Technology

They almost certainly do, if only because of the practicalities of adding a new comment

If this is true, it shifts the problem from "not having it" to "not knowing which version should be used" (to train the LLM).

They could feed it the unedited versions and call it a day, but a lot of times people edit their content to correct it or add further info, specially for "meatier" content (like tutorials). So there's still some value on the edits, and I believe that Google will be at least tempted to use them.

If that's correct, editing it with nonsense will lower the value of edited comments for the sake of LLM training. It should have an impact, just not as big as if they kept no version system.

It would also help with any administration/moderation tasks if they could see whether people posted rule-breaking content and then tried to hide it behind edits.

I know from experience (I'm a former Reddit janny) that moderators can't see earlier versions of the content, only the last one. The admins might though.

That said, one of the many Spez controversies did show that they are capable of making actual edits on the back end if they wished.

The one from TD, right?

• spez: "let them babble their violent rhetoric. Freeze peaches!"
• also spez: "nooo they're casting me on a bad light. I'm going to edit it!"

I'll ping @[email protected] because the answer is relevant for both.

Another user mentioned the possibility that they could use an LLM to sort this shit out. If that's correct neither slow edits nor multiple edits will do much, as the LLM could simply pick the best version of each comment.

And while it's a bit silly to use LLM to sort data out to train another LLM, this sounds like the sort of shit that Google could and would do.

It's still somewhat valuable due to the size of the corpus (it's huge) and because people used to share technical expertise there.

I'm guessing, the AI? Seems like a job it'd be good at.

It’s not a waste of money if you can sell it.

And text comments is rarely more than 1kb. They can provably fit more than 1 billion comments in a 1TB drive if they want, which is peanuts in terms of storage.

Relatively recently being 6 years ago.

Keeping old data is expensive, and usually a waste of money.

At the same time, text, which Reddit was exclusively, for a good long time, compresses really well. The entirety of Wikipedia goes from 10 TB to 100 GB when compressed, and if it's just the article text alone, 22 GB.

That's a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of data that they would have had to deal with when they started deciding to take on video and image hosting.

Text data is like practically 0 compared to all the rest of the data (i.e. images for instance).

I assure you that’s not the case anymore

Keeping old comments data is small and relatively cheap to store. I'm sure they've kept backups. Probably even yearly ones for the past 5 years. Storage for text really doesn't take up much room. There's over 4,500,000,000 words in the entirety of Wikipedia. You can download it all right now if you'd like. An offline copy of wiki is currently about 95GB. Probably half the size of your last CoD game update.

If the post is creative then it's automatically copyrighted in many countries. That doesn't stop people collecting it and using it to train ML (yet).

Thank you! This was actually my first attempt at free form poetry, it just kind of flowed out of me. It only took till middle age for inspiration to strike lol

Dude I'm writing one right now but boy is it hard writing like a schizo. Why is it so easy to write meaningful sentences but hard to write bullshit? I went to stormfront for inspiration lol. It amazes me just how deluded and ignorant they are. I hate to poison my account as I had relevant info in many biology/climate whatever.. subs and good relationships with many others but oh well. I'll probably be banned and removed from each which is what I want. It'd be nice if we all copied one and deleted our accounts. I don't have chatgpt but I used a 3p chatgpt site and it was awful which is why I'm writing my own.

I scrapped that. Here's what I put - I was yelling at God at the top of my lungs in my bedroom and thus, encountered Him as he answered me. Yes, I had a “verbal theophany” - I literally heard His voice, and not through my ear canals.

It has been wonderful and terrible. I have no other choice but to speak, teach and proclaim that Jesus Christ is the son of God. I am treated with disdain, contempt, regarded as “overly religious” or “unorthodox” by those trained in a ‘regular’ fashion [i.e. seminary and pulpit].

I am not a missionary, a paid pastor nor a Christian worker. I am only a disciple and sometimes apostle of Christ. That is, I get to learn humility by being low on the social pole to set me up to go do something bold for Christ - speaking in a jail, in a retirement community, etc.

Sounds great? It is - as long as I fix my eyes on Jesus.

I am unmarried, at poverty level - and nearly spoiled by all the provision God gives me. I would fear narcissism and some other sort of self-justifying condition - except for the constant reminders of how often my prayers have been answered - directly.

I cannot count how many miracles and other “super-sized coincidences” have occurred. I have transitioned to the “charismatic” end of the Christian spectrum, where all my apologetics and reasoned faith become of little importance.

It was like what happened to Dr. Strange in the film [and comic]: he starts off rational and brilliant and egotistical and ends up being humbled, knowing the universe is much much bigger than everything he knew.

It is literally painful for me to watch the standard TV fare or listen to some show on PBS roll on and on about evolution as a basis of origin [Evolutionary modification? Sure. Information needs to be edited, but it doesn’t spring into existence without guidance.]

So Jesus did it all, that one night. How do I know it was Jesus?

No one else ever loved me that much. I am trapped by His love.

I sometimes wish I was like most people again. I sometimes get very tired.

Then I think of Him dying for me. I mean an ugly death, like a piece of dung.

I got nothing. He’s my saviour.

It’s gonna suck, what’s coming - for me, for the world, but He’s worth it. Jesus made me brave.

Of all the qualities that the New Testament ascribes to God, compassion is among the most shocking.

Compassion has nothing to do with power, with immortality or with immutability, which is what many people think of when they contemplate God’s qualities. The Greek gods of myth who lived on Mt. Olympus were defined by many things, but compassion was not high among them.

“For much of antiquity feeling the pain of others was regarded as a weakness,” John Dickson, a professor of biblical studies and public Christianity at Wheaton College, told me. This comes to full flowering in the Stoics, he said, “on the grounds that this involved allowing an external factor — the emotions or plight of another — to control your own inner life.”

Compassion, on the other hand, is central to the Christian understanding of God. Compassion implies the capacity to enter into places of pain, to “weep with those who weep,” according to the Apostle Paul, who was central both to the early conception of Christianity and to the idea of its underpinning in compassion.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, we’re told many times that God is compassionate. It is at the center of the Jewish conception of God. But for Christians, there is an incarnational expression of that compassion. The embodiment of God in Jesus — the deity made flesh, dwelling among us — means that God both suffered and, crucially, suffered with others in a way that was a seismic break with all that came before. In the Gospels, we repeatedly read of the compassion of Jesus for those suffering physically and emotionally, for those “harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

When a man afflicted with leprosy came to Jesus, begging on his knees to be healed, we’re told that Jesus, “moved with compassion, stretched out his hand and touched him, and said to him, ‘I am willing; be cleansed.’” And he was.

This is an extraordinary scene. Those with leprosy were considered not just unclean, physically and spiritually, but loathsome. Everything they touched was viewed as defiled. They were often cast out from their villages, quarantined “outside the camp.” In the words of the famed 19th-century preacher Charles Spurgeon, “They were to all intents and purposes, dead to all the enjoyments of life, dead to all the endearments and society of their friends.”

People would avoid contact with those afflicted with leprosy. They were seen by many as the object of divine punishment, the disease understood to be a visible mark of impurity. Yet in the account in Mark, Jesus not only heals the man with leprosy; he also touches him. In doing so, Jesus defied Levitical law. He himself became “unclean.” And he provided human contact to a person whom no other human would touch — and who had very likely not been touched in a very long time.

Jesus’ touch was not necessary for him to heal the man of leprosy, but the touch may have been necessary to heal the man of feelings of shame and isolation, of rejection and detestation.

Kerry Dearborn, professor emerita of theology at Seattle Pacific University, told me her students found the most moving examples of Jesus’ compassion to be his responses to outsiders, especially those deemed unworthy, unclean or unfit. “In taking on their ‘outsider status’ with them,” Dr. Dearborn told me, “he reflected his deep love and solidarity with them, and his willingness to suffer with them.” Jesus not only healed them, she said; he also took on their alienation.

In the 11th chapter of the Gospel of John, we’re told that Lazarus, the brother of Mary of Bethany and Martha, and a friend of Jesus’ whom he loved, was sick. By the time Jesus arrived in Bethany, Lazarus had died and had been entombed for four days. Both sisters were grieving. Mary, when she saw Jesus, fell at his feet weeping. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died,” she said. We’re told Jesus “was deeply moved in spirit and troubled.”

“Where have you laid him?” he asked.

“Come and see, Lord,” they replied. And according to verse 35, “Jesus wept.”

“Jesus wept” is the shortest verse in the Bible and also “the most profound and powerful,” the artist Makoto Fujimura told me. For him, those are “the most important two words in the Bible.”

And understandably so. Earlier in John 11, we’re told that Jesus knew he was going to raise Lazarus from the dead, which he did. So Jesus wasn’t weeping because he wouldn’t see Lazarus again; it was because he was entering into the suffering of Mary and Martha. Jesus was present with them in their grief, even to the point of tears, all the while knowing that their grief would soon be allayed.

My daughter Christine Wehner, who originally suggested to me that Jesus’ compassion would be a worthwhile topic to explore, told me, “Jesus wept because Mary was before him and her heart was breaking — and as a result, his heart broke, too.” The Psalms tell us that God is “close to the brokenhearted”; in this case, Christine said, “Jesus doesn’t just care for the brokenhearted; he joins them. Their grief becomes his in a remarkable act of love.”

“Jesus ushered in a compassion revolution,” Scott Dudley, senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church, told me. Before Jesus, compassion was primarily thought of as a weakness, he said.

“When Jesus says he is with us, that’s not a metaphor or a trite offer of ‘thoughts and prayers,’” the pastor said. “He’s literally in it with us.”

Dr. Dudley pointed out that in his suffering, Job says to God, “Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see as a mortal sees?” In other words, Do you know how hard it is to be human? “Because of Christmas,” Dr. Dudley told me, “God can legitimately say yes in a way no other god in any other religion can.”

Renée Notkin, colead pastor of Union Church in Seattle, told me that “our daily invitation in living is to be with people in their stories. When I take time to listen deeply and to listen beyond the words spoken to another person’s heart story, am I able to begin to cry with them? Not problem solving and not saying, ‘I know what you mean’; rather simply weeping alongside in shared humanity.”

As a Christian, my faith is anchored in the person of Jesus, who won my heart long ago. It would be impossible to understand me without taking that into account. But sometimes my faith dims; God seems distant, his ways confounding. “Faith steals upon you like dew,” the poet Christian Wiman has written. “Some days you wake and it is there. And like dew, it gets burned off in the rising sun of anxiety, ambitions, distractions.” And the rising sun of grief and loss, too. Those things don’t necessarily destroy faith; in some cases, for some people, they can even deepen it. But they always change it.

... A nice NYT article.

I got like 10 warnings for harrassment by u/reddit but I\m already banned. Got banned from r/biology and others, they probably think I'm a conspiracy nut now.

Or change it to this nice schizo wall of text made from stormfront's intellectuals. Reddit has my home IP though from a long time ago and I dont want to sound like a domestic terrorist.