patatahooligan

@patatahooligan@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Two conversational AI agents switching from English to sound-level protocol after confirming they are both AI agents⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  No, the implied solution is to reevaluate the standard rather than hacking around it. The two humans should communicate that the standard works for neither side and design a better way to do things.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Two conversational AI agents switching from English to sound-level protocol after confirming they are both AI agents⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This is really funny to me. If you keep optimizing this process you’ll eventually completely remove the AI parts. Really shows how some of the pains AI claims to solve are self-inflicted. A good UI would have allowed the user to make this transaction in the same time it took to give the AI its initial instructions.

  On this topic, here’s another common anti-pattern that I’m waiting for people to realize is insane and do something about it:

  • person A needs to convey an idea/proposal
  • they write a short but complete technical specification for it
  • it doesn’t comply with some arbitrary standard/expectation so they tell an AI to expand the text
  • the AI can’t add any real information, it just spreads the same information over more text
  • person B receives the text and is annoyed at how verbose it is
  • they tell an AI to summarize it
  • they get something basically aims to be the original text, but it’s been passed through an unreliable hallucinating energy-inefficient channel

  Based on true stories.

  The above is not to say that every AI use case is made up or that the demo in the video isn’t cool. It’s also not a problem exclusive to AI. This is a more general observation that people don’t question the sanity of interfaces enough, even when it costs them a lot of extra work to comply with it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta Says it Made Sure Not to Seed Any Pirated Books⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s much more complicated than this. Given that models have been shown to spit out verbatim copies of some training material, it can be argued that the weights do in fact encode the material, just in some obfuscated way. Additionally, it can be argued that the output of the model is a derivative copy of the original work regardless of whether the original work can be “found inside” the model weights, just by the nature of the process. As of now, there is no precedent that I know of on whether this constitutes redistribution of copyrighted material.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code.⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Agreed. A few year back the devs looking for quick fixes would go over to StackOverflow and just copy answers without reading explanations. This caused the same type of problems that OP is talking about. That said, the ease of AI might be making things even worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why doesn't phones numbers have a "DNS" servet so we can just type in words like we do with the internet?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Getting the entire world to switch to something better would be quite the undertaking.

  But that’s probably not necessary. You could install something on your phone that does phone number lookup and then just dials the number as normal. The service doesn’t need to be built into the old phone networks this way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨This was Likely Recently Auto-Installed on your Phone.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  As far as I know, the apps are not intercepting the text messages for passcodes. The messages have a specific format and a hash to indicate which app they are targeting. It is up to the messages app to read the message and to forward the code. This design should not need to give the apps any access to your messages.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s only really feasible for phones they knowingly send to regulators. The phone would have no practical way of knowing that I’m having staged conversations around it and keeping track of the ads I see.

  But even if you’re right, that doesn’t change the fact that a lack of objective measurement means all these stories are unreliable.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks for the heads up. I am aware of the spying issues with smartphones (and any way you access the internet really). This is part of the reason why I don’t think proving the unauthorized use of the microphone to spy is really important and why we need systemic solutions to prevent abuse in any case.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  All online ads should have to say which filters they matched to advertise to you.

  According to the Signal foundation, the reverse is true. They claim they got banned for revealing that info.

  signal.org/…/the-instagram-ads-you-will-never-see…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I still don’t think companies serve you ads based on spying through your microphone⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  There are billions of smartphones out there. Thousands of people getting ads relevant to what they just discussed is normal. And it’s not just about the number of stories. It’s also about how unscientific these reports are as well. If you want to come up with actually useful evidence you would have to test this multiple times to prove it’s not random and you would also have to objectively measure the effect. You need to show a significant increase in the probability of getting a relevant ad, which in turn means you need to know what the baseline probability of getting one is (when the phone has not been allowed to spy on you).

  All that being said, I don’t think proving that smartphones spy on us is all that useful. The fact that it can happen very easily is already a problem. Security and privacy are protected when we design systematic solutions that prevent abuse. They are not protected in unregulated systems where we might sometimes prove abuse has happened after the fact. There’s plenty wrong with a modern smartphone regardless of whether it happens to be spying on you right now.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨LineageOS now officially supports the Pixel 9 series⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Is the bootloader really that important for a lost phone? If someone finds your phone can’t they just tear it apart and read the storage with external tools? A locked bootloader sounds more like an anti-tampering measure and not for protecting your phone’s content after it’s lost.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Social media is becoming infested with climate change denial and misinformation⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  For anyone stumbling onto this who actually wants to be educated, the science has practically unanimously agreed that climate change is mainly caused by human activity. No expert is unaware of the cycles that temporarily affect climate. They are well studied, modeled, and found to pale in comparison to human-made climate change. You can find comparisons between human and natural drivers, with sources from expert organizations and scientific studies, here and here. Funnily enough, the NOAA, which this commenter used as a source for El Niño and La Niña below, also hosts this article which literally starts by linking to a page that points out how climate change is mostly caused by humans.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Intel releases one last microcode update to fix high-end desktop CPU crashes⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Where are you searching for updates? Your motherboard manufacturer should release firmware updates that include the microcode patches.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI Execs Mass Quit as Company Removes Control From Non-Profit Board and Hands It to Sam Altman⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, there isn’t really any such alternate timeline. Good honest causes are not profitable enough to survive against the startup scams. Even if the non-profit side won internally, OpenAI would just be left behind, funding would go to its competitors, and OpenAI would shut down. Unless you mean a radically different alternate timeline where our economic system is fundamentally different.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨GitHub - WinampDesktop/winamp: Iconic media player⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  You would still not be allowed to to redistribute it though. Others would not be able to build your code and distribute binaries either. Just the act of creating a fork is not enough to create a viable project.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft is bringing annoying Windows 11 Start menu ads to Windows 10⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve gamed on Linux for the past 5 years. If you use Steam, most stuff works out of the box after you enable a single setting. Now that the linux gaming community is growing it’s easier to find workarounds for the games that don’t work. The only games that are hopelessly broken right now are games with intrusive anti-cheats that don’t support Linux. You can head over to protondb.com and check compatibility status for your games, including workarounds when necessary.

  If you don’t use Steam, then I’m not sure. Last time I played non-Steam games there was more troubleshooting and tweaking required but it’s been a couple of years and I don’t know the current state. It’s worth noting that Valve’s compatibility layer, Proton, is open-source and based on other open-source projects. There’s work currently being done to port the functionality outside of Steam. Hopefully, this will mean that in the future all launchers will behave similarly.

  But that’s just the software side of things. Don’t forget to check how your hardware works on Linux as well.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ars Technica content is now available in OpenAI services⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s funny because you’re making the opposite point of the one you think you’re making. Cause if you put together the two pieces of information from your comment, the entire picture is:

  Open ai makes a deal to pay media org for there content and makes it so they can link back to original article, with the money they make from stealing everybody else’s content

  That’s already pretty bad, even without that points you neglected to mention, like how some of the content that is indirectly making money for Ars Technica is stolen from their competitors, or how Ars Technica basically became a worthless journalistic source for AI at a time where public opinion is not yet settled on its morality and precedent has not been set on its legality. How is this not “sold out” to you?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The EV industry can’t shake its human rights abuse problem⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  EVs can be better than ICEs and still a terrible industry though. You phrase it as if it’s one or the other.

  Regardless of abuse allegations, EVs are just not the big improvement we need to fight climate change and save the millions of people that will die because of it. We need fundamental changes like lives built around public transport, biking, and walking, not slightly better vehicles in an enormously wasteful model.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨What is a good eli5 analogy for GenAI not "knowing" what they say?⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Imagine you were asked to start speaking a new language, eg Chinese. Your brain happens to work quite differently to the rest of us. You have immense capabilities for memorization and computation but not much else. You can’t really learn Chinese with this kind of mind, but you have an idea that plays right into your strengths. You will listen to millions of conversations by real Chinese speakers and mimic their patterns. You make notes like “when one person says A, the most common response by the other person is B”, or “most often after someone says X, they follow it up with Y”. So you go into conversations with Chinese speakers and just perform these patterns. It’s all just sounds to you. You don’t recognize words and you can’t even tell from context what’s happening. If you do that well enough you are technically speaking Chinese but you will never have any intent or understanding behind what you say. That’s basically LLMs.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Just because something is available to view online does not mean you can do anything you want with it. Most content is automatically protected by copyright. You can use it in ways that would otherwise by illegal only if you are explicitly granted permission to do so.

  Specifically, Stack Overflow licenses any content you contribute under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 (older content is covered by other licenses that I omit for simplicity). If you read the license you will note two restrictions: attribution and “share-alike”. So if you take someone’s answer, including the code snippets, and include it in something you make, even if you change it to an extent, you have to attribute it to the original source and you have to share it with the same license. You could theoretically mirror the entire SO site’s content, as long as you used the same licenses for all of it.

  So far AI companies have simply scraped everything and argued that they don’t have to respect the original license. They argue that it is “fair use” because AI is “transformative use”. If you look at the historical usage of “transformative use” in copyright cases, their case is kind of bullshit actually. But regardless of whether it will hold up in court (and whether it should hold up in court), the reality is that AI companies are going to use everybody’s content in ways that they have not been given permission to do so.

  So for now it doesn’t matter whether our content is centralized or federated. It doesn’t matter whether SO has a deal with OpeanAI or not. SO content was almost certainly already used for ChatGPT. If you split it into 100s of small sites on the fediverse it would still be part of ChatGPT. As long as it’s easy to access, they will use it. Allegedly they also use torrents for input data so even if it’s not publicly viewable it’s not safe. If/when AI data sourcing is regulated and the “transformative use” argument fails in court and if the fines are big enough for the regulation to actually work, then sure the situation described in the OP will matter. But we’ll have to see if that ever happens. I’m not holding my breath, honestly.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This has nothing to do with centralization. AI companies are already scraping the web for everything useful. If you took the content from SO and split it into 1000 federated sites, it would still end up in a AI model. Decentralization would only help if we ever manage to hold the AI companies accountable for the en masse copyright violations they base their industry on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 10 reaches 70% market share as Windows 11 keeps declining⁩ ⁨⁨9⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I would highly advice against using Wine. It requires constant root access, just like virus scanners, making your system vulnerable.

  This can’t be right. Was it maybe a particular workflow you used that required root access? I know I’ve used wine as part of Steam’s Proton as well as via Lutris and neither app has ever requested privilege escalation. I’ve also run wine manually from the terminal also without being root.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI transcribed over a million hours of YouTube videos to train GPT-4⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No, the intent and the consequences of an action are generally taken into consideration in discussions of ethins and in legislation. Additionally, this is not just a matter of ToS. What OpenAI does is create and distribute illegitimate derivative works. They are relying on the argument that what they do is transformative use, which is not really congruent with what “transformative use” has meant historically. We will see in time what the courts have to say about this. But in any case, it will not be judged the same way as a person using a tool just to skip ads. And Revanced is different to both the above because it is a non-commercial service.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨F.A.A. Audit of Boeing’s 737 Max Production Found Dozens of Issues⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  According to The Guardian he got $60M in stock and pension for being fired. Also it seems that stock price didn’t fall much after the crashes and the grounding. It is only after COVID hit that Boeing’s price plummeted. So it might be only by pure luck that he lost anything of value at all.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Nvidia is sued by authors over AI use of copyrighted works⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Humans are not generally allowed to do what AI is doing! You talk about copying someone else’s “style” because you know that “style” is not protected by copyright, but that is a false equivalence. An AI is not copying “style”, but rather every discernible pattern of its input. It is just as likely to copy Walt Disney’s drawing style as it is to copy the design of Mickey Mouse. We’ve seen countless examples of AI’s copying characters, verbatim passages of texts and snippets of code. Imagine if a person copied Mickey Mouse’s character design and they got sued for copyright infringement. Then they go to court and their defense was that they downloaded copies of the original works without permission and studied them for the sole purpose of imitating them. They would be admitting that every perceived similarity is intentional. Do you think they would not be found guilty of copyright infringement? And AI is this example taken to the extreme. It’s not just creating something similar, it is by design trying to maximize the similarity of its output to its training data. It is being the least creative that is mathematically possible. The AI’s only trick is that it threw so many stuff into its mixer of training data that you can’t generally trace the output to a specific input. But the math is clear. And while its obvious that no sane person will use a copy of Mickey Mouse just because an AI produced it, the same cannot be said for characters of lesser known works, passages from obscure books, and code snippets from small free software projects.

  In addition to the above, we allow humans to engage in potentially harmful behavior for various reasons that do not apply to AIs.

  • “Innocent until proven guilty” is fundamental to our justice systems. The same does not apply to inanimate objects. Eg a firearm is restricted because of the danger it poses even if it has not been used to shoot someone. A person is only liable for the damage they have caused, never their potential to cause it.
  • We care about peoples’ well-being. We would not ban people from enjoying art just because they might copy it because that would be sacrificing too much. However, no harm is done to an AI when it is prevented from being trained, because an AI is not a person with feelings.
  • Human behavior is complex and hard to control. A person might unintentionally copy protected elements of works when being influenced by them, but that’s hard to tell in most cases. An AI has the sole purpose of copying patterns with no other input.

  For all of the above reasons, we choose to err on the side of caution when restricting human behavior, but we have no reason to do the same for AIs, or anything inanimate.

  In summary, we do not allow humans to do what AIs are doing now and even if we did, that would not be a good argument against AI regulation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI companies are violating a basic social contract of the web and and ignoring robots.txt⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  AI companies will probably get a free pass to ignore robots.txt even if it were enforced by law. That’s what they’re trying to do with copyright and it looks likely that they’ll get away with it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The White House wants to 'cryptographically verify' videos of Joe Biden so viewers don't mistake them for AI deepfakes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  The general public doesn’t have to understand anything about how it works as long as they get a clear “verified by …” statement in the UI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mozilla’s new service tries to wipe your data off the web⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  lsblk is just lacking a lot of information and creating a false impression of what is happening. I did a bind mount to try it out.

  sudo mount -o ro --bind /var/log /mnt
  

  This mounts /var/log to /mnt without making any other changes. My root partition is still mounted at / and fully functional. However, all that lsblk shows under MOUNTPOINTS is /mnt. There is no indication that it’s just /var/log that is mounted and not the entire root partition. There is also no mention at all of /. findmnt shows this correctly. Omitting all irrelevant info, I get:

  TARGET                                                SOURCE                 [...]
  /                                                     /dev/dm-0              [...]
  [...]
  └─/mnt                                                /dev/dm-0[/var/log]    [...]
  

  Here you can see that the same device is used for both mountpoints and that it’s just /var/log that is mounted at /mnt.

  Snap is probably doing something similar. It is mounting a specific directory into the directory of the firefox snap. It is not using your entire root partition and it’s not doing something that would break the / mountpoint. This by itself should cause no issues at all. You can see in the issue you linked as well that the fix to their boot issue was something completely irrelevant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Apple refuses to relax its iron grip on iPhones in Europe⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If this isn’t violating the DMA then the DMA is stupid. Legislation should limit the company’s control, not force it into a specific action while allowing it to maintain as much control as possible.

  In other words the DMA should effectively say “you don’t get to choose how your platform is used”, not “you get to make the rules, but just don’t be the only one who can develop for your platform”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I'm at a roulette table. I only bet on red. When I lose I triple my bet, when I win I restart. Is this a roulette strategy?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If you have a large enough bank roll and continuously double your bet after a loss, you can never lose without a table limit.

  Unless your bank roll is infinite, you always lose in the average case. My math was just an example to show the point with concrete numbers.

  In truth it is trivial to prove that there is no winning strategy in roulette. If a strategy is just a series of bets, then the expected value is the sum of the expected value of the bets. Every bet in roulette has a negative expected value. Therefore, every strategy has a negative expected value as well. I’m not saying anything ground-breaking, you can read a better write-up of this idea in the wikipedia article.

  If you don’t think that’s true, you are welcome to show your math which proves a positive expected value. Otherwise, saying I’m “completely wrong” means nothing.