> Counterpoint: Sufficient media control kills a democracy because it enables you to control public sentiment and election outcomes.
That's just as true when the entity seizing control is the government, such that the entity that control public sentiment and election outcomes is the incumbent administration.
Absolutely. A quite typical way for dictatorships to consolidate power.
But the question is how much this applies, especially in most western states; there is a huge spectrum between having some government-determined regulation (or funding) for media and a single individual politician being in full control of all media content.
I'd argue that Turkey/Hungary or past-Italy under Berlusconi were all much farther along that spectrum than most western nations right now, US included.
So your theory is that a single, coherent actor ("deep state"?) is responsible for current public sentiment that is both somewhat critical of social media and specifically foreign control of that media? I disagree on that.
In a democracy, if you gave full control over local media to a foreign nation, do you see how that could lead to problems, or would you be fine with that?
TikTok being owned by a Chinese company didn't represent "giving full control over local media to a foreign nation."
And it's weird that you mistrust the influence of something as banal as TikTok but apparently believe the moral panic around social media and TikTok specifically is entirely organic. Because I guess there is no such thing as propaganda or influence operations on Western social media?
If you're worried about foreign influence on social media literally every Western platform is being aggressively manipulated by both foreign and Western intelligence. It just got revealed that most of the MAGA accounts on Twitter were foreign, likely Russian-based networks. The platform that serves as the de facto psychological operations and communications channel for the current Presidental administration.
But it's just TikTok and the Chinese mind control we should worry about?
I'm absolutely not saying that there is no western propaganda. But giving control over your media to any single actor (especially sovereign ones) is basically suicide for a democracy because it allows those actors to "democratically" achieve results against voter interests.
Politicians having control over media is always a problem, but it got much worse thanks to inherent centralization of modern media, so more regulatory pushback is needed now than in the newspaper age. I'd also argue that foreigners having media control is typically worse because incentives are even less aligned with voters.
>But giving control over your media to any single actor (especially sovereign ones) is basically suicide for a democracy because it allows those actors to "democratically" achieve results against voter interests.
There's plenty of evidence of Russian influence operations affecting Western elections on Facebook and Twitter.
Where is the evidence that the CCP is controlling people's minds and rigging Western elections through TikTok?
This isn't some tin foiled hat wearing nonsense, every person I talk to seems think that ending anonymity online would be a good thing, until I explain the democracy protecting use cases,i.e. whistle blowers.
If democratic outputs can be sufficiently controlled via media that is for sale, then you already have a de-facto plutocracy.
Similarly, allowing foreign interests a significant media presence (and control) in your country is a very real threat to the basic principles of a democratic nation.
Something like a pop-sci article along the lines of "Mad scientists create racist, imperialistic AI"?
I honestly don't see publication of the weights as a relevant risk factor, because sensationalist misrepresentation is trivially possible with the given example responses alone.
I don't think such pseudo-malicious misrepresentation of scientific research can be reliably prevented anyway, and the disclaimers make your stance very clear.
On the other hand, publishing weights might lead to interesting insights from others tinkering with the models. A good example for this would be the published word prevalence data (M. Brysbaert et al @Ghent University) that led to interesting follow-ups like this: https://observablehq.com/@yurivish/words
I hope you can get the models out in some form, would be a waste not to, but congratulations on a fascinating project regardless!
Yes but if you are building an voice activated autonomous flying hammer then you either want it to be very good at differentiating heads from hammers OR you should restrict its use.
OR you respect individual liberty and agency, hold individuals responsible for their actions, instead of tools, and avoid becoming everyone's condescending nanny.
Your pre-judgement of acceptable hammer uses would rob hammer owners of responsible and justified self-defense and defense of others in situations in which there are no other options, as well as other legally and socially accepted uses which do not fit your pre-conceived ideas.
I do agree with this and think it is an important point to stress.
But we don't know how much different/better human (or animal) learning/understanding is, compared to current LLMs; dismissing it as meaningless token prediction might be premature, and underlying mechanisms might be much more similar than we'd like to believe.
If anyone wants to challenge their preconceptions along those lines I can really recommend reading Valentino Braitenbergs "Vehicles: Experiments in synthetic psychology (1984)".
Yes, that's what I'm saying. You can't just use a quick and easy mask, you have to use a modulo operator which is computationally expensive enough that it's probably killing the time savings you made elsewhere.
There's probably no good reason to make your buffer sizes NOT a power of two, though. If memory's that tight, maybe look elsewhere first.
What I mean is: This ringbuffer implementation (and its simplicity) relies on the index range being a multiple of the buffer size (which is only true for powers of two, when the index is e.g. a 32bit unsigned integer).
If you swap bitmasking for modulo operations then that does work at first glance, but breaks down when the index wraps around. This forces you to abandon the simple "increment" operation for something more complex, too.
The requirement for a power-of-two size is more intrinsic to the approach than just the bitmasking operation itself.
US and China are on completely different stages of industrialization: The US had its massive boom of manufacturing almost a century ago, enriching its population massively. Those rich citizens make the same manufacturing uncompetitive today, because no one is going to work in a factory for $20k/year (median wage in urban China), when he can work for other "rich" people for more than twice as much.
Switching paths is not feasible for the US in the same way that it is not gonna be feasible for China to hold on to all its industry as wages rise: You can't compete globally at "poor people wages" while being "rich", as simple as that.
I don't see how this is really much different from just setting up servers in some underregulated banana republic; to do anything, you still need a connection to the public internet, and somewhat regulated nations like the EU or US can just block/prosecute at that interface.
I think a very problematic aspect of this is self-perception.
People that see (growing) wealth inequality as a problem rarely perceive themselves as part of it, but e.g. anyone complaining about the "top 1%" on this forum is pretty likely to be part of the "problem" themselves, globally speaking.
I think that for a lot of issues "people richer than us" are mostly a convenient scapegoat to shift the blame upstream, e.g. with CO2 emissions: If you're an average "western" citizen, then you are pretty likely to be in the upper percentiles of emission culpability, and pointing at celebrities and their private jets or somesuch is no better than thinly veiled whataboutism in my view.
> you are pretty likely to be in the upper percentiles of emission culpability
Since you are talking about culpability specifically, what exactly can they do about it? Or, more to the point, what have they done so that it it is their fault?
Vote political parties into power that put a price on emissions and honestly work on reducing it.
The big problem is that this is not gonna be free. When fossils are used, it's obviously because they are the most economical option. As soon as you price in actual externalities (=> climate change), energy is going to get more expensive, and people don't like this. Almost everyone claims to be concerned about climate change, but a lot of people are neither willing to pay more for gas or power, nor do they want to risk making local industry less competitive.
The sad truth is that almost any cost for environmental sustainability/emission reduction is already too much for a lot of people.
If there are no parties mainly concerned with climate sustainability, then that is very likely because voters are not sufficiently interested in such platforms, and are more receptive to messages like "will fight immigrants", "will fight use of incorrect pronouns" or "will prevent trans-women from fighting in womens MMA".
Speaking for the US: climate sustainability (as main focus) was up for election 25 years ago, and about half the nation did not even bother voting, so it seems unsurprising to me that focus has shifted away from this issue (and fair to blame voters for that).
The amount of CO2 emissions a human makes or even an average family makes pales in comparison to the emissions companies create. It was all advertising propaganda to reduce corporate accountability.
This is simply incorrect. CO2 emissions from a single passenger vehicle alone are ~5 tons/year (this is tailpipe missions only), while per capita emissions for EU/US citizens are between 5 and 15 tons/year.
So invididual transport alone (not even counting indirect emissions from vehicle construction, road infrastructure etc.) is already significant.
What fraction of emissions would you blame on corporations alone (which corporations)?
A democracy that yields sufficient media control to (single) individuals, corporations or foreign nations is basically commiting suicide.
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