Barbarian

Barbarian , 2 days ago to Technology in Google Search Ranks AI Spam Above Original Reporting in News Results

So basically the Lemmy version of Subreddit Simulator, but allowing users as well?

Barbarian , 2 days ago to Technology in Google Search Ranks AI Spam Above Original Reporting in News Results

Yes, absolutely. That is a concern that I too share, fellow meat being. We should be vigilant against superior, more capable, and really friendly artificial intelligences.

Barbarian , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago) to Lefty Memes in Self-Regulation

The Romania link is kinda misleading. That isn't a big government problem: that's a profit crushing laypeople problem. Both the communist Romanian government and the capitalist government that followed wanted to profit from many different mines even though it would destroy nearby villages.

Rosia Montana is still very controversial today. A different mine, but the same core reasoning and issues.

Barbarian , 4 days ago (edited 4 days ago) to Lefty Memes in Self-Regulation

What is an example of something that is not self-regulated that was worked out well?

EU food industry works pretty well. Incidences of food-borne disease, contaminated food, etc are very rare, and you can generally trust the label says exactly what's in the food with confidence.

The regulations themselves are very complex, change depending on new evidence, and include all sorts of rule changes for events that impact the food industry.

Barbarian , 5 days ago (edited 4 days ago) to Memes in Average US presidential debate

How do you ever solve a problem if you don't acknowledge it exists?

I'm not from the US, but live in a country that is a US ally with a lot of military bases. The US election effects us. The fact the DNC is fielding an old age pensioner who should be sitting comfortably in a retirement home complaining about the birds obstructing his view against an equally old fascist is deeply worrying.

Barbarian , 9 days ago to Fuck Cars in Stonehenge In ‘Danger’ From U.K.’s Road Plan, Warns UNESCO

Wait... could Just Stop Oil have done some 5D chess move here? Force Sunak to publicly claim he cares about Stonehenge just before the UNESCO report comes out?

Barbarian , 16 days ago to Lefty Memes in Capitalists: capitalism is the only system that lets you chase your dreams…

Yeah, that does sound very comparable to what I was talking about. Your example and mine both do not have the state deciding what university you apply to though, which is what I understood from "the state decides what you'll study".

Barbarian , 16 days ago to Lefty Memes in Capitalists: capitalism is the only system that lets you chase your dreams…

No, I'm disagreeing. You could study anything you wanted, not what the state wanted. It was just hard to get a slot.

I guess it's similar to how it's incredibly hard to get a scholarship at a great university today. You'd hardly say that the modern scholarship system "forces you to study what the state wants".

Barbarian , 16 days ago to Lefty Memes in Capitalists: capitalism is the only system that lets you chase your dreams…

This is not true. At least here in Romania, the issue with colleges under communism was that there were VERY limited slots, so you had to either be the best of the best or have a high up party member in the family or as a close personal friend.

Barbarian , 21 days ago to Technology in Tim Cook is “not 100 percent” sure Apple can stop AI hallucinations

Even the question of "who" is a fascinating deep dive in and of itself. Consciousness as an emergent property implies that your gut microbiome is part of the "who" doing the thinking in the first place :))

Barbarian , 21 days ago (edited 21 days ago) to Technology in Tim Cook is “not 100 percent” sure Apple can stop AI hallucinations

So, first of all, thank you for the cogent attempt at responding. We may disagree, but I sincerely respect the effort you put into the comment.

The specific part that I thought seemed like a pretty big claim was that human brains are "simply" more complex neural networks and that the outputs are based strictly on training data.

Is it not well established that animals learn and use reward circuitry like the role of dopamine in neuromodulation?

While true, this is way too reductive to be a one to one comparison with LLMs. Humans have genetic instinct and body-mind connection that isn't cleanly mappable onto a neural network. For example, biologists are only just now scraping the surface of the link between the brain and the gut microbiome, which plays a much larger role on cognition than previously thought.

Another example where the brain = neural network model breaks down is the fact that the two hemispheres are much more separated than previously thought. So much so that some neuroscientists are saying that each person has, in effect, 2 different brains with 2 different personalities that communicate via the corpus callosum.

There's many more examples I could bring up, but my core point is that the analogy of neural network = brain is just that, a simplistic analogy, on the same level as thinking about gravity only as "the force that pushes you downwards".

To say that we fully understand the brain, to the point where we can even make a model of a mosquito's brain (220,000 neurons), I think is mistaken. I'm not saying we'll never understand the brain enough to attempt such a thing, I'm just saying that drawing a casual equivalence between mammalian brains and neural networks is woefully inadequate.

Barbarian , 22 days ago to Technology in Tim Cook is “not 100 percent” sure Apple can stop AI hallucinations

That's a strong claim. Got an academic paper to back that up?

Barbarian , 23 days ago to Technology in Tim Cook is “not 100 percent” sure Apple can stop AI hallucinations

This is why I strictly refer to these things as LLMs. That's what they are.

Barbarian , 23 days ago to Technology in Tim Cook is “not 100 percent” sure Apple can stop AI hallucinations

I'm happy with the Oxford definition: "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills".

LLMs don't have knowledge as they don't actually understand anything. They are algorithmic response generators that apply scores to tokens, and spit out the highest scoring token considering all previous tokens.

If asked to answer 10*5, they can't reason through the math. They can only recognize 10, * and 5 as tokens in the training data that is usually followed by the 50 token. Thus, 50 is the highest scoring token, and is the answer it will choose. Things get more interesting when you ask questions that aren't in the training data. If it has nothing more direct to copy from, it will regurgitate a sequence of tokens that sounds as close as possible to something in the training data: thus a hallucination.

Barbarian , 24 days ago to Memes in Three Wishes

No, I'm not talking about the 1936 constitution. I meant specifically the disempowerment of local and union soviets.

I'm no expert on Russian history, so I may be misinformed about this, but as far as I understand it he put in place a series of reforms that stripped power from the local level and empowered the central committee.