworthy source is harder than it used to be.

I guess there are probably a lot of people trading that stuff dumb enough to be networking on facebook and instagram with their real identities

The listing notes that special operations troops “will use this capability to gather information from public online forums,” with no further explanation of how these artificial internet users will be used.

Any chance that’s the real reason and not just a flimsy excuse? What kind of information would you even need a fake identity to gather from a public forum?

changing how its “block” button works. That option previously allowed users to hide their profile from certain accounts – but will no longer do so.

So I guess all that stuff they did to lock down the ability to see things on Xitter without an account was strictly for evil then

True, and that is an issue, but I guess the main thing I’m getting at is that despite voter registration not being a unified system a majority of people moving between states aren’t going to be deterred from registering by a Kafkaesque bureaucratic labyrinth.

I think for most people in the US when you move you have to get a new driver’s license, and that process also lets you register to vote as an automatic bonus if you check a box saying you want it

That doesn’t sound like something you get arrested for though

I’d be skeptical that’s even real, outside of a select few countries with especially strict copyright enforcement

people being arrested for using pirate streaming services

What circumstances does that even happen in? Like a bar that plays a pirated sports stream?

this will force us humans to go actually outside, make friends, form deep social relationship, and build lasting, resilient communities

There is no chance it goes that way, how is talking to people outside even an option for someone used to just being on the internet? Even if the content gets worse, the basic mechanisms to keep people scrolling still function, while the physical and social infrastructure necessary for in person community building is nonexistent.