zalack

NVIDIA’s marketing overhypes, but their technical papers tend to be very solid. Obviously it always pays to remain skeptical but they have a good track record in this case.

The comment was about strategy, not objective.

It’s not that strange. A timeout occurs on several servers overnight, and maybe a bunch of Lemmy instances are all run in the same timezone, so all their admins wake up around the same time and fix it.

Well it’s a timeout, so by fixing it at the same time the admins have “synchronized” when timeouts across their servers are likely to occur again since it’s tangentially related to time. They’re likely to all fail again around the same moment.

It’s kind of similar to the thundering herd where a bunch of things getting errors will synchronize their retries in a giant herd and strain the server. It’s why good clients will add exponential backoff AND jitter (a little bit of randomness to when the retry is done, not just every x^2 seconds). That way if you have a million clients, it’s less likely that all 1,000,000 of them will attempt a retry at the extract same time, because they all got an error from your server at the same time when it failed.

Edit: looked at the ticket and it’s not exactly the kind of timeout I was thinking of.

This timeout might be caused by something that’s loosely a function of time or resources usage. If it’s resource usage, because the servers are federated, those spikes might happen across servers as everything is pushing events to subscribers. So, failure gets synchronized.

Or it could just be a coincidence. We as humans like to look for patterns in random events.

It’s because the producers want their counterparts spending time, energy, and perceived social capital negotiating over it rather than the things the Producers actually worry about having to give up.

IMO it’s pretty transparent, but creative people are pretty scared of AI right now so it might be a good bargaining tactic if they can get rank and file Union members to tie up the negotiatiors by reacting.

Crowd extensions are already pretty common with traditional VFX techniques.

I worked in Hollywood editorial for a bit and, IMO, the producers are playing up the AI stuff so that said stuff can be given to the writers and actors as a “victory” instead of the real spectres in the room:

• streaming residuals need to get the same payout and transparency as home video and syndication did

• streaming numbers need to be made available to creators to facilitate the above.

• the ‘mini-room’ system that totally disconnects writers from the productions they are writing for needs to be broken down.

I posted a version of this in another thread:

I really think Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon need to figure out a way to have a default terms of service that ships with their product which forbids using the API to collect data for anything outside of user-facing social network interfaces, including account association heuristics and similar processes.

A way for users to set licenses on individual posts would be huge as well, with a default license instance admins can set.

That way for-profit instances could be forced to filter out posts with licenses that do not allow for-profit use. Honestly, even just a simple check mark “[ ] allow for-profit republication”, and have two licenses that can be attached: one that allows for-profit use and one that does not.

The fediverse should start baking in data control into it’s legal framework. Want to federate with Mastodon? You need to follow the ToS for what you can do with its posts. If we wanted to get really extreme we could even say the license should be copy-left. Any instance that wants to federate with a non-profit instances needs to also be non-profit.

That could block for-profit companies from becoming part of the network in the first place, even by use of stealth relay instances.

#threads

I really think Lemmy, Kbin, and Mastodon need to figure out a way to have a default terms of service that ship with their product which forbids using the API to collect data for commercial purposes.

Additionally, there should be a way for users to indicate licensing for individual posts, with a default license instance admins can set.

That way for-profit instances could be forced to filter out posts with licenses that do not allow for-profit use. Honestly, even just a simple check mark “[ ] allow for-profit republication”, and have two licenses that can be attached: one that allows for-profit use and one that does not.

Kbin generally seems to churn faster than Reddit for me, but posts on Lemmy do seem to stay around for a awhile.

I think it would be interesting to explore an API affordance for attaching licenses to fediverse content, with the admins being able to set a default license for their server.

So if Meta wants to get content from the fediverse, it has to check the headers of each post and make sure it’s licensed for commercial use.

The thing is that this can happen even without active malice.

If the product owners or engineers decide “hey, we want to add this cool feature, but it’s not supported by activity pub” the path of least resistance – bypassing the long process of changing the activity pub spec and getting everyone else on board – can be super tempting, and come from a place of wanting to make your product better.

Those ostensibly good intentions can lead to E/E/E without actively meaning to.

Even if it’s just as a username? How would Google even know about that?

I’m not saying “sign in with Google” sign ins. Just that I use that email address as a username in a couple places

I have a couple accounts I use as usernames to log into stuff, but I couldn’t tell you if I’ve actually logged in to those email addresses in the last two years.

Is it stealing to learn how to draw by referencing other artists online? That’s how these training algorithms work.

I agree that we need to keep this technology from widening the wealth gap, but these lawsuits seem to fundamentally misunderstand how training an AI model works.

I didn’t even consider the fact that the fediverse offers us the ability to start having publicly owned social media and government-run instances for direct communication.

That could be very interesting…

The craziest part of that to me is that they could have just charged the users directly without putting the onus for payment on the app developers.

You want your account to be able to use the data API? You have to subscribe to Reddit+. Once you do, that account can use any Oauth App it wants to access the site.

The fact that they put something as complicated as payment flow on third party developers is just obscene.