https://youtu.be/V5u9JSnAAU4 Relevant Tom Scott

Not entirely true. You don’t need your own personal data centre, you can use GPU cloud instances for a lot of that stuff. It’s expensive but not so expensive that it would be impossible without being a huge tech company (only 1000s of dollars, not billions). This can be done by anyone with a credit card and some cash to burn. Also, you don’t need to train a model from scratch, you can build on existing models that others have published to cut down on training.

However, to impersonate someone’s voice you don’t need any of that. You only need about 5-10 seconds of audio for a zero-shot impersonation with a pre-trained model. A minute or so for few-shot. This runs on consumer hardware and in some cases even in real time.

Even to build your own model from scratch for high quality voice audio, there doesn’t need to be a huge amount of initial training data. Something like xtts was trained with about 10-15K hours of English audio which is actually pretty easy to come by in the public domain. There are a lot of open and public research datasets specifically for this kind of thing, no copyright infringements necessary. If a big tech company wants more audio data than what’s publically available, they just pay people to record audio, no need to steal it or risk copyright claims and breaking surveillance laws, they have a budget to exploit people to record whatever they want.

This tech wasn’t invented by some evil giant tech company stealing everybody’s data, it was mostly geeky computer scientists presenting things at computer speech synthesis conferences. That’s not to say there aren’t a bunch of huge evil tech companies profiting from this or contributing to this kind of tech, but in the context of audio deepfakes being accessible to scammers, it’s not on them and I don’t think that some kind of extra copyright regulation on data centres would do anything about it.

The current industry leader in this space in terms of companies trying to monetize speech synthesis is elevenlabs which is a private start-up with only a few dozen employees.

The current tech is not perfect but definitely good enough to fool someone who isn’t thinking too hard over a noisy phone call and a scammer doesn’t need server time or access to a data centre to do it.

One thing you gotta remember when dealing with that kind of situation is that Claude and Chat etc. are often misaligned with what your goals are.

They aren’t really chat bots, they’re just pretending to be. LLMs are fundamentally completion engines. So it’s not really a chat with an ai that can help solve your problem, instead, the LLM is given the equivalent of “here is a chat log between a helpful ai assistant and a user. What do you think the assistant would say next?”

That means that context is everything and if you tell the ai that it’s wrong, it might correct itself the first couple of times but, after a few mistakes, the most likely response will be another wrong answer that needs another correction. Not because the ai doesn’t know the correct answer or how to write good code, but because it’s completing a chat log between a user and a foolish ai that makes mistakes.

It’s easy to get into a degenerate state where the code gets progressively dumber as the conversation goes on. The best solution is to rewrite the assistant’s answers directly but chat doesn’t let you do that for safety reasons. It’s too easy to jailbreak if you can control the full context.

The next best thing is to kill the context and ask about the same thing again in a fresh one. When the ai gets it right, praise it and tell it that it’s an excellent professional programmer that is doing a great job. It’ll then be more likely to give correct answers because now it’s completing a conversation with a pro.

There’s a kind of weird art to prompt engineering because open ai and the like have sunk billions of dollars into trying to make them act as much like a “helpful ai assistant” as they can. So sometimes you have to sorta lean into that to get the best results.

It’s really easy to get tricked into treating like a normal conversation with a person when it’s actually really… not normal.

It’s a bit late for that. This particular nuclear reactor is open source, free to download and runs on consumer hardware. Can’t really unfry that egg and the quality is getting better all the time. Identity fraud is already illegal in most places so not sure exactly what regulation would be appropriate here.

“No worries!” means “Yes, that’s fine, there is nothing to worry about.”

He thought it meant “No! You should worry about that!”

This is a really interesting cultural one that always kinda surprises me.

Where I am, cooking has always been a very masculine thing. Cutting up meat with sharp knives, setting things on fire, etc. The chef industry here is very male dominated and men cook together as a social thing when hanging out. In most families I encounter, the dad does most of the cooking with the exception of maybe baking? It’s weird to hear that it would ever be thought of as insufficiently masculine.

In fact I think it would be seen as maybe a bit embarrassing/weak if you were a man who couldn’t cook.

Friendship drive charging…

Yep, and even when talking about living things it’s not a clear distinction.

In biology, poison is a substance that causes harm when an organism is exposed to it. Venom is a poison that enters the body through a sting or bite. In a bunch of medical fields though, poisons only apply to toxins that are ingested or absorbed through the skin and that definition sometimes carries across to zoology.

Venomous creatures are poisonous by most definitions because venom is a poison. But if the distinction is useful in a medical or zoological context then they’re not.

tldr: The pedantry of eg. correcting someone who says a snake is poisonous is totally pointless and mostly wrong.

Hmmm…

That looks pretty paywally to me. That said, I’m all for people supporting independent media.

I don’t think that’s how it works? It’s the client application that has the key for the end to end encryption, not the server. I don’t think you need to trust the matrix server you use? I could be wrong, I don’t know matrix particularly well.

It does sound very strange. What kind of anti-China content would ever help a student’s application process? Most of the application documents are about things like English language competency, visa requirements and prior qualifications, not political opinions.

The most popular brand of matches in Denmark is called Tordenskjold. In the late 1800s, Sweden had a large export production of matches, so a Danish manufacturer put Tordenskiold’s portrait on his matchbox in 1882, in the hope he could once more strike at the Swedish (Danish: give de svenske stryg).[13] The Tordenskjold brand was bought by a Swedish company in 1972.[14]

Ouch.

Haha, the internet did not fit on a 1.44mb floppy in 1998. Curious to know what was on this‽

1998 was well into the CD-ROM era and the internet was full of .mp3s and .isos by then.

Looks more /usr/bucket/cat

I don’t think that’s universally true. Most parts of Australia I’ve been to have the same nuance of “females” often being used by assholes in a demeaning way and seen as somewhat dehumanising in some contexts (but not all).

They ruined Linux!

Best is very subjective.

.world is a good general purpose instance for just about anything. I think it has the biggest population at the moment, so communities there are likely to get at least some engagement.

For “general discussion” it doesn’t really matter. The instances are federated so you’ll likely get general discussion in comments from lots of people from lots of instances anyway, wherever your community is based.

Some people get almost nationalistic about their chosen instances or have grudges against people from certain other instances. There’s sometimes inter-instance politics with some servers defederating with others or threatening to for various reasons. It’s kinda fun to watch in a popcorn drama kind of way. For the most part, the instance doesn’t matter.

That’s pretty cool!

Although that’s probably what op is actually asking for, I don’t think it’s a modem. It’s a router with an access point.

It does have SFP for a fibre connection and pcie and USB for you to potentially add a modem or whatever else you want.

I’m guessing OP is just looking for a wifi router? Otherwise we’d need to know what kind of modem they’re looking for, like Cellular? VDSL? HFC? Satellite? It depends on the internet connection. Different parts of the world need very different kit.

It’s a hard K sound and the i and a are “uh” (ə) sounds. Like “Ark uh pel uh go” (at least in my accent).

Yep, 100%. It’s probably safe to call it like it is and he doesn’t have a great track record with lawsuits at the moment. That said, they might still just not want to take the risk if their research is showing that painting him as a fool who you wouldn’t want in the job is more effective with people who might change their minds.