Ziro

I want to talk about trains.

All locked down here in South Portland, which is about 50 minutes or so from Lewiston.

Stop all the hate for nuclear. It’s just a way for the fossil fuel industry to cause infighting among those of us who care about the climate. If we can make energy free or close to it, we should. The closer everything comes to being free the better.

interesting. I wonder whether that’s specific to the mobile hardware. I have a 3080 running just fine on Mint.

Your mom would do just fine on Mint, and you know it.

Or, please, trains.

There is an essentially immeasurable difference between support for anarchy and support for coercive power structures. Marxist-Leninists hope to exchange one coercive power structure for another. It is little different from the imperialism it would hope to supplant. Piracy belongs to anarchy, not Marxism.

I will tell you why atheism, regardless of the horse on which it rides, is a step toward progress: it is because belief in fantasy is an opiate that numbs us and stymies progress toward improving the welfare of all.

I think that the left-right dichotomy is inherently flawed. A lot of what I believe might be considered “right-leaning” or “left-leaning,” but I cannot say that I prescribe to either sort of ideology fully or with any fidelity.

I will always be opposed to any view with a pervasive “moral” authority, and both the so-called left and right are obsessed with their own versions of this. The problem we run into is the false supposition that beliefs can be categorized on a spectrum spanning right to left (or, even more liberally, a spectrum spread across two dimensions). It has been a ridiculous notion from its inception, whenever that might have been.

Building one’s identity (another silly notion, in general—identity itself being a frivolous construct that functions only as a fulcrum for the extortion of social power) upon a supposed spectrum is likewise ridiculous. You can be conservative or liberal, or anything, really. But those beliefs do not exist in a linear or planar dimension. They are so far removed from each other that one cannot fathom sliding incrementally from one to the next.

And to each respective party, “left” and “right,” the other can be demonized as evil, even without full comprehension of the other. It’s all just so damned tribalistic and silly.

Right. So, I don’t get why it should matter where, exactly, the bar of soap goes.

Isn’t the soap that touches the body ablated by friction with the skin?

I like Flatpak for what it is. It’s great. But I wish that the application IDs weren’t so long.

It does. I am disappointed in the game studios who refuse to allow Linux players, though, such as Bungie. I’m certain that Destiny would be playable if not for their obstinacy.

I switched to Firefox when I switched to Linux. It’s great. I remember when firefox/mozilla was the go-to browser. It could be again.

USB One X

Let’s remove the context of AI altogether.

Say, for instance, you were to check out and read a book from a free public library. You then go on to use some of the book’s content as the basis of your opinions. More, you also absorb some of the common language structures used in that book and unwittingly use them on your own when you speak or write.

Are you infringing on copyright by adopting the book’s views and using some of the sentence structures its author employed? At what point can we say that an author owns the language in their work? Who owns language, in general?

Assuming that a GPT model cannot regurgitate verbatim the contents of its training dataset, how is copyright applicable to it?

Edit: I also would imagine that if we were discussing an open source LLM instead of GPT-4 or GPT-3.5, sentiment here would be different. And more, I imagine that some of the ire here stems from a misunderstanding of how transformer models are trained and how they function.

Thank you. I appreciate your perspective. Using Linux again has been like a breath of fresh air, honestly. I just love how fast everything is. (Both my Windows and Mint boots live on their own M.2 drives, but Mint is so, so much faster.) And, unlike Windows, I don’t feel like I have to jerry rig it to get things to work. I’m sure there are instances where that is the case, but I haven’t run into them yet.

This is why I had to switch. It was just too clunky to get CUDA and Pytorch and Tensorflow set up in Windows. In Linux, it was a total breeze.

Edit: And then I thought, “well, wouldn’t it be great if I didn’t have to use Windows to use Linux?”

I know it’s not a very Linuxy distro, but Linux Mint (Cinnamon) is so easy to use, especially for Windows users. I’ve completely replaced Windows (and with better software), aside from using Windows for a few games that require it. I used Ubuntu, Suse, and Fedora long ago, but for me, Mint takes the proverbial cake.

Excepting the opinion of the imaginary person you’ve invented, the question still remains.

Edit: and I would like to add that I do not align myself with conservative politics. I just question the morality of killing a being that would have likely lived if it had been removed from the mother.