this post was submitted on 01 Oct 2024
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[–] [email protected] 71 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It's just basic economics. The amount of power and influence you can generate with a disinformation troll farm dramatically outweighs the cost. It's a high impact, low cost form of geopolitical influence. And it works incredibly well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

It's like saying that bullets and knives being more convenient than bricks for killing people are basic economics.

Doesn't explain why those brownshirt types have guns and knives and kill people on the streets, while you don't have those, and the police doesn't shoot them, and more than that, they'd arrest you were you to do something to brownshirts.

What I wanted to take from this bad analogy is that the systems are designed for troll farms to work, and not vice versa. Social media are an instrument to impose governments' will upon population. There are things almost all governments converge on, so the upsides of such existing outweigh the downsides.

Our world is dangerous.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Yeah…. That shit is going on right here on lemmy. Some of them have even allowed to be come so popular, we know them by name.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Ozma, yogthos, tokenboomer, alcoholicorn... am I forgetting anyone?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Is .ee one of the ones with bad rep? I picked it randomly.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

It's not as bad as ml who actively filter content they don't like.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Starts with “L,” ends with “bann.”

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Knew I was letting someone out. How non-inclusive of me lol

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

UniversalMonk potentially

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I think Lemmy is so tiny that those named below truly are just utter idiots doing that work for free.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

I don't rule it out. The prior era of "reddit alternatives" in the Voat era was quickly overrun too even though they were very small. The key to the internet has always been first mover advantage. If they have enough power to manipulate the top sites, it would take very little to hedge bets on budding platforms. They risk losing their advantage if a replacement platform establishes itself without them. That's pretty much the whole history of modern tech. To actively seek and snuff out your competitors.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Someone always has to be king shit of whatever hill they're on.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago (1 children)

My new rule of social media: Unless I know and trust the person or the organization making a post, I assume it's worthless unless I double check it against a person or organization I trust. Opinions are also included in this rule.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Hello fellow Western capitalist nation citizen, it is I, a relatable friend colleague of David! David will vouch for me, what a capital guy!

So, me and the boys (David's idea, you know what he's like) thought it might be pretty radical to scooby over to our local air force base and take some cool photos of us doing kick flips with their buildings and infrastructure in the background.

We think it would look totally tubular and really show those capitalist pig dogs (who we outwardly claim to love otherwise the secret police present in every Western nation will disappear us and our families, something we deny, but other nations with better intelligence services who don't lie to the great people of their glorious nation educate their populace about) what we think of their money war machine.

Oh! And then we can up post the photographs immediately to TikTok for the klout points!

What do you say, are you in, Breve? David said you'd be in.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Okay so now that everyone is here, the above comment is precisely what to look for when checking for signs of stroke.

On to .ml for the rest of our addled brains tour. Stay with you buddy and the group!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

This is such a David thing to say, ho ho, you japester!

[–] darkevilmac 25 points 1 week ago (1 children)

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'm Soviet Russia, don't fix broke you!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

And continues to do so. You've grown since 2013

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

The imperial core is so fragile and indoctrinated that troll farms are an existential threat.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 week ago

They NEED shit like that to exist. Bullshit needs more bullshit to survive. This is why despite murdering countless people and endless campaigns funded by billions of dollars there are still leftist movements that won't die.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (2 children)

I'd love to debate politics with you but first tell me how many r's are in the word strawberry. (AI models are starting to get that answer correct now though)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I tried this with Gemini. Regardless of the number of rs in a word (zero to 3), it said two.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

So ask it about a made up or misspelled word - "how many r's in the word strauburrry" or ask it something with no answer like "what word did I just type?". Anything other than, "you haven't typed anything yet" is wrong.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

But it's a phrase you typed, the very one that contains the question, unless you ask by voice or in a picture

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

Its 3 right? Am i real? Why can't ai guess that one?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Over simplification but partly it has to do with how LLMs split language into tokens and some of those tokens are multi-letter. To us when we look for R's we split like S - T - R - A - W - B - E - R - R - Y where each character is a token, but LLMs split it something more like STR - AW - BERRY which makes predicting the correct answer difficult without a lot of training on the specific problem. If you asked it to count how many times STR shows up in "strawberrystrawberrystrawberry" it would have a better chance.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 week ago

Thanks, you explained it well enough this layman kinda gets it!

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Llms look for patterns in their training data. So like if you asked 2+2= it would look its training and finds high likelihood the text that follows 2+2= is 4. Its not calculating, its finding the most likely completion of the pattern based on what data it has.

So its not deconstructing the word strawberry into letters and running a count... it tries to finish the pattern and fails at simple logic tasks that arent baked into the training data.

But a new model chatgpt-o1 checks against itself in ways i dont fully understand and scores like 85% on international mathematic standardized test now so they are making great improvements there. (Compared to a score of like 14% from the model that cant count the r's in strawberry)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

People complain about Russian troll factories, but hey, they are helping develop a reddit alternative so they can't be all that bad.