

The Monarch Formerly Known as Prince
I feel bad for writing that, like I just insulted Prince simply by association.
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Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango!


The Monarch Formerly Known as Prince
I feel bad for writing that, like I just insulted Prince simply by association.


Part of a properly functioning LLM is absolutely it understanding implicit instructions. That’s a huge aspect of data annotation work in helping LLMs become better tools, is grading them on either understanding or lack of understanding of implicit instructions. I would say more than half of the work I have done in that arena has focused on training them to more clearly understand implicit instructions.
So sure, if you explain it like the LLM is a five year old human, you’ll get a better response, but the whole point is if we’re dumping so much money, resources, destroying the environment, and consumer electronics market for these tools, you shouldn’t have to explain it like it’s five.
Seriously what is the point of trashing the planet for this shit if you have to talk to it like it’s the most oblivious person alive and practically hold it’s hand for it to understand implicit concepts?


I mean, I’ve been saying this since LLMs were released.
We finally built a computer that is as unreliable and irrational as humans… which shouldn’t be considered a good thing.
I’m under no illusion that LLMs are “thinking” in the same way that humans do, but god damn if they aren’t almost exactly as erratic and irrational as the hairless apes whose thoughts they’re trained on.


That’s because they want to be the ones doing the surveilling. There’s loads of disgusting threads you can find online about them discussing ways to disable or hide that their devices are recording so they can surreptitiously record others while claiming they’re not. Most often filming vulnerable women.


“You’d have anxiety too if you knew that entire government organizations were dedicated to watching your every move while everyone told you that you were crazy.”


That’s a feature, not a bug.
The whole point of warrantless mass surveillance where you collect a person’s entire life history from birth to death is to be able to go back through that history at any point they become an inconvenient person, whether because they are protesting or are a whistleblower or anything else that endangers the existing power structures. They can and will use your history to fabricate a “reasonable” narrative to turn you into whatever type of criminal they claim you are.
This is exactly why they’re pushing the “antifa is an organized terrorist organization” so hard.


Who’d have thought that warrant-less mass surveillance that treats every citizen like a potential criminal would eventually hit a tipping point where people began to fight back against it?


You know it’s a bad idea because it’s literally what Mark Zuckerberg suggested in court the other day.
How will they know no one else is using the device? Kids use their parents devices and tablets all the time.
It’s a backdoor to a national digital ID scheme.


Of course they aren’t, they will happily block information that they dislike because it’s embarrassing and incriminating to them. Skepticism should cut both ways, skeptical of those who use Russian connection to delegitimize valuable tools and the people associated with them, and skepticism of why Russia allows those things to persist providing they impact Western countries but not Russia.
Until the Western copyright situation is amended to something reasonable, we have to be skeptical in all aspects of this situation. I’d rather copyright was a reasonable length with reasonable policies so organizations didn’t have to resort to connections with Russia. In the meantime we have to work with the situation we have.


Original post title was:
Until further notice: archive.today/archive.is/archive.ph/… is banned from this community for apparently being a Russian DDOS tool
And linked to the /c/ukraine community which posted it.
Also, from the Ars story:
Patokallio wasn’t able to determine who runs Archive.today but mentioned apparent aliases such as “Denis Petrov” and “Masha Rabinovich,” and described evidence that the site is operated by someone from Russia.
The reason it matters:
It makes people suspect of anything hosted in Russia, which is frustrating because there’s a lot of valuable shit hosted there by people who are not necessarily from there, such as Alexandra Elbakyan founder of Sci-Hub, who has had many accusations tossed her way due to her websites association with Russia:
In December 2019, The Washington Post reported that Elbakyan was under investigation by the US Justice Department for suspected ties to Russia’s military intelligence arm, the GRU, to steal U.S. military secrets from defense contractors. Elbakyan has denied this, saying that Sci-Hub “is not in any way directly affiliated with Russian or some other country’s intelligence,” but noting that “of course, there could be some indirect help. The same as with donations, anyone can send them; they are completely anonymous, so I do not know who exactly is donating to Sci-Hub. There could be some help that I’m simply unaware of. I can only add that I write all of Sci-Hub code and design myself and I’m doing the server’s configuration.”
We cannot take for granted that one of the reasons we have access to a large amount of archived information on the internet is often because of unsavory countries who refuse to play by the US governments copyright rules.
We also cannot take for granted how connections with those countries are used to delegitimize people providing valuable services. Bypass Paywalls Clean in particular has had a litany of people assume it’s untrustworthy because of its current hosting situation because they don’t know the history of it and how it’s been kicked off of every other public repository that was stateside.
The archive.today person fucked things up and gave people more ammunition to claim that anything and everything associated with Russian internet is untrustworthy.


No problem, I’ve been using Pi-Hole for years but have only recently started exploring options with the Groups feature. In fact I spent a few minutes messing around with it before I wrote my original reply to make sure I was going to explain it right. Don’t be afraid to hit me up with questions, I’d be happy to try to help.


There’s also a version for Chrome if you swing that way.


I mentioned this the day he did the press conference to announce the 10% worldwide tariffs.
The tariffs were originally sold under the guise of managing fentanyl trafficking by forcing new trade agreements to be crafted piecemeal with various nations instead of the large multinational agreements of yesteryear.
They were sold on Trump being such an incredible dealmaker and his constant refrain that countries were coming to him and begging him to make deals.
He literally blew up every deal that was in the works not because anyone else in the world did anything wrong, but because he is mad at his own Supreme Court rightfully telling him to pound sand. He is punishing every idiot who took a chance to work with him, not because they didn’t follow through on their agreements but because he is the biggest baby bitch on the fucking planet who cannot handle being told “no” whether it’s a whole country, a court, or a thirteen year old girl.
Master dealmaker my fucking ass. Any country that was in the process of making a deal with him already had a lot of evidence he would blow up his own deals at his convenience, but this should be the final nail in the coffin of anyone even trying to work with the US and expecting the US to be acting in good faith.


As someone who uses Bypass Paywalls Clean, this is so frustrating.
Bypass Paywalls Clean was chased off of the Firefox Add-Ons site, chased off of Gitlab, and chased off of Github via DMCA takedown notices for copyright infringement. It is now hosted on the Russian Gitflic.ru.
We all know Russia sucks in a litany of ways, but one way it doesn’t suck is that it is one of the few countries left that has really thrown all caution to the wind and absolutely said “fuck it” in terms of respecting the international Big Copyright norms as promoted by and deeply influenced by the USA copyright cabal (RIAA/MPAA).
We have spent the better part of two decades dealing with the DMCA being used as an outright weapon to silence information that corporations and government find inconvenient mostly because that information is wildly incriminating for them. It works especially strongly because a large amount of the world’s internet has been consolidated to the US and its vast hosting structures like AWS and Cloudflare, putting enormous amounts of the internet under the direct influence of US laws like the DMCA.
Websites like Anna’s Archive, Libgen, and Sci-Hub live because they use hosting in countries that allow them to bypass these kind of restrictions. Russia is one of the most common countries for them to host the data out of due to the lack of enforcement of copyright laws, although it is obviously not the only country that these sites use.
Until we are able to alter international copyright protections to be reasonable instead of their current over-zealously and aggressively abusive nature, we will all suffer having to risk hosting of such sites in countries that are otherwise very unsavory to be associating with.
We live in the kind of world early piracy pioneers such as the original creators of The Pirate Bay were trying to fight from becoming a reality. The American copyright cabal fought tooth and nail to change Sweden’s interpretations of copyright law so they could send these men to prison.


Yeah, someone being shitty to you doesn’t mean go you full-fledged shitty in return, it kind of proves your lack of trustworthiness to begin with. It’s like Nazis being like “leftists were mean to me by explaining how my politics made me a Nazi, so I’m gonna show them by Nazi-ing even harder! They forced me to be like this!” It kind of betrays the argument that the reason you got that way was because leftists were mean to you.


If you’re allowing full-client-logs on Pi-Hole, anything that passes through it will be seen in your Pi-Hole logs in the same way.


The best I could come up with is a separate instance of Pihole that any device my kids use is linked to.
It’s a little clunky, but you can do this with one Pi-Hole instance by using the Groups feature. In the “Groups” tab make a group for your default Pi-Hole settings (or just use the already included Default group), and then make a separate group for the additional blocked domains for your children’s devices (for purposes here we’ll refer to this group as “Child”). In your Lists tab, choose which Group each list should be applied to (or choose the group it should be applied to while adding the entry). In your Clients tab use the drop down menu to choose and assign devices to Groups, put all your devices in the Default group and put all your children’s devices in both the Default Group and the Child Group. This way your devices will have the default blocklists and your children’s will have the default plus the additional blocklists aimed to protect them specifically.


Absolutely agreed, but you’re still going to need a government authority for things like UBI, free housing, and deciding at what age it is reasonable for a child to be emancipated from their parents and live on their own. Obviously a four year old probably isn’t going to be capable of fully caring for themselves, even if they deserve the autonomy from their abusive parents. If I recall correctly, current emancipation laws are roughly around 13 years old, which is when a child is starting to be able to competently care for themselves. However, that still leaves over a decade of potential abusive parenting where someone needs to be raising the child whether it’s a good parent, or a foster parent, or a state institution. More importantly, that decade is the most important period for a child’s development, especially in terms of mental health. So whether we like it or not, there still needs to be some checks on parents just doing whatever the fuck they want to their children during that period.


or we can attempt to use what little political capital we have to make them realise their errors.
Exactly. That was essentially my point regarding those who supported the PATRIOT Act and the creation of the DHS which both have been widely abused since their inception (although thankfully the PATRIOT Act was finally sunseted). That it’s important to help the politicians who think they’re helping but are actually creating a more dangerous environment understand why what they’re proposing is dangerous rather than to cynically reject all government as bad and to give up entirely. Thank you for stating it more clearly than I did.
Aged like milk.
I vote for the “die trying” bit.