General_Effort
@General_Effort@lemmy.world
- Comment on Does the average person know markdown? 1 hour ago:
And quartz, of course.
- Comment on Is there any fundamental difference between an instance and a formal website ? 7 hours ago:
“Instance” is programmer lingo. Roughly, it’s when you have the same piece of code running multiple times with different values (as part of the same system). More narrowly, “instance” is used in the context of classes. All lemmy instances run the lemmy code but with different users, admins, and so on. The expression makes perfect sense, but it is not used in a formal way.
A lemmy instance runs a web server. Wikipedia says that when you host a web page under a dedicated domain name, you have a website.
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 1 day ago:
Instead of being silly, why don’t you just correct your disinformation and be done with it? Why these games?
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 1 day ago:
so you think that an automated account like, say “no-reply@amazon.com”, is somehow personal data?
No. I don’t know why you would believe that.
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 2 days ago:
So, what you are telling me, is that you are an IT professional working in Europe, and in your considered opinion, emails don’t fall under GDPR if you don’t provide your phone number or something. And that totally doesn’t sound like a joke. Is that about right?
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 2 days ago:
I still don’t get where all this disinformation comes from. What do you mean by “the GDPR website”? Are you under the impression that the linked website is somehow official? Even so, the information seems solid and shouldn’t give you these ideas.
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 2 days ago:
A user is typically a natural person. A username identifies that person. Any information that is directly or indirectly linked to that username is thus personal data of that person. The GDPR explicitly gives “online identifier” as an example of an identifier. I did link to the official repository, which hosts translation in all European languages. Each translation can be reached with 1 click. It cannot be a language issue. I do not understand what the problem could be.
The personal data in the OP (consent options) are linked to a person via a cookie stored in their browser. I do not understand how one could make sense of the case without understanding what personal data is.
There also appears to be some confusion between GDPR and copyright. I do not know where these strange ideas come from.
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 3 days ago:
Changing the subject. I take that as a sign that you understand how absurd your pontifications about the GDPR were. That’s great. I was able to help you. You’re welcome. However, it’s problematic that you chose to leave up incorrect info.
Now, you are not being truthful about what I wrote, so I do not think that it’s a good use of my time to lay out the issues here. If, at some point in the future, you are genuinely interested and able to behave like a responsible adult, we can talk about this.
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 3 days ago:
Da ist nichts, was man einem Erwachsenen, der einen IT-Job hat, erklären müsste. Die Behauptung, dass personenbezogene Daten nach DSGVO und PII im US-Recht dasselbe sein, ist so fundamental unsinnig, dass ich sie nur als Witz verstehen kann. Klar, normalerweise würde ich das erklären, aber wenn einer so rumtextet von wegen Profi, dann muss das ein Witz sein.
In case there’s really anyone lurking here. Maybe you could explain to them what you think happens when one agrees to be tracked for ads. That ought to be funny. Do they send a drone swarm with 4K-cameras to your location? What’s a TC-string? Something that goes up your butt?
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 3 days ago:
Ok. So you are trolling. Haha. The vote manipulation isn’t cool, though.
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 4 days ago:
I’m in the EU and PII definitely IS “a thing” here,
Then let me be more clear: It is not a thing in EU law.
With due respect, the level of intellectual functioning, in this case reading comprehension, you display is incompatible with being an IT professional in any country. If you are not trolling, then you should consult a physician.
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 4 days ago:
slight mistranslation: apparently, the proper english term is “personally identifiable information” or “PII”.
PII is a concept from US law. It is not a thing in the EU.
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 4 days ago:
I have trouble believing that you have been taught this nonsense. As far as I can tell, the term “PID” is not in use anywhere. That commercial site that you are so kindly helping sell its services doesn’t seem to use it. So who taught you that?
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 5 days ago:
PSA: Everything in the above post is wrong.
I copied from and linked to the GDPR on the official database of EU law. There is nothing I could possibly say to someone who claims that that is wrong.
That the facts are downvoted and the “alternative” upvoted is either the result of manipulation or says something very horrible about this community.
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 6 days ago:
For the purposes of this Regulation:
‘personal data’ means any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (‘data subject’); an identifiable natural person is one who can be identified, directly or indirectly, in particular by reference to an identifier such as a name, an identification number, location data, an online identifier or to one or more factors specific to the physical, physiological, genetic, mental, economic, cultural or social identity of that natural person;
Anything connected to your username is personal data. Your votes, posts, comments, settings subscriptions, and so on, but only as long as they are or can be actually connected to that username. Arguably, the posts and comments that you reply to also become part of your personal data in that they are necessary context. Any data that can be connected to an email address, or an IP address, is also personal data. When you log IPs for spam protection, you’re collecting personal data.
It helps to understand the GDPR if you think about data protection rights as a kind of intellectual property. In EU law, the right to data protection is regarded as a fundamental right of its own, separate from the right to privacy. The US doesn’t have anything like it.
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 6 days ago:
Federation means that personal data is sent to anyone who spins up an instance. What legal basis is there for that? These guys and their lawyers weren’t able to figure one out.
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 6 days ago:
I don’t really see how this ruling is helpful. The reasoning seems to confirm the view that the Fediverse is legally very problematic.
- Comment on EU ruling: tracking-based advertising by Google, Microsoft, Amazon, X, across Europe has no legal basis 6 days ago:
It sounds like it would be relatively easy to fix, but I worry it will strengthen monopolistic tendencies.
- Comment on Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected 1 week ago:
Thanks for the answer.
- Comment on Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected 1 week ago:
By giving us the choice of whether someone else should profit by our data.
What benefit do you expect from that?
Same as I don’t want someone looking over my shoulder and copying off my test answers.
Why not?
- Comment on Cloudflare CEO warns AI and zero-click internet are killing the web's business model 1 week ago:
Hah. No. That goes all the way back to the 90ies. Tim Berners-Lee proposed that standard.
- Comment on Avoiding AI is hard – but our freedom to opt out must be protected 1 week ago:
We should have the right to not have our data harvested by default.
How would that benefit the average person?
- Comment on Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa among artists urging British Prime Minister Starmer to rethink his AI copyright plans 1 week ago:
The copyright industry would never accept that. Where’s the money for them?
- Comment on Paul McCartney and Dua Lipa among artists urging British Prime Minister Starmer to rethink his AI copyright plans 1 week ago:
Ahh. Paul McCartney. Looks like Lemmy has finally found a billionaire it likes.
I’m sure it is The Beatles’ activism for social change that won people over. Who could forget their great protest song “The Taxman”, bravely taking a stand against the 95% tax rate. Truly, the 60ies were a time of liberation.
- Submitted 1 week ago to [deleted] | 3 comments
- Comment on Why I don't use AI in 2025 1 week ago:
Thank you for the long reply. I took some time to digest it. I believe I know what you mean.
I can also say that the consciousness resides in a form of virtual reality in the brain, allowing us to manipulate reality in our minds to predict outcomes of our actions.
We imagine what happens. Physicists use their imagination to understand physical systems. Einstein was famous for his thought experiments, such as imagining riding on a beam of light.
We also use our physical intuition for unrelated things. In math or engineering, everything is a point in some space; a data point. An RGB color is a point in 3D color space. An image can be a single point in some high dimensional space.
All our ancestor’s back to the beginning of life had to navigate an environment. Much of the evolution of our nervous system was occupied with navigating spaces and predicting physics. (This is why I believe language to be much easier than self-driving cars. See Moravec’s paradox.)
One problem is, when I think abstract thoughts and concentrate, I tend to be much less aware of myself. I can’t spare the “CPU cycles”, so to say. I don’t think self-awareness is a necessary component of this “virtual environment”.
There are people who are bad at visualizing; a condition known as aphantasia. There must be, at least, quite some diversity in the nature of this virtual environment.
Some ideas about brain architecture seem to be implied. It should be possible to test some of these ideas by reference to neurological experiments or case studies, such as the work on split-brain patients. Perhaps the phenomenon of blindsight is directly relevant.
I am reminded of the concept of latent representations in AI. Lately, as reasoning models have become the rage, there are attempts to let the reasoning happen in latent space.
- Comment on Why I don't use AI in 2025 1 week ago:
You do it wrong, you provided the “answer” to the logic proposition, and got a parroted the proof for it.
Well, that’s the same situation I was in and just what I did. For that matter, Peano was also in that situation.
This is fixed now, and had to do with tokenizing info incorrectly.
Not quite. It’s a fundamental part of tokenization. The LLM does not “see” the individual letters. By, for example, adding spaces between the letters one could force a different tokenization and a correct count (I tried back then). It’s interesting that the LLM counted 2 "r"s, as that is phonetically correct. One wonders how it picks up on these things. It’s not really clear why it should be able to count at all.
It’s possible to make an LLM work on individual letters, but that is computationally inefficient. A few months ago, researchers at Meta proposed a possible solution called the Byte Latent Transformer (BLT). We’ll see if anything comes of it.
In any case, I do not see the relation to consciousness. Certainly there are enough people who are not able to spell or count and one would not say that they lack consciousness, I assume.
Yes, but if you instruct a parrot or LLM to say yes when asked if it is separate from it’s surroundings, it doesn’t mean it is just because it says so.
That’s true. We need to observe the LLM in its natural habit. What an LLM typically does, is continue a text. (It could also be used to work backwards or fill in the middle, but never mind.) A base model is no good as a chatbot. It has to be instruct-tuned. In operation, the tuned model is given a chat log containing a system prompt, text from the user, and text that it has previously generated. It will then add a reply and terminate the output. This text, the chat log, could be said to be the sum of its “sensory perceptions” as well as its “short-term memory”. Within this, it is able to distinguish its own replies, that of the user, and possibly other texts.
My example shows this level of understanding clearly isn’t there.
Can you lay out what abilities are connected to consciousness? What tasks are diagnostic of consciousness? Could we use an IQ test and diagnose people as having or not consciousness?
I was a bit confused by that question, because consciousness is not a construct, the brain is, of which consciousness is an emerging property.
The brain is a physical object. Consciousness is both an emergent property and a construct; like, say, temperature or IQ.
You are saying that there are different levels of consciousness. So, it must be something that is measurable and quantifiable. I assume a consciousness test would be similar to IQ test in that it would contain selected “puzzles”.
We have to figure out how consciousness is different from IQ. What puzzles are diagnostic of consciousness and not of academic ability?
- Submitted 2 weeks ago to games@lemmy.world | 0 comments
- Comment on Why I don't use AI in 2025 2 weeks ago:
Because I don’t think we have a sure methodology.
I don’t think there’s an agreed definition.
Strong AI or AGI, or whatever you will, is usually talked about in terms of intellectual ability. It’s not quite clear why this would require consciousness. Some tasks are aided by or maybe even necessitate self-awareness; for example, chatbots. But it seems to me that you could leave out such tasks and still have something quite impressive.
Then, of course, there is no agreed definition of consciousness. Many will argue that the self-awareness of chatbots is not consciousness.
I would say most people take strong AI and similar to mean an artificial person, for which they take consciousness as a necessary ingredient. Of course, it is impossible to engineer an artificial person. It is like creating a technology to turn a peasant into a king. It is a category error. A less kind take could be that stochastic parrots string words together based on superficial patterns without any understanding.
But we may be able to prove that it is NOT conscious, which I think is clearly the case with current level AI. Although you don’t accept the example I provided, I believe it is clear evidence of lack of a consciousness behind the high level of intelligence it clearly has.
Indeed, I do not see the relation between consciousness and reasoning in this example.
Self-awareness means the ability to distinguish self from other, which implies computing from sensory data what is oneself and what is not. That could be said to be a form of reasoning. But I do not see such a relation for the example.
By that standard, are all humans conscious?
FWIW, I asked GPT-4o mini via DDG.
Screenshot
I don’t know if that means it understands. It’s how I would have done it (yesterday, after looking up Peano Axioms in Wikipedia), and I don’t know if I understand it.
- Comment on Why I don't use AI in 2025 2 weeks ago:
Just because you can’t make a mathematical proof doesn’t mean you don’t understand the very simple truth of the statement.
If I can’t prove it, I don’t know how I can claim to understand it.
It’s axiomatic that equality is symmetric. It’s also axiomatic that 1+1=2. There is not a whole lot to understand. I have memorized that. Actually, having now thought about this for a bit, I think I can prove it.
What makes the difference between a human learning these things and an AI being trained for them?
I think if I could describe that, I might actually have solved the problem of strong AI.
Then how will you know the difference between strong AI and not-strong AI?
