Ya, that seems reasonable.

I think it’s a pretty core democratic value that no person is worth more than another. A compromise of 1 million times should satisfy individuals with even the most acute case of wealth hoarding.

Adversarial noise a fun topic and a DIY AI thing you can do to familiarize yourself with the local-hosting side of things. Image generating networks are lightweight compared to LLMs and are able to be run on a moderately powerful, NVIDIA, gaming PC (most of my work is done on a 3080).

LLM poisoning can also be done if you can insert poisoned text into their training set. An example method would be detecting AI scrapers on your server and sending them poisoned instead of automatically blocking them. Poison Fountain makes this very easy by supplying pre-poisoned data.

Here is the same kind of training data poisoning attack, but for images that was made by the researchers of University of Chicago into a simple windows application: https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html

Thanks to you comment I realized that my clipboard didn’t have the right link selected so I edited in the link to his github. ( https://github.com/bennjordan )

Not only is it panic, but by the time you’re looped in it’s already half way up the management chain and you can’t see the end of the cc list.

Valve made a big move when they started their Proton project. That was a key compatibility layer for a more wide-spread adoption.

It was shocking at how fast it went from ‘you can tweak it to run most things’ to ‘I don’t even check to see if the game works anymore before I buy it’.

Someone hacked the government

So I keep a windows partition just so I can manage a 16 year old mp3 player and radio. That has to be the worst reason to keep a Windows partition, right?

Yeah, and you can often assume that someone else has had that problem and was also enough of a nerd to fix it for us all.

https://github.com/Klar/ZuneSyncLinux

This is absolutely massive for the FOSS community. A sovereign nation has resources that dwarf anything that the FOSS community has ever had access to.

Now, they just need to repeal the anti-circumvention laws. That’ll cut the US tech sector deeply by allowing us to use the products that we pay for in the ways that we want.

No, a flat amount will never work. Make it a multiple of some figure, like average wage. That way it actually changes with inflation and we don’t have a situation where the the inflation adjusted minimum wage is 6 times the actual federal minimum wage.

She’s a great author and person.

Yeah, and I spent the last week ice skating on Europa and coaching the Bears to victory.

You can’t appeal to your own authority on the Internet, we’re all anonymous strangers who may as well have just popped into existence 15 seconds ago (in some cases, very literally).

Don’t push ideas that look like they’re suggesting violence, if you’re on my side on that idea then you’ll have no trouble with my position of ‘violence bad’ even if it hurt your feelings a little bit.

I’m a psychic reindeer in Santa’s sleigh team and I always tell the truth or my nose grows 6 inches so you know that I’m not lying. We can be anything that we want to be on the Internet, it only takes a few twitches of the finger (or output vector, in most cases).

There’s been a lot of ‘Fellow Leftists’ showing up on Lemmy recently and they all of the newcomers seem to be attempting to foment political violence and discourage real people from any other plans that they may be forming.

The topic of the post is about some concrete action that is being suggested to improve the situation and your comment is ‘Nah fellow leftists, lets go do some sabotage and resistance instead’. No details or the suggestion of an actual proposed series of steps to be taken, just a general push in the direction of political violence with smidgeon of ‘Your idea is dumb’.

Now, to me, I think that we don’t need that kind of person/bot in this community. If you want to be a person of action, then live up to your dreams in your own life.

You’re in a social media space that we know is being monitored in an attempt to locate dissenters so that the administration can slap the ‘terrorist’ label on them. This is something anybody who is even remotely active in this space will understand.

So, it immediately stands out as fake when someone claims to be and old veteran leftist (look at the account age and comments, no way to fake that guys!) and also thinks that spreading violent rhetoric on public social media is the move. The only people talking about violence on social media are soon to be imprisoned naive idiots and the bots/agents that influence them.

Nobody take this bait.

If you’re interested in like this line of attack, you can also use similar techniques to defeat models that are trained to do object detection (like, for example, the ones that detect the location of your license plate) using adversarial noise attacks.

The short version is, if you have a network that does detection, you can run inference with that network on images that have been altered by another network and have the second network use the confidence of the detection network in its loss function. The second model can be trained to create noise, which looks innocuous to human eyes, that maximally disrupts the segmentation/object detection process of the target/detection network.

You could then print this noise on, say, a transparent overlay and put it on your license plate and automated license plate readers (ALPRs) would not be able to detect/read your plates. Note: Flock is aware of this technique and has lobbied state lawmakers to make putting anything on your plate to disrupt automated reading illegal in some places, check your laws.

Benn Jordan has actually created and trained such a network video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ

And also uploaded his code, PlateShapez to github: https://github.com/bennjordan

In states where you cannot cover your license plate you’re not restricted from decorating the rest of your car. You could use a similar technique to create bumper stickers that are detected as license plates and place them all over your vehicle. Or, even, as Benn suggested, print them with UV ink so they’re invisible to humans but very visible to AI cameras who often use UV lamps to provide night vision/additional illumination.

You could also, if you were so inclined, generate bumper stickers or a vinyl wrap which could make the detector be unable to even detect a car.

Adversarial noise attacks are one of the bigger vulnerabilities of AI-based systems and they come in many flavors and can affect anything that uses a neural network.

Another example (also from the video) is that you can encode voice commands in plain audio which, to the user is completely transparent but a device (like Alexa or Siri) will hear it as a specific command (“Hey Siri, unlock the front door”). Any user-generated audio that you encounter online can have this kind of attack encoded in it, the potential damage is pretty limited because AI assistants don’t really control critical functions in your life yet… but you should probably not let your assistant listen to TikTok if it can do more than control your home lighting.

You just knew it was the first step in getting rid of the headphone jack… and it made the mens line at the Apple Store, ironically, very long

Declaring ‘This thing <always the thing that is not being done> is the only thing that can work, what you are suggesting is stupid/won’t work/pointless’

This message is just: “Give up, Give up, Give up” with more grammatical complexity.

Do you want to be one step closer to fascism or one step further away? Actively attempting to discourage people makes me think it is the former.

To the people that don’t get it. Censorship is when the government oppresses or modifies speech.

What the user above is talking about is when social media companies like Twitter banned Donald Trump and neo-nazi accounts.

Social media companies are private entities that you have a contract with where they provide you with service and you agree to abide by specific terms of that service. Hate speech and promotion of violence are things that you have agreed to not do on their services. If you do those things, then you agreed that your account could be terminated. That is what happened to Trump and the neo-nazi accounts (but I repeat myself).

I can agree that social media companies have too much power over public interaction and media consumption but I also agree that a person or organization should not be forced to host and broadcast messages that they disagree with.

Ironically, this standing legal interpretation is due to a right-wing lawsuit widely celebrated on the religious right about a cake baker who didn’t want to make wedding cakes for a gay wedding. The ruling is what affirmed the ability of private entities to regulate speech on their platforms.

Complaining about being banned from a public platform and also celebrating the victory of the cake baker is a situation where their side wants to have their cake and eat it too.

This brand of argument is basically ‘If you can’t do everything perfectly, then it is pointless to do anything especially the thing that you’re suggesting.’

You see this person in every thread on every topic where people discuss things that they can contribute their expertise to. Their message is ‘it is hopeless, your plan won’t work, give up what you’re doing, you don’t stand a chance’.

Honestly, and forgive the langue, but fuck those people. You know what your strengths are and what you’re capable of, not some faceless bot pushing violent political rhetoric who is, by its own admissions, not in the US.

If you don’t want to participate in the tech landscape as it exists today, there is absolutely nothing wrong about avoiding it entirely and building something else. Companies will not be so complacent about their position in the market if they know there’s a completely Free alternative that does everything that they charge a subscription for.

The people who are doing self-hosting today are exactly like the early adopters of the smartphone or any other technology. There’s always people trying new things and sometimes they succeed.

People who are using privacy focused approaches to personal technology, like self-hosting, are beta testing the ability to use cheap, mass produced hardware and open source software to build a product ecosystem that meets their needs. That progress is enjoyed by anybody in the future who decides they also want to leave the walled gardens of Tech Giantopia.

Once Wine made about 50% of my games playable I was dual booting because I liked the environment and customization.

Once Valve started contributing to the WINE project and released Proton most of my games were working and I was only swapping back to Windows to play a few games.

Now, I don’t have a game that doesn’t work on Proton(-GE-10) and exclusively use Linux. HDR was really the last item that I was missing and with the newest KDE/Wayland/Wine changes, it works with little fuss.

I cannot think of a single reason to recommend Windows if you’re even moderately technical. The problems you’ll have with Linux are different than the ones you’ll have with Windows but the big difference is that they are not happening in a black box and so you can troubleshoot some issues A LOT easier.

A crash happens in DirectX? You don’t have the symbols, nothing you can realistically do.

If you have a crash in Wine, not only do you have access to the full source code and the ability to write the patch and compile it yourself. You also have access to developers that are not bound by NDAs, a public issue tracker and the ability to use fixes made by other users without their risking prison time for copyright law violations.

There is no privacy destroying ‘telemetry’, no advertisements disguised as system messages, your data isn’t automatically uploaded to the cloud where you have to rent access to it, your encryption keys are not stored in on someone else’s computer, there are not mystery closed-source modules running in kernel space, the developers cannot force your system to update or deny you the ability to, and they do not force you to buy a new computer who’s only new feature is the ability to more strictly enforce IP laws and further tie your technological dependence to one of the 5 tech companies.

But, you can’t play Valorant, have to learn GIMP and you may one day have to type a terminal command… so, I mean, there’s that too

That isn’t the conspiracy that I mean.

When I wrote my comment, there were about 10 other comments, half of whom were saying things like ‘This is because they’re all getting together to jack up the price and hoarding stock’ complete conspiracy nonsense.

So I was posting to show that: “No, the price increase is expected based on normal market forces. There is no evidence of a conspiracy.”

I believe you’re attributing views to me that I didn’t state.

1. I never claimed the price increase itself was “social-media vibes.” My sentence referred to the belief that prices are out-running supply and demand. That belief needs data, not just anecdotal posts.

2. I also never said the price rises “weren’t true.” I said the cause is straightforward demand-pull from AI, not conspiracy or hoarding. Prices can rise faster than CPI when demand shifts quickly and supply is inelastic; that’s consistent with the chart I posted.

3. My first comment was about the aggregate RAM market, not Samsung specifically. The sentence “Memory isn’t expensive because Samsung is greedy …” was meant to rebut all of the conspiratorial comments in the thread, not to build a micro-level model of Samsung’s pricing power. You’re right that an oligopoly can amplify price moves, but that point needs margin data to separate strategic withholding from pure demand-pull. You haven’t provided that data.

If you have evidence that Samsung’s margins have expanded faster than the industry cost curve, I’d like to see it. Those numbers would tell us if the spike is market-clearing or profiteering.

And next time, lead with the data you did find instead of the name-calling; it lands better and actually backs the claim you’re making.

Ok, so who is arguing against that? Certainly not me.

Yes, every company on Earth would charge you $182737854 billion dollars for their product if they could and ever seller on earth would like to buy the product for $0. The market price is the price that both of these two opposing positions agree is fair.

You said:

Memory is high because there is nothing preventing them from charging anything they want above and beyond the cost of manufacture.

It is a requirement of every successful manufacturing business that has ever existed has to charge a price that is above the cost of manufacture. The term for this in academia is profit. If a company does not charge a price above and beyond the cost of manufacture then they’re selling the product for less than it costs to make it and, unless they’re Tesla, then they will eventually go out of business.

I can admit that maybe I did misread you because I assumed that you were trying to make some deeper point, because what you said, if read literally, is that “Memory is high because companies seek profit” which is the most trivially true thing you can say about economics.

So, back to basic economics.

The thing that is preventing a company from charging ‘anything they want’ is the fact that there are other manufacturers (because there isn’t a true monopoly in the RAM market) that are competing in the same market. Nothing is preventing Samnsung from charging $150,000 for a 1GB stick of RAM, but if Micron is selling their 1GB sticks of RAM for $150 then nobody will buy from Samsung.

This a phenomena known as competition prevents Samsung from being able to sell RAM for arbitrary prices. The market sets the price, not any individual company.

I assumed you knew something so basic.

The only way a manufacturer can arbitrarily change the market price is if they are the only manufacturer, aka a monopoly (in which case the $150,000 sticks of RAM are the only ones available on the market) or they are price fixing (and Micron has secretly agreed to sell RAM at $150,000 and no other manufacturers exist).

So if you’re not alleging price fixing then your comment is basically ‘Companies seek to maximize profit’ which is like saying the sky is blue or the sun is hot.