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   Sindarina, Edge Case Detective (sindarina@ngmx.com)'s status on Thursday, 13-Apr-2023 07:59:18 JST Sindarina, Edge Case Detective

   This is an excellent short video from the Vox team, talking about the many problems with the Western Acquisition manifest in the sets of data that large language models get trained on;

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2DgdsE86ts

   Entirely unsurprising for anyone who has been keeping track of this sort of thing for a while, but worth being reminded of regardless.

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     Sindarina, Edge Case Detective (sindarina@ngmx.com)'s status on Thursday, 13-Apr-2023 07:59:13 JST Sindarina, Edge Case Detective

     in reply to

     So let's define consent again, shall we? There is only one (1) form of valid user consent;

     INFORMED, ENTHUSIASTIC CONSENT, REVOCABLE.

     That's it. No ifs, no buts.

     The user must understand what they are giving consent for, and the scope for which their consent is valid.

     They must be enthusiastic, wholly onboard with the decision, not begrudgingly agreeing to it because they feel like they have no other choice.

     And they must be able to revoke that consent at any time, whether five minutes from now, or five years in the future.

     —

     This part was originally posted on .lol, but that's about to disappear, so here it is again.

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     Sindarina, Edge Case Detective (sindarina@ngmx.com)'s status on Thursday, 13-Apr-2023 07:59:14 JST Sindarina, Edge Case Detective

     in reply to

     This is why there is no such thing as a 'neutral' algorithm, and it's not just a matter of 'getting better data’.

     You simply cannot compensate for what amounts to centuries of skew by having computers controlled by the haves harvest more public data, because every link in that chain, including the programmers and their code, introduce compounding errors that increase bias, and erase some things altogether.

     Everything associated with the Western Acquisition, whether it's big tech companies like Google and Microsoft or non-profit projects like the Internet Archive, is suspect.

     And that's before you even get to consent.

     Valerie Aurora repeated this.
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     Sindarina, Edge Case Detective (sindarina@ngmx.com)'s status on Thursday, 13-Apr-2023 07:59:15 JST Sindarina, Edge Case Detective

     in reply to

     Colonial attitudes are alive and well, which is how, for example, IPv4 space assigned to AfriNIC, the regional internet registry for the African continent, ends up in the hands of US hosters, and then used by German spammers.

     It is why the US Department of Defense has more IPv4 address space than the entire African continent combined.

     Then there was that thing around how RIPE handled the allocations on an entire Class A, 185/8;

     https://labs.ripe.net/author/wilhelm/so-long-last-8-and-thanks-for-all-the-allocations/

     The process was abused. Shocking!

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     Sindarina, Edge Case Detective (sindarina@ngmx.com)'s status on Thursday, 13-Apr-2023 07:59:15 JST Sindarina, Edge Case Detective

     in reply to

     It's also why, in 2019, on the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee got to reminisce in The Guardian about how, despite his best intentions, there were negative outcomes. So surprising!

     It is layer upon layer of cis white men insisting that they are benevolent creators who could not have predicted that their systems would create new problems and aggravate existing ones, despite having all of human history and decades worth of warnings to tell them otherwise.

     Large language models are simply the latest iteration of these extractive practices.

     https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/mar/12/tim-berners-lee-on-30-years-of-the-web-if-we-dream-a-little-we-can-get-the-web-we-want

     #DontPayTheGuardian

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     Sindarina, Edge Case Detective (sindarina@ngmx.com)'s status on Thursday, 13-Apr-2023 07:59:16 JST Sindarina, Edge Case Detective

     in reply to

     The internet is an imperial project, controlled by the American Empire and its allies. As a result of this, the United States controls almost 36% of all IPv4 address space, or almost 5 IPv4 addresses per person; 4911 per 1000 people.

     The next biggest chunk is China's, at about 7,7%, or 245 per 1000 people.

     Ethiopia has a single IPv4 address per 3000 or so people.

     This is 2012 data from Wikipedia, but I doubt the numbers have changed much since then, since IPv4 address exhaustion has been a thing for years now, and new allocations predictably tend to end up in the same hands.

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IPv4_address_allocation

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     Sindarina, Edge Case Detective (sindarina@ngmx.com)'s status on Thursday, 13-Apr-2023 07:59:17 JST Sindarina, Edge Case Detective

     in reply to

     It's a great example of how unequal access gets compounded, and bias essentially multiplies with every layer that is stacked on top of it.

     The bias present in large language models is a combination of the colonial heritage of English as an imperial language, the ascent of the American Empire after World War II, accumulated wealth, the allocation of network resources, and so forth.

     Take IPv4 address allocation, for example; it's a pretty solid proxy for how biased new tech is going to be.