cygon

joined 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

After reading, the gist of it seems to be:

  • Vanilla far-right indoctrinated dumbo (his vision: "Reds" welcome, "Blues" not, "Anti-Blue Propaganda" on public view screens)
  • Wants exploitative capitalism on steroids with companies controlling everyone's lives completely
  • Claims current capitalism is only bad because it's "woke capitalism" which he claims the "ruling class" is pushing
  • Wants tech bros to butter up police and give security staff jobs to their children as a favor, i.e. intentional social classism

.

In short, just another out of touch entrepreneur who sells snake oil cures to people suffering in the current system, so that they may invite in the boot that stomps them down for good.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

So... this AI company gets gaming teens to "donate" their computing power, rather than pay for render farms / GPU clouds?

And then oblivious parents pay the power bills, effectively covering the computing costs of the AI porn company?

Sounds completely ethical to me /s.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (4 children)

If you were alive (and online) during the 90s, you may remember the banter between Microsoft and General Motors:

From https://crysa.fzu.cz/ondra/documents/cars_like_windows.html (the only online copy I could find)

Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, "If GM had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving twenty-five-dollar cars that get 1,000 miles to the gallon."

In response to Bill's comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

[...]

  1. The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single "general car error" warning light.

  2. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.

  3. The airbag system would ask "Are You Sure?" before going off.

  4. Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed a hold of the radio antenna.

30 years later, some of those jokes are finally becoming reality, thanks to Tesla.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's a standard feature in nearly all common video editors (i.e. DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere).

Usually, stabilization goes over all video frames and tries to find image transformations (rotation + translation + zoom) that make a frame match as closely as possible with the previous frame. That's an oversimplified explanation, but from a user point-of-view, these tools are mature enough to be applied with just a few clicks.

This video is definitely the result of that, as, whoever did it, didn't even bother to insert a cut when the feed switches between left side and right side camera, thus making the stabilization spazz out momentarily.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Breaking News: border checkpoint doing its job, normal number of criminals encountered.

Fox News: look at these cherry-picked criminals with cartel associations apprehended at the border. Take a moment to let the worry and fear rise up in you, then watch our next segment, an opinion piece where someone will make allusions to the great replacement theory and falsely claim that the Democratic party wants open borders.

Joking aside, progressives are aware that criminals exist and that some of them are crossing country borders. The critical part is whether one looks at the big whole through statistics, or whether one lets themselves be rabble-roused into irrational fear and hatred of foreigners.

Let's say my name was Mupert Rurdoch and I was running an anti-conservative news channel. Currently, murders per capita (per 1 million people) are around 70, so a population of 300 million people commits about 21000 murders per year. I could cherry-pick murders committed in red state, rural areas and make them my headline every few days. Then smoothly blend into opinion segments where the hosts talk about a "murder epidemic amongst conservatives" and mentions militias executing people and so on.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

A perfect demonstration of how Russian indoctrination works right here.

Original reporting: A major disinfo attack against Europe being prepared by Russia is uncovered through diligent investigation and published and reported on.

The response:

    1. divert to farmer's dissatisfaction with several policies
    1. cast disinfo reports as underhanded attempts (by politician Russia wants gone) to arrogantly brush off farmer's concerns (which the report never even related to)
    1. claim Macron is selling out to EU (here, have a serving of anti-EU sentiment, too)
    1. vaccinate reader against the disinfo being countered ("everyone who tells you otherwise belittles you and hates you, join us in our righteous anger")

Emotional framing:

Nationalists, agricultural owner-operators, and farmers exposed to rising interest rates

"truckloads of exported Ukranian agricultural salvage" vs. "fresh French produce"

we’re getting an earful about how all these local yokels are hoodwinked by anti-EU Russian Propaganda

Macron for selling out the agg sector to financial interests in Brussels

"If you’re not in favor of (insert supposed evil acts described in lurid way), then you’re a secret spy for Putin and a traitor."

Result: The reader comes out the other end an angry person, outraged about the plight of farmers, outraged again at disinfo reports supposedly serving to silence them, outraged once more at a France politician selling them out to the EU, EU painted as high-and-mighty villain, automatic anger against anyone who tells them a different viewpoint ready to trigger.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I agree that a lot of human behavior (on the micro as well as macro level) is just following learned patterns. On the other hand, I also think we're far ahead - for now - in that we (can) have a meta context - a goal and an awareness of our own intent.

For example, when we solve a math problem, we don't just let intuitive patterns run and blurt out numbers, we know that this is a rigid, deterministic discipline that needs to be followed. We observe and guide our own thought processes.

That requires at least a recurrent network and at higher levels, some form of self awareness. And any LLM is, when it runs (rather than being trained), completely static, feed-forward (it gets some 2000 words (or 32000+ as of GPT-4 Turbo) fed to its input synapses, each neuron layer gets to fire once and then the final neuron layer contains the likelihoods for each possible next word.)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Is this a case of "here, LLM trained on millions of lines of text from cold war novels, fictional alien invasions, nuclear apocalypses and the like, please assume there is a tense diplomatic situation and write the next actions taken by either party" ?

But it's good that the researchers made explicit what should be clear: these LLMs aren't thinking/reasoning "AI" that is being consulted, they just serve up a remix of likely sentences that might reasonably follow the gist of the provided prior text ("context"). A corrupted hive mind of fiction authors and actions that served their ends of telling a story.

That being said, I could imagine /some/ use if an LLM was trained/retrained on exclusively verified information describing real actions and outcomes in 20th century military history. It could serve as brainstorming aid, to point out possible actions or possible responses of the opponent which decision makers might not have thought of.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

...and, hear me out, that will be perfect for keeping messages untraceable by the government. Every single of those 200,000 computers will have full copies of all the messages ever transmitted, unencrypted, but they'll never be able to tell who wrote them and who they were for.

 

I'm planning to encode some of my blu-ray discs to AV1 with maximum quality in mind. After thinking I had a good set of settings nailed down, I got sensitized to the topic of banding and found that in certain frames, my encodes were suffering from it quite badly.

I also found the biggest magnet for banding in an animated show: the very first episodes of "The Eminence in Shadow" shows a purple blanket that has crazy banding even at 10-bit with high bit rates.

Here's aom-av1-lavish, the "opmox mainline merge" branch as of November, 14th, 2023 with --arnr-strength=0 --enable-dnl-denoising=0 --denoise-noise-level=1

After seeing that another (x265) encode did it much better and even SVT-AV1 with mostly default settings performed well (see further down), I changed to --arnr-strength=1 --enable-dnl-denoising=0 --denoise-noise-level=6 and what a difference:

Finally, this is the result of SVT-AV1-psy as of January, 22nd, 2024. The settings are --film-grain 6 --film-grain-denoise 0:

So how does one estimate a video's noise / grain level? Do I just develop a feel for which setting corresponds to what look? That might involve quite a bunch of failed encodes, however.