When people say Local AI, they mean things like the Free / Open Source Ollama (https://github.com/ollama/ollama/), which you can read the source code for and check it doesn’t have anything to phone home, and you can completely control when and if you upgrade it. If you don’t like something in the code base, you can also fork it and start your own version. The actual models (e.g. Mistral is a popular one) used with Ollama are commonly represented in GGML format, which doesn’t even carry executable code - only massive multi-dimensional arrays of numbers (tensors) that represent the parameters of the LLM.

Now not trusting that the output is correct is reasonable. But in terms of trusting the software not to spy on you when it is FOSS, it would be no different to whether you trust other FOSS software not to spy on you (e.g. the Linux kernel, etc…). Now that is a risk to an extent if there is an xz style attack on a code base, but I don’t think the risks are materially different for ‘AI’ compared to any other software.

They don’t have any leverage, because the people calling the shots in Israel (and to be clear, that is the likes of Ben-Gvir and Smotrich, who want effectively no Arabs river to sea, and hence Netanyahu, who I think would do just about any atrocity no matter how abhorrent just to stay in power and out of jail) value the pretext to invade far more than they value the lives of the hostages.

So the hostages do not actually give Hamas any leverage over Israel - hence why Israel is not willing to agree to anything. Hamas should not have taken civilians hostage or targeted civilians in the first place, and they should release them. That is still an ongoing war crime, even if it is overshadowed by bigger ones being perpetrated by the Israeli side.

Hamas never had a chance of winning on military might.

The best chance for a good outcome for the Palestinian people is through raising awareness of the plight of the Palestinians, resulting in international pressure. The pressure against Israel arising now is because of the severity of Israel’s war crimes, while Hamas’ war crimes are one of the key talking points used to justify not taking action. Hamas could help Palestine win the information space war by taking the high road; winning a military war is futile for them.

While it is not fair to punish Palestinian civilians for the war crimes of Hamas just because the interests of Palestinian civilians are aligned to Hamas’ goals, there are many people who don’t see it that way. Palestinian statehood (or a non-apartheid one-state solution) would now get far more international support if the Palestinian militants shifted to peaceful resistance.

Blockchain is great for when you need global consensus on the ordering of events (e.g. Alice gave all her 5 ETH to Bob first, so a later transaction to give 5 ETH to Charlie is invalid). It is an unnecessarily expensive solution just for archival, since it necessitates storing the data on every node forever.

Ethereum charges ‘gas’ fees per transaction which helps ensure it doesn’t collapse under the weight of excess usage. Blocks have transaction limits, and transactions have size limits. It is currently working out at about US$7,500 per MB of block data (which is stored forever, and replicated to every node in the network). The Internet Archive have apparently ~50 PB of data, which would cost US$371 trillion to put onto Ethereum (in practice, attempting this would push up the price of ETH further, and if they succeeded, most nodes would not be able to keep up with the network). Really, this is just telling us that blockchain is not appropriate for that use case, and the designers of real world blockchains have created mechanisms to make it financially unviable to attempt at that scale, because it would effectively destroy the ability to operate nodes.

The only real reason to use an existing blockchain anyway would be on the theory that you could argue it is too big to fail due to legitimate business use cases, and too hard to remove censorship resistant data. However, if it became used in the majority for censorship resistant data sharing, and transactions were the minority, I doubt that this would stop authorities going after node operators and so on.

The real problems that an archival project faces are:

• The cost of storing and retrieving large amounts of data. That could be decentralised using a solution where not all data is stored on a chain - for example, IPFS.
• The problem of curating data and deciding what is worth archiving, and what is a true-to-source archive vs fake copy. This probably requires either a centralised trusted party, or maybe a voting system.
• The problem of censorship. Anonymity and opaqueness about what is on a particular node can help - but they might in some cases undermine the other goals of archival.

This is absolutely because they pulled the emergency library stunt, and they were loud as hell about it. They literally broke the law and shouted about it.

I think that you are right as to why the publishers picked them specifically to go after in the first place. I don’t think they should have done the “emergency library”.

That said, the publishers arguments show they have an anti-library agenda that goes beyond just the emergency library.

Libraries are allowed to scan/digitize books they own physically. They are only allowed to lend out as many as they physically own though. Archive knew this and allowed infinite “lend outs”. They even openly acknowledged that this was against the law in their announcement post when they did this.

The trouble is that the publishers are not just going after them for infinite lend-outs. The publishers are arguing that they shouldn’t be allowed to lend out any digital copies of a book they’ve scanned from a physical copy, even if they lock away the corresponding numbers of physical copies.

Worse, they got a court to agree with them on that, which is where the appeal comes in.

The publishers want it to be that physical copies can only be lent out as physical copies, and for digital copies the libraries have to purchase a subscription for a set number of library patrons and concurrent borrows, specifically for digital lending, and with a finite life. This is all about growing publisher revenue. The publishers are not stopping at saying the number of digital copies lent must be less than or equal to the number of physical copies, and are going after archive.org for their entire digital library programme.

I’m looking into it using data from my instance to check it isn’t an abuse issue.

What I know so far:

1. It is a lemmy.world user.
2. That user has downvoted 548 comments, and upvoted 18. Downvoted 557 posts and upvoted 25.
3. Timing: the downvoting has been going on for some time, it isn’t a new thing. 71 downvoted comments since 2024-06-01T00:00:00Z, 212 since the start of May (out of 548).
4. The user has two comments ever, and no posts. One comment, on a thread about the actions of a right-wing American politician, said “Click bait lemmy for sure”. This could imply the downvotes are legitimate and coming from having an impossibly high standard for what is considered quality here, or perhaps they are related to political grudges. I’m going to look further for patterns in the downvotes. I think a bot could have done far more downvotes - so it could just be a human.

Votes on this comment:

1. Came from 14 different instances - many of them major. Of those instances, the instance with the most votes contributed was lemmy.world (i.e. your own instance), from which my instance has seen 14 votes for that comment.
2. Of the voters, I looked at the distribution of the person IDs assigned on my instance, which approximately represents the order they were seen by my instance (e.g. they voted on or interacted with another comment). If there was vote manipulation, I’d expect to see lots of IDs close together. However, there are not runs of IDs that are close together. To avoid this when manipulating votes, they’d need to have planned in advance, and made accounts and used them individually over time before finally deploying them to downvote you.

If there are instances that are a significant source of vote manipulation, and the local admins are unwilling to address it, there are options available to instance admins like defederation.

However - in the case of your comments, there is no meaningful evidence of vote manipulation.

The best option is to run them models locally. You’ll need a good enough GPU - I have an RTX 3060 with 12 GB of VRAM, which is enough to do a lot of local AI work.

I use Ollama, and my favourite model to use with it is Mistral-7b-Instruct. It’s a 7 billion parameter model optimised for instruction following, but usable with 4 bit quantisation, so the model takes about 4 GB of storage.

You can run it from the command line rather than a web interface - run the container for the server, and then something like docker exec -it ollama ollama run mistral, giving a command line interface. The model performs pretty well; not quite as well on some tasks as GPT-4, but also not brain-damaged from attempts to censor it.

By default it keeps a local history, but you can turn that off.

Cars definitely kill wildlife too - estimation methodologies vary, but I’ve seen estimates saying:

• Vehicles directly kill about 10,000,000 native animals across Australia per annum. That’s not including habitat loss, and doesn’t include insects (birds, reptiles, and mammals only).
• Pet cats kill about 546,000,000 native animals across Australia per annum. I believe that’s using a similar definition excluding insects.
• Feral cats kill about 3,000,000,000 native animals across Australia per annum.

Of course, habit destruction and pollution has a huge impact as well.

But roaming pet cats legitimately are a major part of the problem. It is possible to simultaneously replace lawns with tree cover, and reduce the burden of cats. That could also feed into a comprehensive policy of tackling stray and feral cat populations - something which is made harder in suburbs due to roaming pet cats.

As for whether it is cruel: change is a stressor for cats, so a sudden change from outdoor access to indoor-only could increase stress levels, but that is a one-off transition and there could be ways to manage that (for example, by providing a lot of notice of a change and allowing owners to phase out access, or by having a permit system for indoor and outdoor cats, and allowing renewal of existing permits for specific microchipped cats, but no new outdoor cat permits). Outdoor access / hunting outdoors is a form of enrichment for cats, but not the only one possible. Indoor cats can play with toys, and have owners simulate chasing and hunting activities indoors (for example, with ribbons, small balls, chasing cat treats, and so on) to provide similar enrichment. At the same time, the indoors protect cats from stressful situations like encountering or being mauled by dogs, aggressive cats, foxes, brushtail possums, injuries on the roads, and disease.

I think it is a positive sign - although obviously hypocritical when they are providing lethal aid to the Israeli government while it’s controlled by genocidal extremist parties like Likud and Mafdal-RZ, who are using it to create the very situation for Palestinian civilians in the first place.

The bombing of civilian homes and infrastructure, combined with shootings and so on has already killed or wounded about 2% of the population in only 5 months. However, a famine could kill far faster than that; to avoid that, the IDF would only need to not interfere with the distribution of aid, allowing NGOs to provide it. Instead, they have interfered with the entry of aid at the Egyptian-Palestinian border, bombed places where aid is being distributed, and shot at civilians seeking aid on the street with machine guns.

So anything that makes that 2% of casualties not grow to 80%, for example, and frustrates the plans of Israel’s far right to depopulate Gaza of Arabs is a good start, but not really enough.

A ‘Treaty of Versailles’ type solution is not a good idea for durable peace though, harsh reparations, despite any sense they might be ‘fair’, seldom lead to both countries returning to be prosperous democratic countries (and to be clear, neither is a capitulation by Ukraine - that would be seen by Putin as locking in its current gains, with no real incentive not to try again for more despite what the treaty might say).

The best outcome for everyone is if Russia ends up being a genuinely pluralistic democracy (i.e. anyone in Russia can have political views, and the public selects its leadership in free and fair elections). Then Ukraine can normalise relations with Russia, and Russia stops being a threat to democratic institutions across the world as a whole.

I think the best way of thinking about it is not that Ukraine has a Russia problem, but rather that Ukraine and Russia have an oligarch problem (with Putin chief amongst them). Therefore, in a fair world, the oligarchs, and not the Russian people, would pay. It is true that Russians (and indeed some Ukrainians in occupied regions) have been radicalised by the oligarchs, so some kind of deradicalisation would be needed even if the oligarchs disappeared.

Solutions that look to negotiate how to reduce corruption and authoritarianism in Russia from the top are therefore the most likely to succeed long term. Shorter term solutions could include a negotiated end to hostilities coupled with agreements for Ukraine to join a defensive alliance that the oligarchs wouldn’t consider provoking - which could be followed up by a carrot approach to easing sanctions in exchange for progressive movements towards genuine Russian democracy. This might give oligarchs enough push to take off ramps to cash in what they have plundered already, and slowly be replaced by less corrupt alternatives going forward.

Recovery from oligarchy for Russia might also by costly for Russia though - essential assets plundered from the USSR are now in private hands through crony capitalism; the best solution would be for many of the major ones to go back to or be rebuilt under state ownership, under genuine democratic leadership. But that is likely easier said than done given the state of Russia.