There might be a universe in which magic exists. However, there is no universe in which I exist and magic exists. That’s because I was born into a mundane version of the universe, so there are infinite possibilities, but because my existence in a magical universe is 0

That doesn’t really follow. Specifically, you’re putting way too much credit (infinity times as much credit as you should, in fact) on your ability to know exactly how your universe works. You’re saying there are zero hypothetical worlds in which you are the person you are now and also magic exists. I’m sure you can see how this is not true; for all you know magic is very obvious in your world and you just got mind-controlled, a minute ago, to your current state of mind. Or maybe you just never noticed it and hence grew up thinking you are in a mundane universe, which is very unlikely but not probability-0. Or one of many many other explanations, which are all unlikely (nothing involving a universe with magic in it is going to be likely), but very much not probability-0.

Sure, in Firefox itself it wasn’t a severe vulnerability. It’s way worse on standalone PDF readers, though:

In applications that embed PDF.js, the impact is potentially even worse. If no mitigations are in place (see below), this essentially gives an attacker an XSS primitive on the domain which includes the PDF viewer. Depending on the application this can lead to data leaks, malicious actions being performed in the name of a victim, or even a full account take-over. On Electron apps that do not properly sandbox JavaScript code, this vulnerability even leads to native code execution (!). We found this to be the case for at least one popular Electron app.

Huh? What do you mean “if”? Such a PDF vulnerability literally did happen a few months ago; fixed in Firefox v.126: https://codeanlabs.com/blog/research/cve-2024-4367-arbitrary-js-execution-in-pdf-js/.

There’s no real need for pirate ai when better free alternatives exist.

There’s plenty of open-source models, but they very much aren’t better, I’m afraid to say. Even if you have a powerful workstation GPU and can afford to run the serious 70B opensource models at low quantization, you’ll still get results significantly worse than the cutting-edge cloud models. Both because the most advanced models are proprietary, and because they are big and would require hundreds of gigabytes of VRAM to run, which you can trivially rent from a cloud service but can’t easily get in your own PC.

The same goes for image generation - compare results from proprietary services like midjourney to the ones you can get with local models like SD3.5. I’ve seen some clever hacks in image generation workflows - for example, using image segmentation to detect a generated image’s face and hands and then a secondary model to do a second pass over these regions to make sure they are fine. But AFAIK, these are hacks that modern proprietary models don’t need, because they have gotten over those problems and just do faces and hands correctly the first time.

This isn’t to say that running transformers locally is always a bad idea; you can get great results this way - but people saying it’s better than the nonfree ones is mostly cope.

Incredibly weird that this thread was up for two days without anyone posting a link to the actual answer to OP’s question, which is g4f.

Run for office? With what money?

Note that openai’s original whisper models are pretty slow; in my experience the distil-whisper project (via a tool like whisperx) is more than 10x faster.

Really? This is the opposite of my experience with (distil-)whisper - I use it to generate subtitles for stuff like podcasts and was stunned at first by how high-quality the results are. I typically use distil-whisper/distil-large-v3, locally. Was it among the models you tried?

How’s musk related to this one?

My point is just that nobody really thinks it should be a free for all.

Don’t made judgements about everybody based on one guy. I’m on an instance that doesn’t defederate lemmygrad or lemmy.ml, so I commonly see utterly insane tankie takes in popular, and of course also in various comments - and yet I don’t want those people to not have a platform. Because I trust just about noone to decide whether my opinions should be censored, and if that means also not censoring the opinions of people who I think are very wrong, I’m willing to take that trade.

Yet, people suffering from it can lead happy and fulfilling lives.

Sure, it’s possible for a person with a severe disability to grow up happy. But when one is making a decision in real life (like having a child), one should consider an average case, not a exceptional one. And the average case for an example like Down’s Syndrome is pretty bad. It is a bit unclear how to quantify the suffering in this particular disease’s case because the main harm to the child is lifelong mental impairment and assorted physical disabilities - but it is at least going to inflict suffering on the child’s family, since caring for a child with a severe disability for their entire life isn’t exactly fun.

It is a slippery slope that, if not navigated carefully, has historically leaded to atrocities.

I don’t see the relation. You’ll notice that I’m not proposing killing off disabled people for the “improvement of society” or whatever it was that nazis called it. I am not doing this because nonconsensually killing a person is a harm to them. But deciding not to have a child isn’t the same thing as murdering a person - it’s not harming anyone who exists, and hence may well be morally better than having a child.

(Oh, I suppose you might mean that I’m arguing that there are circumstances in which it’s morally bad for a person to have a child, which is similar to nazi eugenics in that I’m deciding whether or not people should have children? In that case, my answer is that the difference is that I’m a person, not an authoritarian government, and I don’t have power (nor, indeed, the desire) to force people to obey my personal moral judgements.)

Developers usually make $50-300/hour.

That seems like an overestimate even for US. More importantly, I don’t think most open source developers earn this much money (otherwise they wouldn’t ask for tiny donations), and hence it’s not the relevant figure. If I’m wrong about this, please do tell me - I very much would like to know if the hours I occasionally spend on open-source contributions can instead earn me hundreds of dollars. ;)

Depends - do you have crypto?

I see. No, I don’t think I have any specific questions at this point.

carries the implication that the world would be happier were you to just kill off the huge segment of the population who end up on the negative side.

Not necessarily. Someone dying isn’t the same as someone not existing at all.* It does imply that the world would be better off if it stopped existing, and under some assumptions implies it’d be moral to, say, instantly end all of humanity. I’m not sure that these conclusions are necessarily “contrary to our instincts”.

*one reason why this has to be true, is that if we didn’t distinguish between those, then if an average life had positive value, it’d be immoral not to have as many children as possible, until the marginal value of an extra life fell to zero once again (kind of like how Malthus thought societies worked, except as a supposedly moral thing to do). That conclusion is something I do consider very contrary to my instincts.

I do tend towards a variant of utilitarianism myself as it has a useful ability to weigh options that are both bad or both good, but for the reason above I tend to define “zero” as a complete lack of happiness/maximum of suffering, and being unhappy as having low happiness rather than negative (making a negative value impossible), though that carries it’s own implications that I know not everyone would agree with.

I too am an utilitarianist, sure. I’m not sure I can possibly buy “maximum suffering and no happiness” being the zero point. I very strongly feel that there are plenty of lives that would be way worse than dying (and than never having existed, too). It’s a coherent position I think, just a very alien one to me.

That’s literally true, but the simple counterargument is that the happiness/suffering conversion coefficient is a matter of one’s values and not particularly up for debate - so there’s nothing incoherent about, say, the position that your child living a happy fullfilling life for a thousand years but stubbing their toe once is enough suffering to make their life net negative.

This is a great comment. I’ll add that anyone thinking about disability ethics should read Two Arms and a Head, lest they start taking too seriously the idea that disabilities have no effect on quality of life.

I agree that there’s a lot of space between “considered disabled” and “horrible life”, but OP said “suffer their whole life” which I associated with the latter.

Is there some feature comparison of lemmy vs mbin vs other reddit-like platforms? There was some major reason why I didn’t like kbin, but I forgot why.

What’s so hilarious about it?