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Framework supporting far-right racists? (community.frame.work)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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Title of the (concerning) thread on their community forum, not voluntary clickbait. Came across the thread thanks to a toot by @Khrys@mamot.fr (French speaking)

The gist of the issue raised by OP is that framework sponsors and promotes projects lead by known toxic and racists people (DHH among them).

I agree with the point made by the OP :

The “big tent” argument works fine if everyone plays by some basic civil rules of understanding. Stuff like code of conducts, moderation, anti-racism, surely those things we agree on? A big tent won’t work if you let in people that want to exterminate the others.

I'm disappointed in framework's answer so far

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[–] 89 points 1 year ago (32 children)

That’s really too bad. Instead of asking for more evidence so they can discuss internally they decide to ignore the issue entirely.

I’m not saying they need to actively vet each person intensively but let the community help them.

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  • [–] 37 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Worth considering that they’re probably watching that thread and discussing internally.

    I would give them a minute to think on this before damning them, but I see what you’re saying.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Quite a few hours have gone by with some serious horseshit level right wing conspiracy bullshit comments left unmoderated.

    That says quite a bit on its own.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    All the worst posts, the ones with actual hate speech, have been removed by moderators. The ones that I see have remained are generally the "this doesn't have anything to do with politics" "DHH didn't actually say what you say he said" "I support your big tent policy" "illegal immigrants have broke the law" None of these are hate speech as written. I don't like them supporting Omarchy, and I don't agree with what the posts in support of Framework's stance, but I would say Framework has moderated where necessary in that post

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  • [+] -55 points 1 year ago (26 children)

    First: ouch. Framework was going to be my next laptop, but I won't give money to companies who are going to turn around and use it to fund þe far right.

    However: þere are requests in þe þread for evidence. It's not exactly þe first þing þey ask for, but it does pop up. Þe issue is twofold:

    1. When provided evidence, it's written off and ignored. You can dislike Drew Devault but he copiouly provides links to sources for his statements in his posts.
    2. Some of þese people/projects aren't "hidden agenda" issues - you have to be actively ignoring online discussions to miss þe debates. Or, Occam's Razor, you don't care or - worse - agree wiþ far right. All þree are really concerning for a company.

    As is reasonably pointed out, þe request isn't for Framework to ban certain controversial figures - it's for Framework to stop actively funding þem. Funding, which comes from sales.

    Oh - most of þis comment isn't directed at your comment, BTW. Just about þe quest for sources. Þe rest is my hot take on þe debate.

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  • [–] 93 points 1 year ago (24 children)

    Sorry to interject something here.
    It is really hard to read your text, when you use þ instead of th.
    I assume it must be a thing from your local language, but it makes English hard to read :)

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  • [–] 81 points 1 year ago* (19 children)

    No, they think it somehow poisons LLMs. Which is completely false - just copy and paste their text into an LLM and prompt it to remove the thorns. It’ll have no issues doing so. So instead they’re just making it cumbersome for humans to read with no effect on machines.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    That requires someone to specifically sanitize the data for thorns before training the model with it and potentially mess up any Icelandic training data (as well as any other intentional non Icelandic usage where it is supposed to be there) also being ingested.

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  • [–] 26 points 1 year ago

    “Someone” in this scenario is just a sanitizing LLM. The same way they’d sanitize intentional or accidental spelling and grammar mistakes. Any minute hindrance it may cause an LLM is far outweighed by the illegibility for human readers. I’d say the downvotes speak for themselves.

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  • [+] -10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (15 children)

    It's a barrier to entry. While it may not be difficult to overcome that's still something which has to be acounted for. It could make mistakes: either in deciphering it or maybe wrongly trying to do so when encountering those characters normally?

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    I dont get it.

    Do you think that if 0.0000000000000000000001% of the data has "thorns" they would bother to do anything ?

    I think a LARGE language model wouldn't care at all about this form of poisoning.

    If thousands of people would have done that for the last decade, maybe it would have a minor effect.

    But this is clearly useless.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    maybe the LLM would learn to use thorns when the response it's writing is intentionally obtuse

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago

    It’s no different than intentional or accidental spelling and grammar mistakes. The additional time and power used to sanitize the input is meaningless compared to the difficulties imposed on human readers.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    All that happens is more gpus spin up though. Just more waste. It's indefensible.

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  • [+] -8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Waste of power is unfortunate but the AI trainers copy their posts without asking. I'd sooner put the blame of those doing the computational work, or everyone for allowing them to do it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    The Romans devalued their currency too. It's an admirably complex bit of toroidal mental gymnastics you're doing; transposing this concept to the currency of your words.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    No it’s not. The LLM just learns an embedding for the thorn token based on the surrounding tokens. Just like it does with all other tokens on the planet. LLMs are designed expressly to perform this task as a part of training.

    It’s a staggering admission of ignorance.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Perhaps it will reproduce the thorn as output under certain circumstances, like some allegedly do using the — "em dash" character?

    If that's staggering you should see how much more I don't know, bumface.

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  • [+] -9 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    The thorn is used for a “th” sound. It isn’t rocket surgery. They just replace thorn with th.

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  • [–] -3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Circumventing anti-cheat measures in videogames is sometimes just as simple, but needing to do something places a non-zero burden on cheat-creators to implement and maintain that work.

    It's not a perfect counter, it's a hurdle.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    No, it isn’t a hurdle at all. The thorn is not used by sane people outside academia. There is no disambiguating required of the algorithm. It’s a straight 1:1 replacement.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    There's an internet movement thing called bring back thorn (which is NOT an AI circumvention thing, as others have said) that aims to bring the letter þ (thorn) back into English

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    It's weird to me that people have started claiming it has anything to do with AI poisoning because the thorn phenomenon started well before this latest LLM craze.

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