I think it’s reasonable to downvote.

This for instance:

It’s a channel funded partly by a Bill Gates subsidiary, and has to do propaganda for them to meet its budget requirements.

May be technically true, but the implication is conspiratorial.

This:

Kurzgesagt makes low quality content that’s poorly researched…

Is an opinion I would strongly contest. “Slopaganda” doesn’t fit my impression either, especially with what they’ve disclosed about their production process.

And this:

This makes sense… They should be banned.

Sounds like advocating for a ban under false pretenses, which I am vehemently against. That’s what ultimately crosses the downvote threshold for me.

…That came out as more accusatory/singled out than I intended. I don’t mean to pile on the comment.

Is the channel perfect? No. I think they’re citation-lite in the videos, have made mistakes and had bad takes. And it’s a little oversimplified for my tastes.

But on this:

I dislike how disenting opinions get downvoted on Lemmy/technology probably more than even on reddit.

I think a downvote is a fair tool, in this case.

And unlike Reddit (at least in by browser UI), Lemmy doesn’t hide the comment when it’s heavily downvoted, which I like. The comment still gets “fair” exposure like any other comment in this thread, but that doesn’t mean people have to like it.

Other Lemmy/Piefed UIs may handle this differently, though. Not sure about that.

I’ve seen this repeated a ton, so looked into it for myself, especially the “Bill Gates influence” angle.

I don’t buy it.

They aren’t perfect, but every Kurzgesagt video I’ve seen is above par for YouTube. And on the few topics I already knew something about, they seem to cover stuff well.

The criticism, on the other hand, was (to me) entirely unconvincing when investigated. It was mostly “I personally don’t like the agenda these facts point to.”

EDIT

And all that aside:

No one should be banned for the wrong reason.

If Kurzgesagt should be taken down, it shouldn’t be from a dysfunctional AI detection filter. It should be over whatever they actually did wrong.

They are, they’re trying, they’re pushing other platforms constantly. Kurzgesagt already does, heavily.

But are users switching? Nope.

They hardly even know they exist.

Sometimes I even see such a comment on YouTube, a user questioning YouTube; yet they didn’t even watch the video long enough to see the creator promoting an alternative platform.

They’ve already scrolled to the next video, algorithmically fed to them.

YouTube has an iron grip on YT users, and they know it. Even if ALL creators band together, IMO there’s basically nothing the creators can do.

I respectfully disagree.

Have you seen what Minimax H3 can output, on a desktop? Even dirt-cheap AI video gen is basically undetectable now. I think all YouTube can filter is the absolute “bottom barrel” spammers still using some old model because they don’t know any better.

And if they train detectors on “stereotypical” AI output like Ghibli style or flat colors or whatever, they’re just going to nuke channels like Kurzgesagt while most AI slop spammers adapt to get through. There’s literally nothing for detectors to go on anymore.

…But also, YT doesn’t even care.

The filters make next quarter look better because they do catch the bottom barrel, and that’s all that matters.

If the slop videos get through, the average user won’t see the difference either, so why should they care?

Yeah, it’s bad.

Non-watermarked slop is going to be impossible to detect going forward, and the false detections are going to get worse.

The fundamental issue is the monetization scheme. It’s just too lucrative for spammers. YouTube’s economics are broken, and getting worse.

…Hence, no matter what YouTube says, YouTube is going to double down on “detectors,” because Alphabet leadership couldn’t care less about destroying longstanding creators. Their only objective is to suppress just enough spam to keep ad buyers unconcerned next quarter, no matter the long term damage; that’s someone else’s problem.

It’s ironic. Windows went on AI, not just visibly with Cortana, but under the hood too. For example, they spent a ton developing ONNX, even before “AI” was everywhere, and still push it as a format.

Same with the vendors. AMD NPUs (for instance) were only supported on Windows forever; I think they still are. Same with Intel’s.

…And yet Windows is basically useless for local AI, compared to linux.

gift cards to give to thirst traps.

What does he use specifically, though? Facebook, Instagram? OF?

On his phone, right?

I apologize if that’s a weird question, but I’m… scientifically curious. I know lots of folks are susceptible, but I’m interested in the systems that suck folks like your father in.

IMO it’s only a problem when the customer doesn’t understand that they’re buying an illusion.

+1. But I wonder how many know it’s an illusion.

I’m the wrong person to analyze this though, as I do not get why people engage in these services. Like, I get roleplaying, I’ve daydreamed or even written out long fantasies, but why would I (for example) pay for some girl to talk it out on the phone?

…Much less gawk at some influencer on Insta?

What’s the point?

I’m always shocked by how LLM illiterate professionals or even leading “science influencers” are.

…But I know why.

It’s on purpose

Literally everything about the most common (Big Tech) interfaces obfuscates everything about them, to the maximum degree, to present them as “sycophantic oracles” and maximize engagement. If that’s all one is exposed to, there is literally no way to get a cold ass bucket of water in the face by peeking under the hood.

It’s all very… anti science.

On a semi related note, see this absolutely unhinged but not wrong rant:

The Conspiracy Against High Temperature Sampling

https://gist.github.com/Hellisotherpeople/71ba712f9f899adcb08b94bce20d5397

It is related. Anyone, even Hank Green, will rely on AI more if they never get a chance to poke it and peel it apart.

Like, if I ware in charge of a university, I would mandate a course where everyone gets a untuned base model in raw completion mode, and gleefully watch the slow realization. “Wait… all “AI” is just this?”

Also:

I’d love to do case studies on the real people at the end of these things.

Like, who is scrolling Facebook and Insta to thirst over algorithmic posts, yet is somehow unaware of the generative explosion?

Do they know, and just don’t care? Do they think they could tell if an image is fake, or is it true unawareness?

What do they do in real life? What are their relationships like?

How does this system work.

I think it’s easy to assume they’re all basement dwellers or whatever, but one could stereotype Lemmy the same way, and that’s just not true.

EDIT: Now that I think about it, such studies must exist. I don’t want to fall into the “I didn’t even try to search for the answer” thing.

But all this has happened so fast. And clearly the studies aren’t being acted on…

I ran into a Discord where the sole topic was running hot girl “AI influencers” on Instagram. Literally hundreds of thousands of people thirsted over them, and the operaters made real money.

Their systems were pretty sophisticated. The whole process is automated; LLMs write the posts and do sexy DMs, imagegen and videogen models and such do the sexy images and videos, controlnet keeps the look consistent-enough between media. LLM agents press all the buttons. I think there may have even been OnlyFans stuff.

So a single operator could run dozens of bots.

…It’s not hard for these models, either. DMs and short Insta posts are stupidly simple language, and media of sexy people in clothes, doing insta-style poses, probably makes up most of the image/video model training corpus.

I think there was some engagement farming with other bots, of course, but it would snowball and turn organic. Real Instagram users were thirsting over these bots.

…It got me thinking.

Is it really that different from a parasocial relationship with a “real” influencer?

I mean, functionally, its exactly the same. The users can’t even tell the difference.

I posit that the whole “thirst” influencer system was broken and exploitive to everyone involved, except Facebook.

It was fucked up to begin with.

AI just made it more obvious to onlookers. It destroyed the pretense that any of it was “real.”

Gestures. This is what I’m talking about.

A large fraction lemmy.ml literally cannot participate in a thread without bringing up western imperialism. Like, it could be /c/superbowl picture of an owl, and somehow it would devolve into that.

Unfortunately condensation is, indeed, an intractable issue there.

Sometimes people put a heat pump in water cooling loops, where condensation along the pipe can be mitigated with insulation, but even that’s a little risky with a 5090 these days.

Enjoy your lovely greenery!

the old Encyclopedia Britannica.

No one uses this.

You’ve got dozens of alternative Wiki competitors with their own rarified communities of editors and contributors.

No one uses them.

You’ve got subject-specific Wikis for a thousand different fandoms, hobbies, and crafts.

Fandom has a grip on this space, unfortunately, and that’s under Wales too. Yes, I know there are community alternatives, but their traffic/SEO is small in comparison.

But the idea that tens of millions of curious people and subject-experts are just going to endure a vacuum? Come on.

They absolutely will.

They already have!

Look at the rest of the internet. Literally every space, every niche, every congregation of experts has rotted away, and these “curious people and subject-experts” are clingimg to big social media toxic spaces because it’s the default.

It’s a very English-language and Euro-History oriented source of truth for tens of millions of online nerds. If it gets subsumed or shut down or otherwise undermined by western-aligned governments, I might suggest that the problem will not be an absence of Wikipedia but the presence of a malignant surveillance-enabled censorship bureaucracy.

You’re speaking of an internet that, for the bulk of humanity, doesn’t exist anymore. It is all but gone. That’s what I’m saying.

Maybe a few million nerds would create new Wikipedias, but the billions of other people on their phones and tablets would almsot never see it.

And that is dangerous for society. Wikipedia’s sheer critical mass is a huge monkey wrench in “soft” censorship, and for all its faults, every bit Wikipeida is delegitimized is a fascist dream-come-true.

And I hear a lot of people talking like that popularity isn’t important. There’s this sort of “old internet” attiude like we can just archive it and keep to ourselves. What does everyone else matter?

Well. Without Wikipedia putting the braKES on loss of freedoms in our IRL lives, we may lose the ability to do that.

Well, unfortunately, there is no project like that with Wikipedia’s critical mass. Most attempts with any attention are rather horrific. See: Grokipedia.

If Wikipedia dies, nothing good will replace it.

I know that’s a bit defeatist, but I really think its “the best we got.” Nothing better is coming with the state the internet is in now.

And I just want to emphasize that maybe a small community could build something better. I know.

But in terms of “keeping a healthy knowledge base for civilization,” that kind of project doesn’t matter if no-one sees it. Wikipedia is valuable because its a reasonably sane default reference for billions of people, that isn’t some megacorp or government.

I think you missed my point.

I’m not worried about them running out of funding. I’m worried about their reputation in the public’s eye.

Duct it!

I have a 400W 3090 with zero case fans.

Its always cool, because I bought like $10 of weather stripping to “seal” its intakes against the edge of an SFF case. So it’s always sucking in ambient air:

You can also severely undervolt a 5090 to like 250-300W, with very little performance impact. Honestly its stock speeds are kind of crazy.

…But again, you aren’t gaining much over a 4090. A 4090 + DDR4 threadripper would be way faster than a 5090 + occulink, for many reasons. And TR CPUs are pretty reasonably priced compared to GPUs these days.

But even if you do go 5090, I’d highly recommend finding some way to shove it in the case and duct some air into its intakes. Its going to be way faster on a PCIe slot.

You could even get a riser and mount it somewhere else in the case, theoretically.

This is bad.

…But I’m very worried about the future of Wikipedia.

Questionable leadership or not, it is a lighthouse in the information dystopia of the 2020s, which literally helps hold society together.

The far right wants it gone, and are not shy about screaming it, because Wikipedia is not compatible with fascism.

If it becomes hated by the left too, and ignored by the masses because of Big Tech blacklists it, I worry it won’t have the political support to keep its prominence.

And to be clear, I’m not worried about it dying. Wikipedia will stay where it is for decades.

I’m worried about it ceasing to be popular.

It doesn’t function as a uncontrolled source of information if no one sees it. Modern fascist censorship works by simply shifting attention.

First of all, I mean zero offense with any purchase decision. A 5090 is very good.

…But if I were paying that kind of money, I’d probably get a 4090 and a new motherboard/CPU instead. Maybe a used DRR4 threadripper system.

Hybrid (CPU + GPU) inference is where it’s at these days. It opens up a whole world of huge MoE models, whereas on an 5090 you are stuck with Qwen 27B.

Having a fast CPU, with lots of RAM channels, with full PCIe bandwidth is much more important for that than having a 5090, where a 3090 or 4090 will get the job done.

Even if pure speed is your primary concern, you can tune a sparse 120B model (like Laguna) to run almost as fast as Qwen 27B on a 5090, and get at-least-good results.

It’s more finicky and involved, though. For sure.

Running an LLM on a 5090 is a task. Hybrid CPU + GPU inference is a hobby.