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Voroxpete

@Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works

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Voroxpete ,

Tom Waits, IIRC, successfully sued the makers of a commercial for mimicking his voice, so there is precedent. And the fact that OpenAI reached out to her about using her voice, and that Altman tweeted the word "Her" on its own as a teaser of the product makes it pretty clear that they had knowledge and intent. I think she's likely to have a pretty solid case here if she chooses to pursue it.

Voroxpete ,

Yeah, my first reaction to this was "Amazon is still doing drone delivery?"

Voroxpete ,

Same.

Voroxpete ,

Listen, I love to hate on the cybertruck, but this article is just repeating a claim made in a forum post. There appears to have been no attempt made to verify the facts of the matter. I'd take this with a big grain of salt.

Voroxpete ,

This isn't outrage, it's schadenfreude, and it's well earned. It just doesn't excuse not vetting your sources. When a story justifies your existing ideas about the world is when you need to be most skeptical.

Voroxpete ,

One of the biggest reasons is because cattle growers (especially in North America) feed their cows corn instead of grass or other things that cows actually evolved to eat. They do this because long standing US government subsidies on corn production mean that it can be sold for less than the cost of production; the farms are literally paid to grow it. This is also why high fructose corn syrup is in everything you eat. The corn makes the cattle sick, so the farms pump them full of antibiotics, because that's cheaper than just feeding them properly.

Voroxpete ,

Brain machine interface development has been around for a lot longer than nueralink. Musk is just better at getting his stuff into the headlines. Yes, the idea is good and beneficial to humanity, but then so are electric cars. That's part of Musk's grift. He latches onto something genuinely good and turns it into his pet project so that any criticism of how he does it can easily be deflected, because he's automatically the good guy just for being there at all.

CEO of Google Says It Has No Solution for Its AI Providing Wildly Incorrect Information (futurism.com)

You know how Google's new feature called AI Overviews is prone to spitting out wildly incorrect answers to search queries? In one instance, AI Overviews told a user to use glue on pizza to make sure the cheese won't slide off (pssst...please don't do this.)...

Voroxpete ,

He's not owning up. He's dismissing.

Pichai acknowledges the problem (how could you not, it's obvious the problem exists), but in a way that basically goes "Yeah, but it's cool, nothing is prefect", shrug, smile.

The part of the problem he's pointedly not acknowledging is this; if the answers generated by this system are so unreliable that we have to double check them every time, using traditional research methods, what is the point of having the AI there in the first place?

Voroxpete ,

So does pretty much every search engine. Running your own web crawler requires a staggering amount of resources.

Mojeek is one you can check out if that's what you're looking for, but it's index is noticeably constrained compared to other search engines. They just don't have the compute power or bandwidth to maintain an up to date index of the entire web.

Voroxpete ,

So, there's a few reasons why everyone wants you to go in blind:

  1. It's a puzzle game and a mystery, and one where knowledge is everything. Technically you seem complete the whole game in 5 minutes if you know how. In practice, it's hours of discovery as you slowly piece together an absolutely breathtaking mystery (there's literally a "conspiracy board with polaroids and string" on your ship that you can consult as you start to piece things together). That sense of discovery and wonder is everything, and we're trying to preserve as much of it for you as possible.
  2. There's an absolutely brilliant twist about half an hour in that will leave your jaw on the floor.
  3. The ending is incredible. Real top tier "best endings in video games" kind of material.
  4. The whole game is just full of really really cool "WOW" moments as you discover new things and just lose your mind over them.

But I get it, you want a little more than that. Here's the non-spoilery version:

Its a puzzle game that deftly avoids presenting you with "Solve this Sudoku" style puzzles. You're not doing an IQ test, you're solving a vast mystery that reaches across space and back into the past. You're an archaeologist, unearthing the ruins of a dead civilisation. You're an explorer (most of the puzzles are about navigation; figuring out how to get into or out of places) diving deep into the unknown.

On a more practical level, it's a game about flying around a tiny but surprisingly well simulated star system in a little tin can space ship, landing wherever you want, and exploring whatever you want, as you try to solve a mystery that threatens your whole civilisation.

It's a game of cosmic wonder. If you've ever felt awestruck by the idea of things like black holes, wormholes, four dimensional space, megastructures in space and so on, this game has it all and more. It's cute and fun on the surface, but really it's 2001 and Solaris and Interstellar, just slamming you with the sheer majesty of space.

And it's just full of heart. It's a game about life and community and the beauty of building great things together.

Now the more spoilery stuff. Let's talk about that big twist that happens early on. This doesn't give much else away, but it does slightly lessen the impact of one really cool moment.

Spoiler

About half an hour into your first exploration of the solar system, the sun goes supernova.

It is terrifying, and awe inspiring. And you die.

And wake up again, 22 minutes in the past.

That's the game; it's a time loop. It's groundhog day but instead of I've Got You Babe it's the fucking sun exploding. So now you have to repeat the loop, over and over, trying to piece together an answer to why the sun is blowing up, and how you can stop it, and perhaps how it all ties into a dead alien civilisation and their quest for something called The Eye of The Universe.

That should be enough to give you some idea of why people are so hype about this game. It doesn't even come close to covering some of the truly wild discoveries you'll make along the way, or indeed the truly heartbreaking emotional gut punches the game will deliver.

It's one of the best games ever made. I cannot recommend it enough.

Voroxpete ,

Fuck me, the DLC got dark. Like, really fucking dark.

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    Voroxpete ,

    This is not about "fringe science." Or, rather, it actually is; the fringe science being the evidence that the government is using for what they're doing to trans people.

    The attacks on trans people in the UK are so insane that the government is now claiming, with a straight face, that people under the age of 25 are not capable of making medical decisions about their own bodies. That's kind of quackery that is being employed to justify these decisions.

    The global medical community wholeheartedly agrees that puberty blockers and HRT are good and safe treatments. There is no meaningful medical consensus that says otherwise. However it is now almost impossible to actually get prescriptions for these drugs in the UK in anything short of a years long timeframe, which in the case of puberty blockers effectively makes it impossible to get them at all, since for obvious reasons they're somewhat time sensitive. People are turning to illegal sources because they are being shut out from the legal ones.

    And no, the fact that puberty blockers and hormone replacement have some potential side effects is not a good reason to ban them (or restrict them so severely that they might as well be banned). Aspirin and paracetamol have potential side effects. Every drug does. In a functional society, the solution is to have doctors monitor the patient's usage, and adjust dosages or switch to different drugs if problems arise. That's how medicine works in the modern world. Carving out a specific exclusion to that just for trans people is bigotry, plain and simple.

    To steal a line, if any anti-depressant were as successful as HRT at treating depression, it would be hailed as a miracle. The only "controversy" over these drugs is manufactured by regressive idiots who hate and fear what they don't understand.

    Voroxpete ,

    You are correct, left hand is a fork bomb. Specifically, it creates and then runs a function named ":". What this function does is pipe its output into itself while running in a background process, which instantly spawns infinite copies of itself. Technically I believe the : character could be any character as its just a name. The creator just picked a colon for aesthetics.

    Voroxpete ,

    Fun fact, in case you weren't aware; Texas pays bitcoin mining companies to shut off their rigs during peak demand.

    Miners love this; in effect they can just threaten to mine bitcoin and get paid as much as they would have made actually mining bitcoin, but without the wear and tear on their expensive hardware. It's a legalized extortion racket being enacted on the public purse.

    Apologies if I just gave you even more reason to be angry.

    Voroxpete ,

    Effectively, yes. But that just makes extorting the government even more effective in comparison. Better to just get paid not to mine.

    Voroxpete ,

    We not only have to stop ignoring the problem, we need to be absolutely clear about what the problem is.

    LLMs don't hallucinate wrong answers. They hallucinate all answers. Some of those answers will happen to be right.

    If this sounds like nitpicking or quibbling over verbiage, it's not. This is really, really important to understand. LLMs exist within a hallucinatory false reality. They do not have any comprehension of the truth or untruth of what they are saying, and this means that when they say things that are true, they do not understand why those things are true.

    That is the part that's crucial to understand. A really simple test of this problem is to ask ChatGPT to back up an answer with sources. It fundamentally cannot do it, because it has no ability to actually comprehend and correlate factual information in that way. This means, for example, that AI is incapable of assessing the potential veracity of the information it gives you. A human can say "That's a little outside of my area of expertise," but an LLM cannot. It can only be coded with hard blocks in response to certain keywords to cut it from answering and insert a stock response.

    This distinction, that AI is always hallucinating, is important because of stuff like this:

    But notice how Reid said there was a balance? That’s because a lot of AI researchers don’t actually think hallucinations can be solved. A study out of the National University of Singapore suggested that hallucinations are an inevitable outcome of all large language models. **Just as no person is 100 percent right all the time, neither are these computers. **

    That is some fucking toxic shit right there. Treating the fallibility of LLMs as analogous to the fallibility of humans is a huge, huge false equivalence. Humans can be wrong, but we're wrong in ways that allow us the capacity to grow and learn. Even when we are wrong about things, we can often learn from how we are wrong. There's a structure to how humans learn and process information that allows us to interrogate our failures and adjust for them.

    When an LLM is wrong, we just have to force it to keep rolling the dice until it's right. It cannot explain its reasoning. It cannot provide proof of work. I work in a field where I often have to direct the efforts of people who know more about specific subjects than I do, and part of how you do that is you get people to explain their reasoning, and you go back and forth testing propositions and arguments with them. You say "I want this, what are the specific challenges involved in doing it?" They tell you it's really hard, you ask them why. They break things down for you, and together you find solutions. With an LLM, if you ask it why something works the way it does, it will commit to the bit and proceed to hallucinate false facts and false premises to support its false answer, because it's not operating in the same reality you are, nor does it have any conception of reality in the first place.

    Voroxpete ,

    Less horrifying conceptually, but in Canada a major airline tried to replace their support services with a chatbot. The chatbot then invented discounts that didn't actually exist, and the courts ruled that the airline had to honour them. The chatbot was, for all intents and purposes, no more or less official a source of data than any other information they put out, such as their website and other documentation.

    Voroxpete ,

    That's called "fuzzy" matching, it's existed for a long, long time. We didn't need "AI" to do that.

    Voroxpete ,

    Consider some human examples: sometimes people disagree with their doctor so they go see another doctor and another until they get the answer they want. Sometimes two very experienced lawyers both look at the facts and disagree.

    This actually illustrates my point really well. Because the reason those people disagree might be

    1. Different awareness of the facts (lawyer A knows an important piece of information lawyer B doesn't)
    2. Different understanding of the facts (lawyer might have context lawyer B doesn't)
    3. Different interpretation of the facts (this is the hardest to quantify, as its a complex outcome of everything that makes us human, including personality traits such as our biases).

    Whereas you can ask the same question to the same LLM equipped with the same data set and get two different answers because it's just rolling dice at the end of the day.

    If I sit those two lawyers down at a bar, with no case on the line, no motivation other than just friendly discussion, they could debate the subject and likely eventually come to a consensus, because they are sentient beings capable of reason. That's what LLMs can only fake through smoke and mirrors.

    Voroxpete ,

    .... aaaaaand you've killed us all.

    Voroxpete ,

    Yeah, what kind of idiot doesn't parallelize their timer function.

    Voroxpete ,

    Found the person who's never used tar :-P

    Voroxpete ,

    There is nothing unfortunate about this.

    Voroxpete ,

    pro-palestine

    Weird way to spell "people who aren't totally cool with genocide", but OK

    Voroxpete ,

    This isn't something new to nueralink. Brain-machine interfaces have existed for quite some time. Neuralink is one of a number of companies that are exploring directly implanting these devices rather than using an externally attached (hence, easily removable) interface, but the core thesis of "Brain control computer" isn't any kind of grand leap forward. That's just Musk's marketing.

    Voroxpete ,

    Correction: An even more useless search engine.

    Voroxpete ,

    I think there's a lot to be said for "soft boycotting." If we could get more people to just check a few other retailers before they go to Amazon, that would actually hit their bottom line a lot harder than a small number of people cutting them out entirely.

    The problem with boycotts is that people get told to treat it as an all or nothing thing. It's a lot better, to my mind, to just reduce our reliance on large monopolies where possible, and accept them as an unfortunate necessity when not.

    Voroxpete ,

    Which in turn leads to people giving up or never trying.

    Even a 20% reduction in sales from a million people does a lot more than a 100% reduction in sales from 100,000.

    Voroxpete ,

    You did. If you leave your root password blank it'll automatically add the user account you create in the following step to sudo and disable the root account.

    If you want to have both a root account and a user account with sudo, you'll have to do that manually, but that's a pretty unusual setup.

    Voroxpete ,

    Yeah, general practice is to either elevate privelige by switching accounts, or by using sudo. Having both just increases your attack surface to no practical benefit (especially since you can technically still switch to a root account with "sudo - i" even if you're going the sudo route).

    Voroxpete ,

    Yeah, at the point where you're resisting outside pressure your hull is basically just the plastic resin that the fibres are sealed in. Without that, the fibres are just a fabric bag.

    Imagine if they'd said "We're diving down to the Titanic in a submersible with a plastic resin hull." Doesn't sound so great.

    Voroxpete ,

    Harold, they're lesbians!

    Voroxpete ,

    Very little. Thanks to Docker + Watchtower I don't even have to check for updates to software. Everything is automatic.

    Voroxpete ,

    And this, right here, is why Tesla's stock price is down 50% from its all time high.

    Voroxpete ,

    It's still massively overvalued now. Just compare their market cap to any other major car manufacturer.

    Voroxpete ,

    Love a good flanged mace.

    Voroxpete ,

    Yes. Of course you do. This is Minecraft. What kind of question even is this?

    Voroxpete ,

    "All the believers were together and had everything in common. They sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need. Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts," - Acts 2 44:46

    Just saying, old school church was pretty big on sharing.

    Voroxpete ,

    Oh boy, it sure was a good idea to rely on one company, with facilities located in just one country, for almost all production of an essential component that basically all modern technology needs in order to work.

    Voroxpete ,

    Or any visible cheese.

    Voroxpete ,

    Brit chiming in here, this is correct. Three syllables. And shire pronounced "sheer", not "shy-er".

    Voroxpete ,

    Their point was clearly that the total amount of genocide is less in that scenario. It takes an extremely uncharitable reading to imagine that they are saying that genocide doesn't matter if it happens elsewhere (and one that ignores all of the surrounding context within the text itself).

    Voroxpete ,

    That would be a great idea if there weren't two supreme court seats ready to be replaced in the next four years.

    Siezing control of the courts has already given the far right incredible control over life in the US, and they're looking to cement that control as much as they can.

    You're not only talking about fucking over vulnerable people for the next four years, you're actually talking about fucking over vulnerable people for decades.

    Voroxpete ,

    Yeah, what the fuck is with the depiction of Zorin here? Someone really got wowed by that plasma theme, eh?

    Voroxpete ,

    Nah, I'm Debian user and that's a fucking solid depiction of Debian.

    It's not fancy, it's not pretty, it has no bells and whistles, but it's God damn workhorse and it'll keep on trucking no matter what you do to it.

    Voroxpete ,

    I mean, under the hood it's just Ubuntu. No one's questioning how reliable it is. It's just that everything that actually makes it Zorin is just a bunch of fancy skins. It was designed to be something you could load on your Grandma's PC and still have it look like Windows.

    Voroxpete ,

    Now do NixOS.

    Voroxpete ,

    Some wifi drivers. It's because of the Debian philosophy of never using non-free (as in speech, not beer) software.

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