MangoCats

@MangoCats@feddit.it

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Collapse of GPT: Will future artificial intelligence systems perform increasingly poorly due to AI-generated material in their training data?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  It is a hard problem. Any “human” based filtering will inevitably introduce bias, and some bias (fact vs fiction masquerading as fact) is desirable. The problem is: human determination of what is fact vs what is opinion is… flawed.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨The Collapse of GPT: Will future artificial intelligence systems perform increasingly poorly due to AI-generated material in their training data?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  They don’t have decent filters on what they fed the first generation of AI, and they haven’t really improved the filtering much since then, because: on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Programs like low cost housing currently cost a great deal of political capital.

  They cost physical capital. They generate political capital, as they create a consistency that will support the politicians who support the program

  All historical evidence to the contrary… it’s a nice theory.

  Social Security / Medicare are the Ur-examples. Enormous constituencies that love to punish politicians who in any way threaten their benefits.

  Have they? Really punished those politicians who threatened to slash the benefits? Because I’ve seen lots of threats of slashing and no punished politicians yet. I do hope we get to that phase in the next election, but the threats of slashing were made loud and clear before November 2024.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  popular / market opinion will make some properties more valuable than your fixed number, and some properties less.

  What happened to price being set by individual willing to buy? How did we get back to anonymous markets again?

  They are one in the same. The anonymous market is an estimate of what an individual will be willing and able to pay, the true value is cash in hand after surrender of title.

  You can talk “market rate” or you can talk “biggest sucker”. But the wholesale rate is very different from individual sales made under false pretexts.

  Where has a “wholesale rate” ever existed for titled real-estate? You might buy a piece of land and sub-divide it, but each transaction is its own negotiation of value between seller and buyer.

  You’ll have the “overpriced” properties fill up

  With what? Second class citizens who can’t get what they really want?

  surplus housing is preferable to homelessness.

  We’ve got oodles of surplus housing, what we lack is a rational distribution of wealth.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  “Primary accumulation” as you call it was pretty well finished many generations ago in most of the world.

  Since then, written records of ownership, payment of property taxes, etc. have established title which is transferred legally in exchange for “good and valuable consideration” - usually money.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  But acquiring that political capital is the challenge

  Not just acquiring, but maintaining that political capital. Programs like low cost housing currently cost a great deal of political capital. The majority of people seem not to vote in their own best interests, so here we are.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  maintaining property at-cost.

  As soon as you set “cost” for properties, popular / market opinion will make some properties more valuable than your fixed number, and some properties less. If the cost of acquisition of these properties doesn’t approximate the market value, you’ll have the overpriced properties abandoned and the underpriced properties fully occupied.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Primary accumulation happens when individuals occupy vacant real estate or through violent expulsion of existing residents.

  Your world, maybe. Not the one I want me or my children to live in.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  But offer them a real supply of public at-cost housing, and I think you’ll discover quite a few people don’t want that mortgage after all.

  But what is the cost of housing?

  Where do the materials come from to build the housing? Are those suppliers allowed to make a profit? And their suppliers?

  Where does the labor come from to build the housing? Are the laborers paid by the job or by the hour?

  And the land for this housing, is that obtained from the free market? Anybody price gouging there, or taking kickbacks?

  Once this housing is built, it transforms from “cost” to whatever the market is willing to pay. If the land was downtown, on high bluff riverfront, “at cost” for free via eminent domain, one would assume that housing will become quite a bit more valuable than it cost to build the moment it is made available to the open market. How do we protect this housing as “at cost”? Is it first come, first served? Life estates? Transferred to children, spouses, designated heirs?

  And, the opposite situation, when the public housing isn’t in a desirable area, and the residents don’t maintain the housing, who pays for the maintenance?

  Easy to hand-wave a solution, harder to make it fit in the real world. At least let’s try to be minimizing:

  extortion, cartelization, vexatious litigation, and other hostile business practices

  there’s far too much of that already.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Except credit changes the math on that significantly. You aren’t constrained by your income, but by your risk of default (and even then… glances 2008-ward) Then you can afford to buy more by paying a higher interest rate.

  That has nothing to do with what someone is willing to pay, it is everything about what someone is able to pay. Plenty of people are willing to mortgage their future for something they want now but have no current liquid assets to purchase it with.

  “Willingly” is doing a lot of lifting, given the degree to which fraud, extortion, and price gouging play a roll in the national economy.

  Fraud is all about deceiving the mark into willingly handing over assets. Extortion isn’t involved in free market transactions.

  Even price gouging, particularly in the field of end stage medical care, is a sort of willing payment. You ask a dying person: are you willing to mortgage your children’s assets in order to maybe live a little longer? The answer is all too often: yes, and the children often willingly sign up out of sympathy for their dying parents.

  Is that extortion? Sort of, but they always have the option to just let MeeMaw suffer in pain and die, instead of paying the hospital $300K to make her more comfortable.

  Promotion (and deception and intimidation) drives sales. They create the illusion of scarcity and transform luxury into necessity.

  I’m not so familiar with promotion that creates the illusion of scarcity. I mean, in Real Estate it’s not an illusion, there is only one property in the entire Universe like the one under consideration… High pressure sales is often driving the “don’t think, act now, close the deal ASAP” aspect of things. But most promotion for things like Coca Cola, or new cars, provides the marketing aspect of “easy to obtain, just go to your local dealer and pick one up, TODAY!”

  They add perceived value among the unwitting and create implicit value through absence of harm.

  Yes, and that perceived value is what provides willing consumers anxious to exchange their fungible currency for the goods. Evaluation of “actual value” is an impossible thing, it is like beauty: in the eye of the beholder. For some, an $800 T-shirt is a “great value” because of how it makes them feel to wear it, others’ perception of them wearing it, etc. That T-shirt might only wash once before falling to rags, but for those who are spending $800 on a T-shirt, they probably don’t care - they can buy more different ones at any time. Does that make them unwitting, or just obscenely wealthy in comparison to most people?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  But suckering someone doesn’t increase the utility of what you sold them.

  No, but what someone is willing to pay is the sum total of what a business gets income from. Whether a business is delivering tangible value (say: food) or nothing of substance (say: Bitcoin) the viability of a business, it’s ability to survive and thrive in the capitalist marketplace, is 100% correlated to income willingly given vs cost of obtaining that income, and 0% correlated to “actual value delivered.”

  What shocks me about much of the U.S. economy is how much is spent on marketing, promotion, advertising, and sales. 0% value derived from such activity, but frequently over half the cost of things that are purchased in the U.S. is sunk in promotion.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Try appraising real estate for a while, it’s a strong lesson in: something is worth whatever somebody is willing to pay for it. Can be higher than cost, can be lower than cost, but the willing buyer is the key to the whole valuation equation.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Tesla Reportedly Has $800 Million Worth of Cybertrucks That Nobody Wants⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  cost != value

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Now I know why they’re trying to push corporate users off of Linux, again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is the right way, but holding it in their hands will be the way so many clever rebels do it at first.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Thanks Microsoft, I’m investing in cell-phone tripods today.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Jerb security.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, no, AI Recall has “special privileges” - just you lusers don’t.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft Teams will soon block screen capture during meetings⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Laughs at all the cell phone camera captures that will start showing up…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down. I just didn’t expect them to be such losers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Your statement reminds me of entrepreneurship: you’ve got a dream, a vision, a goal to improve people’s lives. What you don’t got is enough money to get your dream into the hands of people it will help. So, you go in search of people with money who honestly don’t give a damn about your dream, they just want to know how it’s going to get them more money, which they already have in abundance but somehow feel the need to continue to grow their hoard. They want to see business plans, with exit strategies. They want to maximize ROI, minimize (monetary) risk, minimize time to market - and those are the criteria your pitch will be evaluated on relative to all the others they receive all the time.

  Politicians aren’t selling a business plan, they’re selling a legislative agenda. They don’t have to show ROI, they have to show low-cost electability.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down. I just didn’t expect them to be such losers⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It was cringe when it released - it’s dated cringe now…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s the thing about being paranoid about MkUltra - it was actively suppressed and denied while it was happening (according to FOI documents) - and they say that they stopped, but if it (or some similar successor) was active they’d certainly say that it’s not happening now…

  At the time there were active rumors around town about influenza propagation studies being secretly conducted on the local population… probably baseless paranoia… probably.

  Now, as you say, your (presumably smaller) country has never known such things to happen, but…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The only thing driving solar panel production development to China is cost. Cost of labor, cost of environmental regulations, maybe cost of raw material acquisition… All that investment there for the past 20+ years driven by cost is “paying off” now with their production capacity. We’re getting TMSC plants in Arizona, we’ve already got BMW, Mercedes, Toyota etc. production plants in the US, nothing stopping us from building solar panel factories, except international corporate profit optimization.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Oh, I investigated it too - it seems like it was a real thing, though likely inactive by 2005… but if it were active I certainly didn’t want to become a subject.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Currently, we’re preventing the “sunken coastal cities, economic crisis and famine in poor regions” kind of change

  Are we really preventing it? Seems like the track toward that change is mostly unabated. Sure, it’s a couple of generations out before it gets serious, but what are the signs that the track has improved?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’m reading hopeful signs from China that they are actually making positive progress toward sustainability. Not that other big players are keeping up with them, but still how 1 billion people choose to live does make a difference.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s just that now it tries to be a bit more stealthy.

  With regard to what has been happening the past 100 days in the United States, it’s not even trying to be stealthy one little bit. If anything, it’s dropping massive hints of the objectionable things it’s planning for the near future.

  There are still existential threats: thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/

  The difference with a population of 8 billion is that we as individuals are less empowered to do anything significant about them than ever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  1925: global financial collapse is just about to happen, many people are enjoying the ride as the wave just started to break, following that war to end all wars that did reach across the Atlantic Ocean…

  Yes, it is accelerating. Alvin Toffler wrote Future Shock 45 years ago, already overwhelmed by accelerating change, and it has continued to accelerate since then. But these are not entirely new problems, either.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There have been a couple of big discontinuities in the last 4500 years, and the next big discontinuity has the distinction of being the first in which mankind has the capacity to cause a mass extinction event.

  Life will carry on, some humans will likely survive, but in what kind of state? For how long before they reach the technological level of being able to leave the planet again?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My problem with LLMs is that positive feedback loop of low and negative quality information.

  Vetting the datasets before feeding them for training is a form of bias / discrimination, but complex society has historically always been somewhat biased - for better and for worse, but never not biased at all.