PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S [he/him]

Anarchist, autistic, engineer, and Certified Professional Life-Regretter. I mosty comment bricks of text with footnotes, so don’t be alarmed if you get one.

You posted something really worrying, are you okay?

No, but I’m not at risk of self-harm. I’m just waiting on the good times now.

Alt account of PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org. Also if you’re reading this, it means that you can totally get around the limitations for display names and bio length by editing the JSON of your exported profile directly. Lol.

  • 6 Posts
  • 384 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • Since I don’t feel like arguing

    I’ll try to keep this short then.

    How will these reasonable AI tools emerge out of this under capitalism?

    How does any technology ever see use outside of oppressive structures? By understanding it and putting to work on liberatory goals.

    I think that crucial to working with AI is that, as it stands, the need for expensive hardware to train it makes it currently a centralizing technology. However, there are things we can do to combat that. For example, the AI Horde offers distributed computing for AI applications.

    And how is it not all still just theft with extra steps that is imoral to use?

    We gotta find datasets that are ethically collected. As a practitioner, that means not using data for training unless you are certain it wasn’t stolen. To be completely honest, I am quite skeptical of the ethics of the datasets that the popular AI products were trained on. Hence why I refuse to use those products.

    Personally, I’m a lot more interested in the applications to robotics and industrial automation than generating anime tiddies and building chat bots. Like I’m not looking to convince you that these tools are “intelligent”, merely useful. In a similar vein, PID controllers are not “smart” at all, but they are the backbone of industrial automation. (Actually, a proven use for “AI” algorithms is to make an adaptive PID controller so that’s it can respond to changes in the plant over time.)



  • When not in school:

    • Phone with wallet case
    • Keys
    • Wireless headphones

    When in school: all the above plus:

    • Yorepek 50L backpack (everything else goes in here)
    • Laptop (notes, actual work) (Debian w/ KDE Plasma)
    • Laptop charger
    • Grandma’s laptop from 15 years ago that runs like dog shit (backup, also Debian, can still access my repos and load web pages, decoy if robbed)
    • Tablet (books)
    • Voltmeter (yes all the time)
    • Blank computer paper and pencils (derivations)
    • Guitar picks (Dunlop Gator Grip 2.0mm; for playing death metal, but also makes for a great tool)

    Wireless headphones get extra priority because they allow me to control what I hear. For example, instead of getting sensory overload (I’m autistic) at the supermarket, I can replace it with death metal, which is better for some reason.




  • Disagree. The technology will never yield AGI as all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.

    We definitely don’t need AGI for AI technologies to be useful. AI, particularly reinforcement learning, is great for teaching robots to do complex tasks for example. LLMs have shocking ability relative to other approaches (if limited compared to humans) to generalize to “nearby but different, enough” tasks. And once they’re trained (and possibly quantized), they (LLMs and reinforcement learning policies) don’t require that much more power to implement compared to traditional algorithms. So IMO, the question should be “is it worthwhile to spend the energy to train X thing?” Unfortunately, the capitalists have been the ones answering that question because they can do so at our expense.

    For a person without access to big computing resources (me lol), there’s also the fact that transfer learning is possible for both LLMs and reinforcement learning. Easiest way to explain transfer learning is this: imagine that I want to learn Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, and Computer Science. What should I learn first so that each subject is easy for me to pick up? My answer would be Math. So in AI speak, if we spend a ton of energy to train an AI to do math and then fine-tune agents to do Physics, Engineering, etc., we can avoid training all the agents from scratch. Fine-tuning can typically be done on “normal” computers with FOSS tools.

    all it does is remix a huge field of data without even knowing what that data functionally says.

    IMO that can be an incredibly useful approach for solving problems whose dynamics are too complex to reasonably model, with the understanding that the obtained solution is a crude approximation to the underlying dynamics.

    IMO I’m waiting for the bubble to burst so that AI can be just another tool in my engineering toolkit instead of the capitalists’ newest plaything.

    Sorry about the essay, but I really think that AI tools have a huge potential to make life better for us all, but obviously a much greater potential for capitalists to destroy us all so long as we don’t understand these tools and use them against the powerful.






  • Back on R*ddit, I actually managed to connect with a few R*dditors (under a different username tho) through the /r/BedroomBands sub. Looks like it’s still active. As far as I’m aware, we don’t have anything like that on Lemmy yet.

    From my experience in music, drummers are always in demand, especially if you can record your kit, even badly; real kit with sample replacement always beats an electric kit, which itself beats programmed drums. (And programming drums from scratch is so boring, speaking from experience.) So I think you’ll find people very quickly if you mention it.

    As far as my music chops go, I play guitar and bass, mainly metal, but I’m really more of a producer. Unfortunately, I had to stop taking clients from R*ddit because I had to focus on school. Now I’m living with my grandmother and parents so I can’t really do music stuff without headphones, so I’m kinda out of commission for a while.

    ps - I’m pretty socially anxious and autistic, so making friends takes me extra effort and time.

    Me too. It took me months to build up the courage to make my first post. But it was one of the best things I ever did, and I miss that part of my life dearly.



  • Amazon Fire Tablet 7in. I bought it literally just to read PDFs, and it was so slow that it was basically unusable. I tried switching out the launcher to something more minimal (Niagara launcher I think), and I figured out how to disable the ads that were all over the place. It helped a bit, but not enough to overcome the hardware and Fire OS. (I think I needed ADB for both of those fixes; I had to put in some real work to unfuck that tablet.) Plus the screen was too small for my pathetic human eyeballs.

    Was it worth $30? At the time, yeah, because I literally couldn’t afford anything else, but I now have an $80 10in generic Android tablet that’s wildly faster.