leftzero
@leftzero@lemmynsfw.com
- Comment on OpenAI and Anthropic are ignoring an established rule that prevents bots scraping online content 1 week ago:
The problem is not them being random.
They are not random, that’s the point. They’re entirely deterministic and very precise, and they aren’t hiding anything; they will give you the most likely (not blacklisted) sequence of characters to follow your input according to their model. What they won’t give you is information, except by accident.
If they were random (hidden or not) they’d be harmless, no one would trust them any more than one of those eight ball toys, or your average horoscope.
The issue is that they’re very not random, so much that there’s no way to know if what they are saying bears any accidental semblance to the truth without fact checking… and that very soon they’ll have replaced any feasible way to fact check them, since all the supposed “facts” we’ll have access to will have been generated by LLMs train on LLM generated garbage.
- Comment on OpenAI and Anthropic are ignoring an established rule that prevents bots scraping online content 1 week ago:
If the models are random then we shouldn’t be trusting them to do anything, let alone serious applications.
That’s not the reason we shouldn’t be using them for anything other than generating lorem ipsum style text or dialogue for non quest critical NPCs in games.
The reason is that, paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, LLMs don’t generate information, they generate information shaped sentences.
Specifically, an LLM takes a sequence of characters (not a word or text; LLMs have no concept of words, or text, or anything else for that matter; they’re just an application of statistics on large volumes of sequences of characters; no meaning or intelligence involved, artificial or not)… as I was saying, an LLM takes a sequence of characters, pushes it through its model, and outputs the sequence of characters most likely to follow it in the texts its model has been trained on (or rather, the most likely after discarding the ones its creators have labelled as politically incorrect).
That’s all they do, and they’ll excellent at it (or would be if it weren’t for the aforementioned filters), but that’ll never give you a cure for cancer unless there already was one in their training data.
They take texts written by humans, shred them, and give you their badly put back together dessicated corpses, drained of any and all meaning or information, but looking very convincingly (until you fact check them) like actually meaningful or informative texts.
That is what makes them dangerous. That and the fact that the bastards selling them are marketing them for the jobs they’re least capable of doing, that is, providing reliable information.
(And that’s while they can still be trained on meaningful and informative texts written by humans — inasmuch as anything found on reddit, facebook, or xitter can be considered to be meaningful or informative —, but given that a higher and higher percentage of the text on the internet is being generated by LLMs soon enough it’ll be impossible to train new models on anything but 99% LLM generated garbage, at which point the whole bubble will implode, as anyone who’s wasted time, paper, and toner playing with a photocopier or anyone familiar with the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” will already have realised… which is probably why the LLM peddlers are ignoring robots.txt and copyright laws in a desperate effort to scrape whatever’s left of the bottom of the barrel.)
- Comment on RIP Twitter Dot Com: Elon Musk Moves Social Network to X Web Address 1 month ago:
It’s called xitter, and it’s full of xit(s).
- Comment on 'Does Everyone Hate Real World?': Ghost In The Shell: Arise Director Bemoans The Rise Of Isekai Anime 1 month ago:
Does everyone hate real world?
I mean… kinda, yeah. Though, to be fair, the feeling seems to be mutual…
- Comment on OpenAI strikes Reddit deal to train its AI on your posts 1 month ago:
Meh, good luck with that.
All my Reddit comments have just said “Comment redacted in protest against Reddit’s deranged attacks against third party apps, the community, and common sense. See you’ll in Lemmy or Kbin once this embarrassment of a site is done enshittifying itself out of existence. Monetize this, u/spez, you greedy little pigboy. 🖕” since I edited them before moving here. 🤷♂️
- Comment on Is there a movie with a significant portion of it shot through a telescope? 1 month ago:
Yes, that’s a good example, though there are several other candlelit scenes in the film.
- Comment on Is there a movie with a significant portion of it shot through a telescope? 1 month ago:
Not a telescope, but Barry Lyndon was shot using lenses designed specifically for the Apollo program to capture the dark side of the moon.
The large aperture of these lenses allowed Kubrick to shoot scenes lit only by candlelight, and helped make every frame look like a painting.
- Comment on xkcd #2929: Good and Bad Ideas 1 month ago:
Not as much as necrotic tissue still attached to the patient, I suppose. (The idea is that these maggots are extremely good at debridement, that is, at eating only the dead tissue and leaving the still healthy ones alone; other methods, like scalpels, can’t be so discriminating, and force the doctors to remove healthy tissue to make sure there’s no necrosis left).
- Comment on xkcd #2929: Good and Bad Ideas 1 month ago:
Those aren’t good types of bread, though.
- Comment on Helldivers 2 Players Express Frustration On Steam As It Will Soon Require A PSN Account 1 month ago:
“But the plans were on display…” “On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.” “That’s the display department.” “With a flashlight.” “Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.” “So had the stairs.” “But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?” “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
- Comment on Catholic 'media ministry' defrocks AWOL AI priest after it told faithful you can baptise babies in Gatorade and that, sure, it can totally perform your wedding 1 month ago:
Oh, I wasn’t aware of that, sorry. Guess I’ve got something to watch, then, thanks!
- Comment on Catholic 'media ministry' defrocks AWOL AI priest after it told faithful you can baptise babies in Gatorade and that, sure, it can totally perform your wedding 1 month ago:
The TV adaptation of the quoted book.
- Comment on Catholic 'media ministry' defrocks AWOL AI priest after it told faithful you can baptise babies in Gatorade and that, sure, it can totally perform your wedding 1 month ago:
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, Douglas Adams, 1987, in case anyone was wondering.
- Comment on Windows 10 reaches 70% market share as Windows 11 keeps declining 1 month ago:
You forgot Vista between XP and 7 (probably because your brain blocked that traumatic experience).
- Comment on Anyone else notice a long delay for comments/posts from lemmy.world? 2 months ago:
Dbzer0 recently had issues with long federation queues with big instances, due to delays in database access caused by geographic distance between frontend and backend… maybe this might be caused by something similar…?
- Comment on "Guess the animal I'm thinking of! Clue: it's a type of bat" 3 months ago:
Wait, does that mean that we evolved our scrotums independently from other mammals…?
- Comment on "Guess the animal I'm thinking of! Clue: it's a type of bat" 3 months ago:
- Comment on Covenant Of The Plume: An Hidden Nintendo DS Masterpiece 3 months ago:
An 'idden.
- Comment on why don't people say mega meters 3 months ago:
For interplanetary space and beyond the time it takes for light to cross the distance makes more sense, I’d say. The moon is about half a second away, the sun about eight minutes, Alpha Centauri or Barnard’s about four years, and so on…
- Comment on Reddit Signs AI Content Licensing Deal Ahead of IPO 4 months ago:
I used some text telling Spez he was a greedy little pigboy and to train his AI with that, if I recall correctly.
- Comment on Why don't we have one timezone covering the whole earth? 4 months ago:
You have 244 timezones.
Let’s have one timezone for the whole world!
You have 245 timezones.
- Comment on Passkeys might really kill passwords 4 months ago:
This means you can access your account form a public device without that device ever knowing your credentials provided you and your secure device are physically presen
My secure device is in my other pants, though. I misplace my brain much less often.
- Comment on Passkeys might really kill passwords 4 months ago:
It makes your passwords easier to brute force
Passphrases are by definition hard to brute force.
The formula should not be obvious. Don’t just put the site’s name in the passphrase, put a similar sounding but easy to remember word, something that rhymes, the first and last letters of the site’s name plus the number of letters in the domain name, whatever.
An attacker would need to specifically target you and have more than one of your passphrases using the same formula in order to try to figure it out. Too much work. If they’re that interested in your password it’s easier to beat you up until you tell them.
And what happens if the password is breached? Do you change the formula? What happens if a site requires a password change?
You can have a couple different formulas or variations.
how do you remember which iteration you’re on?
Same way you’d remember the password you used for a site if you reused two or three different passwords.
And if you use the wrong one just try again; sure, passphrases can be a bit long, but having to type them multiple times is a good way to make sure you remember which one you used, lest you have to type it again.
- Comment on Passkeys might really kill passwords 4 months ago:
unless someone looks at a password breech list and figures out your super simple pattern.
Don’t simply put the site’s name there. Put a similar sounding easy to remember word, a synonym, rhyming slang, the first and last letters of the site’s name plus the number of letters in the domain name, whatever.
- Comment on Passkeys might really kill passwords 4 months ago:
Just use a simple formula to make the passphrase unique to each site. 🤷♂️
- Comment on Passkeys might really kill passwords 4 months ago:
There’s no way for the average person to keep up with remembering unique, strong passwords for all the sites that require them.
Passphrases with a simple formula to make them unique for each site.
You just have to remember the formula, you get a strong unique password for each site.
Easy and safe, and doesn’t tie you to a single point of failure like a specific device or a password manager.
Add two factor authentication on top (with multiple options, of course, otherwise you’ll get locked out once you inevitably lose the second authentication method), and you can even safely use it from third party devices which you don’t want to remember how to access your accounts.
- Comment on Passkeys might really kill passwords 4 months ago:
there’s nothing you have to remember which makes it more convenient for you to use
Unlike my devices, I always have my brain on me. Devices are much more easily lost or stolen than memories. I often might want to access sites using my account from third party devices which I don’t want to be able to use my accounts when I’m not using them.
I just can’t understand how using passkeys (or password managers, for that matter, massive single points of failure that they are) is supposed to be in any way shape or form more convenient than simply remembering a passphrase (which can easily be customisable for each site using some simple formula so that no two sites will share the same but it’ll still be trivial to remember).
Both password managers and passkeys seem like colossal inconveniences and security risks to me when compared to passphrases, frankly. And if you want extra security there’s always two factor authentication (with multiple alternatives in case you don’t have access to one of them, of course; otherwise you might as well delete your account).
- Comment on What game fits this? 4 months ago:
If I recall correctly you meet a guy who did that with agility (or was it acrobatics?) just after leaving Seyda Neen. It didn’t end well for him. (Also, I haven’t played that damn game in probably over two decades; how the fuck do I still remember that town’s name…? How the fuck do I still remember Fargoth…!?)
- Comment on ChatGPT's new AI store is struggling to keep a lid on all the AI girlfriends 5 months ago:
Main problem I see with this is that when the AI girlfriend company inevitably eventually folds, or dumbs down the product, or makes it start pushing ads instead of loving words, or succumbs to enshittification in any other way (which has already happened with at least a couple of models people were using as AI girlfriends) the users have to deal not only with going back to loneliness, but with the equivalent of the death of a loved one to boot. It’s not unlikely that some will end up hurting themselves or others as a consequence.
I mean, this is Lemmy, for fuck’s sake. I think we can all here agree that the whole concept is abhorrent, exploitative, and doomed from the start. What we evidently need are self hosted, open source AI companions, backed by a healthy community developing forks and extensions to cater to any and all imaginable (or unimaginable) kink and / or fetish, not this cloud based corporate-driven dystopian AI nightmare we seem to be heading to.
- Comment on ChatGPT's new AI store is struggling to keep a lid on all the AI girlfriends 5 months ago:
Fuck incels.
Isn’t that what they’re asking for…?