👋👋 :)

Well, maybe you don’t get into the kinds of discussions I do, or our values are different. It seems like particularly when I say anything advocating for minorities it attracts a slew of reactionaries who are persistent and impossible to reason with, and two of the places I’ve noticed they tend to come from are lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, both largeish instances with open sign up. I haven’t noticed any particularly reactionary instances apart from the tankie ones.

This is probably the reason a number of instances have defedded from .world, so you are probably getting more of those kinds of people, and less of the people who would object to that kind of hatred, whether you’ve noticed it or not.

And I’ve noticed this problem seems worse here than it was on reddit, but I’ve realised it makes sense because the more vocal people are the ones more likely to leave or get booted from reddit, so of course we get them here, and of course the ones who have covert ideologies tend to go for open sign up.

Personally I prefer to be on an instance that I know is roughly aligned with my values so I know I won’t have to make the case to my admins that hate is bad and should be moderated out.

Maybe what I said should’ve been more neutrally stated, but it is just my opinion.

People won’t usually go to that effort just to troll when there are open instances available, and anyone with closed sign up will be quicker to ban someone who turns out to have lied about the kind of person they are, rather than these giant open instances that don’t seem to give a shit.

And yes, I know it won’t ‘“fix Lemmy” or something lol’, I never said it would. I said it was a feature I would like to see.

The others gave you a decent rundown.

I’m certainly not meaning to imply that you did anything wrong signing up with .world, it’s just somethjng to be aware of. This is actually the first time I’ve made this suggestion, I honestly don’t know how most people feel about this, so actually maybe it was a bit much to dump on a newcomer. If so I apologise.

One thing I forgot about was that being on .world means you do miss out on a lot of piracy related stuff if you’re into that.

Also though, you can read about a given instance and its policies and values when you visit it. That often says a lot about the kinds of people you’ll meet there.

Don’t worry about it. It’s like Linux enthousiasts talking about distros.

If you get to the point where it matters to you, you’ll look into it then. I’ve been here for more than a year and still haven’t bothered to hop servers.

Ignore them. Enjoy yourself. If you’re interested in moving to a different instance later once you learn more about what that means then go for it. There are tools to help you and there’s “no karma” so there’s no reason to not. But there’s no rush to do so.

I’d love to see the precedent, if you don’t mind.

Nonsense.

Usually any hosting platform has some kind of wording to the tune of “you give us permanent and unrestricted right to use your content however we want”. Copyright is still yours, but you can’t use it against the platform. Applies to social networks, YouTube, Flickr, anything I can think of.

I guess an assumption that no-one would do both blinded me to that fact.

No, but SearX does similar things. I’ve been learning about Kagi recently, and as far as I can tell, they don’t index pages on their own, they just use APIs provided by the real search engines.

If we do end up at a point without search engines, where AI does the search and summarizes an answer, what do you think their level of ability to tie back to source material will be?

I haven’t used the text-based search queries myself; I’ve used LLM software, but not for this, so I don’t know what the current situation is like. My understanding is that current approach doesn’t really permit for it. And there are two issues with that:

• There isn’t a direct link between one source and what’s being generated; the model isn’t really structured so as to retain this.

• Many different sources probably contribute to the answer.

All information contributes a little bit to the probability of the next word that the thing is spitting out. It’s not that the software rapidly looks through all pages out there and then finds a given single reputable source that could then cite, the way a human might. That is, you aren’t searching an enormous database when the query comes in, but repeatedly making use of a prediction that the next word in the correct response is a given word, and that probability is derived from many different sources. Maybe tens of thousands of people have made posts on a given subject; the response isn’t just a quote from one, and the generated text may appear in none of them.

To maybe put that in terms of how a human might think, place you in the generative AI’s shoes, suppose I say to you “draw a house”. You draw a house with two windows, a flowerbed out front, whatever. I say “which house is that”? You can’t tell me, because you’re not trying to remember and present one house – you’re presenting me with a synthetic aggregate of many different houses; probably all houses have mentally contributed a bit to it. Maybe you could think of a given house that you’ve seen in the past that looks a fair bit like that house, but that’s not quite what I’m asking you to tell me. The answer is really “it doesn’t reflect a single house in the real world”, which isn’t really what you want to hear.

It might be possible to basically run a traditional search for a generated response to find an example of that text, if it amounts to a quote (which it may not!)

And if Google produces some kind of “reliability score” for a given piece of material and weights the material in the training set by that (which I will guess that if they don’t now, they will), they could maybe use the reliability score to try to rank various sources when doing that backwards search for relevant sources.

But there’s no guarantee that that will succeed, because they’re ultimately synthesizing the response, not just quoting it, and because it can come from many sources. There may potentially be no one source that says what Google is handing back.

It’s possible that there will be other methods than the present ones used for generating responses in the future, and those could have very different characteristics. Like, I would not be surprised, if this takes off, if the resulting system ten years down the road is considerably more complex than what is presently being done, even if to a user, the changes under the hood aren’t really directly visible.

There’s been some discussion about developing systems that do permit for this, and I believe that if you want to read up on it, the term used is “attributability”, but I have not been reading research on it.