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nyan

@nyan@lemmy.cafe

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The ugly truth behind ChatGPT: AI is guzzling resources at planet-eating rates (www.theguardian.com)

Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually....

nyan ,

Liters are a great unit for making small things seem large. I’ve seen articles breathlessly talking about how “almost 2000 liters of oil was spilled!” When 2000 liters could fit in the back of a pickup truck.

That just means you have no intuitive sense of how large a litre is. If they'd written it as "2000 quarts" (which is close enough to being the same volume at that level of rounding) would it have painted a clearer picture in your head?

nyan ,

I actually have a bit of hope for this one, since they seem to have figured out a way to avoid one of the known problems with these systems. At very least, it's an angle worth exploring.

nyan ,

They're making their own and selling them for about 2% of the cost of the Boston Dynamics version: This LiDAR-equipped 30-pound robot dog can be yours for $1,600 . How much of the technology was actually developed independently, I have no idea.

nyan ,

Yes, you can have your own robot attack dog for about the same price as a high-end gaming PC. Some assembly possibly required, and you'll have to write your own attack software based on a manual poorly translated from Chinese (if you're lucky), but what do you expect at that price point? 🤨

nyan ,

stores use it and it alone to ban people despite it having a low but well known error rate.

And it is absolutely predictable that some stores would do that, because humans. At very least, companies deploying this technology need to make certain that all the store staff are properly trained on what it does and doesn't mean, including new hires who arrive after the system is put in. Forcing that is going to require that a law be passed.

nyan ,

Technically, there's a tendency for them to be trained on datasets that don't include nearly enough dark-skinned people. As a result, they don't learn to make the necessary distinctions. I'd like to think that the selection of datasets for training facial recognition AI has improved since the most egregious cases of that. I'm not willing to bet on it, though.

nyan ,

Pleased, but surprised.

nyan ,

The real issue is that we seem to be purging all the wrong things.

Useful answer to technical question? Gone five years later.

Unfounded and fraudulent accusation that some teenager in Albuquerque committed a hideous crime? Preserved for the ages. Revenge porn photos? Also preserved, although possibly without the attributions.

Although, really, all of that is human nature too: we conserve what draws the attention of the average mook, not what specialists find useful.

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.)...

nyan ,

eat as much glue as you can

Likely won't make a difference to the gene pool. I looked up a couple of MSDS, and it seems that PVA glue ("white glue"), is safe to ingest. The Elmer's glue "recommended" in the original Reddit post is a form of white glue.

nyan ,

Because a lot of people won't look at sources even if you serve them up on a silver platter?

nyan ,

Yes, but as a solution it's far inferior to not presenting questionable output to the public at all.

(There are a few specific AI/LLM types whose output we might be able to "human-proof"—for instance, if we don't allow image generators to make photorealistic images of any sort for any purpose, they become much more difficult to abuse—but I can't see how you would do it for search engine adjuncts like this without having a human curate their training sets.)

nyan ,

This is why you don't train a bot on the entire Internet and then use it to offer advice. Even if only 1% of all posts are dangerously ignorant . . . that's a lot of dangerous ignorance.

Fortunately, this particular piece of bad advice is unlikely to poison any fool who goes through with it, since PVA glue is not considered an ingestion hazard, but "non-toxic" doesn't mean "edible", it just means "not going to poison you when used in the intended manner". "Non-toxic" can still be quite dangerous if you mistake something intended as linoleum pigment for a dessert topping.

nyan ,

Are there any classes of object left that Tesla FSD has not either hit or almost hit? Icebergs, maybe?

nyan ,

Someone will figure out how to turn it off again in fairly short order (it might be as simple as a mklink to NUL for the storage directory, causing it to send its recordings into the void). What irritates me more is the typical Microsoft misuse of the word "feature".

(I mean, this thing does have some potential uses (imagine being able to see what that elderly relative you provide tech support for actually did when they claim they "did nothing"), but the privacy concerns vastly outweigh them.)

nyan ,

The part that's being ignored is that it's a problem, not the existence of the hallucinations themselves. Currently a lot of enthusiasts are just brushing it off with the equivalent of boys will be boys AIs will be AIs, which is fine until an AI, say, gets someone jailed by providing garbage caselaw citations.

And, um, you're greatly overestimating what someone like my technophobic mother knows about AI ( xkcd 2501: Average Familiarity seems apropos). There are a lot of people out there who never get into a conversation about LLMs.

nyan ,

I prefer carrying the plastic over carrying a tracking deivce everywhere with me. Then again, I'm one of those weirdos that also still carries cash.

(Note that I'm not saying you should ditch your phone—your priorities are doubtless different from mine—just that for me the tradeoff is not acceptable.)

nyan ,

had to restore from backups onto a brand new Google business account

Thus proving that they learned nothing from the experience.

nyan ,

And it's a sad, sad day when the situation in xkcd 908 looks like an improvement over even one of the commercial offerings.

nyan ,

Companies should be sued for false advertising if they claim that their streaming service allows you to "buy" or "own" anything (unless their service includes non-DRM downloads for permanent offline storage). All you're buying is temporary use of their rental network and library. Which is fine if that's what you wanted and knew you were getting, but a problem if you were expecting something else.

What's stopping you from using Ecosia? Your searches could plant trees! (www.ecosia.org)

Ecosia is a search engine that aggregates search results from multiple other search engines. The ad revenue from our searches funds the planting of trees worldwide. With over 200 million trees planted so far, Ecosia have learned to be fully transparent about their projects, and financials which are available right on that...

nyan ,

That assumes all the trees survive. A lot of them apparently don't.

nyan ,

It's one of the weaksauce paywalls that can be bypassed by just not allowing their Javascript.

nyan ,

I seem to recall that scarring around the electrodes, which eventually causes them to stop functioning, is a known failure mode of older experiments along similar lines. It's one of the reasons I didn't hold out much hope for this iteration.

I just hope the patient doesn't take any long-term damage from the implant.

nyan ,

Amazon lost its way when in started acting as a storefront for others, rather than a bookstore. In other words, a good twenty years ago.

Tech gear in particular is one of the things that's extremely risky to order from there (along with food, meds, and anything for babies/small children), as there are a lot of fraudulent or damaged goods mixed into their supply. Go to a specialist supplier instead. Newegg isn't great, but at least they don't appear to mix inventory from different sellers the way Amazon does.

nyan ,

That depends a lot on where you drive. I've been in situations where, if I had hit a moose, there would have been no one around to call for help except the moose (assuming it had survived the collision, but they often do if it's a smaller vehicle). That stretch of road didn't get many passers-by on snowy Sunday nights in January. Maybe a half-dozen vehicles an hour. Combine that with poor visibility, and it could have been a long time before someone noticed and called for help. Fortunately, I never did have an accident along that stretch.

Of course, if you're only driving in built-up areas or along major transit corridors instead of in awkward parts of northern Ontario in the middle of winter, your chances of having someone call in for you are much higher.

nyan ,

I think OnStar is satellite-based, so it might reach areas where cell service doesn't. I believe the stretch of highway I was thinking of (Ontario highway 655) does have at least partial cell coverage now, although it didn't at the time when I was driving it regularly. It isn't extremely remote—it would take emergency services from Cochrane or Timmins about half an hour to reach the farthest point, so they might get there in time, depending on what exactly the damage was.

nyan ,

Modest profit isn't an issue, but most businesses of more than a certain size accumulate MBAs like some kind of parasitic fungus. They then proceed to wring out as much money as possible in the short term while destroying the business in the long term.

If it's just a local guy making 5% or so a year off his one rental shop, that's no problem.

nyan ,

The problem is maintaining competition. Another thing those MBAs salivate over is the idea of buying out the competition, and their squeeze-the-company-dry method can give them just enough money for just long enough to buy a competing business to run into the ground when the original one starts to give out. Like I said, parasitic fungus: move to a new host as the old one dies. Keeping them from spreading can only be accomplished by stronger government regulation than many people seem willing to see in place, alas.

nyan ,

Most Usenet discussion groups don't even get spambot posts these days.

nyan ,

Usenet started out as a forum-like system, with individual messages grouped into discussion threads (the protocol worked kind of like email, with messages indicating which other message they replied to, so that client software could build a tree for each group). That side of it was eventually killed off by lack of good moderation options or support for embedded media.

nyan ,

All software has bugs in it.

People were using this service to put up money to encourage programmers working on open-source software to fix specific bugs that were especially bothering them. For instance, if text in software X didn't scale properly and that was a problem for you, you could use this service to offer $100 to programmers working on X to fix the text scaling. Once they got it fixed, they collected the money.

The service went bankrupt.

When it went bankrupt, some programmers didn't get their promised payment for bugs they had fixed.

The money didn't get returned to the people who had paid for the bug to be fixed, either.

So now both programmers and users have lost money because of this service, and everyone's ticked off.

nyan ,

Perhaps they want to keep it to drink.

nyan ,

Let's just hope that it isn't bought up by Bitcoin miners . . .

nyan ,

In the absence of a local club, I'm not sure. I mean, have a look at the cover on this one—I understand that's considered one of the more reliable and informative guides for the locations it covers, which is why it's still in print after 30+ years, but the only reason that photo doesn't look AI generated is that you can't imagine how they would have come up with the prompt . . .

nyan ,

Except that the issues with distribution have nothing to do with efficiency, they have to do with politics, economics, and corruption. Last I checked, we had or could produce enough food for everyone on the planet, but getting it to the right places was impossible for reasons that can't be fixed with technology.

Improvements in storing vegetables can reduce waste, which is a good thing in and of itself, but aren't going to feed people in famine-stricken areas that have no vegetables to store.

nyan ,

The point is, the main problems in most places with serious hunger issues are food being confiscated by government or militias, turned back at borders, or left to rot in port warehouses because no one's sure what set of palms need to be greased before distribution will be permitted. Tech can't fix those problems. As for improvements in local agriculture, that helps when the cause of the famine is natural, but not so much when the issue is farmers getting shot at in the fields or having their produce stolen at gunpoint.

nyan ,

So they want people to pull the plug instead of signing out properly. If they don't can this before it leaves the Beta Channel, they're going to need to beef up their tech support, because the many office workers who use Windows mostly as a launcher for Excel won't have a clue.

nyan ,

We managed to pick up some off newegg.ca as recently as a couple of years ago (RCA branded). Only 32-inch panels, though, so if you're looking for a living room centerpiece, you're better off going the digital signage route.

nyan ,

A good thing for some, a bad thing for others. Good for the environment, most likely. But we're going to have to extensively reorganize the workforce.

nyan ,

While the climate crisis is a significant part of what ails the environment, it's far from the only thing. Lowering the human population should mean reduced destruction of surviving animal habitats and populations, for instance. And the greater the genetic diversity in an animal population, the better its chances of adapting to external events like climate change become.

X automatically changed 'Twitter' to 'X' in domain names, breaking legit URLs (mashable.com)

On Monday, it appears X attempted to encourage users to cease referring to it as Twitter and instead adopt the name X. Some users began noticing that posts viewed via X for iOS were changing any references of "Twitter.com" to "X.com" automatically....

nyan ,

A shame that the pioneering Japanese visual kei band stopped referring to itself as just "X" back in the mid-1990s. That would have been a trademark fight for the ages. (Or at least, the hair and costumes would have been more interesting than what Musk usually sports.)

nyan ,

Technically true, but they could still have an epic argument about the ownership of the x.com domain name.

nyan ,

Utterly unsurprising, given that very few students are actually interested in learning.

Fake Photos, Real Harm: AOC and the Fight Against AI Porn (www.rollingstone.com)

In 2023, more deepfake abuse videos were shared than in every other year in history combined, according to an analysis by independent researcher Genevieve Oh. What used to take skillful, tech-savvy experts hours to Photoshop can now be whipped up at a moment’s notice with the help of an app. Some deepfake websites even offer...

nyan ,

The real problem is that people automatically believe what they see online, no matter how ridiculous or outrageous, rather than thinking about probability and provenance and supporting evidence and all that stuff.

Unfortunately, this problem is not likely to be solved any time soon, since we've had more than a quarter-century now (since the advent of image editing software) to work on it. Hell, even further back than that, a certain percentage of the population could be fooled into believing in UFOs by a blurry black-and-white photograph of pie plates suspended from fishing line. We're never gonna fix this.

nyan ,

The official repositories often have no useful oversight either. At least once a year, you'll hear about a malicious package in npm or PyPI getting widespread enough to cause real havoc. Typosquatting runs rampant, and formerly reputable packages end up in the hands of scammers when their original devs try to find someone to hand them over to.

nyan ,

I'm actually a bit surprised they got any of them right. Maybe the ones they solved correctly had exact matches in their training data . . . ?

nyan ,

Most recycling isn't currently profitable without some kind of subsidy or legislation pushing it (exceptions: some metals, paper, maybe glass). If dealing with the increasing mountains of dead electronics made money, it would be getting done on a much larger scale than individual junk-pickers in the developing world scavenging in dumps. In addition to reducing the volume of waste being created, we need to provide a market for the recycled material that pays enough to push financing of new plants to do recycling at scale (and make sure that the recycling doesn't create negative externalities of its own).

nyan ,

The reason I phrased it that way is that it struck me as the sort of feature that might have gotten removed from one or more popular browsers in the name of "simplification". The right-click functionality still exists in the browser I daily-drive (Pale Moon, a Firefox fork that retains a lot of features its parent has jettisoned, so I couldn't be sure this wasn't one of them).

nyan ,

I gave up commenting on bad websites about a quarter-century ago. Most of them are bad one way or the other.

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