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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Windows 10 LTSC 2021 ends support in 2027 (although it doesn’t matter quite as much). And it’s likely that the Win 11 LTSC later this year will necessarily be free from much of 11’s bullshit. Linux is still the right call, but for those of us who need to run a Windows machine for whatever reason, there are alternatives, so, you know… yarr.








  • And you’re absolutely right about that. That’s not the same thing as LLMs being incapable of constituting anything written in a novel way, but that they will readily with very little prodding regurgitate complete works verbatim is definitely a problem. That’s not a remix. That’s publishing the same track and slapping your name on it. Doing it two bars at a time doesn’t make it better.

    It’s so easy to get ChatGPT, for example, to regurgitate its training data that you could do it by accident (at least until someone published it last year). But, the critics cry, you’re using ChatGPT in an unintended way. And indeed, exploiting ChatGPT to reveal its training data is a lot like lobotomizing a patient or torture victim to get them to reveal where they learned something, but that really betrays that these models don’t actually think at all. They don’t actually contribute anything of their own; they simply have such a large volume of data to reorganize that it’s (by design) impossible to divine which source is being plagiarised at any given token.

    Add to that the fact that every regulatory body confronted with the question of LLM creativity has so far decided that humans, and only humans, are capable of creativity, at least so far as our ordered societies will recognize. By legal definition, ChatGPT cannot transform (term of art) a work. Only a human can do that.

    It doesn’t really matter how an LLM does what it does. You don’t need to open the black box to know that it’s a plagiarism machine, because plagiarism doesn’t depend on methods (or sophisticated mental gymnastics); it depends on content. It doesn’t matter whether you intended the work to be transformative: if you repeated the work verbatim, you plagiarized it. It’s already been demonstrated that an LLM, by definition, will repeat its training data a non-zero portion of the time. In small chunks that’s indistinguishable, arguably, from the way a real mind might handle language, but in large chunks it’s always plagiarism, because an LLM does not think and cannot “remix”. A DJ can make a mashup; an AI, at least as of today, cannot. The question isn’t whether the LLM spits out training data; the question is the extent to which we’re willing to accept some amount of plagiarism in exchange for the utility of the tool.







  • Your solution to rampant economic inequality is … campaign and vote downballot.

    I mean, sure, that’s a great idea, but your argument essentially boils down to combating apathy (which isn’t a new or unique problem), and I guess attacking a hypothetical Sanders administration that never happened because–I dunno, you just wanted to get a jab in at voters who were actually motivated about a candidate for once in a lifetime? Well, good news for you; all the Sanders supporters are back to voting defensively until their kids grow up, if they vote at all. Does that feel like a win to you?

    People aren’t “taking the easy way out” by not voting the entire ballot. In fact, split-ticket voting is down historically, at least as of 2020, across both parties. Blaming people for not devoting their lives to political activism is akin to blaming minimum wage workers for not walking out: Yeah, maybe things would be better if they did, but people have to survive. Choosing to use what little spare time one has with family instead of participating in local politics isn’t a moral failure, and it’s not the easy way out. It’s just rational. People have limited time and limited means, and there are more important things than who gets to be the constable next year.