Was scrolling my account history and came upon this old post, in which many people, yourself included, expressed disbelief that Meta was knowingly taking money to foment genocide, which we learned when Careless People was released, was absolutely the case. And we learned just this week, Meta been paying Nazis to post on Facebook.
I wonder what the line is, for people in general.
Listen, everything that they are doing by scorching the planet and turning the tap water brown, could be achieved on CPU or much smaller GPUs on local machines - it’s a question of focused, tight training. What they’re doing instead is literally attempting to build gigantic models that take in absolutely everything (burning real books in the process because fuck history we got money to make) and attempting to sell the idea that this brute force, one-thing-does-it-all approach, which requires us to give up everything else that is good in the world, is the only way forward, and yes, we must build the roko basilisk now.
It’s a big, big grift.
I have always felt surrounded by right wing bullshit, on previous socials and in life.
This is the only place where I look around, and believe that it is people further to the left of me that are maybe taking things a bit far. I do NOT, for the record, agree with the apologists who want us to let more fash in, I like being in a place where I am, for once, the moderate.
Oh dear, you have creeped my history and identified that I am neurodivergent, and therefore have identified the pretext to reject my thesis without bothering to really engage with its implications. Well played, you sure got that sucker.
I am afraid you are off base though, I have put bipolar in front of my various practitioners many times, and they tell me that while they do see things that resemble a cycle in the things I say to them, the problem seems to be that neither my manic phases nor my depressed phases (last one was about ten years ago and lasted twenty years or so) were sufficiently destructive to my functioning to be diagnosable.
That said, I am halfway through clearing a ~300m forest path on my property today, and intend to have a fence up a week from now, so who knows, maybe you and I are both correct and the doctors are wrong.
edit, 3 years later: I finished the fence.
This whole internet could run on a tiny fraction of what it current consumes, with no drop in service levels… if the extraction of profit from every single interaction was not prioritized.
That being said, I was addressing someone who refused to believe that local inference was even possible on CPU; this tells me that the efforts to present the current grift as the only and inevitable AI outcome is working, on minds that do not fundamentally grasp what the technology is, nor what it’s doing. I think the tech is great, and highly useful - the way they are implementing has perverse incentives and existential outcomes, and it does not have to be that way, but it is, because capitalism.