verdigris
@verdigris@lemmy.ml
- Comment on AI is the digital equivalent of an atom bomb. You can refuse it but you can't prevent others from using it... and there may be dire consequences if only the worst people have it. 3 days ago:
Whole lotta ifs and assumptions. “A high enough level of information processing” is meaningless if we don’t have any idea what sort of information processing could lead to consciousness, because it clearly isn’t just raw throughput.
AGI definitionally improves itself, which implies awareness of itself and intention. Those are a huge amount of how we define consciousness.
- Comment on AI is the digital equivalent of an atom bomb. You can refuse it but you can't prevent others from using it... and there may be dire consequences if only the worst people have it. 3 days ago:
The general definition.
- Comment on AI is the digital equivalent of an atom bomb. You can refuse it but you can't prevent others from using it... and there may be dire consequences if only the worst people have it. 3 days ago:
Yeah no only people who don’t understand the tech are worried about AGI. There is zero evidence to suggest that we’re anywhere on the right path to develop it. The chatbots are not intelligent, they are just a big bag of all the data the trainers could scrape and an algorithm to pull things out of that bag in a way that humans like.
Actual AGI would require us to understand how consciousness works. We don’t at all.
- Comment on What's stopping youtube from just going full authoritarian and mandate DRM for all their videos in attempt to prevent people from downloading it or block ads? 1 week ago:
The browsers implement the DRM protections. It will be black if you try to record.
- Comment on Question: Is there a Self Hosted Discord like app? 2 weeks ago:
Well that seems like a fairly big deal.
- Comment on how to dust properly 1 month ago:
Hahaha okay great I was just feeling sorry for your back!
- Comment on how to dust properly 1 month ago:
Tap it off on your ankle or a chair leg.
- Comment on how to dust properly 1 month ago:
The floor? Have you heard of brooms and mops?
- Comment on how to dust properly 1 month ago:
Use a decent quality duster, cheaper options retain way less dust.
Dust from high to low in a room or area.
After a few strokes, tap out the duster at ground level, on your ankle or a hard surface. This minimizes dust getting in the air.
Finally, vacuum.
- Comment on Transcribed text of Samantha Fulnecky's assignment, paper, and professor's comments 2 months ago:
The corrections to the paper literally ask for actual quotes lol
- Comment on Are those of us who grew up on older games more attuned to latency? 5 months ago:
I think so – gamers these days complain about having 50 ping or less than 120fps. There’s certainly a point at which it seriously impacts your gameplay, but I find it laughable when they can’t even deal with better performance than even existed 15 years ago.
- Comment on What does 🥀 mean? I've seen it used online a lot recently. 5 months ago:
It’s a flower
- Comment on Google will block sideloading of unverified Android apps starting next year 5 months ago:
Okay? My point is that it’s absurd to say that the USFG has been hard on monopolies until Trump’s second term.
- Comment on Google will block sideloading of unverified Android apps starting next year 5 months ago:
Right, because the single anti-trust action against Microsoft in the 90s is definitely all that was justified during the rise of the tech giants.
- Comment on A handful of people are slowly killing over 8 billion people, but we're expected to sit idly by and let it happen 6 months ago:
Organize by building stronger and more resilient communities. That’s what you’re supposed to be doing as an anarchist anyway.
- Comment on Schools are using AI to spy on students and some are getting arrested for misinterpreted jokes and private conversations 6 months ago:
The costs for responses are overblown, but the costs for training are not.
- Comment on Schools are using AI to spy on students and some are getting arrested for misinterpreted jokes and private conversations 6 months ago:
This is a wild take. You can get chatbots to vomit out entire paragraphs of published works verbatim. There is functionally no mechanism to a chatbot other than looking at a bunch existing texts, picking one randomly, and copying the next word from it. There’s no internal processing or logic that you could call creative, it’s just sticking one Lego at a time onto a tower, and every Lego is someone’s unpaid intellectual property.
There is no definition of plagiarism or copyright that LLMs don’t bite extremely hard. They’re just getting away with it because of the billions of dollars of capital pushing the tech. I am hypothetically very much for the complete abolition of copyright and free usage of information, but a) that means everyone can copy stuff freely, instead of just AI companies, and b) it first requires an actually functional society that provides for the needs of its citizens so they can have the time to do stuff like create art without needing to make a livable profit at it.
- Comment on Schools are using AI to spy on students and some are getting arrested for misinterpreted jokes and private conversations 6 months ago:
Okay so you could have just looked up one of dozens of resources on regex. The images you “need” are likely bad copies of images that already exist, or they’re weird collages of copied subject matter.
My point isn’t that there’s nothing they can do at all, it’s that nothing they can do is worth the energy cost. You’re spending tons of energy to effectively chew up information already on the web and have it vomited back to you in a slightly different form, when you could have just looked up the information directly. It doesn’t save time, because you have to double check everything. The images are also plagiarized, and you could be paying an artist if they’re something important, or improving your artistic abilities if they aren’t. I struggle to think of many cases where one of those options is unfeasible, it’s just the “easy” way out (because the energy costs are obfuscated) to have a machine crunch up some existing art to get a approximation of what you want.
- Comment on Schools are using AI to spy on students and some are getting arrested for misinterpreted jokes and private conversations 6 months ago:
Okay sure but in many cases the tech in question is actually useful for lots of other stuff besides repression. I don’t think that’s the case with LLMs. They have a tiny bit of actually usefulness that’s completely overshadowed by the insane skyscrapers of hype and lies that have been built up around their “capabilities”.
With “AI” I don’t see any reason to go through such gymnastics. The value in the tech is non-existent for anyone who isn’t either a researcher dealing with impractically large and unwieldy datasets, or of course a grifter looking to profit off of bigger idiots than themselves. It has never and will never be a useful tool for the average person, so why defend it?
- Comment on Schools are using AI to spy on students and some are getting arrested for misinterpreted jokes and private conversations 6 months ago:
I hate how fully leapfrogged the conversation about surveillance was. It’s so disgusting that it’s just assumed that all of your communications should be read by your teachers, parents, and school administration just because you’re a minor. Kids deserve privacy too.
- Comment on Schools are using AI to spy on students and some are getting arrested for misinterpreted jokes and private conversations 6 months ago:
You seem to be handwaving all concerns about the actual tech, but I think the fact that “training” is literally just plagiarism, and the absolutely bonkers energy costs for doing so, do squarely position LLMs as doing more harm than good in most cases.
The innocent tech here is the concept of the neural net itself, but unless they’re being trained on a constrained corpus of data and then used to analyze that or analogous data in a responsible and limited fashion then I think it’s somewhere on a spectrum between “irresponsible” and “actually evil”.0
- Comment on Drinks shouldn’t be chewed 7 months ago:
Not autistic but yeah I hate them. If they weren’t so sticky it’d be better…
- Comment on Adblockers stop publishers serving ads to (or even seeing) 1bn web users - Press Gazette 7 months ago:
Advertising should be illegal. Huge waste of money and everyone’s time.
- Comment on Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share In USA 7 months ago:
I know that and you know that, but have you seen the sort of thing Trump and those who have his ear think is a good idea?
I don’t think they’d just ban using all open source software, it’d be something ridiculous like asserting that all FOSS licenses are null and void and those projects are now the intellectual property of the US. Likely propped up by the classic “security” justification.
- Comment on Linux Reaches 5% Desktop Market Share In USA 7 months ago:
I’m less worried about any specific targeting of Linux than I am about some random tech bro whispering in Trump’s ear and suddenly he bans Open Source or something similarly unenforceable and insane.
- Comment on It's just loss. 7 months ago:
Factory farming has never been done sustainably. Give an example if you disagree. Or are you one of those homesteader guys who thinks he can raise two cows and four sheep on an acre alongside your field of corn and miniature orchard?
- Comment on [Video] BBC cuts away during pro-Palestine musicians Kneecap. The followup act Bob Vylan invents a new chant on live TV 7 months ago:
The IDF is a military force actively engaged in ethnic cleansing and genocide. Israel itself is a colonist state that only exists thanks to constant violence threatened and perpetrated by its military and the US. It is not in any way antisemitic to criticize these entities up to and including advocating for their dissolution. Anyone who takes this valid criticism and turns it into “Jews Bad” is either incapable of understanding the complexity of the issues here, is a bad faith actual anti-Semite looking for an excuse, or has fallen for the ubiquitous state propaganda that has been conditioning this exact response.
States and militaries are not culture. Nationalism is not identity. Fascism must be dismantled whatever form it takes.
- Comment on What's a good instance to be on at the moment? 8 months ago:
Yeah I’ve been very happy here. Despite a reputation as a “tankie instance” I find that we mostly just don’t put up with fascists which is sick imo.
- Comment on Tunic is awesome and I wish more people talked about it 8 months ago:
Hmmm, something isn’t adding up here. While there are a couple places where the combat is annoying, it’s really only the bosses and maybe a few enemies in the endgame.
The blobs absolutely have tells, I can’t remember what they are but they exist. If you’ve played literally any action game before you should be able to beat that enemy pretty easily, it sounds like you were pressing the wrong button to dodge or something.
- Comment on Why are American cops allowed to be morbidly obese? 8 months ago:
Police unions are the only bad union.