FaceDeer

And some of those hosts can decide to serve up their content to AI trainers. Some of those hosts can be run by AI trainers, specifically to gather data for training. If one was to try to prevent that then one would be attacking the open nature of the fediverse.

There have been many people raging about their content being used to train AIs without permission or compensation. I’m speaking to those people, not the “fediverse collectively”. As you suggest, the fediverse can’t say anything collectively.

Yup. There are dumps of Reddit’s entire archive of comments and posts available via torrent, I suspect the only reason Reddit’s getting paid for that stuff right now is that it’s a legal ass-covering that’s comparatively cheap. Anyone who’s a little daring could use it to train an LLM and if they prep the data well enough it’d be hard to even notice.

Well, I hope my answer clarifies it. You can’t prevent LLMs from being trained on your public posts.

I really don’t see how it would be physically possible to do that and still allow the content to be publicly seen by other humans.

We’re sick of closed walled-garden monoliths like Reddit! Let’s move to an open federated protocol where anyone can participate and the APIs can’t be locked down!

…wait, not like that!

Yeah. This is what you signed up for when you joined the Fediverse, the ActivityPub protocol broadcasts your content to any other servers that ask for it. And just generally, that’s how the Internet works. You’re putting up a public billboard and expecting to be able to control who gets to look at it. That’s not going to work. Even robots.txt is just a gentleman’s agreement, it’s not enforceable.

If you really want to prevent AI from training on your content with any degree of certainty you’re probably looking for a private forum of some kind that’s run by someone you trust.

Social markers are usually not a conscious thing. Once it becomes part of the “this is the way a proper person behaves” ruleset it gets internalized.

I think that’s too convenient and loaded an explanation. I suspect a better one can be found in social identity theory, with positions like these being social markers that they use to establish firm boundaries around their in-group. Every group tends to develop social markers, things you’re expected to believe or otherwise exhibit to show that you’re “on their side.” There may be some particular reason why any given marker first shows up, but once it gets adopted it becomes essentially self-perpetuating.

Ah, that might apply, then. Though that appears to be specifically about abortion clinics, and my googling suggests Mount Sinai might not provide abortions, so it might still be fiddly if it actually went to court.

Even if not, they should probably have still routed around it if only in recognition of the "on edge"ness.

It was made clear to you, immediately and concisely. You should have accepted that clarification and moved on with your life. Instead you continued poking and prodding after that in search of some way to misconstrue what was being said.

Seems like it might be a bit more nuanced than that. From the article:

There is a federal law, C-3, which deems it an offence for anyone who “intentionally obstructs or interferes with another person’s lawful access to a place at which health services are provided by a health professional.” As far as I saw while I was passing the hospital, the entranceway was clear and no one was stopped from entering or exiting the building. Other than vague mentions, I found no specific evidence that people were prevented from entering or exiting the building.

Update, Feb. 15, 11:06 a.m.: It has come to our attention that the University Ave. entrance to Mount Sinai Hospital closes at 6 p.m. daily. The protest passed by the hospital around 8 p.m., two hours after that entrance had closed. See the bottom of the map below for the University Ave. entrance hours, accessed today from the Mount Sinai Hospital website.

So this may not have broken those laws. There was apparently an incident where the crowd blocked the car of a doctor that was trying to drive home, so perhaps some more care needed to be taken, but I think everyone’s just really on edge right now and looking for things to get angry about.

Plenty of for-profit companies use open protocols and don’t harm them in the slightest.

Almost any website you visit, for example.

We believe in open protocols and hate walled gardens!

Except our walled garden!

That’s a false dichotomy.

Maybe something like these “tinyshelters” would be a good compromise - they’re safer and more comfortable than ramshackle tent-and-cardboard encampments, but they’re still far short of what I’d call a “free apartment.”

It’s a bit of a catch-22, unfortunately. Homeless camps are not exactly safe places to live. Fire codes and zoning laws are not arbitrary things, they exist for reasons.

I would find it reasonable to require that the government has to have someplace for those homeless people to go before dismantling their camps, though.

What’s wrong with the logic used to justify using public data to train large language models?

Calling it “stealing content” is loaded terminology. You’re posting content on an open protocol whose very purpose is to broadcast it far and wide.

Unless there’s some actual technical reason why this a bad idea, I don’t buy the “ethical” hand-wringing here. It sounds like just another case of not liking specific social media companies and wanting the defaults to conform to those personal dislikes.

Most nuclear fission products don’t remain radioactive for long periods either, let alone “virtually forever.” Bear in mind that the longer-lived a radioisotope is, the less radioactive it is.

For JET, I dug up the actual numbers (LLW is low-level waste and ILW is intermediate-level waste):

Radioactive wastes arising from operation and decommissioning of the JET experimental nuclear fusion reactor, located at Culham, are already factored into the UK radioactive waste inventory. Forecast LLW and ILW packaged volumes are 4,120 m^3 and 480 m^3, respectively; activated steels and alloy plant and equipment, including the JET vacuum vessel, are a major contributor to the ILW arising.

According to this page a typical 1-gigawatt fission reactor produces 3 m^3 of high-level waste per year, 7 m^3 of intermediate-level waste, and 90 m^3 of low-level waste per year while operating.

I’m having trouble finding easily comparable numbers for the wastes produced during decommissioning, this page had a lot of detail but was focused more on the area of land that needed to be sealed off rather than the cubic meters of material contained there. It does talk about the mass of some of the turbines being considered as low-level waste being in the range of a few hundred tons, which isn’t much.

It’s true that spent fission fuel rods are high level waste, but the total volume of that is quite small and it’s in a very manageable form. So overall, I’m not really sure there’s going to be a big improvement on nuclear waste production with fusion power. It’s certainly not going to be a panacea, we’re still going to need nuclear waste repositories and still be dealing with processing and sequestering large amounts of materials there.

I have to throw a little water on the “clean” part of the claim, unfortunately. JET does deuterium/tritium fusion, which produces neutron radiation that causes the lining of the reactor to become radioactive. The lining needs to be replaced every once in a while, producing nuclear waste.