Now I'm wondering if it's possible to take the benefits of MIDI with decent quality VST, isolate the vocal track from the .mp3 or whatever format, and combine them. I sadly think it'll be awhile before we have a way to fake individual artist voices with MIDI and I'm kind of glad we don't have that because I worry about the implications in a world with so much slop music.

I'm not CWing this despite it technically touching on Canadian politics, but it's important and I won't be addressing partisan politics in this post.

Some of you reading this either have fallen victim to a wildfire, know someone who was, or are worries this will be the year it happens to you. You no doubt have seen people jump on your tragedy or fear of tragedy to push their own partisan agenda. I hope you can forgive me for falling into that trap myself and that it might be some comfort I'm also terrified it'll come for me too, that I'll also have to pull my go bag and start drill sargent scream into the houses of my mostly elderly neighbours to get out or for me to help them get out lest the flames engulf their life as well as their stuff. I cannot imagine how those of you who have lost to these fires must be suffering. I don't want it to happen to a single other person.

We may not agree on why it's happening. We likely agree that something needs to be done about this. Fortunately, fire breaks, watch towers, building future homes to either prevent or slow the spread of fire, these are all things that don't care if you vote red, blue, yellow or green. These are all things I think we should be ramping up in normal times. These are things we can help each other on. We can prevent this.

Actually address the issue of sycophancy enabling and potentially CAUSING psychosis in users, particularly in minors. Design the LLM to consider a valid output to the prompt one which reinforces the danger of unhealthy or unsafe rhetoric in the prompts every time.

If prompt injection truly is an unpatchable exploit, core policy must include isolating the technology from use for potentially dangerous tasks if prompt injected, such as an agent managing files on a server with sensitive information. This is merely a single example to provide guidance on what to account for. I will not consider this resolved if you only resolve this example.

Contractually oblige, if not mandated in future laws, a universal basic income programme with the only qualification being a loss of employment due to advancements leading would-be employers to use the technology instead of hiring people. Openly advocate for such to be mandated by law if not already bound by law.

The latter is unnecessary if you explicitly design LLMs and diffusion models, and technology derived from such to never be a full labour replacement and only be a tool in a craftsperson's arsenal and guarantee this will not change.

If ALL of these are addressed FULLY, I will stop advocating against the technology and use it myself.

I hope this is the last time I speak about this in particular, but I have a nasty track record of making statements with finality and some shit happening that prevents it.

I have an enormous, ambitious, laundry list of measured and notable grievances with the development and usage of #LLMs and #DiffusionModels for generating media in their current form. Dealing with one of them is not going to sell me on it. All of them are deal breakers. Until you address ALL of them, any usage I make will be what is mandated of me with minimal actual utility usage. I feel strongly enough about this I will say publicly that if a future boss mandates a usage quota, I will feed it bullshit to meet those quotas and do my actual job.

Until commercially available LLMs can do ALL of the following:

Retrain on data sets removed of any and all material without express permission of the author when consent was not already given by way of their licence or express permission.

Reduce power and water consumption from data centres both for training and processing prompts by multiple orders of magnitude.

NEVER, *EVER* use gas turbines or other grossly dirty energy for said data centres EVER AGAIN and compensate victims of ecological damage from such use.

[continued in replies]

I get it wrong. I don't know if it would end as badly or worse like if I said "¿hablas Español?" to someone who turned out to be from Brazil or Portugal.

Hopefully this is just me overthinking things. Maybe it'll be like when I started asking customers at Walgreens, "¿Quierres bolsa?" if I overheard them recognisably speak Spanish to each other and their eyes lit up because this gringo actually bothered to not only learn the words, but to decently pronounce them. It's a small gesture, I wish I had the time and executive function to devote myself to becoming fluent in the dozen-ish languages I could run into here. I just hope it makes people who likely have been made to feel like strangers see this as their home too the way someone might do so if a Quebecer came in and I started speaking French to them.

2/2

One of the few things that makes me feel like an idiot being in Canada now is knowing enough Spanish to crudely go through whatever situation where I'd be working with a Latin American person who doesn't speak a lick of English is useless now, and the closest equivalent now would be trying to figure out which of the half dozen south/east Asian languages people commonly speak and learning that. Do I learn Hindi? Punjabi? Vietnamese? Cantonese? Some other language? Am I going to fuck up someone's day if I mix up Hindi with Punjabi and ask them if they need help in the wrong language?

So far, everyone just speaks English to me even if they're struggling with the language, even if they maybe only know extremely basic words/phrases or try to awkwardly brute force it without speaking. I worry they're doing it because I look like the sort of person who will get pissy if they don't speak English. I'm just not familiar enough with accents to tell someone from Bangladesh from someone from India or Pakistan the way I can tell someone from Puerto Rico from Mexico or El Salvador or at very least can tell Spanish is their first language because I grew up with a decent amount of Latin people.

I suppose I could ask, but that runs into the other problem I mentioned of not wanting to offend someone if 1/n

@Paulatics I assume you are aware of the abnormal conditions around passage of bill C-22. In case you are not, just as with billC-16 fpr which you previously decried the rush to pass it, I fear the same is true for C-22. Worse yet, MPs were evidently not permitted to debate the bill further, and some proponents of the bill gave gone as far as to insult their own constituents when pointing out flaws within the text of the bill, some which detract from the very goal of the bill itself, such as poorly or undefined terminology. Evidently, such basic structural concerns are conflated with reductionist interpretations of concerns around security of individual Canadians, let alone the security of the nation.

I may not be a resident in your jurisdiction as a resident in BC. However, you are the only Senator I am aware of that has a presence on Mastodon and I fear attempts to contact my Senator will be met with the same silence and later handwaving attempting to contact my MP resulted in. I am terrified for the future of this country as someone desperate to love this country the way I love the spouse who is why I immigrated here and not to another country when my home country became unsafe. This is bigger than "tinfoil" privacy concerns, this is about preventing proven harms.

NOW can we stop spamming captchas at every person who isn't running Chrome on default settings without a VPN?! This fucking shit would be a lot less effective if captchas weren't fucking everywhere.

@deviantollam https://defcon.social/@deviantollam/116416495125470235

Given recent events I guess I have to make it even more explicit.

Because Epstein, whether you think he killed himself or was killed, I don't fucking care anymore, died by hanging, a miscarriage of justice took place. Not just because it made it harder to get to the bottom of things, but because such a vile shitstain with less value than a singular earthworm was denied the suffering he deserved for what he did. Were it not for the fact that I'm unsure if calling for violence if a dead person *was* alive violates the rules of this instance, I would gleefully recount the ways I wish I could personally make a monster I would value less than inanimate objects suffer given tbe opportunity.

So I'm sorry if I got a little bit emotional at even the implication that I was somehow defending a corpse that is further beneath me than the mud on my boots for whom Hel itself is too great a mercy. I'm sorry if I refuse to let a vitriol so great it's taken all my willpower not to destroy the phone I'm using to type this in pure rage splash back onto the hunan shields the "people" also at fault for this placed in front of them.

Kindly choke on the shit you spew if that makes me a heretic. We all have bigger fucking fish to fry than your bitch ass.