It would indeed be pretty stupid to equate new technology with racism. The whole idea of having a moral stance against an inanimate object is the height of idiocy. I have a moral stance against the capitalist system and the way technology is applied within it, but you do you.

The only sect like behavior on here comes from people who think that this tech will just magically go away if they post enough ‘AI slop’ comments on a niche social media forum.

yeah seriously

Yet, here you are continuing to talk without saying anything of substance. I also love how in your mind, actually doing something practical about the problem of corps owning AI tools is conservative. Amazing mental gymnastics there champ.

And I don’t know what policy you think that I’m defending that goes against my arguments. But I guess we’ll never know since you won’t actually mention what it is.

My earlier arguments were that we should encourage open model usage to displace closed model usage. The whole problem I’m outlining in my argument is that as long as closed models are the only game in town, that’s what people are going to use. And the way forward is to provide credible alternatives. I even gave you a concrete example of Linux displacing Windows use which you studiously ignored.

Turns out you don’t think my AI stance is in good faith due to your poor reading comprehension skills.

Very telling that you don’t actually provide sources for your state department talking points.

The whole conspiracy theory started with a claim of millions of Uyghurs being supposedly imprisoned story is based on two highly dubious “studies.”.

However, this claim is completely absurd when you stop and think about it even for a minute. That figure 1 million is repeated again and again. Let’s just look at how much space would you actually need to intern one million people.

This is a photo of Rikers Island, New York City’s biggest prison. The actual size of a facility interning ten thousand people.

According to Wikipedia, “The average daily inmate population on the island is about 10,000, although it can hold a maximum of 15,000.” Let’s assume this is a Xinjiang detention camp, holding ten to fifteen thousand people. How many of these would it take to hold one million people?

Let’s do some math:

In reality, one million people would probably take more space; all the supposed detention camps we see are much less dense than Rikers.

For comparison, San Francisco is 47 square miles. Amsterdam is 64 square miles. You’d literally need detention camps that total the size of San Francisco or Amsterdam to intern one million Uyghurs. It’d be like looking at a map of California. There’s Los Angeles. There’s San Diego. And look, there’s San Francisco Concentration City with its one million Uyghurs.

Literally visible to the naked eye from space.

CHRD states that it interviewed dozens of ethnic Uyghurs in the course of its study, but their enormous estimate was ultimately based on interviews with exactly eight Uyghur individuals. Based on this absurdly small sample of research subjects in an area whose total population is 20 million, CHRD “extrapolated estimates” that “at least 10% of villagers […] are being detained in re-education detention camps, and 20% are being forced to attend day/evening re-education camps in the villages or townships, totaling 30% in both types of camps.” Furthermore, it doesn’t even make sense from logistics perspective.

Practically all the stories we see about China trace back to Adrian Zenz is a far right fundamentalist nutcase and not a reliable source for any sort of information. The fact that he’s the primary source for practically every article in western media demonstrates precisely what I’m talking about when I say that coverage is divorced from reality.

Zenz is a born-again Christian who lectures at the European School of Culture and Theology. This anodyne-sounding campus is actually the German base of Columbia International University, a US-based evangelical Christian seminary which considers the “Bible to be the ultimate foundation and the final truth in every aspect of our lives,” and whose mission is to “educate people from a biblical worldview to impact the nations with the message of Christ.”

Zenz’s work on China is inspired by this biblical worldview, as he recently explained in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. “I feel very clearly led by God to do this,” he said. “I can put it that way. I’m not afraid to say that. With Xinjiang, things really changed. It became like a mission, or a ministry.”.

Along with his “mission” against China, heavenly guidance has apparently prompted Zenz to denounce homosexuality, gender equality, and the banning of physical punishment against children as threats to Christianity.

Zenz outlined these views in a book he co-authored in 2012, titled Worthy to Escape: Why All Believers Will Not Be Raptured Before the Tribulation. In the tome, Zenz discussed the return of Jesus Christ, the coming wrath of God, and the rise of the Antichrist.

The fact that this nutcase is being paraded as a credible researcher on the subject is absolutely surreal, and it’s clear that the methodology of his “research” doesn’t pass any kind of muster when examined closely.

It’s also worth noting that there is a political angle around the narrative around Xinjiang. For example, here’s George Bush’s chief of staff openly saying that US wants to destabilize the region, and NED recently admitting to funding Uyghur separatism for the past 16 years on their own official Twitter page. An ex-CIA operative details US operations radicalizing and training terrorists in the region in this book. Here’s an excerpt:

US has been stoking terrorism in the region while they’ve been running a propaganda campaign against China in the west. In fact, US even classified Uyghur separatists as a terrorist group at one point https://www.mintpressnews.com/us-was-at-war-uyghur-terrorists-now-claims-etim-doesnt-exist/276916/

Here’s an interview with a son of imam killed in Xinjiang https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-06-19/Son-of-imam-assassinated-in-Kashgar-s-2014-mosque-attack-speaks-out-RqNiyrcRuo/index.html

Here’s an account from a Pakistani journalist who has been all over Xinjiang (which borders Pakistan) claims that western media reports on “atrocities” are lies. https://dailytimes.com.pk/723317/exposing-the-occidents-baseless-lies-about-xinjiang/

It’s also worth noting that the accusations originate entirely from the west while Muslim majority countries support China, and their leaders have visited Xinjiang many times.

• https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/on-eid-xinjiang-imams-defend-china-against-u-s-criticism-1.5425967
• https://www.bolnews.com/latest/2023/07/pak-religious-leaders-nurture-bonds-of-cooperation-with-xinjiang/
• https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/w/islamic-envoys-say-china-is-protecting-minorities-in-xinjiang-after-five-day-visit

Also notable that whenever western media actually deigns to visit Xinjiang, which is not often, they’re unable to produce support for any of their claims of mass imprisonment and oppression, so they opt for insinuations instead https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-china-health-travel-7a6967f335f97ca868cc618ea84b98b9

There’s a further list of debunking here if you’re interested https://redsails.org/the-xinjiang-atrocity-propaganda-blitz/

The whole thing is very clearly a propaganda blitz that US is cynically using to manipulate impressionable people in the west.

liberals are not ok 🤣

Ah yes, when you’re unable to come up with any actual counter point just say that the detailed explanation of why you’re wrong is not in good faith. Bye troll.

What part of distributed systems are you still struggling with here? Also, models are getting incredibly more efficient every few months. Qwen 3.8 that runs on a laptop today is comparable to Opus 4.6 from around half a year ago which needed a whole data centre.

People working on local models don’t need to compete with whatever the big corps are doing, they just need to make tools that are good enough to use on your machine. Just the same way Linux didn’t have to do everything Windows did to become usable.

And yeah, Luddites had lists of demands just you do, how’s that work out for them?

And if the US somehow did ban open models, I’m sure the vassals would as well, but again who gives a fuck? The whole west is like 13% of the global population. And it’s imploding economically and politically in real time. Who cares what goes on in this genocidal cesspool?

amazing counterpoint as always

That’s what I said?

No, I’m countering what you said by pointing out that there are rational reasons for companies to put models out in the open.

Current techniques cannot give you anything close to the level of inspection you can with software.

So, that just means people need to put the work into improving the techniques. That’s how problems are solved. Last I looked, models like Qwen are actually becoming easier to understand as the article I linked explains.

You always be at a massive disadvantage because of the severally more limited compute available.

Not really because you’d be leveraging a global compute cluster and amortizing the work. But the thing is that it’s not even a competition. Local models just need to be good enough to use. The same way my I don’t need to have a supercomputer at home for my needs, I don’t need a frontier model either. A model like Qwen is already plenty useful, and they will only get better.

raining a model also does nothing for the environmental side of things and just makes things worse

That’s going to continue to happen regardless of how much whinging you do. The question is whether models will be owned by corps or by the public.

The point is to not encourage more people to use the tool that gives control to Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.

You already lost this battle. And on top of that, as you so glibly pointed out in your other reply, an insane amount of money is going into these companies. So these models will obviously continue to be trained and operated. This is the reality:

What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

Normalizing whinging about AI without doing anything productive just means that people who share none of your concerns will be the ones developing it.

The Luddites were skilled artisans, who saw a few capitalists growing rich by introducing machinery to destroy their guilds. So, they set to work to smash the machines thinking that if they could destroy the technology, their artisanal guilds would be saved. And they were predictably crushed by state violence. The machines prevailed because the ruling class wanted to cut costs and increase profits. The same is true today, and those who want to stop these systems from being put into production are merely attacking the symptoms of the underlying material relations.

Also, you’re simply confusing the fact that the US is in a bubble with what it takes to develop new technology. Listening to you, one would think Linux could have never been developed because Microsoft put billions into Windows.

https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeaways-from-the-2026-report

Also, highly unlikely they would get banned, because there’s a huge amount of capital in the US now being invested in companies using open models already. But even if the burger reich banned them why should I give a fuck, I don’t live in that shithole.

The reason Chinese companies are making open models is very simple actually, and has fuck all to do with charity. LLMs are a form of a general commodity, and it’s not a viable business model to monetize them directly. Trying to compete on model quality is a race to the bottom. Anything one lab can do, others can figure out a few months later. So, you have to keep investing more and more money just to keep ahead. Chinese companies realized this early, and that’s why they release the model in the open, aiming for the high end of the value chain building customized services and integrations tha capture the market. My expectation is that LLMs will become like Linux where nobody really makes any money off the tech directly. But you’ll see platforms like AWS built on top of it.

Also, not sure what the rationale for companies releasing open models would be to trigger some unspecified poisoning in a coding model. Like what exactly is it gonna do when running locally?

Meanwhile, you absolutely can inspect the weights and there are now plenty of tools for doing just that. It’s an active area of research, but these things aren’t black boxes people make them out to be.

Finally, there are completely open models as well with training data, and source released in the open. None of them are frontier quality, but they are certainly a starting point.

There also projects like petals for doing distributed training. There’s absolutely no reason why you can’t have something like SETI@home for training models on a network. This is what people should be putting their energy into instead of whinging endlessly, as if OpenAI or Anthropic give a flying fuck that some brave lib made yet another ‘AI slop’ comment on a niche social media platform.

Somehow doubt that a bunch of whingers are going to fork Linux successfully, but I’ll wait to be proven wrong.

Do explain how open models like Qwen that you can run locally give massive control to handful of companies. In fact, what seems obvious is that using and improving these models is precisely what takes control away from these companies. People who started the free software movement didn’t cry like a bunch children about how much they hated software. They had the brains to understand the problem wasn’t the software itself, but rather who controls it. So, they went out and built open versions of the software that weren’t corporate owned. And try guess what tools they used initially to do that since open software didn’t exist yet. Your mind is about to be blown.

The difference is that free-software movement is about rolling up your sleeves and actually making alternatives as opposed to throwing a tantrum like spoiled children which is what you all are. You lot are just a modern day iteration of Luddites who were raging against the technology as opposed to social relations that resulted in the technology being used in abusive ways. And lacking basic understanding of the problem you are doomed to fail the same way as your predecessors.

Thank you for taking your valuable time away from huffing gas to share your invaluable insights.

or maybe just time to grow up