• Tattorack@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    The funniest thing is a security company called “Palantir”. If they had actually read the books they’d know how ironic that name is… Or ironically on point.

    • doug@lemmy.today
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      Irony and satire both require critical thinking beyond the scope of what bigots are capable of because it requires them empathy enough to understand the author’s POV; namely that the author is not being literal with their words.

  • Zoabrown@lemmy.world
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    Analogies like this work because they invite reflection rather than certainty. Tools themselves are neutral — it’s how people choose to use them, and the values they bring with them, that really shape the outcome.

  • ☂️-@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    they absolutely have evil in their hearts and they know it. dare i say they enjoy it.

    • Gumus@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 days ago

      They’re big fans. The stories are full of cool names they could use for their companies and projects!

  • queermunist she/her@lemmy.ml
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    3 days ago

    There’s more parallels when you consider Tolkien was writing a critique of industrialization. Evil wasn’t just represented by the One Ring, but also mining too greedily and too deep, cutting down all the trees, poisoning all the water, etc etc.

    There’s smoke rising from Isengard these days because they fired the coal plants back up.

  • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    2 days ago

    No thanks on this fantastical take. This kind of hyperbolic rhetoric is part of the “AI” grift. Indistinguishable from like Peter Thiel and similar.

    Technology =/= Sauron. Technology is almost exclusively controlled by evil people because of capitalism, but technology is not the part that’s inherently evil.

  • ceenote@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Flawed rhetoric. Tech bros read Lord of the Rings and think “Sure, those guys got corrupted by the ring, but I could handle it.”

    • Master167@lemmy.world
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      Which is the problem with them. They think themselves better and idolize the heroes but don’t look at the why they are heroes. Gandalf could have carried the ring but refused because he knew what corruption would bring. Aragorn is the typical masculine hero stereotype in fighting a war and getting the girl in the end. But even he refused because it wasn’t right for him to carry and all of his efforts were to be a distraction at best.

      It was only the continued effort of the smallest people in middle earth that won the day.

    • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 days ago

      The same types who watch It’s Always Sunny / Rick and Morty and see only role models and positive character traits.

  • MoffKalast@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Along a similar line, guy makes a global surveillance company and calls it Palantir, apparently oblivious to how much of a comic book villain he looks like. Thiel looks at Sauron like “that’s so meee”.

    • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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      Palantir. The network of seeing stones infamously compromised by just one bad actor. Drove a man completely mad with depression and doomsaying.

      Yes, let’s name our security surveillance company after it.

  • boydster@sh.itjust.works
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    3 days ago

    It’s important to know, I feel like, that the Curtis Yarvin acolytes like Peter Thiel know about Tolkien lore and think he simply took the wrong perspectivein writing his tales. They actually think Sauron was a hero and represented the right side of history. They are that fucked up, morally and ethically.

  • Rhaedas@fedia.io
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    3 days ago

    Tolkien predicted the failure of marketed AI? I’m not surprised, it’s a product of human industry and progress, something he was critical about.

    I say marketed AI as it’s not really AGI, even though it’s sold that way. The good/bad news is that actual progress in AGI will have worse results, and current AI is just demonstrating the issues that will crop up without the faster pace and worse destruction AGI could possibly bring. (See the AI alignment problem for details)

    But hey… we learn lessons from history, right?

    Right??

    • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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      I say marketed AI as it’s not really AGI

      “it” - being machine learning - is not even AI. Only dumbfucks believe that garbage marketing BS.

      • Jesus_666@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        It objectively is, same as OCR and fuzzy logic.

        It’s just that when people hear “artificial intelligence”, they think of Lt. Cmdr. Data and not the actual field of research that machine learning is a legitimate part of.

        • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
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          The problem is that the term being used is alike to saying “bread” when referring to pancakes. If this branch of IT was run by sane people, I might not even take such issue with the label. But there’s nothing wrong with labeling it machine learning, and all the credible applications do just that, be it for medical analysis or for other targeted applications. The only morons insisting to call machine learning “AI” are the LLM fuckers. And the only thing that is “AI” about LLMs are the input and output filters, which have are coded with actual, deterministic rules (or so I suspect). LLM companies are snake oil vendors, and the users are all helping them ruin the planet, politically and environmentally. And the users need to understand that, or they’ll contribute a big part to running us right into the ground. So when someone says “AI”, and means machine learning systems, they need to understand there is absolutely nothing “intelligent” about them. Because people are gullible and if the output sounds impressive enough, they - and you can observe that every minute in the real world - they actually believe the software has an understanding of what it is saying. It doesn’t. You know that, I know that, but most of the dumb users using LLMs do not. And they need to be reminded every minute until they stop fucking around with it.

    • hector@lemmy.today
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      2 days ago

      None of us can afford gucci black leather shoes, but I feel comfortable judging them anyway, as I can see they are pieces of fucking shit.

  • yucandu@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    What about the AI that I run on my local GPU that is using a model trained on open source and public works?

    • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      It’s cool as hell to train models don’t get me wrong but if you use them as assistants you will still slowly stop thinking no?

      So Nazgûl.

      • yucandu@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Feels like telling me not to use a calculator so I don’t forget how to add and subtract.

      • mattvanlaw@lemmy.world
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        I’ve settled on a future model where AIs are familiars that level up from their experience more naturally and are less immediately omnipotent

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      3 days ago

      This is very cool. Any advice a simple software engineer (me) could follow to practice the same?

      • Jankatarch@lemmy.world
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        People were making LLMs before openai/chatgpt tbf.

        It’s the “destroy the environment and economy in an attempt to make something that sucks just enough to justify not paying people fairly so you can advertise to rich assholes gambling their generational wealth” that OpenAI invented for the LLMs.

        • amino@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          what are those LLMs you mention that people are still using? never heard of them, sounds like a cop out

        • Jared White ✌️ [HWC]@humansare.social
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          It is still trained on open source code on GitHub. These code communities seemingly have no way to opt out of their free (libre) contributions being used as training data, nor does the resulting code generation contribute anything back to those communities. It is a form of license stripping. That’s just one issue.

          Just because your inference running locally doesn’t use much electricity doesn’t mean you’ve sidestepped all of the other ethical issues surrounding LLMs.

          • yucandu@lemmy.world
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            It is not trained on open source code on Github.

            But I can use it to analyze a datasheet and generate a library for an obscure module that I can then upload to Github and contribute to the community.

              • yucandu@lemmy.world
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                StarCoderData.23 A large-scale code dataset derived from the permissively licensed GitHub collection The Stack (v1.2). (Kocetkov et al., 2022), which applies deduplication and filtering of opted-out files. In addition to source code, the dataset includes supplementary resources such as GitHub Issues and Jupyter Notebooks (Li et al., 2023).

                That’s not random Github accounts or “delicensing” anything. People had to opt IN to be part of “The Stack”. Apertus isn’t training itself from community code.

                • Jared White ✌️ [HWC]@humansare.social
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                  I’m tired of arguing with you about this, and you’re still wrong. It was opt-out, not opt-in, based initially on a GitHub crawl of 137M repos and 52B files before filtering & dedup.

    • hector@lemmy.today
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      2 days ago

      Mordor is New Jersey. Gaza idk, gates of cirith ungol maybe? No more like Sauramen’s Isengaard.

        • hector@lemmy.today
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          I am just spitballing here, but Mordor is like the industrial engine of the empire, not the wasteland of their warring. It’s where the industry of the dark lord, such as it is, spews toxic ash clouds over the land and blots out the sun that never shines bright overhead to the point the orcs find it rather seasonable (orcs being perhaps a cross between men and elves captured and tormented through generations by Morgoth, Sauron’s former boss, the Eldar that went bad, (the other Eldar finally came to Middle Earth and killed/banished Morgoth, but not before the elves warred against him in vain for generations after he stole their prize simaril jewels and murdered some in a betrayal and ran to his middle earth kingdom from valinor.)

          So mordor has toxic air, just like New Jersey, in fact endocrinologists have long decreed that New Jersey causes cancer. Their government is corrupt and in league with those polluters in industry that dump their waste under dishonest arguments and pay the politicians to believe it. The D or R next to their names is inconsequential in this regard, they are corrupted by the employers, and are of the party that can win. You don’t let someone poison your family if they have one letter next to their name rather than another do you? You shouldn’t.

          New Jersey is the only state I’ve been to where you have to pay to leave, as it’s all private highways, best money you can spend.

          • Formfiller@lemmy.world
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            Yes, but the eye of Sauron is in Mordor and the plan for Gaza is to build a city run by and ruled by technocrats like Peter Thiel and Larry Ellison who are heading the global mass surveillance systems(eye of Sauron ) This of course will be built on over the blood of the innocent women and children they just slaughtered in a genocide and the project will be policed by the Israeli (orcs) who gleefully engaged in the slaughter of an entire people. I haven’t read the books since I was a teenager but my broad recollection brings me to this conclusion because Mordor is the headquarters of evil and that’s Israel