Sir Arthur V Quackington

Its great until something overloads the USB bus or you just have a random driver reset cause it to reload, and you hear that disconnect/reconnect noise while something was writing to the array.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that we’re going to suddenly have a people’s revolution that topples Google. Google is so entrenched that it is near inescapable. The fact that there is no antitrust action means that they dominate entire segments of the market with no competition and no ability for anyone to rise to that level.

Even though I loathe Google, I am not fully capable of cutting them out of my life. They are at my job. They’re running tons of my friends and families, email, which by proxy they control the email delivery for an insane number of people. They own the most popular browser in the world, which they heavily, heavily promote. And on and on and on.

I think the contingent of people that are pretty sick of Google shit is actually pretty large, but being sick of their shit doesn’t mean that you can even remotely remove them from your life. I had family members who were separately given the nagging harassment that they must sign up for Google One or lose all their photos because they were approaching the maximum storage Because Google had silently activated backups on their phones in the background. And both of them separately signed up for Google One accounts when they could have shared a household account between the two of them. Google extort my less tech-savvy relatives. They double dipped on the extortion.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg and I’m hardly alone. But so many people are like my relatives that you just wind up trapped. If you don’t know how to do a full Google takeout and then process the Google takeout and filter that down into something you can use to migrate off of their platform, then you are really stuck.

So yeah, I’ll be loud and bitter and fucking mad at Google until something happens. Not that I expect anything will. Losing an anti-trust did nothing. At this point, I feel like they could create a search engine that does nothing but ai generate child pornography and somehow get away with it. “We’re only committing this crime to train our models.” Worked for Facebook.

I ditched Google Chrome years ago. I’ve been using Firefox and now Zen. And despite all the bitching, duck duck go is 99% as effective for most searches.

At most, you have to go through one or two more pages. Which nowadays is about the same you would have to do on Google. Only the entire time you were bombarded with advertising lies in AI slop. While also feeding their ad machine.

I cannot, in my lifetime, think of another company that had such overwhelming, positive public opinion and momentum and squandered at all so effectively and thoroughly to the extent that they are seen as almost a villain by huge chunks of the world globally.

I think the craziest thing is that someone in their company actually allowed them to get rid of their don’t be evil motto. Even if they were going to do all the evil shit they already are doing, just keeping the motto around was such an easy PR win in slam dunk to deflect concerns to and say, oh no, we’re always keeping in mind not to be evil.

I don’t know if that was the day that Google’s fortunes turned. But it definitely feels like it was a tipping point for the history of the company. And now, even though I’m posting this from an Android phone, they just announced plans to make Android shittier in one year by locking down the ability to install apps from online downloads even further. And here I am trying to think of how I can get a custom ROM installed on my phone again for the first time in over a decade. Not because I want new features or cutting edge technology. But because I just want that fucking company as far away from me as possible, and the “year of the Linux phone” is not here yet. So figuring out some kind of way to put Google Apps into a jail and lock them out of my life except when I need them is the new goal. (Probably GrapheneOS)

The fact that they lost their antitrust case and were declared a monopoly and then were hit with basically no punishment whatsoever other than sharing a tiny bit of the data with other super corporations, just makes me livid beyond belief.

Companies like this and the CEOs and executives that run them should not exist.

There will be physical labor to get done. For a few decades at least until someone figures out the roomba of automatons.

So there must be some labor force. It will just be a much larger unemployed and underemployed contingent. And with extreme overabundance, horrible downward pressure on wages.

And so what labor remains gets squeezed, and the rest battle for the job of garbage man, or babysitter.

Honestly real economies have many factors, but I’m really just saying that absent controls, the system by design approaches a hellscape at lightspeed.

With every dime they can scrape together.

Then with debt and labor.

Then with lifelong debt.

No hyperbole, by design the system is setup to bleed people dry for every penny, not to create thriving nations or economies with many wide participants. We have been hacking away at hard won safeguards for 4 decades now, and the consequences are coming.

If enough of the people with the means own a majority of the assets, have little to no regulation to stop them, eventually you will be getting paid in WalmartCoin and redeem it exclusively at WalmartTown where the goods are all priced so you can never afford enough, just barely enough to get by.

We did it 100 years ago, and had to trust bust and outlaw it. But I guess we’re in for a do over.

They just have all the money, and charge you to extract infinite interest on all the assets they now control.

VC is buying up as much water rights and housing as it can by the way.

Just an unrelated detail.

Jesus Christ. We need regulations on corporate LLM use NOW.

Ingesting all the artwork you ever created by obtaining it illegally and feeding it into my plagarism remix machine is theft of your work, because I did not pay for it.

Separately, keeping a copy of this work so I can do this repeatedly is also stealing your work.

The judge ruled the first was okay but the second was not because the first is “transformative”, which sadly means to me that the judge despite best efforts does not understand how a weighted matrix of tokens works and that while they may have some prevention steps in place now, early models showed the tech for what it was as it regurgitated text with only minor differences in word choice here and there.

Current models have layers on top to try and prevent this user input, but escaping those safeguards is common, and it’s also only masking the fact that the entire model is built off of the theft of other’s work.

There is nothing intelligent about “AI” as we call it. It parrots based on probability. If you remove the randomness value from the model, it parrots the same thing every time based on it’s weights, and if the weights were trained on Harry Potter, it will consistently give you giant chunks of harry potter verbatim when prompted.

Most of the LLM services attempt to avoid this by adding arbitrary randomness values to churn the soup. But this is also inherently part of the cause of hallucinations, as the model cannot preserve a single correct response as always the right way to respond to a certain query.

LLMs are insanely “dumb”, they’re just lightspeed parrots. The fact that Meta and these other giant tech companies claim it’s not theft because they sprinkle in some randomness is just obscuring the reality and the fact that their models are derivative of the work of organizations like the BBC and Wikipedia, while also dependent on the works of tens of thousands of authors to develop their corpus of language.

In short, there was a ethical way to train these models. But that would have been slower. And the court just basically gave them a pass on theft. Facebook would have been entirely in the clear had it not stored the books in a dataset, which in itself is insane.

I wish I knew when I was younger that stealing is wrong, unless you steal at scale. Then it’s just clever business.

Terrible judgement.

Turn the K value down on the model and it reproduces text near verbatim.

I’m not worried about me. I can manage. But I had to intervene and make it a Project for my immediate family. Which is always unfun, because who wants to expose all their personal data that way, especially photos.

Crazy that Google just screwed over GrapheneOS like this.

Great link, and I fully agree. If it’s possible anyways.

Yes, but that shouldn’t explicitly opt in, and they shouldn’t marry that product to Gmail and Google Drive if they are going to push it to enable by default.

Again, it’s really insidious. They push it so aggressively I had to disable it on my personal device twice, and I can’t just not use Google Photos app because it’s tied to the camera itself on pixel phones.

The absolutely criminal dark patterns that they pull on people via Google photos auto backup is insane.

Just in my own orbit 2 of my friends wives, my parents, and my in-laws all wound up paying Google because they thought they had to or lose all their photos. We helped most of them disconnect the autobackup (that they didn’t even know was activated) and move it to offline safely. But that was the most downright evil shit Google has ever done and literally a fire in me for manipulating the elderly and less tech savvy so blatantly.

I responded above, but my point kind of was that it doesn’t work that way, but as we rethinking content delivery we should also rethinking hosting distribution. What I was saying is not a “well gee we should just do this…” type of suggestion, but more a extremely high level idea for server orchestration from a public private swarm that may or may not ever be feasible, but definitely doesn’t really exist today.

Imagine if it were somewhat akin to BitTorrent, only the user could voluntarily give remote control to the instance for orchestration management. The orchestration server toggles the nodes contents so that, lets say, 100% of them carry the most accessed data (hot content, <100gb), and the rest is sharded so they each carry 10% of the archived data, making each node require <1tb total. And the node client is given X number of pinned CPUs that can be used for additional server compute tasks to offload various queries.

See, I’m fully aware this doesn’t really exist on this form. But thinking of it like a Kubernetes cluster or a HA webclient it seems like it should be possible somehow to build this in a way where the client really only needs to install, and say yes to contribute. If we could cut it down to that level, then you can start serving the site like a P2P bittorrent swarm, and these power user clients can become nodes.

I realize that is not how the fediverse works. I’m not speaking about the content delivery as much as the sever orchestration.

That’s why I’m saying if somehow it could work that way, it would be one way to offset the compute and delivery burdens. But it is a very different paradigm from normal hosting. There would have to be some kind of swarmanagement layer that the main instance nodes controlled.

My point was only that, should such a proposal be feasible one day, if you lower the barriers you could have more resources.

I myself have no interest in hosting a full blown private instance of Lemmy or mastodon, but I would happily contribute 1tb of storage and a ton of idle compute to serving the content for my instance if I could. That’s where this thinking stemmed from. Many users like me could donate their “free” idle power and space. But currently it is not feasible.

Provided there is an “upper limit” on what scale we are talking, Ive often wondered, couldn’t private users also host a sharded copy of a server instance to offset load and bandwidth? Like Folding@Home, but for site support.

I realize this isn’t exactly feasible today for most infra, but if we’re trying to “solve” the problem, imagine if you were able to voluntarily, give up like 100gb HDD space and have your PC host 2-3% of an instance’s server load for a month or something. Or maybe just be a CDN node for the media and bandwidth heavy parts to ease server load, while the server code is on different machines.

This kind of distributed “load balancing” on private hardware may be a complete pipe dream today, but it think if might be the way federated services need to head. I can tell you if we could get it to be as simple as volunteers spinning up a docker, and dropping the generated wireguard key and their IP in a “federate” form to give the mini-node over to an instance, it would be a lot easier to support sites in this way.

Speaking for myself, I have enough bandwidth and space I could lend some compute and offset a small amount of traffic. But the full load of a popular instance would be more than my simple home setup is equipped for. If contributing hosting was as easy as contributing compute, it could have a chance to catch on.

No, the mistake was the complete corruption of US politics through naked graft and a FPTP voting system leading to extremist views being the only rallying opposition to reasonable stances.

The government needs to get purged of lobbyists and money.

Probably deemed more important to get eyes on it than hold to the community guidelines.

True, in a broad sense. I am speaking moreso to enshittification and the degradation of both experience and control.

If this was just “now everything has Siri, it’s private and it works 100x better than before” it would be amazing. That would be like cars vs horses. A change, but a perceived value and advantage.

But it’s not. Not right now anyways. Right now it’s like replacing a car with a pod that runs on direct wind. If there is any wind over say, 3mph it works, and steers 95% as well as existing cars. But 5% of the time it’s uncontrollable and the steering or brakes won’t respond. And when there is no wind over 3mph it just doesn’t work.

In this hypothetical, the product is a clear innovation, offers potential benefits long term in terms of emissions and fuel, but it doesn’t do the core task well, and sometimes it just fucks it up.

The television, cars, social media, all fulfilled a very real niche. But nearly everyone using AI, even those using it as a tool for coding (arguably its best use case) often don’t want to use it in search or in many of these other “forced” applications because of how unreliable it is. Hence why companies have tried (and failed at great expense) to replace their customer service teams with LLMs.

This push is much more top down.

Now drink your New Coke and Crystal Pepsi.