and has fuck all to do with charity

That’s what I said?

you absolutely can inspect the weights

Current techniques cannot give you anything close to the level of inspection you can with software. Worse still, techniques of frontier AI labs are moving in the opposite direction with it getting harder to understand over time and less going into things like chain of thought

There also projects like petals for doing distributed training

You always be at a massive disadvantage because of the severally more limited compute available. Additionally, distributed computing not inside the same data center adds massively increased latency

Training a model also does nothing for the environmental side of things and just makes things worse

instead of whinging endlessly as if OpenAI or Anthropic give a flying fuck that some brave lib made yet another ‘AI slop’ comment on a niche social media platform.

That’s 100% missing the point. The point is to not encourage more people to use the tool that gives control to Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. Social stigma and pushback is the point. People use things less when it’s seen as uncool. Normalizing AI use just means it’s going to be used more against your interests

Only a handful of companies make open weight models, and those models are not made for charity. They want either market share and/or control. Making your own model is not like making your own software because the capital cost are extraordinarily high. The masses will not have the billions in funds they would need need to train these models

Unlike open source code, you cannot check what’s actually in the open weight models. Worse still, you can hide things that trigger on very specific words (poison attacks can be intentional by the model maker or put by other actors in the public data). Fine tuning attempts are also no escape from hidden features you don’t even know to look for

This is the kind of arguments people made against the free-software movement in the first place. That it’s somehow more mature to not care about consequences of what we do and how we do it

I think it’s exactly the other way around

The open source software movement was very much founded on the idea of being concerned about what kinds of tools we use as a society. Software that’s “just a tool” can lock you down and out of what you can do with it. Same argument can just as well be made that people were “shying away from using new and interesting tools” by running free software instead of Microsoft’s new priority stuff that locks you in

AI similarly gives massive control to a handful of companies. They have already used that leverage to intentionally sandbag tasks without telling you, when they think it’s against their economic interests (model distillation and AI research). Is it not possible to imagine that goes further, they would use that leverage to slip in backdoor, not report classes of bugs, etc.?

The meat, dairy, etc. industry are horrifying all around the world. Some countries are just better at playing it down than others

There are more than 1,000 US-style mega-farms in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, including some holding as many as a million animals

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/18/uk-has-more-than-1000-livestock-mega-farms-investigation-reveals

Both for the non-human animals as well as the workers

Revealed: exploitation of meat plant workers rife across UK and Europe

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/sep/28/revealed-exploitation-of-meat-plant-workers-rife-across-uk-and-europe

Together, poultry slaughtering and processing companies reported more severe injuries to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) than many industries that are popularly recognized as hazardous, such as sawmills, industrial building construction, and oil and gas well drilling

https://www.hrw.org/report/2019/09/04/when-were-dead-and-buried-our-bones-will-keep-hurting/workers-rights-under-threat

Related: The infectious disease trap of animal agriculture

Infectious diseases originating from animals (zoonotic diseases) have emerged following deforestation from agriculture. Agriculture can reduce its land use through intensification, i.e., improving resource use efficiency. However, intensive management often confines animals and their wastes, which also fosters disease emergence. Therefore, rising demand for animal-sourced foods creates a “trap” of zoonotic disease risks: extensive land use on one hand or intensive animal management on the other

Significantly harder to achieve a ban of all advertising, but I do agree that companies would just skirt a law like this anyway they can. I think what Amsterdam has done is a better model (just banning ads for meat entirely)

There is some amount of traction for similar ideas. From the article:

The campaign calls on local councils to take action on advertising that promotes meat, dairy, and factory farming to “make room for more honest conversations about food.” In a UK-first, Zoe Garbett, the Mayor of Hackney, has pledged to end meat and dairy advertising on all council-owned land in the East London borough.

[…]

Earlier this year, Amsterdam became the first capital city in the world to introduce a ban on advertisements for fossil fuels and meat

high-quality, plant-based foods, low in animal products

[…]

plant-based sources of proteins and fats were associated with about a 15% lower risk of CHD

Not the person you originally replied to, but eating plants directly would at least be a sort of harm reduction in that case. It takes a lot more plants to raise non-human animals than to just use plants directly. This is also a big part of why the environmental impact is so high for meat, dairy, etc.

1 kg of meat requires 2.8 kg of human-edible feed for ruminants and 3.2 for monogastrics

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211912416300013

Humans and human ancestors have also been consuming large quantities of plants for far earlier than that. Here’s another paper looking 780,000 years ago finding a wide amount of plants consumed

we demonstrate that a wide variety of plants were processed by Middle Pleistocene hominins at the site of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov in Israel (33° 00’ 30” N, 35° 37’ 30” E), at least 780,000 y ago. These results further indicate the advanced cognitive abilities of our early ancestors, including their ability to collect plants from varying distances and from a wide range of habitats and to mechanically process them using percussive tools.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2418661121

I am not saying that hunting didn’t happen (it definitely did). I am just saying that more recent research is painting a very different picture of the level of consumption of it

More modern research does not suggest this made up most of the consumption for humans even before agriculture. For instance,

Our results unequivocally demonstrate a substantial plant-based component in the diets of these hunter-gatherers. This distinct dietary pattern challenges the prevailing notion of high reliance on animal proteins among pre-agricultural human groups

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02382-z

Does the Lemmy post title not have “in mice” in it for you? I added it to the title of the post to clarify this. It should show as

Red meat wreaks havoc on gut and drives inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) in study on mice

Whereas the original title of the article was:

Red meat wreaks havoc on gut and drives inflammatory bowel disease

My point is that it was way more rare than what people’s diets look like today. Not zero but not dominant. Wide reliance on plants is even true before modern agriculture. For example:

Here we present the isotopic evidence of pronounced plant reliance among Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers from North Africa (15,000–13,000 cal BP), predating the advent of agriculture by several millennia

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02382-z

Humans historically, also didn’t eat much meat up until very recently. More recent research suggests our ancient human ancestors were eating far more plants than meat

EDIT: For example:

Here we present the isotopic evidence of pronounced plant reliance among Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers from North Africa (15,000–13,000 cal BP), predating the advent of agriculture by several millennia

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02382-z

The council (me) has decided that I too actually wanted to see bean memes again. It has bean started again

https://lemmy.ml/post/34748813

Now you’re getting it!

Be the change you want to see in the world and post beans

I mean this a state where their anti-bestiality law already have an explicit exception for “accepted animal husbandry practices”, so I’m going to take a wild guess that they’re not going to make any attempts to enforce it that way.

https://www.flsenate.gov/Session/Bill/2011/0344/BillText/er/HTML

(Though to be fair these kinds of exception exists in a surprisingly large number of states)

Linked article in the body suggests that likely wouldn’t have made a difference anyway

The scrapers ignored common web protocols that site owners use to block automated scraping, including “robots.txt” which is a text file placed on websites aimed at preventing the indexing of context