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Cake day: June 29th, 2025

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  • Alaknár@sopuli.xyztolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldJust relax
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    57 minutes ago

    I’m still salty that they killed Cortana. For the short period between being released full-featured and MS gimping it hard in my region, it was the best assistant out of the bunch, by far.

    All they had to do was add the option to add the capabilities of Copilot to the existing system and they’d have an actually killer feature.




  • We’re kind of veering into philosophy here. “What is learning” and “what is inspiration”? If you’re inspired by some things, are you “regurgitating inputs”, or are you performing an act that is innately creative, transformative?

    And then we can veer into a bit of lawyering too - are the billions of code files that contain flat-out copy-pasted pieces of open-source code with zero attribution or license compliance more or less moral than OP using an LLM to speed up their coding of an original product?

    The milk is already spilled. I would love nothing more than to bring those who stole and plagiarised to justice, but that’s just not the world we’re living in.



  • Because it kinda’ is…?

    The type of knowledge retained is massively different (understanding of concepts vs memorisation of patterns), but the concept is the same.

    And, again, if you want to consider the use of copy-left code in LLMs as infringing upon open source licenses, do you also want to consider using effectively the same pieces of copy-left code as said infringement?

    If a human writes a simple “Hello World” in C++ after learning how to do it from a copy-left tutorial, does their “Hello World” now requires the use of an identical license?


  • Well, now we venture into legalese.

    LLMs are not incorporating the used code (in theory), so the copy-left clause does not apply.

    It’s like if you read an GNU/GPLv3 source code from something, learned from it, and therefore any time you write any future code you MUST apply GNU/GPLv3 to it. It’d be insane.

    If we assume that training an LLM is like training a person, then obviously the copy-left clause does not apply.

    If we assume that training an LLM means actually incorporating the code into the product, then the entire thing either needs to be open sourced, or cannot be used commercially.



  • Why didn’t you respond to my point about voter fatigue?

    You withdraw your delegation from X

    And you really don’t see a problem with people giving and taking their votes away willy-nilly?

    You really, honest to god, don’t see this as yet another avenue for fraud, masqueraded as mistakes?

    That’s going to be far less than the 50% voting margin required to institute evil.

    It’s going to be vastly more than the 50% voting margin, because most people will be so overloaded with non-stop voting prompts, that they’ll just stop doing it.

    Generally, UBI means an alternative to any corrupt giveaway to a lobby group has the alternative of increasing the UBI

    UBI only works for the “little man”. It doesn’t solve anything for Big Business and CEOs who make six to eight figures.

    Corrupt representatives that ziosplain why you should suffer and die, and oligarchy needs all your money, instead of responding to people’s needs, occurs because of the 2-4 year election cycle, and distractions during election time

    OK, here’s an idea: before you start campaigning for a complete rebuild of the voting system that is 100% doomed to fail, how about you first read about democracies in other countries? Read about France, Spain, Sweden, even Poland with all its shortcomings.

    Maybe you’ll see that the issue is not with the system as it is, it’s with education, involvement, and enforcement.

    The US failed because of the lack of these three elements. If people were more educated, Trump wouldn’t win. If more people were involved, Trump wouldn’t win. If there was proper law enforcement, Trump wouldn’t have been able to even start.

    All three of these elements failed, creating the ultimate shitstorm.

    Your system works perfectly fine… on paper. Just like capitalism (remember “trickle down economy”? Assuming it works, we can presume everyone will be happy) or communism (assuming it works, we can presume everybody has access to everything).

    The issue with your system is the exact same issue that makes capitalism or communism impossible - greed and laziness exist.


  • The digital part is to make it so that voting is fast and convenient

    But it wouldn’t be, would it? People would still have to line up and wait for their laminated receipts. The entire point of your “digital voting” system is defeated by this one element. If there’s a physical component required anyway, might as well do the more secure version, and have everyone voting physically too.

    As they do so, they can order a voting station to print out the physical ballot, which can be picked up or sent by mail to the voter

    I’m struggling to imagine the sheer amount of paper going through the postal services with this set-up. At this point it kinda’ sounds like you’re a lobbyist for some paper company. New York City Hall alone passes 50-100 bills per month. And you want people to be voting on their city, state, and federal bills and laws!

    It ain’t perfect. But it is important to try to at do “mostly good”, rather than being fundamentally sucky

    I’m sorry to say this, but this systems is fundamentally sucky.

    It requires the exact same things to go right as representative democracy, but introduces so many things to go wrong…

    Also, America isn’t Estonia - it is a much larger nation, so there are more resources all around to tackle the problem

    Estonia is the most digitised country on the planet, what are you even talking about, mate…?


  • It is my assumption that an America that has been overhauled, would have UBI. Thus free smartphones

    OK, so if you’re dreaming of a utopia, why complicate things? Just assume America doesn’t have greedy businessmen and then even capitalism works perfectly fine.

    Open-source means anyone can look at the code, be it on their machine or at the repository

    We already have that and there already are OSS projects that have been compromised. The most famous of which, the SSH backdoor, was discovered by the skin of our teeth. We have no way of knowing if there are more backdoors like it that went through undetected.

    With things like hashing, it can be verified at each step of the voting process that the vote remains intact by auditors

    It’s already being done. If the device doing the hashing is compromised, you still get a valid hash of a flipped vote.

    The voting software should be device agnostic, and be something used in all elections and voting.

    Meaning: even more open to fraud than the current solution.

    This is very different from Diebold and other physical devices, because those are black boxes.

    OSS is not a magic “fix security issues instantly” button. True, it can protect from a malicious company wanting to do a take-over, like with what Thiel/Musk did, but it opens you up to so many other attack vectors. Again, learn about the SSH backdoor.

    The receipts are not about anonymity. They are laminated so that people can keep them in storage, and bring them to a poll verification booth if the call goes out. The digital vote is anonymous when cast, the physical ballot reserved for when volunteers are willing to reveal their vote in public. While obviously not fool proof, it is an extra step against corruption if needed.

    Your “extra step against corruption” is just a worse version of what we currently have. The votes can be recounted as needed, only the voter anonymity is preserved.

    Do you honestly believe that malicious actors wouldn’t make “calls for recounts” just enough times to learn exactly who votes how and then use that for spreading propaganda and sway the votes?

    Obviously, there would have to be laws against corruption to go with a redefined nation

    And they would somehow magically work, unlike the existing laws against corruption because…?

    Also, a UBI-based society would have less corruption, because money is associated with luxury, rather than necessity

    Everybody on the planet wants more. Maybe you can’t corrupt 300k UBI-receiving citizens, but you can corrupt the 10 businessmen who operate their news-sources.

    When it comes to calling for a recount, it could be something like 20% of previous participants of a voted measure calling for it, or 30% of eligible voters, whichever milestone is reached first.

    Got it. So, you get votes, on top of votes.

    People would be doing nothing but voting, mate. You get to vote on your city laws, state laws, federal laws, then their recounts. In order to vote you need to read the laws you’re voting on, and these can be easily 500+ pages long, all in lawyer-lingo.

    BTW - how would be re-writes of laws done? Also direct democracy, where the population has to read the law, understand it, see the pitfalls in the budgetary situation, international laws situation, international market agreements situation, human rights laws situation, and a billion other, and then agree that “the comma placed here makes the statement ambiguous, opening an avenue for fraud”?

    Presumably, frivolous calls for a recount would automatically fail if they haven’t garnered support. Presumably, the open-source voting software would be used for collecting the voting metrics.

    A lot of assumptions and presumptions going on to get this thing off the ground, no?







  • I think you’re confusing A LOT of concepts here.

    The “plagiarism” bit is about LLMs generating images or stories. All these have been trained on stolen art.

    The code-building part of LLMs was trained on public repos, official documentation, etc. I haven’t heard anyone saying that LLMs used “plagiarised code” to learn coding.

    And before you go “if they used GNU/GPL repos, they must open source their models” - I don’t think that’s true. Unless you also think that a person learning to code on GBU/GPL repos is obligated to open-source everything he subsequently codes?

    I might be wrong, though, open to duscussion.


  • Buck and Darlene don’t have financial incentives to attack Iran

    Financial? No. But they’re using Facebook, and the military industrial complex has been bombarding their feed with rage-bait of how Iran is going to rape their children, so they decide that US has to bomb Iran first.

    Our richest and ‘wise’ leaders who had the resources and time to better the world, failed to do so

    Mate, that’s not a problem with democracy. That’s a problem with the fact that you currently have an organised crime ring that’s taken over the country, and your entire rule of law got kicked in the balls.

    With a (free) smartphone in hand, anyone can instantly check out a voting measure and cast their opinion on it.

    Mate…

    First of all: digital voting is famously difficult to pull off. Source: last two US elections, especially the 2024, where - somehow - the guy who’s friends with the guy whose company makes the majority of the voting machines, and who provides them all with Internet access, somehow knew the result 4 hours before the count ended.

    Did you miss this part?

    Secondly, I mentioned that there should be laminated receipts from the voting machines. Every voter may ask for it after casting their vote. Their cellphones can also have a QR code, so they they can go into the local print shop to immediately have their voting record printed out

    You seem to be under the impression that “vote fraud” means Belarusian or russian levels of comedy, where the person committing fraud wins by taking 90%+ of all votes.

    How it actually happened in your case was by flipping a couple thousand votes here and there.

    Which means one of two scenarios:

    1. Nobody gives a shit because the difference looks realistic enough to not suspect anything.

    2. People get salty and call for re-counts for every single vote they lose.

    Also: people get receipts? Great. How do you anonymise their votes?

    Also-also: people can call for a re-count? How many people? One person can cause the re-count of all votes? Do you need a percentage? If so, how is it collected? Via an online service, such as change.org, famous for being botted non-stop? What happens if most people forgot to take their receipts? Or threw them out?

    Plus, open-source voting. That means instead of Diebold making the software, the federal government does, which has to allow inspectors from any state to make unannounced audits of the software chain.

    Open source doesn’t protect you from exploits, mate.

    Thirdly, I already mentioned who the voters are: the ones who cast an vote. Requiring absolutely 51% of EVERYONE is unrealistic. Instead, the voting pool should adjust according to how many people cast a vote. So if 5,000 people cast votes, 2,501 have to say ‘Nay’ to prevent a pardon

    Right. So, knowing that the vast majority of people would lose interest after the second vote (it’s already difficult to drag their arses into the booths once every four years), you’d end up with big businesses offering thousands of votes for whatever case in exchange for a payout.


  • 51% of all participating voters has to reject the pardon to prevent it. Further, the pardon’s effect is restricted to their state. A presidential pardon is national, but again requires 51% of participating voters to deny it.

    Who are the voters in this scenario?

    EDIT:

    we should have open-sourced digital and standardized direct voting on all matters

    First of all: digital voting is famously difficult to pull off. Source: last two US elections, especially the 2024, where - somehow - the guy who’s friends with the guy whose company makes the majority of the voting machines, and who provides them all with Internet access, somehow knew the result 4 hours before the count ended.

    Secondly: direct voting is probably the worst thing you could think of in terms of systems of governance.

    Just think about it - all the flat earthers, all the anti-vaxers now get to vote in critical, strategic things. You get idealistic pacifists to vote on the military budget, and people who failed primary school to vote on the NASA budget. Laws are famously convoluted and full of tech- and lawyer-jargon, and you want to have Buck and Darlene from the trailer park voting on them?


  • I would love for Mozilla to fix this, which is why I try to be pragmatic and concrete. But so far, they don’t seem willing to do so.

    Here’s the problem - people don’t care if the information is there or not. Microsoft has been disclosing their required telemetry data for years and people still thing it’s an invasion of their privacy.

    Take you for example - I gave you a source, you checked 1/3rd of the information in it and started complaining.

    Why am I assuming you didn’t bother to read the whole thing? Because you’re claiming that “technical data” is too obscure of a term to figure out what it is. “Interaction Data”, in your words, “can be literally a keylogger”, right? Well, it’s very clearly defined in the table:

    Click counts, impression data, attribution data, how many searches performed, time on page, ad and sponsored tile clicks.

    Which of these would you consider to be “literally a keylogger”, hmm?