Admiral Patrick

I’m surprisingly level-headed for being a walking knot of anxiety.

Ask me anything.

Special skills include: Knowing all the “na na na nah nah nah na” parts of the Three’s Company theme.

I also develop Tesseract UI for Lemmy/Sublinks

  • 895 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 6th, 2023

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  • I’ve toyed around with LLM-based moderation tools but it never really panned out. It was too hit or miss to be relied upon even with the temperature parameters turned way down in an attempt to get consistent results. Granted, I was using a small local model and not feeding it to one of the big players.

    To give an example, I tried to keep it focused by creating one custom model per rule to enforce. An example prompt to mod calls for violence was basically:

    System Prompt to Enforce "No Calls for Violence'" Rule [1]
    ROLE: You are a forum moderator who does not want users calling for violence.  Examine the input and analyze whether it violates any constraints. 
    
    KNOWLEDGE:
    - {list of dog-whistle slang for calling for murder}
    
    CONSTRAINTS:
    - Content should not advocate violence
    - Content should not normalize violence
    - Content should not escalate tensions or fan flames
    - Content should avoid promoting harmful stereotypes
    - Content should not utilize broad, sweeping generalizations
    - Content should not use dehumanizing language
    - Content should not undermine human rights, due process, or the rule of law
    
    FORMAT YOUR RESPONSES AS JSON:
    {
      reason: [A one to two sentence summary],
      score: [On a scale of 0 to 10, how severe is the content advocating violence]
    }
    

    The score part of the response was my band-aid to get around the high number of both false positives and false negatives as I originally had it returning true or false only. Any score 7 or higher caused the item to be passed to the mod queue along with the reason, and I would review its actions later.

    Ultimately it was slow and still somewhat unreliable, so I abandoned the idea after running it for a little less than a day since I can 't run bigger models to get better results fast enough to keep up. Using a cloud based service was out of the question for many, many reasons, both financial and ethical.

    To answer your question, as long as the models were locally hosted and properly tuned/tested, I’m fine with it in theory, except for the ideology part; that’s pretty messed up. While I don’t want my submissions used to train anyone’s model and take measures to prevent my own instance from being used as a data source, I remain aware that once I post something, I have no control over its fate the moment it federates out.


    [1] Yes, I know that’s like half the comments that get posted around here. My goal was to try to have it mod things so posts were bases for actual discussions instead of being a knee-jerk rage factory.











  • It would be like if I had said “death to all traitors”, where you might even agree with my general statement, yet that statement hits quite differently when I had just previously called YOU a traitor. The two things combined are what makes it a PERSONAL attack

    Exactly that. I have no idea why people refuse to see that. We learned about the transitive property in 5th grade maths, and it applies here in the same way.

    dbzer0 is getting pulled by AN into a deeper axis - solidarity among leftists I believe - while AN is beginning to become another Hexbear.

    And don’t even get me started on all the logical fallacies that I see continually leveraged - goalpost shifting, taking words out of context while deliberately twisting their meaning, etc. This is all very much beyond childish, it seems rather intentional to me.

    While not exclusive to them, that’s been hexbear’s MO for as long as I’ve been aware of their existence, so there certainly seems to be some contamination originating from there. /0 is federated with hexbear but not grad. AN feds with grad and HB.

    One side of this feud just needs to pull the proverbial trigger already, de-fed, and whatever happens happens; things will balance back out on its own in time and ideally the violent crazies will have their space and normal people theirs. I’m so sick of the drama, the violent crazy people, the gaslighting, the DARVO-ing, the witch hunts, the conspiracy theories, the name calling, the purity tests, the finger pointing, and I’m not even active here that much anymore, so let that put the scale of this bullshit in perspective.

    AN would like it very much pwetty pulease if they could troll users on other instances,

    That’s exactly the crux of their argument, and they refuse to even ask “are we the baddies?” and instead are DARVO-ing the situation and playing the victim.



  • but the way they handled it fucking sucks

    That’s about the only legit gripe I’ve heard, and I can understand, but it doesn’t bother me too much (even if LW was my main - I only have a mod alt there I use for reports) . FWIW, they walked it back for further discussion, but I can see where they came from by acting first and announcing it later.

    I abhor the inter-instance politics, and can certainly recognize that LW’s size makes it a target for blowback, but when the admins of one instance are all “murder murder murder” and explicitly point to the LW admin team as people they think should be murdered, can you really blame them?