alt Hacker News> This lady was just using it as a personal journal. Basically a glorified ELIZA. That kind of thing can be done with really small models locally these days.
And she's facing felony charges. Yeah, folks on hacker news can talk about technical solutions all day long, but that's not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that we've allowed our digital infrastructure that includes everything from banks to schools to doctors to become adversarial to us. In some cases predatory.
It's effectively untrustworthy, like being charged a felony for walking across a bridge incorrectly. That's not a "I'll host a small model in my garage" problem. It's a we need the government to do its job problem.
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I mean, this is also just kind of how mandatory reporting works.
If you tell a teacher, a therapist or a priest that you are going to kill somebody, in many states they do actually have to report that and can be held liable for the resulting crime if they do not.
Every time we have a mass shooting in the US it inevitably comes up that they wrote it down or told somebody and then the next logical question becomes “how could we have stopped a mass casualty event?”
Well this is why I think small local models are the opportunity of a generation. Because it’s a bit transgressive these days to say you don’t need a big centralized service that spies on you and requires a subscription. It’s not the absolute best, but it’s yours.
I agree in general that we technical solutions to social/political problems are suboptimal. But technical solutions don’t require the political system to work, which is a very attractive property at a time when politics seems broken.
There is a counterpoint that retreating into technical solutions only cedes more ground and makes things worse, and for that I don’t have a good reply other than the fact that life is short.