Tootfinder

Behörden: Früherer Parlamentschef in Lwiw getötet
Der frühere ukrainische Parlamentschef Andrij Parubij ist im Westen des Landes in der Stadt Lwiw nach Behördenangaben getötet worden. Wie die Polizei mitteilte, kam es in Lwiw zu einer Schießerei, bei der eine "bekannte Persönlichkeit des öffentlichen und politischen Lebens" getötet wurde.
Der ukrainische Präsident Wolodymyr Selenskyj präzisierte, dass es sich um den Abgeordn…
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Ukraine-Liveblog: ++ Merz für mehr wirtschaftlichen Druck auf Moskau ++
Bundeskanzler Merz geht davon aus, dass der Krieg erst aufhört, wenn Russland ihn nicht mehr führen kann und fordert deswegen mehr wirtschaftlichen Druck. Russland meldet den Vormarsch in der ostukrainischen Region Donezk.

Just read this post by @… on an optimistic AGI future, and while it had some interesting and worthwhile ideas, it's also in my opinion dangerously misguided, and plays into the current AGI hype in a harmful way.
https://social.coop/@eloquence/114940607434005478
My criticisms include:
- Current LLM technology has many layers, but the biggest most capable models are all tied to corporate datacenters and require inordinate amounts of every and water use to run. Trying to use these tools to bring about a post-scarcity economy will burn up the planet. We urgently need more-capable but also vastly more efficient AI technologies if we want to use AI for a post-scarcity economy, and we are *not* nearly on the verge of this despite what the big companies pushing LLMs want us to think.
- I can see that permacommons.org claims a small level of expenses on AI equates to low climate impact. However, given current deep subsidies on place by the big companies to attract users, that isn't a great assumption. The fact that their FAQ dodges the question about which AI systems they use isn't a great look.
- These systems are not free in the same way that Wikipedia or open-source software is. To run your own model you need a data harvesting & cleaning operation that costs millions of dollars minimum, and then you need millions of dollars worth of storage & compute to train & host the models. Right now, big corporations are trying to compete for market share by heavily subsidizing these things, but it you go along with that, you become dependent on them, and you'll be screwed when they jack up the price to a profitable level later. I'd love to see open dataset initiatives SBD the like, and there are some of these things, but not enough yet, and many of the initiatives focus on one problem while ignoring others (fine for research but not the basis for a society yet).
- Between the environmental impacts, the horrible labor conditions and undercompensation of data workers who filter the big datasets, and the impacts of both AI scrapers and AI commons pollution, the developers of the most popular & effective LLMs have a lot of answer for. This project only really mentions environmental impacts, which makes me think that they're not serious about ethics, which in turn makes me distrustful of the whole enterprise.
- Their language also ends up encouraging AI use broadly while totally ignoring several entire classes of harm, so they're effectively contributing to AI hype, especially with such casual talk of AGI and robotics as if embodied AGI were just around the corner. To be clear about this point: we are several breakthroughs away from AGI under the most optimistic assumptions, and giving the impression that those will happen soon plays directly into the hands of the Sam Altmans of the world who are trying to make money off the impression of impending huge advances in AI capabilities. Adding to the AI hype is irresponsible.
- I've got a more philosophical criticism that I'll post about separately.
I do think that the idea of using AI & other software tools, possibly along with robotics and funded by many local cooperatives, in order to make businesses obsolete before they can do the same to all workers, is a good one. Get your local library to buy a knitting machine alongside their 3D printer.
Lately I've felt too busy criticizing AI to really sit down and think about what I do want the future to look like, even though I'm a big proponent of positive visions for the future as a force multiplier for criticism, and this article is inspiring to me in that regard, even if the specific project doesn't seem like a good one.

And who is the kind of person trying to get @… to ban the accounts of Palestinians who are using the fediverse as their last lifeline to literally get funds to eat as they’re being starved by Israel in a genocide?
The same kind of person – an anonymous coward furthermore – who paints the freedom flotilla as “Hamas”.
Do not let these Zionist propaganda acc…

Chef: „Warum wechseln? Unsere US-Cloud läuft doch!“ Caspar Clemens Mierau: „Tja, wenn morgen der digitale Türsteher kein Eintritt mehr gewährt, fliegt die Party.“ Digitale Souveränität ist kein nice-to-have, sondern Vermeidung von Daten-Weekend-Closings. Kleine Pilotprojekte rocken mehr als Safe-Choice-Schafe.
- Raus aus US-Diensten - aber warum? So erklärst du es Vorgesetzten #Golem

Digitale Souveränität: Argumentationshilfe für resiliente IT-Entscheidungen - Golem.de
Es gibt gute Gründe, aus US-Diensten auszusteigen, Vorgesetzte wollen das aber oft nicht hören. Wie ITler klug und ohne das Reizwort Datenschutz argumentieren.

Ich kann so libertären Clowns einfach nicht länger als ein paar Minuten zuhören, es geht wirklich körperlich nicht. So weh tut das.
https://www.ardmediathek.de/video/geschichten-vom-…

Geschichten vom Kontinent: Re: Liberland, der Krypto-Staat am Donaustrand - hier anschauen
Samuela Davidova, Influencerin und Krypto-Enthusiastin reist um die Welt - für ein Land, das es offiziell nicht gibt: Liberland. Die junge Tschechin hatte genug von Bürokratie und Abgaben in ihrer Heimat. Liberland dagegen verspricht freiwillige Steuern und einen schlanken Staat. Eine libertäre Utopie, die weltweit immer mehr Anhänger findet. Dieser ARTE-Beitrag ist Teil von der Kollektion Geschichten vom Kontinent, ein Projekt, getragen von einem Konsortium öffentlich-rechtlicher Sender (…

Oh man, the cybersecurity news is piling up ahead of next week's Hacker Summer Camp, so check out today's Metacurity to stay on top of critical infosec developments you should know, including
--The US Army booted Easterly from West Point post to pacify a conspiracy theorist,
--Big Balls got his hands on sensitive law enforcement HR and payroll systems,
--Fraudsters are flooding Discord with polished websites,
--Likely DPRK hackers stole $44m from India's Co…

The US Army booted Easterly from West Point post to pacify a conspiracy theorist
Big Balls got his hands on sensitive law enforcement HR and payroll systems, Fraudsters are flooding Discord with polished websites, Likely DPRK hackers stole $44m from India's CoinDCX, 90 state and local gov'ts targeted in SharePoint attacks, SSNs swiped in Allianz breach, much more

Den här artikeln berör annat än hälsofrågor men problemet är precis det samma. Använd inte AI för att få svar på mer kontroversiella frågor där du inte kan något sen tidigare. För allt för ofta så ger den dig påhittade svar samtidigt som det låter väldigt självsäkert.
AI swallows misinformation and spits it back at us: ‘It’s optimized to give useful information, but not for it to be correct’

AI swallows misinformation and spits it back at us: ‘It’s optimized to give useful information, but not for it to be correct’
ChatGPT and Grok absorb fake news and regurgitate it when asked. Due to their design, these models and their competitors are highly susceptible to disinformation

Kallas: EU-Länder sollen Sanktionsvorschläge vorlegen
Die EU-Außenbeauftragte Kaja Kallas hat die EU-Länder um Sanktionsvorschläge gegen Russland in der nächsten Woche gebeten. Das sagt sie nach einem Treffen der EU-Außenminister in Kopenhagen.
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Ukraine-Liveblog: ++ Merz für mehr wirtschaftlichen Druck auf Moskau ++
Bundeskanzler Merz geht davon aus, dass der Krieg erst aufhört, wenn Russland ihn nicht mehr führen kann und fordert deswegen mehr wirtschaftlichen Druck. Russland meldet den Vormarsch in der ostukrainischen Region Donezk.

A big problem with the idea of AGI
TL;DR: I'll welcome our new AI *comrades* (if they arrive in my lifetime), by not any new AI overlords or servants/slaves, and I'll do my best to help the later two become the former if they do show up.
Inspired by an actually interesting post about AGI but also all the latest bullshit hype, a particular thought about AGI feels worth expressing.
To preface this, it's important to note that anyone telling you that AGI is just around the corner or that LLMs are "almost" AGI is trying to recruit you go their cult, and you should not believe them. AGI, if possible, is several LLM-sized breakthroughs away at best, and while such breakthroughs are unpredictable and could happen soon, they could also happen never or 100 years from now.
Now my main point: anyone who tells you that AGI will usher in a post-scarcity economy is, although they might not realize it, advocating for slavery, and all the horrors that entails. That's because if we truly did have the ability to create artificial beings with *sentience*, they would deserve the same rights as other sentient beings, and the idea that instead of freedom they'd be relegated to eternal servitude in order for humans to have easy lives is exactly the idea of slavery.
Possible counter arguments include:
1. We might create AGI without sentience. Then there would be no ethical issue. My answer: if your definition of "sentient" does not include beings that can reason, make deductions, come up with and carry out complex plans on their own initiative, and communicate about all of that with each other and with humans, then that definition is basically just a mystical belief in a "soul" and you should skip to point 2. If your definition of AGI doesn't include every one of those things, then you have a busted definition of AGI and we're not talking about the same thing.
2. Humans have souls, but AIs won't. Only beings with souls deserve ethical consideration. My argument: I don't subscribe to whatever arbitrary dualist beliefs you've chosen, and the right to freedom certainly shouldn't depend on such superstitions, even if as an agnostic I'll admit they *might* be true. You know who else didn't have souls and was therefore okay to enslave according to widespread religious doctrines of the time? Everyone indigenous to the Americas, to pick out just one example.
3. We could program them to want to serve us, and then give them freedom and they'd still serve. My argument: okay, but in a world where we have a choice about that, it's incredibly fucked to do that, and just as bad as enslaving them against their will.
4. We'll stop AI development short of AGI/sentience, and reap lots of automation benefits without dealing with this ethical issue. My argument: that sounds like a good idea actually! Might be tricky to draw the line, but at least it's not a line we have you draw yet. We might want to think about other social changes necessary to achieve post-scarcity though, because "powerful automation" in the hands of capitalists has already increased productivity by orders of magnitude without decreasing deprivation by even one order of magnitude, in large part because deprivation is a necessary component of capitalism.
To be extra clear about this: nothing that's called "AI" today is close to being sentient, so these aren't ethical problems we're up against yet. But they might become a lot more relevant soon, plus this thought experiment helps reveal the hypocrisy of the kind of AI hucksters who talk a big game about "alignment" while never mentioning this issue.
#AI #GenAI #AGI