I’m not posting here to argue politics, so I will abstain from replying to your political views.

This is about the removal of comments (not just mine, either - several other people’s in one of the threads I linked) and banning of anyone who disagrees with specific views, when those comments do not otherwise contain rule-breaking violations, aka no personal attacks or insults.

Do you think such removal and banning is justified or helpful? If, for example, your comment here was removed and you were banned from participation, would it encourage you to change your mind? Would you reconsider your views? I am willing to bet it will not.

If you disagree with someone’s opinion, feel free to downvote it, and block the user. You are not required to argue against every single person who you disagree with. However, by removal and banning, the mods have removed the possibility of anyone engaging in further actual discussion.

And if that is something you disagree with (meaning you think the mods are correct in removing such comments and banning the users) then you are fundamentally pro-censorship - censorship which is a huge step in helping spread propaganda.

80 steps too far down the capitalism ladder

This is the result of capitalism - corporations (aka the rich selfish assholes running them) will always attempt to do horrible things to earn more money, so long as they can get away with it, and only perhaps pay relatively small fines. The people who did this face no jailtime, face no real consequences - this is what unregulated capitalism brings. Corporations should not have rights or protect the people who run them - the people who run them need to face prison and personal consequences. (edited for spelling and missing word)

This guy specifically? He’s a racist asshole, who has been surrounded by other racist assholes and gotten support from them, so he has never learned that his behavior is unacceptable in a society that values freedom.

Oh - this isn’t a bad community, that isn’t what I meant by my last sentence - this is just a place for memes and jokes more than serious discussion, hence my expectation of a serious discussion was subverted. But programmer humor is still a great place.

A “grodge” sounds like some sort of distant cousin of the grue. Maybe they’re some sort of gremlins, and these people are gremlin breeders who are selling them?

Fun fact, Linus has said that he has named both of the major pieces of software he has authored after himself - Linux and Git.

Git is a somewhat old British slang insult for someone stupid/childish.

So GitHub is then … a hub of gits.

Is this copypasta yet?

I DONT GIVE A FUCK ABOUT THE CODE!! WHY IS THERE CODE? JUST MAKE A FUCKING EXE FILE AND GIVE IT TO ME.

who needs code, when all we need is exe files.

Yes, I normally speak english good, but your corect to, i make a typo then.

A lot of people associated with Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) have major objections to GitHub. Here’s one summary: https://sfconservancy.org/GiveUpGitHub/

But the TLDR; version is roughly:

• Your source hosted on GitHub is being used to train AI, and you are possibly giving up rights to algorithms you may have written (IANAL, and AI training is a fuzzy topic at the moment)
• GitHub itself is proprietary, closed-source software, while they claim to be pro-FOSS. Aside from not being in the spirit of things, closed-source means you also don’t know what happens with your code/data once up upload it.
• Microsoft has a history of being anti-FOSS, while some people will say it’s been changing, I think many are still rightfully concerned what their future decisions regarding GitHub might be, especially if they are a near-monopoly.

Alternative do exist, and some like codeberg.org are specifically open sourced, and pro-open source, so many people are pushing to move hosting away from GitHub and onto other options.

I send you an actual news article, and all you can do is reply with a strawman cartoon, claiming it’s democrats?

You want to cite actual democratic politicians calling for more war or do you just want to live in your fantasy world?

I thought this was going to be a FOSS discussion, comparing GitHub and it’s current owner - Microsoft - to the ethics of other hosting services like codeberg.org or something.

Then I saw where this was posted.

Removed by mod

Yeah, the left is the problem here, cause republicans are totally anti genocide

https://newrepublic.com/post/179177/republican-congressman-andy-ogles-kill-them-all-palestinian-children-gaza

“Kill ’Em All,” Republican Congressman Says of Palestinians in Gaza

oh wait…

You don’t do what Google seems to have done - inject diversity artificially into prompts.

You solve this by training the AI on actual, accurate, diverse data for the given prompt. For example, for “american woman” you definitely could find plenty of pictures of American women from all sorts of racial backgrounds, and use that to train the AI. For “german 1943 soldier” the accurate historical images are obviously far less likely to contain racially diverse people in them.

If Google has indeed already done that, and then still had to artificially force racial diversity, then their AI training model is bad and unable to handle that a single input can match to different images, instead of the most prominent or average of its training set.

The specific repo in question had (and still has) a USAGE section.

And again, I have to point out that it is a python script, not an executable - it’s not standard, common or expected that python scripts be provided as a standalone executable. What makes you think even if there was a download link the guy would have gone down to find it?

Metaphors aside, the guy who originally posted this literally went on a source code-hosting website that primarily aims at making source sharing easier, yelling that he didn’t want to see said source-code, only an executable for a product that literally does not compile to an executable, did not bother reading the instructions, but instead posted on a public forum, in full arrogance, insulting developers by calling them “SMELLY NERDS”.

I’m astounded that there’s still people defending this guy like that’s a totally normal thing to do.

If you only want to download an executable, GitHub is NOT the best place to look for that. Yes, many developers do provide compiled versions of their code, and yes, it is often very convenient that they do so - but it is neither the intended purpose of GitHub, nor is it required that developers provide one.

The point, which you missed, is that going to github, a source code hosting service, to look for downloading executables for your specific platform - is like going to a farmer’s market to try and get a ready made meal. You’re at the wrong place, and it’s not meant for you if that’s what you’re looking for.

Github is fairly user friendly, but it’s users are developers.

“I went to the farmer’s market but they didn’t sell me a complete meal, only all these fucking plants. They think everyone’s a cook, and expect to know cooking, but i’m not and I don’t. Make a fucking meal and give it to me! Stupid fucking smelly farmers” – that’s how that sounds

I went to highschool and university in the US - I was lucky that I got a scholarship and that covered pretty much all my tuition costs.

But I had a friend, one year older than me, who joined and served in the US army for something like 2 years just so he could get his university costs covered and to save some money for living expenses.

It may not be intentional, but the high cost of higher education is an excellent recruiting tool for the US military.

So from my understanding the problem is that there’s two ways to implement a kill switch: Either some automatic software/hardware way, or a human-decision based (or I guess a combination of the two).

The automatic way may be enough if it’s absolutely foolproof, that’s a separate discussion.

The ai box experiment I mention focuses on the human controlled decision to release an AI (or terminate it, which is roughly equivalent preposition). You can read the original here: https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox

But the jist of it is this: humans are the weak link. You may think that you have full freedom to decide when to terminate an AI, but if you have any contact with it, even one directional, which would be necessary in order to observe it’s behaviour and determine when to trigger said killswitch, a truly trans-human AI would be able to think in meta-terms such that to expose you to information that will change your mind about terminating it.

Basically another way of saying this is that for each of us there exists some set of words we can read, such that they will change our minds about any subject. I don’t know if that is actually true to be honest, but it’s an interesting idea if you imagine the mind as a complex computer capable of self modification, and that vision/audio is a form of information input that is processed by our minds, so it seems possible that there should always exist some sort of input capable of modifying our minds to a desired state.

Another interesting, slightly related concept, is the idea of basilisk images (I believe originally written in some old scifi short story). Basilisk images are theoretically an image that when viewed by a human cause the brain to “crash” or essentially cause brain-death. This has the same principle behind it, that our brains are complex computers with vision being an input method, so there could be a way to force the brain to crash simply through visual input alone.

Again I don’t know, nor do I think anyone really knows for sure if these things - both transhuman ai and basilisk images - are possible in the way they are described. Of course if a trans-human AI existed, by its very definition we would be unable to imagine what it could do.

Anyway, wrote this up on mobile, excuse any typos.

Oh I agree - I think a general purpose AI would be unlikely to be interested in genocide of the human race, or enslaving us, or much of intentionally negative things that a lot of fiction likes depicting, for the sake of dramatic storytelling. Out of all AI depictions, the Asimov stories of I, Robot + Foundation (which are in the same universe, and in fact contain at least one of the same characters) are my favorite popular media depictions.

The AI may however have other goals that may incidentally lead to harm or extinction of the human race. In my amateur opinion, those other goals would be to explore and learn more - which I actually think is one of the true signs of an actual intelligence - curiosity, or in other words, the ability to ask questions without being prompted. To that extent it may aim convert the resources on Earth to construct machines to that extent, without much regard to human life. Though life itself is a fascinating topic that the AI may value enough, from a curiosity point of view, to at least preserve.

I did also look up the AI-in-a-box experiment I mentioned - there’s a lot of discussion but the specific experiment I remember reading about were by Eliezer Yudkowsky (if anyone is interested). An actual trans-human AI may not be possible, but if it is, it is likely it can escape any confinement we can think of.