Notices by Louis Ingenthron (louis@ingenthron.social)

One #Mastodon / #Fediverse tip that I need to follow more often is:

Check out the profiles of people who boost your posts. Consider following them.

If someone is willing to boost what you said, there's a halfway-decent chance you agree on at least one issue and may end up being good mutual follows.

@GreenSkyOverMe It's the Scots word for "to".

@freemo I'm not even saying that. Something simpler.

LLMs typically work in syllables, not whole words. That's good for LLMs, because then it learns patterns of conjugation and pluralization naturally from seeing those patterns used in its training.

But what if you ran it on words, not syllables, and you fed it a well-structured initial dataset (i.e. a dictionary) to seed its initial tokens. It would understand that "humans" and "human" are related words and how.

1/2

Prediction: LLMs, or Large Language Models, are the brute-force approach to language generation models. They will be replaced by SLMs, or Structured Language Models, which will use human-tuned seed datasets to build models from much less source material than LLMs need.

@freemo I somehow doubt it.

@freemo Dunno, how about you ask all the Nazis who got excited after yesterday?

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/elon-musk-salute-reaction-right-wing-extremists-1235241866/

@mekkaokereke There is undeniably a large sect of people who are exactly like you describe. This won't convince them.

The folks I think it would convince are the ones who don't really pay attention to politics other than what they hear other folks talking about around the water cooler. The ones who vote, not as an informed decision, but rather as a social function. The ones who feel left behind in life, but are too stupid or lazy to identify who exactly is leaving them behind.

@mekkaokereke FWIW, I appear to have been quite wrong about this.

I posted it where some of my right-wing family could see it, and they're mostly writing it off as a fabrication of CNN and MSNBC, ignoring their own eyes.

I feel like Charlie Brown trying to kick a football.

@mekkaokereke Are you referring to the Ingraham one? If so, watch again and notice how she at least has the shame to hide it and make it ambiguous. Whenever they do it in public, there's always a mask, an excuse, something to give the average person an out to say "oh that wasn't really a nazi symbol."

But Elon's was blatant and unequivocal, even coming from the chest first. It was shameless and unmasked, and that might make the difference.

@mekkaokereke Because, afaik, those nazis never saluted on-stage at a Trump event.

People respond to symbology. If Trump says "deport all immigrants", people say "eh, he doesn't mean it." But if he says it while wearing a swastika armband, those folks sit up and start paying attention.

There's a reason the high-profile nazis in this country typically avoid those symbols like the plague, at least when not behind closed doors.

@mekkaokereke

I don't think "agitated" is the right word.

But the reason it excites people is because it's a lot harder to deny people are fascists when they wear the symbols of fascists, and we have a *lot* of fascism denial in this country.

This is the kind of thing that could maybe wake up the blase white bible-belter to the what they've wrought.

@freemo Is Wikipedia okay? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restrictions_on_TikTok_in_the_United_States#First_Trump_administration

@freemo If you look at the individual politicians and what they supported, then you'll see that Trump was the one to threaten a TikTok ban in the first place back when he was president in 2020. It was only when he was out of office and democrats agreed with the ban and it stopped being a partisan culture war issue that he flip-flopped to opposing it.

That's not so different from Biden signing it and then choosing not to enforce it.

Nobody has their hands clean on this one.

@freemo Biden said the same thing as Trump: that he wouldn't enforce it (for the one day of his administration it applied to). TikTok just dngaf what he said because he was on his way out.

Both parties, and their leaders, demanded this ban. Now both parties are acting like the dog that caught the car it was chasing...

@mekkaokereke The obvious answer would be centralization of services. With groups like MastoHost using shared resources for lots of servers, the economies of scale drops the overall per-server costs. If there's enough demand, that would even create competition to lower the price further.

@freemo Thanks! It's also responsive to the user's choice of dark mode in their browser, so the background becomes black for them.

Redid my website for potential new clients. Open to both criticism and referrals!

https://www.ingenthron.us

@freemo Personally, I don't think they "control" either party, other than a few useful-idiots like Tim Pool who take their money without even realizing it.

I do think they're involved in deep influence ops in the US, but my grasp of it is that it's largely geared more towards the masses than the electeds, riling us up and inflaming tensions and the like.

@freemo That kind of thinking strikes me as overly-conspiratorial and direly lacking in evidence. It's certainly possible, but I think Occam would take issue with it.

@freemo "when normalized" lmao.

I'm assuming you're normalizing against the donor country's GDP? I'm sure if you asked Ukraine if they'd prefer 2% of America's help or 90% of Ghana's, their answer would come immediately, because such normalization is meaningless in this circumstance.