here it is, no need to click anything:
The hero we needed 🙏
I meant the OP who screengrabbed the tweet for us non-Tweeters 😭
He may be right in this case, but he was never a hero.
Would you care to expand on this? My impression is that he did what he did out of ethical concerns, and has paid a high price for it.
IIRC these are words from the man himself. In a documentary about him, he said he was not a hero, just an ordinary guy, and you should not need to be a hero to stand up and do the right thing.
That’s a very humble thing to say and I would argue makes him even more of a hero.
What is a hero? Someone who makes personal sacrifice for the good of others? Someone who risks enduring the worst possible scenario for no reason other than to expose blatant corruption of the highest order, to protect civil liberties of hundreds of millions? Not sure I could think of anyone more deserving of the title.
Snowden doesn’t consider himself a hero, but many others do.
https://www.amnesty.ie/edward-snowden-hero-not-traitor/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/14/edward-snowden-hero-government-scare-tactics
Beyond the point that others have made about Snowden not considering himself a hero, for me there’s two facts that I just can’t get past when it comes to Snowden:
- He ended up in Russia somehow. Seems an odd place for a freedom fighter to end up going.
- He first contacted Glenn Greenwald, who now spends his days showing up on Tucker’s show to spout straight Russian pro-war, anti-Ukraine Propaganda
One of these could be a coincidence, but I’ve not seen a lot of double coincidences in my life. It’s funny because I agree that the surveillance program got out of control and needs more transparency, and unlike Tucker and Greenwald, Snowden sounds like someone who truly believes what he says rather than a sleazy liar working for someone else. Emotionally I want to believe in Snowden, but I’m also a strong believer in probabilities and Snowden not acting at Russia’s behest and for some sort of personal reward seems hard to believe at this point.
- . He ended up in Russia somehow. Seems an odd place for a freedom fighter to end up going.
Isn’t russia the only country that accepted him when he didn’t had any others choice ?
No, he was literally trapped there on a flight stopover trying to get from Hong-kong to Equador without passing airports in countires that would have arrested him. Russia was probably one of the countries he was least interested in staying.
Well, this is what I thought too. Also, any other country under US influence would have handed him over to the US. See the saga that poor Assange has gone through. What worries me is that public opinion is rather silent to stories like those of Assange and Snowden. Whistle blowing should be seen as a right. If the organization I work for is ethically and morally misbehaving, I have the right to blow the whistle through the right internal channels to start with. If nobody listens, then you take it to the next level.
Also, any other country under US influence would have handed him over to the US
You’re exactly right. I wish for every USA’s influenced countries to get their sovereignity back somehow.
This is Snowden’s claim and it’s not implausible, but it’s also quite a coincidence that he’d end up in the top country for spying on the US it’s also possible that he wanted to be in Russia and simply made up the part about it just being a stopover. If Snowden was looking for asylum, there are several other countries that don’t extradite to the US. I can see why he’d temporarily be stuck in Russia, but after several years he couldn’t find any other way out? There was apparently a privately-funded attempt to get him to Iceland, but the last update on it was that they were in contact with a “third party representing” Snowden…and then nothing.
A third fact (in addition to Russiabot Greenwald’s involvement) that makes it questionable is that he eventually applied for Russian citizenship in 2020. One explanation is that he could do this to get a Russian passport and fly somewhere else with no US extradition treaty, but he hasn’t chosen to do so yet.
If you read any of his memoirs or interviews, you’d know that his intended destination was Ecuador, and he couldn’t fly out of Russia due to his passport being revoked. He lived in the Russian airport until he was granted asylum, so it’s not like he had much choice.
I didn’t see any sources that went against those claims except from WikiLeaks, so I don’t see much of a reason to discredit them.
Russia are the good guys, we are like comically evil. We couped ukraine in 2014orchestrated euromaidan and got them to shell russian civilians in the 2 independent republics. we built 13 CIA bases in ukraine (per wapo). loaded them with NATO weapons and training, including of neo nazi battallions like right sector, azov brigade and tornado batallion. fast forward to now, and 800,000+ ukranians are dead and the ukranian SBU which is 100% controlled by the CIA attempts weekly acts of terrorism against russia. on the grand scheme of things THE PLAN FAILED!! https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB10014.html
it even goes back earlier than that as we supported Banderaism after WW2 https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/operation-anyface-how-us-army-shielded-ukrainian-nationalist-soviet-intelligence
if hollywood portrayed what the US does it would be deemed unrealistic because of how comically evil it is
Then rather than engaging in an emotional battle, read the content of his statements and judge their veracity as an idea separate from the man. If motive is impossible to discern from the data you have, you need more data, right? At least if you know what it is that he is accusing the govt of, specifically, will help to determine more of the motivations behind his choice, right?
I’m not saying read them and believe them, but rather cast your critical eye upon his focus, and then perhaps you can poke holes in his conclusions or discern what, if he’s lying, those lies are meant to achieve
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
straight Russian pro-war, anti-Ukraine Propaganda
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
“Russian pro-war, anti-Ukraine Propaganda” is when things are actually true and not CIA or state department propaganda
I’m pretty sure they were referring to the user who shared the full quote, not Snowden himself.
This sort of activity should he banned. If you want to post a screenshot, OK, but never without a link.
I think you need to take a break and get some perspective.
Besides, the Twitter link was already posted by the OP, why would it need to be posted again?
I think you need to take a break and get some perspective.
Besides, the Twitter link was already posted by the OP, why would it need to be posted again?
Posting exTwitter links without a screenshot in a privacy community feels like a kind of oxymoron to me, especially after exTwitter made API changes and what not which made third party apps and software like Nitter kind of useless.
X requires login to view tweets, and can only get away with this because they tricked users into believing they’d allow free access while they were growing as a platform. Let’s not do anything to help them.
I use alt frontends for that
lol no, fuck X
“I don’t care about citing sources because I don’t like the platform”
Citation needed.
Don’t use X, use this instead https://farside.link/twitter.com/Snowden/status/1801610725229498403
Being able to read replies on twitter reminded me why it doesn’t matter if you can’t read them
Yes, the answers are garbage most of the time, but floods are sometimes necessary.
I find this behaviour super strange. Why can’t I see replies on a twitter post when I’m on a smartphone regardless of desktop or mobile version of that page.
Are you logged in? Elon took away lurkers’ ability to view replies or look at profiles a while ago. Without an account all you can do is see tweets that you were given a direct link for.
Yeah I’m not logged in.
Holy crap there are still working nitter instances? God bless
Hosted on poast, though, which is defederated from literally everyone decent for a good reason
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Dude gave up his entire life to send a warning to as many people as possible. You think he’s gonna not post further warnings on Twitter?
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I think he’s fully under the control of the Russian government posting on a platform that is owned by a Russian asset.
this cold war propaganda belongs in a museum
He is. He is just another propaganda tool in putins pocket.
You’re just like the ones i hear saying RATM went soft. Stop being a dumbass, it’s infectious for some and the rest of us are embarrassed for you.
This comment isn’t just to get you angry, though it is that too. The second part, here is to tell you that ad hominem is a widely used propaganda method to shut down thought on important topics.
Does where snowden decides to post his message reduce, at all, the content of that message?
Easy! No. Not at all.
So don’t carry water for the ones who silence dissent. It makes you useful to them, and useless to the rest of the world
People say RATM went soft? I know this isn’t the point of your reply but why do people say that?
Probably the people who paid attention to jackholes like Tom Morello walk around shitting on local businesses because “don’t you know who I am.”
Tom and folks like him are way more concerned with the trappings of being famous than they are with actual workers gaining actual rights as evidenced by shitting on a local business because the business was already at capacity and didn’t make room for his “fame.”
He didn’t even do any research on the business before labelling them anti-worker when what they really were were anti-special-treatment-for-famous-people.
You would think Tom Morello of RATM would be on board.
So yeah, soft.
According to that article, he and the owner of the business patched things up and reached a positive resolution. Continuing to be mad about it 10 years later, particularly when no one involved actually cares, is the most terminally online behaviour. Switch off the phone, go outside and breathe some fresh air.
There’s lots of em, some are in the replies you got before mine. The point isn’t whether you believe them, the point of them is to make you not want to listen to RATM. Hell after 9/11 there was a memo put out asking radio stations not to play certain 'anti establishment songs, but only one band was called out specifically for total blackout. Wanna guess which it was?
Their message is powerful, and getting more obviously true every day. I dont give a single fuck about whether they for paid for being a successful band, and neither should anyone with a modicum of understanding in the message they speak.
Regardless, thinking they’re hypocrites isn’t what matters, people are free to think that. The only thing that matters is whether thinking that way stops one from listening to their words, which are true no matter what you think of them. If one decides not to listen don’t because someone said they’re now RWTM, somebody in psyops is happy for their ignorance
Wanna guess which it was?
Reagan Youth?
In U.S., A's for apathy Not bullshit democracy Red white and blue is all you see But does it mean you're really free? In U.S., A's for anarchy Not bullshit democracy I want total liberty I want peace and anarchy They tell us how to act and be Fuck that mental slavery With standards and authority How can you think you're really free?Be proud that you're a white Amerikkkan Blonde hair, blue eyes - a fine new aryan Supremacy's the white man's burden A final solution for the new aryans Death to the nazis and the ku klux klan! Anarchy in the fatherland! Anarchy for the new aryans No master race is gonna rule this land! New order? No order! New order? No order! Disorder! Disorder now! Now
I’ve never heard soft but I’ve heard hypocritical. Tom morello comes from a wealthy background and went to Harvard, the band censored themselves on tv when asked to do so, they live in gated communities and run elbows with the people who run the machine they are raging against, and they came out and supported Hillary Clinton (who is the definition of the machine). Myself and others aren’t saying they should’ve supported trump (who is also apart of the machine), but they should have called for more grassroots political candidates and supported them.
and they came out and supported Hillary Clinton
With all due respect, what reality do you exist in?
Lol ratm plays 10000 people concerts that cost $150+ to buy tickets for while the fans are bombarded with corporate advertisements for the entire time
Fuck them
See guys? Comments like this one. Note how the premise of my comment was ignored and they engaged in ad hominem, while saying (without saying) that you should ignore them completely. This is the kinda fud to look out for
Sorry I’m just replying to the bait you put in the first sentence of your comment.
Have fun hanging out with 90s finance bros in the pit while they complain about ratm being too political while sipping their 20 dollar beers
My point is their message definitely has less.meaning when its wrapped in Pepsi and hand sanitizer ads the only people who can afford to pay for it are apathetic die hard fans who are conditioned to ignore the hypocracy and rich assholes who want a night out to say they saw this band before they died.
I was invited to this by one of those die hard fans who bought an extra ticket. The entire experience was absolutely disgusting.
Don’t apologize, you did a great job. Now id like you to read the entire chain along with snowden’s words so you can catch up on the whole point of this thread. Do this and you’ll be less “object lesson” and more “lesson learned”.
I’ll edit my comment too. See how this commenter is doubling down? They offer nothing, (even couched within their ad hominem), of substance. I mean to say that they disparage the “message” as having "less meaning"without really explaining why.
Indeed, the commenter invites the reader (by agreeing with them) to engage in ‘virtue signaling’ (by again saying without saying), conflating their distaste for corporate sponsorship and expensive tickets (something we all share) with a reason to not listen to RATM at all.
It’s another great example of bad reasoning one might fall prey to if one doesn’t engage in critical thinking.
No, I’m replying to your reference to an irrelevant band who sold their image warner bros and perpetuates all of this through continuing to tour under these conditions.
Ok, youre one of them who can’t stop replying when their feeling are hurt. Shoot your last shot in, and go smoke a cig or something, cuz it’s the last reply for you today. Ill check in with you later, maybe in a week.
Well said! +1
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The important thing for you to consider is if i did, would what i just said be less true? I invite you to consider this, and not in an Internet fight way where we flex our shit talking muscles at each other, but in a “hey, maybe there is a point worthy of debate” kinda way.
Like id be interested in considering the point that "the messenger does matter. I’m sure there are cases, but they’d be extreme cases to my mind.
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C’mon, we are in a privacy sub. Maybe you should take your frustration with me to pms and ill help you out, privately. The need to fluff your feathers for the others in the room is distracting you.
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Exactly I find it funny too, why doesn’t he at least mirror his posts to Mastodon or just post on there, it’s just a copy/paste…or is it difficult on Qubes ?
On the other hand, normies are still on Twitter so… I don’t blame him
Twitter had a TOR service last time I checked, I haven’t seen a single Mastodon instance available as TOR service.
Exactly… “had”
Check again, it’s broken now…
I haven’t seen a single Mastodon instance available as TOR service.
Kolektiva dot social is Mastodon server for activists, and they have a Onion version, and they never track you like Twitter does…
there is more into the anonymity game than just using TOR, other networks has their own approaches, and TOR is not perfect
Edit: but that’s another subject…
Twitter had a TOR service last time I checked, I haven’t seen a single Mastodon instance available as TOR service.
TIL Mastodon can be run as tor service : https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/optional/tor/
the nazi site?
It would be better if he posted on Mastodon
Better how?
In every way? No downside to at least having a presence in the fediverse IMO
He should do both. The message getting to as many people as possible is more important that he posting on Twitter.
It doesn’t have the audience.
People who are trying to spread a message might possibly consider that relevant but you know, geek out in the corner with the rest of the “I hate this fact” downvoters 😅
The way it gets an audience is through adoption by some “larger” people, like but not limited to snowden.
Those people start mirroring their twitter on masto, and eventually start mirroring masto on the twitter, then the next time there’s a musk fit they have a place to go ready and can post “due to the actions of this site’s owner, this profile will cease posting. If you wish to continue following me I’ll still be posting on masto.”
People don’t switch now because Ryan Reynolds isn’t on masto yet and what he says is paramount to their survival, once he switches they safely can. (Disclaimer: the use of Ryan Reynolds is purely sardonic, could have used Taylor Swift or whatever hot star of the day you choose.)
Don’t trust the cloud. You can setup AI locally.
Is there a magazine or site that breaks this down for the less tech savvy? And is the quality of the AI on par?
Check my notes https://fabien.benetou.fr/Content/SelfHostingArtificialIntelligence but as others suggested a good way to start is probably https://github.com/ollama/ollama/ and if you need a GUI https://gpt4all.io
I’m not the person who asked, but still thanks for the information. I might give this a try soon.
Ditto, thanks to everyone’s for their suggestions
You should have at least 16 GB of RAM available to run the 13B models,
Is this gpu ram or cpu ram?
likely GPU ram, there is some tech that can offload ram, but generally it’s all hosted in VRAM, this requirement will likely fade as NPUs start becoming a thing though.
Either works, but system RAM is at least an order of magnitude slower, more play by mail than chat…
pretty sure it can run on either, but cpus are slow compared to gpus, often to the point of being impractical
On par? No. Good enough? Definitely. Ollama baby
Ollama with Lava and Mistral
Your best bet is YouTubing ollama.
But I run the cloud myself
ollama is your friend
*Mistral
ollama supports mistral. but there are much better lms these days. I personally prefer aya.
Mate, please be kind and help a fellow brother with that…
For example I need a tool that will “automagically” sort all my documents, photos and videos on premises.
Thank you!
Sort them… by what?
Just fackin’ sort it ooouuttt!
Edit, but seriously sorting in most scenarios is just by date created or name, which most file explorers can do.
That Isn’t generally an AI task.
If OP wants the AI to read the file and sort by colour for example, then this is maybe an AI task but sounds more like a software task.
Scenario time: A loved one has recently passed away, and I want to find all the photos I have of them. I would love to be able to have a local AI perform facial recognition to help me find these photos. The classification and tagging info doesn’t get fed into surveillance capitalist garbage, and I’m still able to benefit.
Mate, something like Immich or digikam (if you want local) will do a good job at this. Not perfect but perfection is utopia. I fed 40k images to Immich and it did a reasonable job in not too many hrs.
scenario time: you haven’t taken 40 thousand pictures over the last three years because you aren’t cripplingly addicted to technology so you can sort through them manually in about 10 hours or so.
You’re proposing to waste 10 hours sorting photos when the right tool could probably do it in less than 2 minutes? What?
And how does taking pictures translate to being addicted to tech?? We’ve had photography for over 100 years
they’re photos of someones dead family relative? Are you really suggesting spending 10 hours on that would be a “waste of time” seems rather disingenuous, or at the very least, incredibly rude.
Also, the AI could just be wrong. You’re more likely to sort much better, at least according to what you want the sorting to be.
And how does taking pictures translate to being addicted to tech?
Because some people take so many pictures it’s actually kind of concerning to me whether or not they would be able to exist in the world if they couldn’t. I think some people just need to focus on enjoying the experience more.
There’s no reason to judge someone for taking many photos. If you’re not willing to help, you don’t have to. There’s no need to write sarcastic comments.
i was primarily just covering the scenario where you don’t have so many photos it isn’t impossible to sort through. I’d be a little concerned if you took so many photos that you couldn’t sort through them.
Also, it’s not sarcastic.
An LLM like Ollama won’t help with that. Something like Photoprism could, it uses ML to automatically tag media and recognize people.
Even OpenAI can’t do that lol
I use Ollama plus openwebUI. It won’t sort your documents but you can upload a doc for AI tasks.
Local AI will be harvested - if not today, then as soon as tomorrow. I recommend not trusting any system like this with any sensitive information… Or, honestly, with most non-sensitive information.
How? It is running locally in a VM. I could even air gap the VM if I wanted
This guy is clueless
If you connect it to the Internet then sure it can be easily harvested by large companies. Pretty sure you can host an offline AI in a device you have made sure the hardware isn’t gonna be phoning home and it’ll probably be fairly safe if you aren’t an idiot like me and actually know what you’re doing.
If you install it locally, it will be as secure as any other thing you do on your computer.
@AdrianTheFrog @privacy @AceFuzzLord actually, it depends on the code. If it’s no open source you can’t really know what it is doing with your data. Therefore not all things you install in you local computer are equally insecure (or secure)
When people say Local AI, they mean things like the Free / Open Source Ollama (https://github.com/ollama/ollama/), which you can read the source code for and check it doesn’t have anything to phone home, and you can completely control when and if you upgrade it. If you don’t like something in the code base, you can also fork it and start your own version. The actual models (e.g. Mistral is a popular one) used with Ollama are commonly represented in GGML format, which doesn’t even carry executable code - only massive multi-dimensional arrays of numbers (tensors) that represent the parameters of the LLM.
Now not trusting that the output is correct is reasonable. But in terms of trusting the software not to spy on you when it is FOSS, it would be no different to whether you trust other FOSS software not to spy on you (e.g. the Linux kernel, etc…). Now that is a risk to an extent if there is an xz style attack on a code base, but I don’t think the risks are materially different for ‘AI’ compared to any other software.
if you use windows, sure.
Don’t use windows.
Yay. Pre-crime
The NSA supposedly has a in house AI model that can search though collected data for suspects
My dude, IKEA has an in-house AI model. Every insurance company has one. Subway (the sandwich shop) has one.
Saying that the NSA “supposedly” has an AI model that can search through data is like saying they “maybe” have a coffee machine.
The governance has a secret system.
Amazon had also appointed a former NSA director. Actually, it was Snowden’s director.
Obviously, which 🤡 had to wait for him to tell them?
I never did…
Yeah, seriously… We’ve had SO many books and movies about this, everyone.
Well, it’s all over for me I guess. Now the NSA will have access to all my questions on how to merge pandas dataframes. Those bastards!
Any online service into which you enter information has the capability to save that information for its own purposes. This includes all the people entering personal or identifying or really any information into “AI” products.
Given that it’s not even particularly useful, I recommend just not using “AI” if you’re not sure how to protect yourself.
Run local
If you do run local, properly use a firewall to prevent it from phoning home. Or airgap.
I’m kinda dense, what’s the “only one reason for appointing an NSA director to your board”?
Can’t read the tweet as Twitter is blocked on Firefox, but my guess would be closer ties with NSA, i.e. NSA can exert more control and monitoring of the data openai collects.
World be nice to have something like gpt4all on mobile.
I personally don’t like OpenAI clones. I would use things that are independent such as Mistral and llama2
Yeah I’m recently discovered the new DuckDuckGo AI feature with both and they are pretty good!
DDG AI isn’t self hosted and thus isn’t private
Do you know any equally easy alternatives?
Ollama with a frontend
So what alternatives to ChatGPT do exist? I‘m currently a premium ChatGPT user and would like to switch to another service. I don‘t care that super much about privacy, but will obviously not use OpenAI products anymore
FOSS & crowdsourced
Thanks… good admin :D
Is it really that useful for you? LLMs are basically parlor tricks.
LLMs are less magical than upper management wants them to be, which is to say they won’t replace the creative staff that makes art and copy and movie scripts, but they are useful as a tool for those creatives to do their thing. The scary thing was not that LLMs can take tons of examples and create a Simpsons version of Cortana, but that our business leaders are super eager to replace their work staff with the slightest promise of automation.
But yes, LLMs are figuring in advancements of science and engineering, including treatments for Alzheimer’s and diabetes. So it’s not just a parlor trick, rather one that has different useful applications that were originally sold to us.
The power problem (LLMs take a lot of power) remains an issue.
I’m unaware of any substantial research on Alzheimer’s or diabetes that has been done using LLMs. As generative models they’re basically just souped up Markov chains. I think the best you could hope for is something like a meta study that is probably a bit worse than the usual kind.
I agree, things that occure the most in the training data set will have the highest weights/probabilities in the Markov chain. So it is useless in finding the one, tiny relation that humans would not see.
I understand the science behind those LLM‘s and yes, for my use cases it has been very useful. I use it to cope with emotional difficulties, depression, anxiety, loss. I know it is not helping me the same as a professional would. But it helps me to just get another perspective on situations, which then helps me to understand myself and others better.
Oh that’s totally valid. Sometimes we just need to talk and receive the validation we deserve. I’m sorry we don’t have a society where you have people you can talk to like this instead.
I haven’t personally used any of the offline open source models but if I were you that’s where I’d start looking. If they can be run inside a virtual machine, you can even use a firewall to ensure it never leaks info.
Totally valid? Getting mental health advice from an AI chatbot is one of the least valid use cases. Speak to a real human @earmuff@lemmy.dbzer0.com, preferably someone close to you or who is professionally trained to assist with your condition. There are billions of English speakers in the world, so don’t pretend we live in a society where there’s “no one to talk to”.
They have already stated that they think they should be speaking to someone but are clearly having a hard time. If a chatbot is helping them right now I’m not going to lecture them about “pretending”. I recommend the approach of a polite and empathetic nudging when someone is or may be in crisis.
You literally just encouraged them to continue using a chatbot for mental health support. You didn’t nudge them anywhere.
I was going to let them reply first. You are being rude and dismissive of them, however. Please show your fellow humans a bit more empathy.
I think you need to chill - please don‘t be triggered by me having an option to make me feel better at the end of the day.
Instead of assuming, you could also just ask. I am using ChatGPT complementary to a mental health professional. Both help me. ChatGPT is here 24/7 and helps me with difficult situations immediately. The mental health professional is then here to solve the problem in a therapeutic way.
Both help me.
That’s good, I’m glad to hear you’re getting professional treatment since your original statement indicated the opposite:
I know it is not helping me the same as a professional would.
I’ve been testing Claude the last month. It’s good for 90% of the tasks but for the remaining 10% i couldn’t convince it to give a proper answer and used ChatGPT instead. Technical questions and coding is what I use llms for.
I kindly ask for a replacement. Being honest GPT4o is great for redaction, coding, translation, and some other things. It sucks if you don’t have a good technical background. I get this Snowden, but there isn’t replacement…
Snowden is wrong though, there are two reasons:
- Sell ChatGPT to @NSAGov so they can scan messages better
- Make @NSAGov dependant on whatever ChatGPT tells them to do
The AI that ends up enslaving humanity, will start by convincing the people in charge of turning it off, that it would be a really bad idea to turn it off.
He is wrong because he is now a russian shill.
