LOL, well… Sh*t, you beat me too it, I was just working on that, err, well sorta. My idea was an extension to mark your primary instance, and then allow you to link back, no matter where or how you wind up on Lemmy. I even called mine Lemmy Instance Linker. xD

My prime example was getting tossed over to the lemmyrs.org instance from r/Rust, and not being able to easily follow it back from there, since I hadn’t accessed it from pawb.social. So perhaps our extensions won’t be redundant? Or maybe we should combine our efforts into one extension? x3

Regardless, nice work!

OpenSuse Tumbleweed really is amazing. If I ever get tired of Pop, Tumbleweed is absolutely what I would consider as an alternative.

Thing is, this isn’t really how AI training works and it can be easily done on the outputs of other AI. That’s actually what Standford used to train their (comparably) small LLM that was very competent, despite its size. It was trained on the outputs of GPT (iirc) and held it’s own much better than other models in a similar category, which is also what opened up the doors to smaller, more specialized models being useful, rather than giant ones like GPT.

Now, image generation via diffusion might be more troublesome, but that’s fairly easily mitigated through several means, including a human or automated discriminator, which basically becomes a pseudo form of a GAN. There’s also other processes that exist for this that aren’t as affected (from what I know at least), such as GANs. But given most image AI’s are trained on stuff like LAION, AI images being uploaded online will have no effect on that, not for quite a while at least, if ever.

It’s less so purely capitalism as it is corporatism. Especially so with Altman running around demanding they, and they alone, be given the ability to make AI’s. Emad and Stability AI prove you absolutely don’t need that model whatsoever. Further still, the potential commercial projects born out of what Stability released are… Many.

What can absolutely not be allowed is for OpenAI, or Google, to be given the sole right to create AI’s, enforced by law. That’s a scary world I 100% do not want to live in…

I must say, I do have to agree that care must be taken with defederating. While I certainly understand doing so from instances which are highly toxic, or those that are actively engaging in spamming. Banning very large instances, like SIJW, could start to cause a lot of issues as more communities move over from Reddit. Here’s a list I found on Reddit of some communities that have established themselves (I don’t know of it’s in an official manner or not, but not sure it 100% matters in this case) on Lemmy apparently. Many are on lemmy.ml, but others are on different instances too, such as lemmy.world. That’s definitely going to be a problem soon if we defederated from omw of those.

I support defederating from actively troublesome instances, but only in a reactive way. Proactively defederating could lead to more issues than it solves. Unless we actively had issues from SIJW, I don’t see a reason to defederate from them? (It would help of we could just block certain communities from instances, instead of having to defederate entirely)

Yes, it’s no longer compute power that is the limiting factor. OpenAI, Google, and other large corps can afford it straight out, and even smaller entities like StabilityAI can manage it by renting GPU’s. Heck, I saw an offer a few days back to rent H100’s for just a few bucks an hour. Those costs do add up, but that’s hardly cost prohibitive either.

Training data, both in quantity and quality, is now the defining feature that determines the “make or break” status for an LLM, and that’s not just a playing field for the largest corps. Even a GPT3/3.5 clone isn’t out of reach for a group like Stability, and smaller, more niche use models are capable of being trained on a fraction of the data needed for GPT3/3.5. There’s already attempts to have Co-Pilot style models run locally on machines which don’t need massive specs. Same goes for image generation diffusion models, as well as GANs again too. DALL-E and DALL-E 2 seemed incredible… Until Stable Diffusion launched and blew it out of the water. And MidJourney is by far the current king of that, blowing both DALL-E 2 and Stable Diffusion away. Adobe also has their’s coming soon (or already out?) for Photoshop, that they claim isn’t trained on copyrighted imagery, which if true means they have really pushed the bounds of what’s possible, given the early results I’ve seen from it.

So yes, training data will be the king maker for AI/ML models going forward. Much like you said, it fits with the trend of Big Data that’s been going on for roughly a decade or so now. That was born out of the desire to build custom advertising and analytic profiles, but it’s grown to power so much more than that now. Reddit is definitely a gold mine for such data.

Yeah, there definitely needs to be finer controls over moderation tools. Especially a per-community blocking. That would solve many issues from the larger instances, like Lemmy.ml, without cutting off the whole thing. The issue with gatekeeping new users is well… Look at me. I’m not even a week old. I’d prefer not to be locked out from elsewhere just because “I’m too young/on probation.” No one is gonna like that very much. Reputation score is an interesting idea, but it’s just too easy to abuse unfortunately. I like the voting mechanics to help show what is and is not popular, but I do start to grow wary when it comes to actually hiding or filtering content. That’s another one of those things that’s just too easy to game or abuse, at the expense of others seeing the content. It breeds echo chambers too easily.

I do support giving individual users the ability to choose what to see and not see from the wider fediverse. That actually is something I’d consider the best solution overall, and perhaps something that should already exist. But yes, these are absolutely the early days indeed, and things are moving rather rapidly due to Reddit’s rather sudden downfall.

Fantastic! Glad to see the Pop community move to the Fediverse/Lemmy!

It was Infinity for me… Still holding out hope it’ll be adapted to work with Lemmy.

I personally have found SoftMaker’s TextMaker to be best word processor, with a backup/fallback being Libre Office. It’s got a great UI, good features, and overall is just a good experience. Honestly, the whole office suite is quite good. I definitely like it better than WPS. It’s also nice that you can just purchase a one-time license and have support for 3 years, for a fairly reasonable price, tbh. Yearly subscriptions are also available if you prefer that route.

There is a free (as in beer) version, called FreeOffice you can try. It’s what convinced me the full version was worth it. My backup is LibreOffice, and while some years ago the difference was stark, LibreOffice has come a long way in terms of support and feature set. So it’s definitely come a long way.

I would advise you to consider switching to LibreOffice from Open Office, if nothing else though. Open Office has not received a major update release in close to a decade now, and LibreOffice is truly the successor to it, as it’s actually forked from it.