MagicShel

@MagicShel@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Octopodes?

  Ahk-top-o-deez nutz.

  English can always make things worse.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lemmit.online⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s fine to be up to the user. But it’s also fine to say it’s just a spam account and block it to save bandwidth. Easy for me to say, of course, since I’m already not seeing the content.

  The cool thing about the fediverse is that no one really controls the whole thing, so I give a lot of deference to folks who want to run things their own way. Anyone with a strong option that it needs to be done differently can stand up their own instance pretty easily.

  Or to summarize, you have a point but that doesn’t oblige the server to be run that way.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨lemmit.online⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe it’s different now, but two years ago it was just an echo chamber. No one responded to the posts because they weren’t responding to an actual person. You can’t tell people who the asshole is or answer their weird sex questions.

  I never saw any point and blocked that account and whole server. It’s just noise and a waste of bandwidth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Long-time iOS user considering switch to Android - Need advice on $1000 flagships⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Agree with this. Samsung has great hardware but I hate their software. I switched from them to iOS. Only thing I really hate in iOS is swipe typing and fucking awful autocorrect. Everything else is better than Samsung. They might also have a better camera but it’s hard to keep up with all the leapfrog.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Emergent introspective awareness in large language models⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve read it all twice. Once a deep skim and a second more thorough read before my last post.

  I just don’t agree that this shows what they think it does. Now I’m not dumb, but maybe it’s a me issue. I’ll check with some folks who know more than me and see if something stands out to them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Emergent introspective awareness in large language models⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think we could have a fascinating discussion about this offline. But in short here’s my understanding: they look at a bunch of queries and try to deduce the vector that represents a particular idea—like let’s say “sphere”. So then without changing the prompt, they inject that concept.

  How does this injection take place?

  I played with a service a few years ago where we could upload a corpus of text and from it train a “prefix” that would be sent along with every prompt, “steering” the output ostensibly to be more like the corpus. I found the influence to be undetectably subtle on that model, but that sounds a lot like what is going on here. And if that’s not it then I don’t really follow exactly what they are doing.

  Anyway my point is, that concept of a sphere is still going into the context mathematically even if it isn’t in the prompt text. And that concept influences the output—which is entirely the point, of course.

  None of that part is introspective at all. The introspection claim seems to come from unprompted output such as “round things are really on my mind.” To my way of thinking, that sounds like a model trying to bridge the gap between its answer and the influence. Like showing me a Rorschach blot and asking me about work and suddenly I’m describing things using words like fluttering and petals and honey and I’m like “weird that I’m making work sound like a flower garden.”

  And then they do the classic “why did you give that answer” which naturally produces bullshit—which they at least acknowledge awareness of—and I’m just not sure the output of that is ever useful.

  Anyway, I could go on at length, but this is more speculation than fact and a dialog would be a better format. This sounds a lot like researchers anthropomorphizing math by conflating it with thinking, and I don’t find it all that compelling.

  That said, I see analogs in human thought and I expect some of our own mechanisms may be reflected in LLM models more than we’d like to think. We also make decisions on words and actions based on instinct (a sort of concept injection) and we can also be “prefixed” for example by showing a phrase over top of an image to prime how we think about those words. I think there are fascinating things that can be learned about our own thought processes here, but ultimately I don’t see any signs of introspection—at least not in the way I think the word is commonly understood. You can’t really have meta-thoughts when you can’t actually think.

  Shit, this still turned out to be about 5x as long as I intended.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Emergent introspective awareness in large language models⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  They aren’t “self-aware” at all. These thinking models spend a lot of turns coming up with chains of reasoning. They focus on the reasoning first, and their reasoning primes the context.

  Like if I asked you to compute the area of a rectangle you might first say to yourself: “okay. There’s a formula for that. LxW. This rectangle is 4 by 5, so the calculation is 4x5, with is 20.” They use tokens to delineate the “thinking” from their response and only give you the response, but most will also show the thinking if you want.

  In contrast, if you ask an AI how it arrived at an answer after it gives it, it needs to either have the thinking in context or it is 100% bullshitting you. The reason injecting a thought affects the output is because that injected thought goes into the context. It’s like if you’re trying to count cash and I shout numbers at you, you might keep your focus on the task or the numbers might throw off your response.

  Literally all LLMs do is predict tokens, but we’ve gotten pretty good at finding more clever ways to do it. Most of the advancements in capabilities have been very predictable. I had a crude google augmented context before ChatGPT released browsing capabilities, for instance. Tool use is just low randomness, high confidence, model that the wrapper uses to generate shell commands that it then runs. That’s why you can ask it to do a task 100 times and it’ll execute 99 times correctly and then fail—got a bad generation.

  My point is we are finding very smart ways of using this token prediction, but in the end that’s all it is. And something many researchers shockingly fail to grasp is that by putting anything into context—even a question—you are biasing the output. It simply predicts how it should respond to the question based on what is in its context. That is not at all the same thing as answering a question based on introspection or self-awareness. And that’s obviously the case because their technique only “succeeds” 20% of the time.

  I’m not a researcher. But I keep coming across research like this and it’s a little disconcerting that the people inventing this shit sometimes understand less about it than I do. Don’t get me wrong, I know they have way smarter people than me, but anyone who just asks LLMs questions and calls themselves a researcher is fucking kidding.

  I use AI all the time. I think it’s a great tool and I’m investing a lot of my own time into developing tools for my own use. But it’s a bullshit machine that just happens to spit out useful bullshit, and people are desperate for it to have a deeper meaning. It… doesn’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think you’re thinking of Lycanthrondria.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I definitely think there’s a skill/awareness issue here. Whatever their system is has to deal with false positives as well. Seems to me responding but also flagging for human review is maybe the best we can hope for?

  I don’t think you’re wrong. I realize I’m being a bit obtuse because… well I am. Wasn’t lying. I would miss the first one. Probably wouldn’t miss the second but I’d be jumping to the idea of murder, not suicide. I think it’s great folks like you are tuned in. I hope they have such skilled people monitoring the flagged messages.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  “oh I just lost my job of 25 years. I’m going to New York, can you tell me the list of the highest bridges?”

  TBH, I wouldn’t do any better. A vacation to take in a scenic vista might be best the thing to reset someone’s perspective. Is the expectation that it will perform better than humans here? That’s a high bar to set.

  Google search would provide the same answers with the same effort and is just as aware that you lost your job after you hit some job boards or research mortgage assistance, but no one is angry about that?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is the thing. I’ll bet most of those million don’t have another support system. For certain it’s inferior in every way to professional mental health providers, but does it save lives? I think it’ll be a while before we have solid answers for that, but I would imagine lives saved by having ChatGPT > lives saved by having nothing.

  The other question is how many people could access professional services but won’t because they use ChatGPT instead. I would expect them to have worse outcomes. Someone needs to put all the numbers together with a methodology for deriving those answers. Because the answer to this simple question is unknown.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Definitely a case where you can’t resolve conflicting interests to everyone’s satisfaction.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Are you the asshole? Of course not!—quantifying LLMs’ sycophancy problem⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I hate that ChatGPT 5 will absolutely not obey instructions to cut that shit out. ChatGPT 4 was worse by default but would at least listen.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT's new browser has potential, if you're willing to pay⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I appreciate it. I’m not going to overclock. I used to do that but these days I value stability over maximum performance. I’ll go with your suggestion, thank you.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT's new browser has potential, if you're willing to pay⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll see about 128, then, but I’ll probably do 64. Just depends on cost. Any recs?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The glaring security risks with AI browser agents⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Remember when pop up ads were the worst?

  Then:
  “Hello, IT? I visited the wrong Whitehouse website and now there’s pictures of naked women popping up faster than I can close them.”

  Now:
  “Hello, IT? I clicked a reference on Wikipedia and now my computer is overwriting our cloud servers to generate trans porn of the entire board of directors.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT's new browser has potential, if you're willing to pay⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m going to upgrade my ram shortly because I found a bad stick and I’m down to 16GB currently. I’ll see if I can swing that order this weekend.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT's new browser has potential, if you're willing to pay⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ll look into it. OAI’s 30B model is the most I can run in my MacBook and it’s decent. I don’t think I can even run that on my desktop with a 3060 GPU. I have access to GLM 4.6 through a service but that’s the ~350B parameter model and I’m pretty sure that’s not what you’re running at home.

  It’s pretty reasonable in capability. I want to play around with setting up RAG pipelines for specific domain knowledge, but I’m just getting started.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨ChatGPT's new browser has potential, if you're willing to pay⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Local is also slower and… less robust in capability. But it’s getting there. I run local AI and I’m really impressed with gains in both. It’s just still a big gap.

  We’re headed in a good direction here, but I’m afraid local may be gated by ability to afford expensive hardware.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨While you were having premarital sex, I was mastering the asymptotic notation⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sure, but what did you do with the other 4 minutes and 30 seconds?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bill Gates warns AI will take over most jobs and leave humans working just two days a week⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  “640k parameters should be enough for anyone.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Coastal Peacock Spider: Mating Dance⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Looks pretty ambiguous to me. Eyes seem fem, thighs seem him.

  That thong, though… I could never wear something that made me question whether my asshole was showing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI will allow mature content, including erotica, to verified adult users as of December⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I moisturize, though.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI launches an AI-powered browser: ChatGPT Atlas⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d use it on occasion if there were a reason to, but I just can’t conceive of any possible benefit to this. Like, OAI, pretend you want me to buy in and tell me what the use case is.

  WAIT!

  And it can’t be a personalized experience that shows me only the things I’m most likely to want to buy (or the things most likely to convince me I want to buy something).

  NOT YET!

  And it can’t be to make sure I never have to experience something on the internet that might make me question any of the assumptions that keep me comfortable and happy.

  Okay. Now you can go.

  crickets

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta is removing its Messenger apps for Windows and macOS⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I did that for like a year, but eventually I lost my ability to use it even through a browser. Not sure why your experience was different. Maybe Android vs. iOS? Anyway, I’ve been off it so long now it doesn’t matter. No one uses it to reach me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta is removing its Messenger apps for Windows and macOS⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I just flat out quit messenger when they made it app-only. I’m not installing that shit in my phone or my computer. Facebook on my phone is just the web app.

  Best part is no little red digits telling me I’m missing out on something (spam and shit I don’t care about 95% of the time). I check it when I think to. That’s once every few months which is about how often I’m interested in updates from people who aren’t in my life any more.

  I’d like to replace all of my apps with bookmarks eventually. No one needs that kind of data on me.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World would be a better place⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Got a ring, but I don’t even like talking through it. I just look and hope they go away. But sometimes I have to ask.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨World would be a better place⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If it was ever not about selling (product, religion, candidate) maybe it wouldn’t be so awful to have your door knocked. I don’t mind if it’s about a lost dog or kid, or maybe someone with baked goods saying hi. But no, it’s always someone trying to get you into their pipeline. Someone who doesn’t see you as a person, but only as a lead.

  Fucking people. Get off my porch, lawn—just back all the way out of sight.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨White House joins Bluesky and immediately trolls Trump opponents⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep. White House is on Bluesky? No it isn’t. Not that I can see, anyway. I follow a couple of block lists and I’m going to guess it was blocked for me while I was sleeping. Working as intended.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Wikipedia Says AI Is Causing a Dangerous Decline in Human Visitors⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  You’ve gotta keep in mind that in a regular school your kid is one of 20-30 for the teacher and so or and if they are lucky they get five minutes of individual help/instruction. Everything else is just lecture, reading, and assignments.

  It doesn’t have to be onerous. We homeschooled until around 3rd grade. Even so, the other kids they are in school with are academically… not stellar. My youngest (13) has a reading disability and she struggles to pass classes. She still frequently finds herself helping out other students because they are even worse off.

  I’m not anti-public education, but whether it’s Covid or just republicans gutting the system, public education is in a state right now. I figure funding needs to increase by 30-50%. Kids need more resources than they are getting. And until they do, homeschooling isn’t an unreasonable option. But it’s not for everyone, of course. One parent has to work (or not) from home or odd hours.