Personally, I’d rather more countries stop fucking around with LLMs generally, thanks!

This is honestly such a stupid goddamn thing to compete over. Maybe I should be thankful in that regard, then, since it keeps the U.S. and China’s ridiculous dick-swinging contest more focused on areas that don’t actually matter, rather than weapons development programs that are eager to ruin our rights and our lives all the more.

Kill a billionaire, another takes his place. You have to make systemic change in order to actually remove billionaires from the equation. That requires a lot more than a bullet. Organizing will always be more effective.

Why are you singling out one small part of their comment to the exclusion of the rest?

The Cybertruck is very much an actual shitty thing that Tesla does. Sure, maybe they don’t literally “have a habit of exploding all on their own,” but I don’t think Gork was exactly trying to play off as an authority on the topic. Just mocking Cybertrucks being shit.

Nobody’s attacking EVs writ large, here. Just Elon and his awful ideas.

This has two issues with it that are sourced from the fact that most people here are likely from the States or similar. Namely:

1. How are we supposed to do anything about China or Russia? It’s anger for its own sake.
2. Criticism of the U.S. is unlikely to make Americans racist towards themselves. Sinophobia, meanwhile, is a real risk.

This aside, I personally am irritated by the quantity moreso than anything else. As I said elsewhere, it’s the same few users, and I find it obsessive. It stops sounding to me like “I want people to be aware of particular issues from China” and starts sounding to me like “I want to bombard people with all possible negativity about China until they hate everything related to the place as much as I do.”

Thanks to these folks, Beehaw virtually always has at least one post about China or Russia on its front page. Often several. Credit where it’s due; I’ve seen a pro-Palestine post here and there, which I appreciate. But Christ, I’m sick of the rest. Blocks are fair, but I feel like that just hides the issue rather than solving it. I feel like I’m seeing a propaganda mill in action, and I don’t like the idea of just ignoring it.

In what way is it meaningfully different? Does the intent of the creators of an LLM – a kind of system notorious for being a black box – fundamentally change the outcomes of what it says? It’s spouting propaganda either way.

Please don’t be deliberately obtuse. You can do better than that.

Condescending attitude aside, don’t bring up an irrelevant scenario if you don’t want me to point out its irrelevance.

Are we in a court?

There’s 2-3 users who post about China/Russia to an extraordinary degree. I could mention them here, but for the sake of avoiding potential harassment (however unlikely) I’d rather not publicly single them out. Suffice to say if you spend a decent amount of time here you probably know who they are.

I find it obsessive and obnoxious at best. At worst, I start to wonder if there are more accounts doing it than there are people behind them.

That’s a distinction without a difference.

I agree with you that “free market” standpoints aren’t very good places to criticize this decision from – except to point out the hypocrisy of the right-wing, which I do think the original comment was trying to do – but it has to be said that nobody is obligated to criticize both China and the U.S. equally in order to not be a hypocrite.

One simple example of why would be that most if not all users here have absolutely no say at all as to what China does. There aren’t a lot of Chinese citizenry here. But there are a lot of Americans. It so follows that it makes sense to criticize the U.S. more, because many people on Beehaw can actually do something about it, especially in aggregate.

It doesn’t help to criticize China much either, anyway. China’s bad, yes; we know. Even among honest-to-god capital-C Communist circles, China is controversial. Posts about it tend to do three things: 1) Create a sort of misery/anger circle-jerk, 2) arbitrarily and unnecessarily signal to others that you aren’t a tankie, when nobody should really need to clarify that in most scenarios, and 3) further U.S. propaganda interests by taking people’s time and attention away from issues they’re more likely to be able to do something about.

I’m obviously not in favor of forgetting what China’s done, either, but there’s a happy middle-ground I think a lot of Western-centric sites sail right past, and I don’t think any of it is helpful.

Some American or other company should just hurry up and make TokTik and rake in the bucks.

Google’s already been trying with Youtube Shorts. Let’s not encourage them.

This is tragic. Nobody should be gunned down in the street like this.

I agree. Which is why we should address the problem by dealing with the absolutely ghoulish situation that is American health care, profiteering, and late-stage capitalism writ large. If there’s one thing I am very happy about, it is the fact that the number one thing being talked about due to this – besides the shooting itself – is the problem that caused it and so many other deaths; not a preference for vigilante justice, not guns, not terrorists, but a desire for profit above all else, regardless of how many die from lack of care as a result.

To be clear, I suspect you agree, at least with the “ghoulish situation that is American health care” part. But what I want to highlight here is that I don’t think almost anyone wants to live in a world where things like this happen, much less one where so many of us are happy about it. In the end, though, we don’t get a choice. We live in that world, and it is far more important for us to worry about fixing that than it is for us to wring our hands when one of the 1% dies while the millions he’s killed got nowhere near as much sympathy.

Murder is obviously bad. Even when it’s justified, it is a tragedy, and indicative of a failure to find a better solution. But this is a failure of the system people like Brian Thompson helped to create. On some other sites, I see a lot of people saying things like what you’ve done here. They spend time focusing on how his death is tragic, prefacing anything else they wish to say with statements to that effect as though they were warding against a curse. Individually, I don’t find this to be a problem. But when a lot of people are doing it? I think that’s an insult to his victims.

Eh, I’ll take it. Bluesky’s learned some lessons from the past, for what it’s worth. It has more than a few features that make the network lock-in less intense, so while I fully expect it to enshittify, I do think it’ll be less severe of an affair than it was for Twitter.

What I’m more upset about is Threads. I can’t think of anything redeeming about that place.

I can’t say I’m too confident about data that was obtained by methods including 1) Facebook data collection (we trust that now?), 2) machine learning and 3) potentially nebulous, unspecific definitions of various political groups. Still, allow me to indulge in some confirmation bias, if you will:

This shouldn’t surprise anyone, if you ask me. People are stressed and limited on time. Of course they’ll take shortcuts!

On places like Bluesky, most articles, videos or news content I’d share would have more to do with how much I trust the person posting or sharing it than with its main body of content. I figure that someone I value has read it, and so I skip it, because reading it would feel like work and I have to deal with enough of that as it is.

Places like here, I take more caution, but as a direct consequence of that you’ll notice I really don’t post very much at all. Comments, sure, but that’s because those are more my opinion than anything else. I don’t have the bandwidth to put through more effort than I already am.

Maybe learn how to use it correctly in its current state

The slop being talked about in this article was made by OpenAI themselves. You know, the company at the forefront of the genAI/LLM bubble, with billions of dollars of money behind it?

I don’t know what kind of mythical standard it is that you believe generative AI is capable of, but when even the organization at the forefront of the tech can’t make this shit look good, you can’t exactly claim it’s a skill issue.

Mainly to identify plants and mushrooms.

Considering modern-day “AI” track records at this, the only thing I’d trust a device like that to do is massively increase poisoning deaths.

From the article, emphasis mine:

According to a report from Shanghai’s The Paper, the incident involved the company’s branch in Shenzhen’s Longhua district, where an employee involved in the filming said it was intended as a joke, and that the three employees in the video had volunteered to take part. The employee said the branch did not punish employees for small mistakes like forgetting straws.

On Wednesday afternoon, Good Me issued a public apology through its Weibo account. “We’re sorry,” it said. “We were playing with punchlines, and it went all wrong.”

Whether or not you might trust that statement, I do think it’s worthwhile context. This post seems to be making a mountain out of a molehill – even the actual article’s title/subtitle makes it clear this was a joke – and I find that in very poor taste given how high tensions are on this topic.

This is tangential, but am I the only one getting sick and tired of all the topics about China? The imperial core’s news industry’s obsession with the country has never been healthy, and none of the articles being posted have had me thinking any of that is changing. I’m seeing post after post, usually from the same two users, and I’m starting to worry that the line between “documenting the atrocities of an authoritarian country” and “sinophobia” might start to get blurry.

To be clear, I’m not trying to point fingers. I don’t want to make assumptions about the users in question. I’ve just been seeing this for a few months now and it’s getting on my nerves, especially given the political climate of the United States.

I don’t personally believe everything’s so bad as it looks. There’s a lot to be mad about, for sure, but it’s worth remembering that fear and anger are some of the best-selling emotions the news has to offer. Doubly so if it’s about China. But none of that means that things are substantially worse than they used to be. Some of it is that things weren’t as good as we thought, some of it is that things are being made to look worse than they are.

Either way, we didn’t start the fire.

Joel conceived the idea for the song when he had just turned 40. He was in a recording studio and met a 21-year-old friend of Sean Lennon who said “It’s a terrible time to be 21!” Joel replied: “Yeah, I remember when I was 21 — I thought it was an awful time and we had Vietnam, and y’know, drug problems, and civil rights problems and everything seemed to be awful.” The friend replied: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it’s different for you. You were a kid in the fifties and everybody knows that nothing happened in the fifties.” Joel retorted: “Wait a minute, didn’t you hear of the Korean War or the Suez Canal Crisis?” Joel later said those headlines formed the basic framework for the song.

I really don’t think these are the same group of people. From the article:

The strike was ignored in some areas, reflecting deep political divisions in Israel after nearly 11 months of fighting.

Those are the people you’re thinking of, and they aren’t striking.