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A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

larslofgren.com

941–950 of 996 posts

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#941
post #860

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You left out the fact that you can’t post to /r/conservative until the moderators there audit your post history and perform an interview with you to confirm your ideology matches theirs. > If someone does pass the test they’re allowed to comment. If they make a comment that disagrees with the message the moderators want to push, their commenting privilege is revoked. Be that as it may, i dont see how the solution t…

Huh? It sounds to me like this is arguing one should be OK with /r/conservative doing it (and joining up, even) but then not OK that other subs do it, too. That doesn't really pass the sniff test, so maybe I'm missing something.

I'm more trying to say, if you find it wrong that r/conservative does it, then you shouldn't do it yourself. Other people's bad behaviour should not be a justification for you own.

When it comes to morality, we can't control how other people act, we can only control what we ourselves do.

Especially when the "retaliation" is aimed at members and not the people implementing the mod policy.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#942
post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair question. The answer is that they didn’t bother hiding it. They literally posted in a whole bunch of Iranian subReddits and only Iranian subReddits. On this thread they were claiming they were British. Literally the first post of that kind, completely different to everything they had posted previously. The clincher was that they deleted their account as soon as I pointed they were Iranian. I’m going to guess the…

Obviously this is not what the posting history of a state-sponsored disinformation actor looks like.

[deleted]

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#943
post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The politically motivated assassination of Charlie Kirk claimed the life of a husband, father, and American patriot. In the wake of this tragedy, and amid other acts of politically motivated violence, Congress has a duty to oversee the online platforms that radicals have used to advance political violence. To prevent future radicalization and violence, the CEOs of Discord, Steam, Twitch, and Reddit must appear befor…

> There may be an attempt to coerce these platforms to start moderating in a way that's more favourable to Trump. That’s the real comedy about this; when we like it censorship is good, when we don’t like it (Covid shutdown, anti vax, Jan 6th) censorship is bad. The double standard is shocking, yet completely normalized. Besides any attempt to end violent rhetoric has to start with POTUS himself, theater exactly what…

Good things are good and bad things are bad - this fact is commonly forgotten.

If mainstream media had censored Adolf Hitler at the time, the Holocaust and the war in Europe might have been prevented. On the other hand, if they'd censored Winston Churchill, the Holocaust and the war in Europe might have been worsened.

It's like the argument for deregulation. Well, good regulations are good and there should be more of them; bad regulations are bad and there should be less of them. There's can be no serious argument for whether the number of regulations to go up or whether it should go down - that should entirely depend on each individual regulation being good or bad. Any argument that all are good or all are bad is pure irrational ideology.

I like the ones I think are good and I don't like the ones I think are bad. That's not a double standard - that's rationality. Besides what I think, there is also usually an objective measure of goodness or badness, but it's a lot harder to get at. I am not flipping a coin to think something is good or bad - I am estimating whether it's objectively good or bad. Am I a good estimator? Hard to tell.

Who is "we" in your comment?

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#944

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I’m definitely biased, I’m not a huge fan of quasi-fascist morons hiding behind a thin veneer of legitimacy while breaking the law, electing a sex offender, destroying every relationship with their foreign allies and engaging in hilariously blatant corruption. Nor am I fan of their voters/supporters. At this point if you don’t oppose them you implicitly support them, the normal rules no longer apply.

>At this point if you don’t oppose them you implicitly support them, the normal rules no longer apply. ^ The average far-left in a nutshell. You are either with us, or against us. There is no centralist.

Or perhaps, that is the centralist position.

To take an apolitical comparison, think about an ordinary crime- a murder, a rape, an arson, etc.

There is some set of people saying "We know that this man murdered these victims. We think that is very bad. We think the murderer should go to prison so that he doesn't murder more people".

Does a neutral centralist say "Yes, the murderer should go to prison" or do they say "I'm remaining central, I don't want to join the side that is condemning the murderer. I think they hate the murderer. I think the murderer should remain free."

My belief is that a neutral centralist agrees to send the murderer to prison. And if someone supports letting the murderer carry on murdering people, then they can reasonably be said to be supporting the murderer rather than claiming to be a centralist on the murder issue.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#945

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago, I looked at front-page threads on r/socialism and found blatant, undeniable calls to political violence all over the place. It was way worse than anything I'd ever seen on r/TheDonald. My reports to the admins went ignored, as far as I could tell.

Bullshit anecdotal evidence. I'm on Reddit every day for the past 10 years and have never seen any call to violence. That's my anecdote. By the way, the US government doesn't just want to regulate Reddit, they would like to take it over and and coerce it into becoming a political propaganda instrument, just like they are doing right now with TikTok. That's why officials use phrases like "deep, dark internet, Reddit c…

>Bullshit anecdotal evidence. I'm on Reddit every day for the past 10 years and have never seen any call to violence. That's my anecdote.

I should start saving the many many posts where redditors talk about a civil war and revolution to stop their political opposition (In the US). It happens every single day.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#946
post #777

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I stated this case as an opportunity. To be able to do this you would need to have a set of examples where sometimes the dominant narrative is incorrect. This article represents one of those cases. Identifying more would be hard work and objectivity would be difficult, but I think possible. Addressing your final point, I think there is scope for doing that. Having a provenance aspect to embeddings would do…

> To be able to do this you would need to have a set of examples where sometimes the dominant narrative is incorrect. You are sidestepping the issue here. The issue is NOT lack of such database per se, the issue is lack of impartial oracle used to build such database. > instead of a straight text to token embedding to have a richer input processing model that takes text plus other known context data to produce an emb…

>The issue is NOT lack of such database per se, the issue is lack of impartial oracle used to build such database. You don't need a perfectly impartial oracle, sure that would make the task much simpler. You build examples from instances where this is generally agreed to be the case.

The notable aspect here is that oracles predict the future. but all data is from the past. You can build examples from cases where, with the benefit of hindsight you know the truth of the outcome even if the majority consensus was the opposite at the time that the data was created.

Perhaps Bitcoin is a good example, albeit on a different time scale. There are ample examples of arguments about Bitcoin predicting various outcomes, that data is available now. At some point in the future it will be obvious which of those predicted outcomes is false. Any widely believed outcome that turned out to be false is a candidate for the data set. If there is any signal in that data to reveal that it is was going to be false the model has potential to learn it. if there is no signal in that data then on average signalless examples will balance out to have no overall impact.

>The issue is lack of context informing us of the sincerity behind the claim, therefore proposal is to use LLMs to infer that. When presented with difficulties inferring that context from immediate message, your proposal is to build broader context and then feed it to LLM. To do what, spit it back packed in certain language tone? Do you see the tautology here? There is no tautology here. The additional context is the provenance of the document and a combination of data that is clearly quantifiable by automated processes. If you note all of the examples of tagging types I gave, they are all things that can be calculated analytically. Age of code can be determined by looking at git logs, when a model generates output itself it can tag that to say that it was generated by itself. User input can be identified at the user interface and all other data that enters the model can be therefore marked as not coming via the user interface.

I proposed no LLM to do any of this, nor even for the translation of that data into the model. I suggested a model, that may involve a transformer, it may not. That input layer is only a translator to turn that additional context into terms that the LLM knows.

A LLM will have an internal way to represent the notion of code that was part of a successful build. Or that a word is from a peer reviewed scientific paper,or a reddit post, or that it does not know the source. Any information you can analytically determine about a source can be fed into the LLM along with its token if you know how the LLM represents that information in its embedding space.

Turning data we know something about into a structure that is how an existing model would represent the same thing is precisely a task that machine learning can currently solve.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#947

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on how you wrote or worded it, that IS instigating violence. "We should just execute them and save money" is instigating violence. If you aren't willing to spend resources because it's "obvious" to you, you do not care about Justice. Cops always think they got the right guy, and they are regularly blatantly wrong, including for people on death row.

Talking about procedures and sentencing for a heinous crime isn't instigating violence lol. Is sending people to prison instigating violence? I really expected more from the HN crowd but this place has obviously deteriorated

Sending innocent people to prison would absolutely be a horrible form of violence against those people.

That's why we have trials, with independent judges, juries and rules.

Remember when the Boston marathon bombing happened, and Reddit users identified dozens of different people as obviously, and definitely, the bombers (https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/reddit-regre...)? Remember when the LAPD opened fire on multiple random civilians who they thought might be Christopher Dorner (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Dorner_shootings_a...) remember when the DC sniper was active and the tip line received thousands of calls from people claiming to have 100% certainty that they saw the sniper, then describe people of conflicting races, ages and physical descriptions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks)

We have trials so that we make sure we put the bad guys in prison, not random innocent people who were misidentified. They're for the benefit of everyone else, not for the criminal.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#948

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh I’m definitely biased, I’m not a huge fan of quasi-fascist morons hiding behind a thin veneer of legitimacy while breaking the law, electing a sex offender, destroying every relationship with their foreign allies and engaging in hilariously blatant corruption. Nor am I fan of their voters/supporters. At this point if you don’t oppose them you implicitly support them, the normal rules no longer apply.

>At this point if you don’t oppose them you implicitly support them, the normal rules no longer apply. ^ The average far-left in a nutshell. You are either with us, or against us. There is no centralist.

Your position is as silly as you view the parent's. It's natural for anyone who thinks there are active crimes being committed to not engage in "compromise" until the other side agrees that they are crimes.

For example, I don't think it would be logical for someone who literally believes abortion is murder to bother allying with a side that doesn't believe as such unless there is a bigger crime that is being commited that they both can agree on. See, both sides would agree that that compromising with someone condoning murder for the sake of centrism would be fucking stupid. Obviously no side thinks they're condoning murder, they simplly don't agree that the action constitutes murder.

So instead of pointlessly championing centrism for the sake of centrism, it's much more constructive to argue: no, they are not a sex offender, no they are not directly engaging or aiding and abetting corruption, no those foreign allies are not worthy allies because of xyz etc etc.

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#949

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Denying existence or identity These are different things (which was most of the point), > will fall under that curtain either way ... but I fail to see how in either case. > Both dehumanize I don't see this, either. Again, the actual act we refer to is: > refusing to see other people as they see themselves, in one specific aspect Is there any other aspect of how people see themselves which would lead you to the sam…

>but I fail to see how in either case. You're free to argue with thr reddit admins on how. It's not my call. But as a hint, it's pretty easy to deny existence when you dehumanize someone. If you can't see that, you may need to read more history.

> But as a hint, it's pretty easy to deny existence when you dehumanize someone.

This has the logic backwards, and is also playing semantic games with the meaning of "deny existence". We're talking about a claim that someone already does not exist (which is why people think it's absurd: they're often actively having a conversation with the person they're falsely accused of believing not to exist), not the act of causing someone to cease to exist (an imprecise, colloquial way of referring to murder).

Re: A competitor crippled a $23.5M bootcamp by becoming a Reddit moderator

#950

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

>Don't be curmudgeonly. Thoughtful criticism is fine, but please don't be rigidly or generically negative. >Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

There was nothing shallow or curmudgeonly about my response. I was careful in explaining why giving examples like this is missing the point and why the examples are not what I'm talking about. I excused myself from attempting a point-by-point rebuttal because I know from past experience that this only leads the discussion deeper into the mire with no insight.

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

I have been trying my hardest to explain reasoning rather than simply accumulating evidence. But the entire discussion has been wildly off-topic from the beginning, so I don't see a reason to continue anyway.

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