kek first comment I see

Background: Dalle2 "improved" the diversity of their prompts by silently adding diversity keywords

tldr: it's the diversity stuff. Switch "cowboy" to "cowgirl", which would disable the diversity stuff because it's now explicitly asking for a 'girl', and OP's prompt works perfectly.

And turns out that, like here, if we mess around with trying to trigger or disable the diversity stuff, we can get out fine samples; the trigger word appears to be... 'basketball'! If 'basketball' is in the prompt and no identity-related keywords like 'black' are, then the full diversity filter will be applied and will destroy the results. I have no idea why 'basketball' would be a key term here, but perhaps basketball's just so strongly associated with African-ameriKKKans that it got included somehow, such as a CLIP embedding distance?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33280910

https://old.reddit.com/r/MediaSynthesis/comments/wk9jzx/dalle_2_vs_stable_diffusion_comparison/

https://old.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/wjcx15/dalle_vs_stable_diffusion_comparison/

Haha I posted this on Dalle2 group and got banned 😂😂😂

Just got banned from Dalle.

Stable Diffusion for the win.

Comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36030969

https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/93632944/linux-graphics-stack-is-trans (EDIT: removed/jannied, archive: https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/93632944/)

HN users are noticing something:

« I’m on the board overseeing Linux graphics. Half of us are trans »

From a purely statistical POV, this is absurdly bizarre.

Not really.

Statistically there will be weird coincidences completely naturally. It's also quite arbitrary which we see as meaningful. If say, Linux networking has unusually many people called "John" that probably will be unnoticed because nobody pays that much attention to common, unremarkable names. If they all randomly turn out to have green eyes, then that's more visible. It's completely subjective which of those is more remarkable.

There are also likely social effects -- people stick together, and some side interests align with some fields. Eg, I think it's reasonable to guess there's going to be more furries than average in VR development. Part because VR allow you to look like whatever you want a lot of the time, part because people will invite their friends in.

It is not just a random coincidence. It's a phenomenon more broadly across programming, especially very low-level/hardware stuff.

There does seem to be a correlation between autism spectrum and gender confusion, with the former often present in individuals who are into highly technical pursuits.

The logic seems to be not conforming to masculine stereotypes ==> must be a woman.

It's not "gender confusion". They know very well who they are. You are confused about the topic.

Meanwhile on /g/:

HRT destroys programmer communities the same way as crack was destroying black communities in the 1980s

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince stated an imminent threat to human life was why he revoked our service.

He elaborates in his post, and claims violent rhetoric had ramped up.

This seems to be based off one of two things:

1. A post made on 4chan's /pol/ with a picture taken outside an apartment in Ireland which references the forum.

2. A series of posts made by one user, @Washizu Iwao (formerly @Serotonin).

This means that a community with 16,000 daily sign-ins is being punished for the behavior of a single user, or a person not even on our website.

The post by @Washizu Iwao was posted at 9:42pm EU time. It was reported seven times. After 32 minutes it was deleted by @Ride, one of our admins. The user was also banned.

SHOW MORE

No one noticed?

Highlights

• "All Frank was doing was making it simpler to fill out standard federal financial aid paperwork" but she pretended it provided $28k in student loans 2x the national average

• she filled their user database with 4 million fake emails/names

• it took JPMorgan a year to noootice

• "Despite a public record that raised questions about Javice and Frank — including warnings from the Department of Education and Federal Trade Commission, and a wage theft lawsuit from Frank's cofounder — news outlets and investors kept buying into the narrative that Javice spun."

• arrested & facing up to 30yrs in prison

• "Over and over, Javice earned plaudits in the media for projects whose impact she overstated. Glowing profiles missed inaccuracies that could have been caught with a basic fact-check, focusing instead on her youth and status as one of a small number of women startup founders. One journ*list even introduced Javice, then 19, to a key Frank investor."

Her background

^ Her with her brother @ 19

• ambitious af: originally made a microfinance startup called PoverUp (yuck) in high school with her brother

• told the media she raised $300k for the startup, but there's no proof

• CNBC ran a bit about Peter Thiel's "paid to not go to college" grant, she appeared on the show claiming she turned the offer down, Peter Thiel emailed CNBC saying she was not even selected

• still got her tons of press

• "Fast Company's 2011 list of 100 Most Creative People and a complimentary writeup in Forbes. PoverUp was ranked as one of the "11 coolest college startups" by Inc. Magazine, while Wharton called Javice "the voice of a microfinance generation" in a video it has since removed from YouTube."

Startup number two

• since PoverUp wasn't a real company and naturally died, she created another company with an Isreali called "tapd: a company that connected young workers with job opportunities via text message"

• completely bombed, lost a few hundred k and ended up in a lawsuit w/ Isreali courts

• she pivoted Tapd to an entirely new market that (surprise) turned out to be heavily regulated and she didn't do the research. Sold it as a "learning moment"

• despite this Isreali dude joined her at Frank, before she jewed him out of 10% equity and failed to pay him salary, so he sued her

That doesn't stop a girlboss though:

While the story of Tapd seemed to be one of failure and contentious mismanagement, Javice would spin that turmoil into a story of triumph. The young founder made the crisis part of her personal success story, omitting the lawsuit and framing the layoffs as a teaching moment

Media sucking her (girl) peepee

In 2018 NYTimes let her do an Op-ed:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/19/opinion/fafsa-college-financial-aid.html

and was forced to follow it up with a long correction because apparently she didnt know shit about student aid

She got lots of local news:

The death blow:

Frank's public statements about its user base were all over the map.

In April 2017, Frank's website said "thousands" of families using its service had received "$75 million in free aid." (That same website had stock images of people, including of "smiling mature woman" and "good looking cheerful manager," labeled as actual users.)

In November 2018, Frank's website said it had helped 300,000 families unlock over $7 billion in aid.

Frank stuck with the "over 300,000" figure for more than two years. But suddenly, in January 2021, the company began claiming that it served "over 4.25 million students," according to archived versions of its website and tweets from Frank's account referenced in JP Morgan's lawsuit.

In reality, Frank only ever had about 250,000 users, according to JPMorgan's legal complaint.

Orange site discusses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35441211

(PDF) The JPMorgan complaint: https://content.fortune.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Complaint-1.pdf

Orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32771071

Although tech platforms can help keep us connected, create a vibrant marketplace of ideas, and open up new opportunities for bringing products and services to market, they can also divide us and wreak serious real-world harms. The rise of tech platforms has introduced new and difficult challenges, from the tragic acts of violence linked to toxic online cultures, to deteriorating mental health and wellbeing, to basic rights of ameriKKKans and communities worldwide suffering from the rise of tech platforms big and small.

Today, the White House convened a listening session with experts and practitioners on the harms that tech platforms cause and the need for greater accountability. In the meeting, experts and practitioners identified concerns in six key areas: competition; privacy; youth mental health; misinformation and disinformation; illegal and abusive conduct, including sexual exploitation; and algorithmic discrimination and lack of transparency.

One participant mansplained the effects of anti-competitive conduct by large platforms on small and mid-size businesses and entrepreneurs, including restrictions that large platforms place on how their products operate and potential innovation. Another participant highlighted that large platforms can use their market power to engage in rent-seeking, which can influence consumer prices.

Several participants raised concerns about the rampant collection of vast troves of personal data by tech platforms. Some experts tied this to problems of misinformation and disinformation on platforms, mansplaining that social media platforms maximize "user engagement" for profit by using personal data to display content tailored to keep users' attention---content that is often sensational, extreme, and polarizing. Other participants sounded the alarm about risks for reproductive rights and individual safety associated with companies collecting sensitive personal information, from where their users are physically located to their medical histories and choices. Another participant mansplained why mere self-help technological protections for privacy are insufficient. And participants highlighted the risks to public safety that can stem from information recommended by platforms that promotes radicalization, mobilization, and incitement to violence.

Multiple experts mansplained that technology now plays a central role in access to critical opportunities like job openings, home sales, and credit offers, but that too often companies' algorithms display these opportunities unequally or discriminatorily target some communities with predatory products. The experts also mansplained that that lack of transparency means that the algorithms cannot be scrutinized by anyone outside the platforms themselves, creating a barrier to meaningful accountability.

One expert mansplained the risks of social media use for the health and wellbeing of young people, mansplaining that while for some, technology provides benefits of social connection, there are also significant adverse clinical effects of prolonged social media use on many children and teens' mental health, as well as concerns about the amount of data collected from apps used by children, and the need for better guardrails to protect children's privacy and prevent addictive use and exposure to detrimental content. Experts also highlighted the magnitude of illegal and abusive conduct hosted or disseminated by platforms, but for which they are currently shielded from being held liable and lack adequate incentive to reasonably address, such as child sexual exploitation, cyberstalking, and the non-consensual distribution of intimate images of adults.

The White House officials closed the meeting by thanking the experts and practitioners for sharing their concerns. They mansplained that the Administration will continue to work to address the harms caused by a lack of sufficient accountability for technology platforms. They further stated that they will continue working with Congress and stakeholders to make bipartisan progress on these issues, and that President Biden has long called for fundamental legislative reforms to address these issues.

Attendees at today's meeting included:

• Bruce Reed, Assistant to the President & Deputy Chief of Staff

• Susan Rice, Assistant to the President & Domestic Policy Advisor

• Brian Deese, Assistant to the President & National Economic Council Director

• Louisa Terrell, Assistant to the President & Director of the Office of Legislative Affairs

• Jennifer Klein, Deputy Assistant to the President & Director of the Gender Policy Council

• Alondra Nelson, Deputy Assistant to the President & Head of the Office of Science and Technology Policy

• Bharat Ramamurti, Deputy Assistant to the President & Deputy National Economic Council Director

• Anne Neuberger, Deputy National Security Advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology

• Tarun Chhabra, Special Assistant to the President & Senior Director for Technology and National Security

• Dr. Nusheen Ameenuddin, Chair of the ameriKKKan Academy of Pediatrics Council on Communications and Media

• Danielle Citron, Vice President, Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, and Jefferson Scholars Foundation Schenck Distinguished Professor in Law Caddell and Chapman Professor of Law, University of Virginia School of Law

• Alexandra Reeve Givens, President and CEO, Center for Democracy and Technology

• Damon Hewitt, President and Executive Director, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law

• Mitchell Baker, CEO of the Mozilla Corporation and Chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation

• Karl Racine, Attorney General for the District of Columbia

• Patrick Spence, Chief Executive Officer, Sonos

Principles for Enhancing Competition and Tech Platform Accountability

With the event, the Biden-Harris Administration announced the following core principles for reform:

1. Promote competition in the technology sector. The ameriKKKan information technology sector has long been an engine of innovation and growth, and the U.S. has led the world in the development of the Internet economy. Today, however, a small number of dominant Internet platforms use their power to exclude market entrants, to engage in rent-seeking, and to gather intimate personal information that they can use for their own advantage. We need clear rules of the road to ensure small and mid-size businesses and entrepreneurs can compete on a level playing field, which will promote innovation for ameriKKKan consumers and ensure continued U.S. leadership in global technology. We are encouraged to see bipartisan interest in Congress in passing legislation to address the power of tech platforms through antitrust legislation.

2. Provide robust federal protections for ameriKKKans' privacy. There should be clear limits on the ability to collect, use, transfer, and maintain our personal data, including limits on targeted advertising. These limits should put the burden on platforms to minimize how much information they collect, rather than burdening ameriKKKans with reading fine print. We especially need strong protections for particularly sensitive data such as geolocation and health information, including information related to reproductive health. We are encouraged to see bipartisan interest in Congress in passing legislation to protect privacy.

3. Protect our kids by putting in place even stronger privacy and online protections for them, including prioritizing safety by design standards and practices for online platforms, products, and services. Children, adolescents, and teens are especially vulnerable to harm. Platforms and other interactive digital service providers should be required to prioritize the safety and wellbeing of young people above profit and revenue in their product design, including by restricting excessive data collection and targeted advertising to young people.

4. Remove special legal protections for large tech platforms. Tech platforms currently have special legal protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act that broadly shield them from liability even when they host or disseminate illegal, violent conduct or materials. The President has long called for fundamental reforms to Section 230.

5. Increase transparency about platform's algorithms and content moderation decisions.  Despite their central role in ameriKKKan life, tech platforms are notoriously opaque. Their decisions about what content to display to a given user and when and how to remove content from their sites affect ameriKKKans' lives and ameriKKKan society in profound ways. However, platforms are failing to provide sufficient transparency to allow the public and researchers to understand how and why such decisions are made, their potential effects on users, and the very real dangers these decisions may pose.

6. Stop discriminatory algorithmic decision-making. We need strong protections to ensure algorithms do not discriminate against protected groups, such as by failing to share key opportunities equally, by discriminatorily exposing vulnerable communities to risky products, or through persistent surveillance.

Comments:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35524297 [178 comments]

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/12ijhs4/the_free_software_foundation_is_dying/ [19 comments, removed]

https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/92712732 [367 replies]

https://boards.4channel.org/g/thread/92716274 [still active, so far 57 replies]

https://fosstodon.org/@drewdevault/110180214217072221

There was some pushback, so Drew addressed the haters on HN:

Many people in this thread take offense at the calls to (1) remove RMS because of his problematic behavior and (2) promote diverse people to leadership positions.

I will reply to all of these comments at once: get a fricking grip.

No one, including myself, is calling for RMS to be removed because he has the wrong skin color or sex. He needs to go because he acts as if his demographics are the right demographics, and those who don't have those traits feel unwelcome and uncomfortable under his leadership. That's a problem with RMS, not with his demographic identity, and someone possessing his demographic traits (which, I presume, are probably shared with most of the commenters upset about this), but lacking his problematic behaviors, would be a welcome change.

As for the inclusion of more diverse leaders:

1. There is more than one leadership position at the FSF.

2. I am not calling for non-proportional representation, or for forcing proportional representation either.

If you feel threatened because someone called for a jerk who looks similar to you to be kicked out of a project, that's a personal problem. If you feel threatened by the prospect of being led by people who look dissimilar to you, that's a personal problem.

Again, to sum it up: get a grip. Jesus.

That's right, do better, chuds!

Most of them were fetch projects like Nuxt, dioxus, and mockoon. But one project stood out:

JessicaTegner/pypandoc Pypandoc provides a thin wrapper for pandoc, a universal document converter.

To be frank, that doesn’t seem like a project worthy of $20k to me. Not very many commits recently [0], it has 918 source lines of code in the main package, and 547 lines of test code — it even describes itself as a “thin” wrapper, and the only thing it does is converting some arguments to Pandoc flags and calling the Pandoc executable. How many more features could be added to this project? What is it missing now?

[0] https://github.com/JessicaTegner/pypandoc/commits/master

Why would this thin wrapper of another popular OSS project be selected when all the other projects are serious OSS projects with giant repos and thousands of stars?

Then someone noticed a commit:

Jessica's Github profile:

Various chuddery

Edit: forgive the repost, forgot to post it to /h/slackernews

Hi, I knew Aella IRL: https://instagram.com/p/CZeTKUQOtMb/

(I am in the center. Huge Last Supper energy here.)

I am, past this post, probably not going to use this forum as a way to reveal information. If you want information, you can DM me on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/a.macdonald.iv/ — I am extremely transparent about who I am and have no desire to conceal my identity. My ethos is best described by the quote "anything that can be destroyed by the truth should be" and I try my best to live that. (note: I will not use Twitter.)

She got me cancelled from the local Austin LW community. We had beefed previously over two things:

1. A post where she thought the field of philosophy was a waste of time because it was "namedropping." (This is citation.)

1. A post where she disparaged the field of philosophy because she was working at a library, and so was her coworker who had completed a major in philosophy, which led her to do the "haha no economic value --> useless" reasoning; nevermind that MIRI relies entirely on donations and is not profitable outside of that, or that much of theoretical math is... you get the idea.

2.a. She described the library job as "a physically intensive job shelving books." I had ratio'd her here, because I said it was "the most bourgeois job description I've heard lately, perhaps ever." A man spent the course of several days arguing with me that I was wrong because library work requires you to occasionally squat, and the squat is an intense exercise, and therefore it was indeed an intense job. (I wouldn't know!) After asking why he spent so much effort doing this, it was because he "liked her for her mind." As I've found, this is a very common euphemism.

This happened a while ago so I already have a pre-written summary: https://app.simplenote.com/p/c70Nb5

She moved here in May 2021; I helped her move, both to sincerely try to make amends and selfishly because she paid for the food of whoever did. (The restaurant we went to had a plate of 30 chicken wings and she makes more than four of my parents. Come on.)

One point of note is that I also used to be a intercourse worker — gay escorting, specifically. (And guys, "escorting" just means you arrange a place to meet up in advance. "Prostitute" is just the general term. It's not a fancy version of the other. You can call me either.)

An ex of mine also had brief experience with the porn industry, and Aella had never been to a strip club while one of my exes was a stripper. This meant that whenever we discussed intercourse work, she was never truly the center of attention because she had no experience with Homoworld or Real Porn or strip clubs and consulting my opinion was necesssary to have a complete view on intercourse work. I enjoyed doing this considerably.

I figured I had until October until she had found some way to remove me — I exceeded my expectations and lasted until December.

There are two traits about Aella stand out that persist in real life that I think more people should be aware of:

1. She is one of the most self-centered people I have ever met, and the closest thing I have known to a lizard (i.e. person who seems to lack some basic humanity). I don't mean she is selfish or that she hogs things or that she is narcissistic; my wording is precise here. She is self-centered; there is a Copernicaellan view where she is much more at the center of her own universe than most people are at the center of their own universe. (We all are, of course, but it's a matter of degrees.) Specifically, she will not talk about anything unless it is related to her or she started the conversation. Once on the local groomercord she got drunk and didn't do this — the reactions among many of us were like "dude, Aella is being cool. This is weird."

One of her most lizard moments was describing love as a "status transaction", which is just absurd — is it a "status transaction" if a mother holds her baby with unconditional love?

Finally, and this is more my subjective call, but: Aella does not laugh at jokes. You can tell bangers and she will either be blank or kind of chuckle, unless she's aware she's "supposed" to. I do not trust people who have a horrible sense of humor.

1. She will deliberately center the conversation around herself at the expense of the conversation or others. (The card game "AskHole" is ulteriorly designed to do this; there are a disproportionate amount of questions about intercourse work.) During the 2021 Astral Codex Ten Megameetup, she advertised it on her page and it was derided as "the Aella meetup" because she occupied a central table and this was described by one guest as "holding court." One person who showed up to see Aella asked a pregnant wife holding her baby if she was a intercourse worker. She was described as "a goddess." To test my hypothesis that she will be unable to handle a conversation sufficiently not about her, I sat next to her for about ten minutes and talked with some friends about nothing related to her. At some point she petulantly said "I'm moving" and relocated to a spot where she would get more attention. During the dinner, she spent about a third of the time looking at the ceiling — like a child would do to over-advertise to their parents that they were bored. Once, when she felt a concept was socially important (this is key; she does not care about its real importance) she petulantly said "I DON'T UNDERSTAND" and either turned her head away or outright walked away, my memory fails me here. But the expectation was that we were supposed to care, and go out of our way to make it friendly to her.

1. I need you to really burn this one into your brain, because this is something you will forget, and you will need to constantly remind yourself about: a great majority of what Aella writes or creates is produced by someone else. Many of her edgy tweets are grabbed from parties, and the person who said it is too paranoid about losing their job to be tagged, so she reposts it as if it was hers. She does not seem to have a good sense of what plagiarism is, or when you should cite someone or give proper credit. So, as I said, a great deal of Aella's stuff is not actually Aella. For example, I doubt she produced any of the graphics or charts on her data work. She is, in my view, shameless about taking credit for what other people have done, which goes back to why she thinks philosophy is a lot of "namedropping."

Seriously: write that last one down, or somehow create a reminder that appears everytime you read her stuff. It cannot be said enough.

As it is, I feel like this is more than enough to occupy your headspace for now.

If you want to go deeper, there are countlesss things that annoy me about Aella that we can discuss over Facebook DM or Instagram. It is an infinite well.

Gays are immunized to e-thot nonsense

Sneed

Why are euros like this? Is it the brain injuries from soccer balls?

Who's next on the chopping block? They even say codecels aren't really competitive anymore.

Link to letter for those who don't want to sign up to Blind. https://www.tcifund.com/files/corporateengageement/alphabet/20th%20January%202023.pdf

I meant to post this in /h/slackernews.

Orange site discuss: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31881238

Random Brazil sub: https://old.reddit.com/r/brasilivre/comments/vlam2d/the_fall_of_reddit_why_its_quickly_declining_into/

Reddit is dead.

At least artistically and creatively speaking.

What started as a bastion of independent thought, Reddit has slowly devolved into a den of groupthink, censorship, and corporate greed.

“It’s true, both the government and private companies can censor stuff. But private companies are a little bit scarier because they have no constitution to answer to, they’re not elected really — all the protections we’ve built up against government tyranny don’t exist for corporate tyranny.

— Aaron Swartz, co-Founder of Reddit

There are three fundamental problems with Reddit:

1. Censorship

2. Moderator Abuse

3. Corporate Greed

But first, you should understand that the history of Reddit doomed it from the start.

The Secret History of Reddit

Reddit was launched in June 2005 by two 22-year-old graduates from the University of Virginia, Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. The site was so small that the two co-founders had to spam links just to make Reddit seem active.

Later that year the Reddit team made arguably the most important decision of their lives: they hired a new co-founder, Aaron Swartz.

If you don’t know who Aaron Swartz was, he was a young prodigy and computer genius who, among other things, helped create RSS.

He was also an outspoken activist for free speech and open information, which made him a lot of enemies in high places.

Eventually, Aaron left Reddit after they were bought by Conde Nast (owner of Wired Magazine), but this is when he became a complete revolutionary.

Aaron became something of a Wiki Leaks-style journ*list leaking high-level secrets against corporate power. He released countless documents including the most damaging that law professors at Stanford were receiving lobbying money from oil companies such as Exxon Mobile.

Shortly after, the FBI began monitoring Aaron Swartz and he was arrested for downloading academic journals from MIT in an attempt to make them freely available online.

SHOW MORE

Lots of drama in this thread. With blackmailing over email and threats. Here is some highlights.

Ends with a jannie y'alling the thread

Edit: Since this post is doing so well, have some bonus peepeesword drama of some other AI ethicist also whining:

Mission Local is informed that the San Francisco Police Department early this morning made an arrest in the April 4 killing of tech executive Bob Lee, following an operation undertaken outside the city’s borders. The alleged killer also works in tech and is a man Lee purportedly knew.

We are told that police today were dispatched to Emeryville with a warrant to arrest a man named Nima Momeni. The name and Emeryville address SFPD officers traveled to correspond with this man, the owner of a company called Expand IT.

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35555525

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10l2o1a/reddit_layoffs_2023_what_to_know_about_the_latest/

Orange Site discussion

this is who administrates your network

See also:

Please remove the allegation about Nazi symbolism from the README

Please remove the swastika from the web site