This is unhinged. Someone building the mainline of an interoperable communication service should absolutely be helping others making software trying to interoperate with it. Complaints can be made about Rochko rejecting PRs, but complaining that other people’s time is going towards a thing they don’t want is insane.

“So they reached out to us and we had conversations about what they want to do, how they can do it, and we had more detailed conversations about how to do X, how to do Y protocol-wise. We helped them resolve some issues when they launched their first test of the federation because we want to see them succeed with this plan, so we help them debug and troubleshoot some of the stuff that they’re doing. Basically, we’re talking with each other about whatever issues come up.”

But from the perspective of hundreds of instances have signed the anti-Meta FediPact, and hundreds more are blocking Threads without signing the pact, any resources devoted to to improving the Threads/Mastodon integration are wasted.

Did the image get copied onto their servers in a manner they were not provided a legal right to? Then they violated copyright. Whatever they do after that isn’t the copyright violation.

And this is obvious because they could easily assemble a dataset with no copyright issues. They could also attempt to get permission from the copyright holders for many other images, but that would be hard and/or costly and some would refuse. They want to use the extra images, but don’t want to get permission, so they just take it, just like anyone else who would like an image but doesn’t want to pay for it.

In life, people will frequently say things to you that won’t be the whole truth, but you can figure out what’s actually going on by looking at the context of the situation. This is commonly referred to as “being deceptive” or sometimes just “lying”. Corporate PR and salespeople, the ones who put out this press release, do it regularly.

You don’t need to record content categories of searches to make a good tool for displaying websites, you need it to perform predictions about what users will search for. They’ve already said they wanted to focus on AI and linked to an example of the system they want to improve, it’s their site recommender, complete with sponsored recommendations that could be sold for a higher price if the Mozilla AI could predict that “people in country X will soon be looking for vacations”.

The example of the “search optimization” they want to improve is Firefox Suggest, which has sponsored results which could be promoted (and cost more) based on predictions of interest based on recent trends of topics in your country. “Users in Belgium search for vacations more during X time of day” is exactly the sort of stuff you’d use to make ads more valuable. “Users in France follow a similar pattern, but two weeks later” is even better. Similarly predicting waves of infection based on the rise and fall of “health” searches is useful for public health, but also for pushing or tabling ad campaigns.

You can technically modify any network weights however you want with whatever data you have lying around, but without the core training data you can’t verify that your modifications aren’t hurting the original capabilities. Fine-tuning (which LoRa is for) isn’t the same thing as modifying a trained network. You’re still generally stuck with their original trained capabilities you’re just reworking the final layer(s) to redirect/tune it towards your problem. You can’t add pet faces into a human face detector, and if a new technique comes out that could improve accuracy you can’t rebuild the model with it.

In any case, if the inference software is actually open source and all the necessary data is free of any intellectual property encumberances, it runs without internet access or non commodity hardware.

Then it’s open source enough to live in my browser.

So just free/noncorporate. A model is effectively a binary and the data is the source (the actual ML code is the compiler). If you don’t get the source, it’s not open source. A binary can be free and non-corporate, but it’s still not source code.

What does “open source” mean to you? Just free/noncorporate? Because a “100% open source model” doesn’t really make sense by the traditional definition. The “source” for a model is its data, not the code and not the model itself. Without the data you can’t build the model yourself, can’t modify it, and can’t inspect why it does what it does.

Unless they’re going to publish their data, AI can’t be meaningfully open source. The code to build and train a ML model is mostly uninteresting. The problems come in the form of data and hyperparameter selection which either intentionally or unintentionally do most of the shaping of the resulting system. When it’s published it’ll just be a Python project with some magic numbers and “put data here” with no indications of what went into data selection or choosing those parameters.

Mozilla wants to be an AI company. This is data collection to support that. Telemetry to understand the user browsing experience doesn’t need to be content-categorized.

This isn’t even telemetry, it’s data collection for AI. That they refused to say that let’s you know that they think what they’re doing needs to be obfuscated.

Telemetry doesn’t need topic categorization. This is building a dataset for AI.

Inconclusive = pr0n is probably a pretty reliable mapping.

Yeah, last time I went back to survey the landscape the more anticorporate/progressive subs I knew were noticeably diminished, while subs that get off on the futility of activism and immutability of power structures were going strong.

I’m personally curious whether Reddit actually has any ability to protect that database. I don’t remember Reddit TOS, but usually those things give them license to use and copy the data, maybe even to sell it, but not actually the copyright on it. So if someone made a Reddit scraper and copied the comments, wouldn’t only the actual commenter be able to sue?

$60M may be reflecting that, in that it’s more a convenience fee to shield Google against individual Redditors going after them than something that Reddit itself could actually sue over.

Nah, give those National Parks posters a Mastodon account. Way more desirable than POTUS. Also put all those other random gov Twitter accounts on it so they can link somewhere that anyone can read.

I mean, it’s not like he’s reading the Threads users’ comments either.

Just a totally straight blog about ice cream and cool cars, with no mention of politics.

Even better, that should be their primary social network site. It’s inherently restricted to valid government accounts and under their control so all the right data protection and preservation procedures can be followed. Then Threads users can follow potus@socia.whitehouse.gov or whatever.

This isn’t an existential problem. Just block threads.net.

If an instance defederates from another instance there’s nothing stopping a user who liked that instance that was defederated with from moving to, making an account on or just using (in the broadest sense) another instance which hasn’t defederated with the instance they like or that instance itself.

This functional consequence of defederation is telling their users they shouldn’t be allowed to interact with an instance. That they can just leave if they don’t like it doesn’t make the choice not coercive. Moving servers is certainly a viable option, but it’s a pain and doesn’t transfer content, so that’s still locked under the former server’s federation choice.

That’s one reason I moved to the fediverse: so I could get rid of all of the content I didn’t want to see before I saw it. More typical social media like Meta, Twitter and Reddit all have a long history of failing to moderate against anti-trans hate, as with other types of hate, so I moved to the fediverse.

On Mastodon, which is the place Threads is trying to federate with and which Katy was comparing it to, you can block instances. You no longer need your instance to make those decisions for you. Your desire to have Threads blocked at the instance level is at odds with Katy’s desire to follow trans people on it. You can do a simple thing to implement your desires without forcing anything on the other person.

What do you think the effect of “defederation” is?