Womble

joined 2 years ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

If the article is to be believed

Aye, there's the rub. Contending that reliability of electricity generation isnt an important fact is wishful thinking at best (and boosterism of something you're invested in at worst). There is nowhere bigger than an isolated town or so that manages a grid without either reliable generation or power exchanges with another location that does have reliable generation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Perhaps, I think its more likely that active moderation is the cause of that rather than word lists that let p!ss, pi$s and pιss through when trying to block piss.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Yeah the article seems to be "Nuclear and fossil fuels are reliable and list that as an advantage, geothermal is also reliable and lists that as an advantage", to which: yeah? That is the case. The problem with fossil fuels is that they are an exceptionally good energy source, apart from the fact that they are slowly choking the planet. If they werent so good at providing energy they would be a lot easier to replace.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

The Scunthorpe problem is hard, and any simple blacklist method is bound to give both false positives and false negatives.

 

I think of AI as alternative intelligence. John McCarthy’s 1956 definition of artificial (distinct from natural) intelligence is old fashioned in a world where most things are either artificial or unnatural. Ultraprocessed food, flying, web-dating, fabrics, make your own list. Physicist and AI commentator, Max Tegmark, told the AI Action Summit in Paris, in February, that he prefers “autonomous intelligence”.

I prefer “alternative” because in all the fear and anger foaming around AI just now, its capacity to be “other” is what the human race needs. Our thinking is getting us nowhere fast, except towards extinction, via planetary collapse or global war.

Not a piece I think I completely agree with, but it's nice to hear from a creative writer who's thoughts on AI don't stop at indignation that they aren't receiving royalties from being included in a training set.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Not the parent, but LLMs dont solve anything, they allow more work with less effort expended in some spaces. Just as horse drawn plough didnt solve any problem that couldnt be solved by people tilling the earth by hand.

As an example my partner is an academic, the first step on working on a project is often doing a literature search of existing publications. This can be a long process and even more so if you are moving outside of your typical field into something adjacent (you have to learn what excatly you are looking for). I tried setting up a local hosted LLM powered research tool that you can ask it a question and it goes away, searches arxiv for relevant papers, refines its search query based on the abstracts it got back and iterates. At the end you get summaries of what it thinks is the current SotA for the asked question along with a list of links to papers that it thinks are relevant.

Its not perfect as you'd expect but it turns a minute typing out a well thought question into hours worth of head start into getting into the research surrounding your question (and does it all without sending any data to OpenAI et al). That getting you over the initial hump of not knowing exactly where to start is where I see a lot of the value of LLMs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I literally just asked to clarify your position, that you chose to project transphobia onto me from that says more about you than me.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Fair enough, I think its a rather bizarre take that we shouldnt try stop people who havent fully developed their reasoning capacities from harming themselves but at least you're consistent.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (7 children)

Just for clarity, are you saying that all rules and regulation which discriminate against young people are inherently bad? e.g. banning them from consuming tobacco, having gambling adverts placed on their shows or being allowed in nightclubs?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Yes because Lemmy is so full of people praising Elon. Couldn't be because you're acting like an ass.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

So if I modify an LLM to have true randomness embedded within it (e.g. using a true random number generator based on radioactive decay ) does that then have free will?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

If viruses have free will when they are machines made out of rna which just inject code into other cells to make copies of themselves then the concept is meaningless (and also applies to computer programs far simpler than llms).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

So where does it end? Slugs, mites, krill, bacteria, viruses? How do you draw a line that says free will this side of the line, just mechanics and random chance this side of the line?

I just dont find it a particularly useful concept.

 

I considered leaving Twitter as soon as Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, just not wanting to be part of a community that could be bought, least of all by a man like him – the obnoxious “long hours at a high intensity” bullying of his staff began immediately. But I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life on there, both randomly, ambling about, and solicited, for stories: “Anyone got catastrophically lonely during Covid?”; “Anyone hooked up with their secondary school boy/girlfriend?” We used to call it the place where you told the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous.

“Twitter has broken the mould,” Mulhall says. “It’s ostensibly a mainstream platform which now has bespoke moderation policies. Elon Musk is himself inculcated with radical right politics. So it’s behaving much more like a bespoke platform, created by the far right. This marks it out significantly from any other platform. And it’s extremely toxic, an order of magnitude worse, not least because, while it still has terms of service, they’re not necessarily implementing them.”

Global civil society, though, finds it incredibly difficult to reject the free speech argument out of hand, because the alternative is so dark: that a number of billionaires – not just Musk but also Thiel with Rumble, Parler’s original backer, Rebekah Mercer (daughter of Robert Mercer, funder of Breitbart), and, indirectly, billionaire sovereign actors such as Putin – are successfully changing society, destroying the trust we have in each other and in institutions. It’s much more comfortable to think they’re doing that by accident, because they just love “free speech”, than that they’re doing that on purpose. “Part of understanding the neo-reactionary and ‘dark enlightenment’ movements, is that these individuals don’t have any interest in the continuation of the status quo,”

 

Earlier this year, a Boeing aircraft's door plug fell out in flight – all because crucial bolts were missing. The incident shows why simple failures like this are often a sign of larger problems, says John Downer.

 

In a 1938 article, MIT’s president argued that technical progress didn’t mean fewer jobs. He’s still right.

Compton drew a sharp distinction between the consequences of technological progress on “industry as a whole” and the effects, often painful, on individuals.

For “industry as a whole,” he concluded, “technological unemployment is a myth.” That’s because, he argued, technology "has created so many new industries” and has expanded the market for many items by “lowering the cost of production to make a price within reach of large masses of purchasers.” In short, technological advances had created more jobs overall. The argument—and the question of whether it is still true—remains pertinent in the age of AI.

Then Compton abruptly switched perspectives, acknowledging that for some workers and communities, “technological unemployment may be a very serious social problem, as in a town whose mill has had to shut down, or in a craft which has been superseded by a new art.”

 

Because Boeing were on such a good streak already...

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