echodot

@echodot@feddit.uk

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Father sues Google, claiming Gemini chatbot drove son into fatal delusion⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  People used to say the same thing about books. There was a lot of moral panic about children sitting inside reading rather than being outside and playing with their friends. Then it was comic books, then it was TV, then it was dungeons and dragons, then it was the internet, now it’s chatbots.

  If there is some detrimental effect, I would like an explanation as to how it’s detrimental, rather than just a lot of hearsay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Sheep are disappearing from the UK's hills - and its dinner plates⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Sheep are incredibly expensive to farm as well which is why the meat cost so much.

  People think sheep are dumb but that isn’t true, they are anti-intelligent, they secretly hide vast intelligences that they use to come up with ingenious ways to injure or kill themselves. You can put goats in a field and fence them off and be reasonably confident that you will still have all of your goats when you come back in the morning.
  Sheep on the other hand will use their psychic abilities to manifest some broken glass, and then step on it.

  Then the supermarkets don’t want to pay very much for them and so now you’ve spent a lot of money looking after them and got very little in the way of return.

  The only reason that sheep were traditionally found was because you could put them on pastures of land that was completely unsuitable for any other animal. But it’s the supermarket aren’t willing to pay a fair price then that doesn’t really count for anything.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As Moon interest heats up, two companies unveil plans for a lunar "harvester"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  If we have colonies on Mars I can’t see why we also wouldn’t have colonies on the moon if only to support ships going further out into the solar system. Refuelling on the moon makes much more sense than refuelling on earth.

  The only way that isn’t the case is if we build a space elevator to bring resources up to spacecraft orbit, but if we’re at that point I still think we would build colonies on the moon just because, even if it’s just at the level of a Saudi Arabian vanity project.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨As Moon interest heats up, two companies unveil plans for a lunar "harvester"⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Would we be able to see it from earth?

  I’ve seen pictures of the earth from the moon and you can barely identify the continents. You definitely can’t see individual open cast mines.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Father sues Google, claiming Gemini chatbot drove son into fatal delusion⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Ok but walk it back a bit, why did they become homeless?

  If somebody is completely 100% mentally healthy I can’t see how an AI can convince them to kill themselves any more than another person could convince them to kill themselves. Only vulnerable people join cults, because it’s difficult to pray on people who have proper defences.

  I’m still not convinced that the AI isn’t just triggering some underlying mental condition that other people in their lives are just not aware of or not willing to accept.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Father sues Google, claiming Gemini chatbot drove son into fatal delusion⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d had a negative opinion of Asimov’s laws of robotics being used to control AI for most of my life, and LaMDA successfully persuaded me to change my opinion.

  Then he’s an idiot.

  Asimov’s laws of robotics aren’t some kind of model by which to control AI, there are plot device. They’re literally not supposed to work, if they did work it would be a very short book, so obviously we shouldn’t use them for controlling AI.

  I don’t know any serious IT professional that has ever, at any point, ever forwarded the opinion that an AI (should we ever a create one, because there is an arguement that LLMs aren’t AI) should be ruled by a plot device from a book. Equally if we ever invent warp drive and find aliens I’m assuming we’re not going to be restricted to the prime directive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Father sues Google, claiming Gemini chatbot drove son into fatal delusion⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the important point here is that just because the father is doing Google doesn’t necessarily mean that Google are at fault. People tend to feel that if an individual is suing a corporation for malfeasance the corporation is necessarily guilty. But reality doesn’t always run like that.

  I can’t see any reason that Google would want to encourage more suicide so I have to assume that it’s just an unfortunate interaction of a mentally unsound mind and a product that frankly even its own creators don’t understand. This is highly unfortunate but I’m not certain where the crime was.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Father sues Google, claiming Gemini chatbot drove son into fatal delusion⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes people can have mental delusions and psychotic episodes; I’m not necessarily convinced that they are a separate unique condition simply because they were triggered by an AI versus anything else.

  For one thing I’ve yet to hear a decent (or indeed any) explanation as to the mechanism by which AI triggers psychosis that is materially different from any other trigger. Most people who suffer from this condition can be triggered by literally anything, including mundane things such as seeing a red cars slightly more often than they believe they should, then they concoct this conspiracy about an evil cabal of red car owners.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Father sues Google, claiming Gemini chatbot drove son into fatal delusion⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  A little bit alarmist I feel after all if it was this easy to be affected by AI about half the population would be dead by now so clearly it’s not that simple.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Teen boys are using ChatGPT as their wingman. What could go wrong? AI is teaching teenagers about love now.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  The collective of all human comments on the topic distilled together are greater than that of Andrew Tate. Simply because Andrew Tate goes out of his way to be an awful person. Clueless is better than evil.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm struggling to think of any online services for which I'd be willing to verify my identity or age⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  My bank once sent me a letter to my address, to tell me that they did not know what my address was. So I’m not completely sure they are exactly on the ball.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Forced age verification is comming sooner than we thought.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  You don’t know anything about software development do you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ars Technica Fires Reporter After AI Controversy Involving Fabricated Quotes⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Copy editing won’t be an executive’s job. But yeah, they didn’t do the bare minimum which is concerning, it seems to indicate that they may not do the bare minimum on all of their articles. How much stuff went undiscovered?

  I’m not going to outright say that journalist shouldn’t use AI to write articles, because it’s basically an enforceable rule, but there should be someone at some point whose ultimate responsibility is to make sure that the articles are at least factual, whether they were written by a human or not. Determining whether a quote is legitimate is pretty easy, you just have to Google the quote, if you can’t find any other sources you start to ask questions. As I said it’s the bare minimum they could have done.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Walking with dinosaurs is like 20 years old it’s not recent.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes that was the retcon explanation. The actual explanation is that they wanted to have Velociraptors in the movie and weren’t really bothered about the fact that they aren’t actually that big, there are species of raptor that are that large, but they didn’t want to use their names because they were less well-known. Velociraptor was one of the few dinosaurs people knew. T-Rex didn’t become famous until after Jurassic Park.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I was think it’s funny how people go on about majestic horses. They’re not majestic, they are uncoordinated panicky idiots.

  My aunt has a horse and I’ve seen him run into a tree, there’s one single tree in his paddock and it’s a giant oak, and he’s running into it at least three times. He panics if he can’t see his friend, often because his friend is behind him, and then runs madly around until he crashes into something, or stumbles into the pond.

  This is the horse and had a panic attack because the farmer had bought a new wheelbarrow and it looked different to the one he was used to.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump: 'I am not happy with the UK'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I was saying this the other day. The best way Zack can get elected is to stand on a platform of pissing off Trump. Even reformer voters aren’t hugely in favour of Trump.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Trump: 'I am not happy with the UK'⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Churchill would have also told Trump to do one. He was not known for his lack of candour. The UK was at war with Germany before the Americans got involved so I don’t know what trump’s talking about. The US joined the UK on that one.

  Why would Churchill get the UK involved in a war that didn’t already affect the UK?

  Of course knowing any of this would require Trump to have actually read a history book which is probably where the issue starts.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pornography depicting sexual relationships between step-relatives set to be banned⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Which is more believable anyway, so I’m not really sure why it changed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pornography depicting sexual relationships between step-relatives set to be banned⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes the boiling frog approach. Now basically going to do it one at a time so they don’t get too much pushback.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Pornography depicting sexual relationships between step-relatives set to be banned⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  A new role for Neil Parish I think

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK Royal Airforce in Cyprus hit by drone strike⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a UK military base there that was attacked. His decision to allow the US to launch attacks from the island is stupid in my opinion, but the attack against the instant military installation happened anyway so it’s not actually his fault.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨UK Royal Airforce in Cyprus hit by drone strike⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Cyprus isn’t controlled by the British government so I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Damn that’s GTA levels of delay.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I sincerely doubt that a collision in low earth orbit is going to result in debris being flicked up into geostationary orbits, the energy differences involved are just monumental.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Little bit of a nitpick but Kessler syndrome doesn’t care about how many satellites you have, and more about how many dead satellites you have hanging around on random orbits. You could put hundreds of millions of satellites in space as long as you had some sort of decommissioned program. You can always send up rockets if you can just move the satellites out of the way / know where they are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  None of the moons in our solar system have atmospheres. Earths moon is too small to hold on to an atmosphere, and the Galilean moons of Jupiter are too cold for an atmosphere, the gas is just freeze.

  The best place would be either a space station in low earth orbit or of the L4 or L5 point. The data issue would be the problem though I suppose you could just use the data centres for training but not for active processing but then you would need to build data centres on earth for that.

  Given that you’re going to build the earth data centres anyway you might as well do all of the processing on earth at the same time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes I’d like to build data centres on Uranus one of the most distant planets in our solar system, and also one without a solid surface but who’s counting.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are making you dumber, according to science⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Then they were already dumb.

  Short attention span correlates with low intelligence but short attention span doesn’t cause low intelligence.

  I can’t remember the whole thing but there is a sort of pseudo research paper that got published exactly to demonstrate the difference between correlation and causation. In the paper they “found” that yellow teeth cause cancer.

  Of course smoking causes yellow teeth, and cancer. The yellow teeth are correlated, but do not cause.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels are making you dumber, according to science⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Intelligence is intelligence you can’t reduce it by watching cat videos