view the rest of the comments
news
Welcome to c/news! We aim to foster a book-club type environment for discussion and critical analysis of the news. Our policy objectives are:
-
To learn about and discuss meaningful news, analysis and perspectives from around the world, with a focus on news outside the Anglosphere and beyond what is normally seen in corporate media (e.g. anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist, Marxist, Indigenous, LGBTQ, people of colour).
-
To encourage community members to contribute commentary and for others to thoughtfully engage with this material.
-
To support healthy and good faith discussion as comrades, sharpening our analytical skills and helping one another better understand geopolitics.
We ask community members to appreciate the uncertainty inherent in critical analysis of current events, the need to constantly learn, and take part in the community with humility. None of us are the One True Leftist, not even you, the reader.
Newcomm and Newsmega Rules:
The Hexbear Code of Conduct and Terms of Service apply here.
-
Link titles: Please use informative link titles. Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed.
-
Content warnings: Posts on the newscomm and top-level replies on the newsmega should use content warnings appropriately. Please be thoughtful about wording and triggers when describing awful things in post titles.
-
Fake news: No fake news posts ever, including April 1st. Deliberate fake news posting is a bannable offense. If you mistakenly post fake news the mod team may ask you to delete/modify the post or we may delete it ourselves.
-
Link sources: All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. If you are citing a Twitter post as news, please include the Xcancel.com (or another Nitter instance) or at least strip out identifier information from the twitter link. There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance, such as Libredirect or archive them as you would any other reactionary source.
-
Archive sites: We highly encourage use of non-paywalled archive sites (i.e. archive.is, web.archive.org, ghostarchive.org) so that links are widely accessible to the community and so that reactionary sources don’t derive data/ad revenue from Hexbear users. If you see a link without an archive link, please archive it yourself and add it to the thread, ask the OP to fix it, or report to mods. Including text of articles in threads is welcome.
-
Low effort material: Avoid memes/jokes/shitposts in newscomm posts and top-level replies to the newsmega. This kind of content is OK in post replies and in newsmega sub-threads. We encourage the community to balance their contribution of low effort material with effort posts, links to real news/analysis, and meaningful engagement with material posted in the community.
-
American politics: Discussion and effort posts on the (potential) material impacts of American electoral politics is welcome, but the never-ending circus of American Politics© Brought to You by Mountain Dew™ is not welcome. This refers to polling, pundit reactions, electoral horse races, rumors of who might run, etc.
-
Electoralism: Please try to avoid struggle sessions about the value of voting/taking part in the electoral system in the West. c/electoralism is right over there.
-
AI Slop: Don't post AI generated content. Posts about AI race/chip wars/data centers are fine.
Industrial scale assembly lines at least have the virtue of consistency. That's one of their main benefits: you get the same thing at the same quality every time. LLMs don't even get you that.
Sure, but the idea with AI is precisely to tackle problems that don't have a formalized set of steps available. And there are ways to do verification of the work they do. For example, if you create a strict specification for what the end result should look like then you can treat the LLM the same way as a genetic algorithm, where it will eventually converge on the desired output using a feedback loop. So, it's not that this tech is inherently useless.
No argument from me. It absolutely has its uses--some potentially really significant--and "Attention is All You Need" and the subsequent literature very much is a landmark development in automation. It's just terrible for like 97% of the use cases it's being pushed for right now, as well as being developed with the explicit goal of actively making the world worse (because it's under the control of the world's worst guys, for the most part). If this tech were genuinely open, being developed responsibly, and used for the things it is genuinely good at without being shoved into applications it isn't good for, it could definitely solve some problems.
Oh yeah completely agree. We're in a midst of a huge financial bubble here, and the vast majority of these companies are either solving problems that don't exist, or selling snake oil. I'm pretty optimistic with what's happening with this tech in China where it is being developed largely in the open, and being applied in much more sensible way from what I can tell.