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CanadaPlus

@CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org

Formerly u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.

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CanadaPlus ,

If so, it's still deliberate, because corporate knows full well a bigger box would work too. Eshittification is coming for our nuggies.

CanadaPlus ,

I often feel like that too, but there were things like haggis and sausage before them. It's good to remember that turning inedible mush into something appealing actually has a long and noble history.

CanadaPlus ,

Oh, it's definitely marketing nonsense. The question is if they managed to hide a sane, usable product underneath it, or if they've added some kind of anti-user nonsense to prevent you from repurposing the button.

'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement (www.theatlantic.com)

As soon as Apple announced its plans to inject generative AI into the iPhone, it was as good as official: The technology is now all but unavoidable. Large language models will soon lurk on most of the world’s smartphones, generating images and text in messaging and email apps. AI has already colonized web search, appearing in...

CanadaPlus ,

It will fail. Downvote me if you must, but AI generated erotica is just as here as machine-woven textiles.

CanadaPlus ,

Yes, it's very hyped and being overused. Eventually the bullshit artists will move on to the next buzzword, though, and then there's plenty of tasks it is very good at where it will continue to grow.

CanadaPlus ,

And if you find a way to lie without getting caught, you aren’t part of the problem anyway.

I was about to disagree, but that's actually really interesting. Could you expand on that?

CanadaPlus ,

Occasionally. If you aren't even proofreading it that's dumb, but it can do a lot of heavy lifting in collaboration with a real worker.

For coders, there's actually hard data on that. You're worth about a coder and a half using CoPilot or similar.

CanadaPlus , (edited )

Shouldn't we be glad they're publishing both viewpoints? (On a real, actively debated issue, I don't mean the "both sides" shit)

CanadaPlus ,

TIL! Interesting.

CanadaPlus , (edited )

Yes, sorry, I didn't realise I was replying to the same user twice.

The problem was never people using AI to do the “heavy lifting” to increase their productivity by 50%; it was instead people increasing the output by 900%, and submitting ten really shitty pics or paragraphs, that look a lot like someone else’s, instead of a decent and original one.

Exactly. I guess I'm conditioned to expect "AI is smoke and mirrors" type comments, and that's not true. They're genuinely quite impressive and can make intuitive leaps they weren't directly trained for. What they're not is aligned; they just want to create human-like output, regardless of truth, greater context or morality, because that's the only way we know how to train them.

I definitely hate searching something, and finding a website that almost reads as human with fake "authors", but provides no useful information. And I really worry for people who are less experienced spotting AI errors and filler. That's a moral issue, though, as opposed to a practical one; it seems to make ad money perfectly well for the "creators".

Regarding code, from your other comment: note that some Linux and *BSD distributions banned AI submissions, like Gentoo and NetBSD. I believe it to be the same deal as news or art.

TIL. They're going to have trouble identifying rulebreakers if contributors use the tool correctly the way we've discussed, though.

CanadaPlus ,

Can confirm. My server has had federation issues, and when that has happened you can still post or vote on outside communities, but it's not mirrored anywhere else.

CanadaPlus , (edited )

I think that's standard, actually. I can always do it at least.

CanadaPlus ,

Yes, that wasn't a random example for anyone OOTL. The thing the OG Luddites would do is break into factories and smash mechanical looms. They wanted to keep doing it the medieval way where you're just crossing threads by hand over and over again, because "muh jerbs".

CanadaPlus ,

I have never, ever heard this definition of Luddite.

CanadaPlus ,

Culture and law aside, I think the real fear is that there's a power imbalance that makes it questionably consensual, if you actually have such a relationship.

CanadaPlus ,

Not yet, anyway.

CanadaPlus ,

Yeah, the short-term outlook doesn't look too dangerous right now. LLMs can do a lot of things we thought wouldn't happen for a long time, but they still have major issues and are running out of easy scalability.

That being said, there's a lot of different training schemes or integrations with classical algorithms that could be tried. ChatGPT knows a scary amount of stuff (inb4 Chinese room), it just doesn't have any incentive to use it except to mimic human-generated text. I'm not saying it's going to happen, but I think it's premature to write off the possibility of an AI with complex planning capabilities in the next decade or so.

CanadaPlus , (edited )

Chinese room, called it. Just with a dog instead.

I have this debate so often, I'm going to try something a bit different. Why don't we start by laying down how LLMs do work. If you had to explain as fully as you could the algorithm we're talking about, how would you do it?

CanadaPlus , (edited )

Yeah, sorry, I don't want to invert burden of proof - or at least, I don't want to ask anything unreasonable of you.

Okay, let's talk just about the performance we measure - it wasn't clear to me that's what you mean from what you wrote. Natural language is inherently imprecise, so no bitterness intended, but in particular that's how I read the section outside of the spoiler tag.

By some measures, it can do quite a bit of novel logic. I recall it drawing a unicorn using text commends in one published test, for example, which correctly had a horn, body and four legs. That requires combining concepts in a way that almost certainly isn't directly in the training data, so it's fair to say it's not a mere search engine. Then again, sometimes it just doesn't do what it's asked, for example when adding two numbers - it will give a plausible looking result, but that's all.

So, we have a blackbox, and we're trying to decide if it could become an existential threat. Do we agree a computer just as smart as us probably would be? If so, that reduces to whether the blackbox could be just as smart as us eventually. Up until now, there's been great reasons to say no, even about blackbox software. I know clippy could never have done it, because there's forms of reasoning classical algorithms just couldn't do, despite great effort - it doesn't matter if clippy is closed source, because it was a classical algorithm.

On the other hand, what neural nets can't do is a total unknown. GPT-n won't add numbers directly, but it is able to correctly preform the steps, which you can show by putting it in a chain-of-thought framework. It just "chooses" not to, because that's not how it was trained. GPT-n can't organise a faction that threatens human autonomy, but we don't know if that's because it doesn't know the steps, or because of the lack of memory and cost function to make it do that.

It's a blackbox, there's no known limits on what it could do, and it's certain to be improved on quickly at least in some way. For this reason, I think it might become an existential threat, in some future iteration.

CanadaPlus ,

To be clear, I wasn't talking about an actual picture generating model. It was raw GPT trained on just text, asked to write instructions for a paint program to output a unicorn. That's more convincing because it's multiple steps away from the basic task it was trained on. Here, I found the paper, it starts with unicorns and then starts exploring other images, and eventually they delve into way more detail than I actually read. There's a video talk that goes with it.

The trick with trying to "make" an AI do semantics, is that we don't know what semantics is, exactly. I mean, that's kind of what we started out with (remember the old pattern-matching chatbots?) but simpler approaches often worked better. Even the Transformer block itself is barely more complicated than a plain feed-forward network. I don't think that's so much because neural nets are more efficient (they really aren't) but because we were looking for an answer to a question we didn't have.

I think the challenge going forwards is freeing all that know-how from the black box we've put it in, somehow. Assuming we do want to mess with something so dangerous if handled carelessly.

CanadaPlus ,

The good old JNU licence.

CanadaPlus ,

I actually really like the AR glasses idea. That said, They need to be open source and de-spookified, and there needs to be some kind of regulation that they can't store or transmit images without first displaying a recording indicator.

It's probably not going to happen like that, though, so I'm not mad existing ones have such bad battery lives.

CanadaPlus ,

It's a pretty common problem, honestly.

CanadaPlus ,

Yup. I definitely ding off points for it when I do my mental restroom reviews.

CanadaPlus ,

0% surprised. This itself would be a fallback if they can't get the C4 in place in time, I'd expect. Unless it literally is just a small amount of C4 that's built in.

CanadaPlus , (edited )

Yeah. Nothing lasts all that long when put next to 400,000 degree plasma. The bigger risk is just know-how that the Chinese could take advantage of, either by employing former staff or copying what they find.

CanadaPlus , (edited )

You don't want to leave anything copyable in the wreckage either, though.

CanadaPlus ,

It could be, that would certainly be safer. I don't think that sounds easier to set up than an explosive charge, though.

If it's not based on physical destruction, I'd guess it's some variant of a killer poke (so the thing is set to burn itself out or actuate parts into damaging configurations), combined with a thorough wipe of all software.

CanadaPlus ,

In this specific case, a spook from the US government would be in the room with them when they discussed it, so procurement isn't a problem. Safety would be a real concern, though, you're right.

CanadaPlus ,

And yet, the Mongols conquered Eurasia on it.

CanadaPlus ,

Yeah, this is a hella weird comment in an alcohol thread. That stuff is actually toxic, and popular mainly because of it.

CanadaPlus ,

The hydrohomies are all grown up, I guess?

CanadaPlus , (edited )

I like this interpretation of history. I guess that means the Wright brothers were drinking Red Bull?

More seriously, they drank milk because they were pastoralists with a lot of it, and because it's something you can consume. Hell, they were even lactose intolerant; if you happen to be European or West African all the better. Not sure where this "it's for kids" idea comes from, maybe it's some kind of American cultural thing. (If you want to be really bio-deterministic, it's for babies, older children are in the same group as adults)

CanadaPlus , (edited )

Source? Addictive milk is kind of "out of left field" for me.

CanadaPlus ,

We show the estimable rational addiction model tends to yield spurious evidence in favor of the rational addiction hypothesis when aggregate data are used. Direct application of the canonical model yields results seemingly indicative that non-addictive commodities such as milk, eggs, and oranges are rationally addictive.

This is literally a study about how to get bad conclusions from this model of addiction. It's supposed to be ridiculous.

CanadaPlus ,

Ah, but it's a very old pool of toxin, cooked over rotten plant matter from a swamp and aged in an obsolete form of container, and it made them significantly poorer to order it! /s

CanadaPlus , (edited )

At least in North America. I get the sense Europe still thinks drinking is cool across the board.

CanadaPlus ,

Hey, no worries. It happens.

CanadaPlus ,

Human sacrifice was also pretty popular for a pretty long time, as was autocracy. Alcohol isn't that bad, obviously, if bad at all, but age isn't a good argument on it's own.

Also; factually inaccurate. I'm not sure how much evidence of alcohol there is in the New World civilisations, and Islam, which forbids it, has been around for a millennia and a half.

CanadaPlus ,

Fair enough. It looks like pulque, at least, was recorded as not being used recreationally, which is probably what I was remembering, but even that I doubt, just based on human nature.

It's still highly unlikely Alpharabius ever discussed political philosophy over a beer. There might have been local Jews that could supply it, but the cultural taboo would have long since been totally integrated. It wasn't ye olde prohibition or something. And it's still not supported that drinking is objectively, universally desirable in some aesthetic sense, which is kind of what "it is cool" suggests in the original context.

CanadaPlus , (edited )

Yep. It also causes a lot of social disorder and addiction. The argument for it is that people like it.

If it wasn't clear from context, I meant socially or ethically.

CanadaPlus ,

Really, most of my hope for the mid-future is tied up in Europe. They have far-right movements there too, but it's totally different in a lot of important ways, and possibly less catastrophic.

Failing that, I dunno. The world is a very scary place indeed.

CanadaPlus ,

I expect they'd treat us like we (the British empire) treated lesser foreign powers. They kind of already do, on the rare occasion they pay attention to little Canada. If they managed to gain direct power here, they'd treat us like the British treated their colonial subjects, or like the Chinese have already treated their westernmost minorities, and you can ask the Natives what that's like.

Unlike America, they're autocratic and openly, officially ethnocentric. That's bad news for anyone not an elite Chinese person, and in the long term it's bad news for even them, because purges.

CanadaPlus ,

How’s that? Disadvantageous trade agreements? You already have those.

You know the Brits did worse that that.

Hell, our trade agreements with the US are fine anyway.

China invades Canada, a country defended by US nukes, with the PLA? There’s a reason Iran and North Korea are still around despite open animus from the US.

That assumes the US still has our back, and Iran doesn't even have nukes, they're just more trouble than they're worth. In the long run, nukes only guarantee countries that actually have them, and that's not us.

For what it's worth, if China was a democracy, I'd be fine with them as the new hyperpower. But they're not, so they are ideological enemies to me.

CanadaPlus ,

I admit I'm fuzzy on how it all went down, exactly, but I was indeed thinking of the opium stuff when I wrote that. And all the shifty dealings with natives here, when we bothered to treat them as actual people worthy of relations.

CanadaPlus ,

Yes, if that specific bit happened to a nuclear nation, it would be the end of the world as we know it.

Do you think a world dominated by autocracies again would be fine, basically?

CanadaPlus ,

I've tried to answer, but it's tough because projecting geopolitics forward is always speculative. Why don't you go now? Do you think democracy would be safe in that scenario? Is that important, in your opinion?

CanadaPlus , (edited )

In the long term, autocracy is a far greater threat to the comfort of our species. Pretty much any and all history before 250 years ago is depressing as hell, and if democracy dies that's where we're headed, but with far more powerful technology to abuse. Climate change will suck, but we'll adapt, even if we make it so bad we have to abandon the tropics entirely.

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