markovs_gun
@markovs_gun@lemmy.world
- Comment on BBC News - Jimmy Kimmel's show to return to air after suspension over Charlie Kirk comments, says Disney - BBC News 2 hours ago:
Just food for thought- if every news story is a distraction from something else, what is ultimately newsworthy? This comment or some form appears on just about every Lemmy post relating to the news and I really just don’t get it. Sometimes news is just news. Different people think different things are noteworthy and want to read about them
- Comment on A robot programmed to act like a 7-year-old girl works to combat fear and loneliness in hospitals 1 day ago:
Is it bad this is the first thing I thought of? I can’t imagine people won’t do absolutely horrifying things to a robot programmed to act like a 7 year old
- Comment on yeah everything is probably made of like, idk, earth water, fire and air or something idrk 5 days ago:
Right but conversations about science where all parties are wrong and nobody is willing to actually look shit up are completely pointless. It’s the exact same problem that caused the situation in the OP in the first place.
- Comment on Nintendo reportedly gets even more obnoxious about patent law by taking a 'mods aren't real games' stance against a Dark Souls 3 mod that could invalidate its Palworld lawsuit 5 days ago:
I honestly think it’s absurd you can be doing something for nearly 30 years (longer than a patent lasts) and then try to get a patent on it retroactively. That seems like a completely insane cheat code for the patent process.
- Comment on yeah everything is probably made of like, idk, earth water, fire and air or something idrk 5 days ago:
Clocks existed then though. The oldest clocktower in Europe that still exists was built over 100 years before Galileo was born, and time measurement existed longer than that. You can measure time fairly accurately with water clocks which had been known for thousands of years before Galileo. Not having “modern” pendulum clocks yet doesn’t mean that they didn’t have any way to measure time. Even without water clocks you can get decently reliable measurements of time with rhythmic chants (think how today we might say "one Mississippi, two Mississippi, etc.). Early alchemical recipes often include time measurements in chanting a specific prayer or passage a certain number of times during a specific step. Sure you’re not going to get milisecond level accuracy this way but you don’t really need that for a lot of things. Hero of Alexandria built mechanical automata 1500 years before Galileo using pulleys and weights as timers. Time measurement not only existed before pendulum clocks, it was pretty decent.
- Comment on yeah everything is probably made of like, idk, earth water, fire and air or something idrk 5 days ago:
I have noticed there is a bit of a more “anti intellectual” bent on Lemmy compared to Reddit. Like there is a lot of stupidity on reddit but usually someone comes in with actual knowledge. On Lemmy I just see people arguing in circles with each other with nobody ever actually looking anything up.
- Comment on Roblox, Discord sued after 15-year-old boy was allegedly groomed online before he died by suicide 1 week ago:
The actual abuse occurred on Discord after the child was groomed on Roblox.
- Comment on Roblox, Discord sued after 15-year-old boy was allegedly groomed online before he died by suicide 1 week ago:
The details of the case are a bit more complicated, but essentially the TL;DR is that the kid was autistic and the parents were under the impression (based on Roblox’s advertising) that his account was locked down to only be able to talk to kids his own age. The adult perpetrator was pretending to be another boy the victim’s age. The part which seems kind of weird legally is that the actual abuse occurred on Discord, after they moved to that platform from Roblox.
Personally IDK how much responsibility we should say Roblox has. I think our culture has a major problem with no longer fearing the Internet. When I was a kid it was taken for granted that if you let your kid use the Internet unsupervised there were pedophiles waiting around every corner. That hasn’t changed, but both parents and companies have seemingly just forgotten about it. I think it’s kind of insane that Roblox is allowed to act like they can prevent your kids from talking to adults when that is obviously false. I also think it’s kind of insane to believe them.
The situation is tragic. I read a longer article about it and just felt bad for the parents and the victim. They really were trying to do the right thing, and they tried to cut their kid off from online games when they found out about all this but again he was autistic and it was one of the only things that could calm him down. It has got to be tough being a parent these days.
- Comment on Inspiring. Innovating. 3 weeks ago:
current state
No state will be efficient. Burning shit in reverse takes more energy than you got out of it in the first place. It’s a physical impossibility to make an energy efficient direct carbon capture plant.
- Comment on Inspiring. Innovating. 3 weeks ago:
No. Direct carbon capture is essentially burning fuel in reverse, and at a bare minimum requires roughly the same amount of energy as was released when you burned the fuel. Consider you have a coal power plant operating at 45% energy conversion efficiency. That means for each 1,000 kW of power produced, you actually released 2,200 kW of thermal power total burning the coal. Guess how much energy you need to completely negate the impact of the power plant? It’s much closer to that 2,200 kW number. Let’s say that it only has a thermodynamic requirement of 2000kW due to a favorable storage reaction. However, those machines aren’t 1000% efficient. Even at something like 80% efficiency (much higher than I have ever seen) that still bumps you up to needing 2500 kW, and at 50% efficiency you get to 4000 kW. So in order to run your carbon capture scheme, even in the most optimal conditions, you need more than double (and potentially quadruple) the power output of the plant you’re putting it on. Now you might say “but you could use green energy to run the carbon capture!” But you could also just replace the plant with green energy and bypass the whole problem.
Carbon capture technology is essentially just PR from fossil fuel companies and it’s a total scam the way that it’s sold to the general public. It’s like if you saw a toddler going around dumping out containers of glitter and said “We need to invest in a better vacuum cleaner to keep the house clean of all this glitter to keep up with this toddler” instead of focusing on stopping the toddler from dumping out more glitter first and worrying about the vacuuming up later. Carbon capture cannot possibly keep up with or make a meaningful dent in total CO2 concentrations until we dramatically reduce emissions. It is a thermodynamic impossibility, and it legitimately pisses me off that there are engineers working on these scams who are either too stupid to realize this or are complacent in the scams.
- Comment on Inspiring. Innovating. 3 weeks ago:
It still uses the energy, and most of the time it just makes more sense to directly swap whatever you’re running to one of those cleaner energy sources instead of using more energy than it would take to run the machine that releases carbon to undo that.
- Comment on Intelligent Design 3 weeks ago:
The periods one is actually addressed by most creationists. In the book of Genesis, Eve (and consequently, all other women) is punished with the pain of childbirth for falling for the lies of the Serpent, and so most creationists view periods as part of that curse. Pretty messed up but that’s how they see it. The vagus nerve is completely nonsensical under intelligent design but makes complete sense under evolution. The biggest issue I see is why TF God made everything in the universe look exactly like it’s way older than it is. The best argument I can come up with is that it was an epic prank to totally own the libs who find all of this stuff 6,000 years later. Like God is like “Hah you just got pranked you stupid nerd! That’ll teach you to be curious about all the cool shit I made!” To believe in creationism is to believe that a huge swath of scientists across an incredibly broad set of fields are part of the largest conspiracy ever conceived of to try to discredit the Bible, or that God is an evil trickster who intentionally laid this giant trap to damn countless souls to Hell.
- Comment on Finland | Minister: "Burkas and niqabs are not suitable for school" 5 weeks ago:
Okay imagine you move somewhere where all the guys go outside with their dicks out, but you don’t want to because you were raised to think your dick should be covered. Even without somebody explicitly forcing you to cover your dick, you’ll still instinctively want to do it because it’s a deeply held cultural taboo to go outside with your dick out, especially if you’re part of an immigrant community that still covers their dicks. Now imagine that your school says you have to go to school with your dick out even if you feel uncomfortable with it.
Yes, the requirement for Muslim women to cover their hair is rooted in and perpetuated by misogyny, but ideas about modesty and decency don’t just disappear overnight and it’s kind of unfair for western societies to put girls in ththat position.
- Comment on [deleted] 1 month ago:
Honestly your dad is doing you a favor. Probably going to be awkward but it might get you out of your slump to go on a shitty date and see that it’s not so bad. Or you might hit it off and it will be good. I think you should go. Worst case scenario you have a bad date and a good story out of it.
- Comment on Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part — what happens when doctors don’t notice? 1 month ago:
My conspiracy theory is that it’s because they want to scam insurance companies into thinking that these things can replace doctors entirely.
- Comment on Google’s healthcare AI made up a body part — what happens when doctors don’t notice? 1 month ago:
Why the hell did they add an LLM aspect to this? I am legitimately confused. ML powered diagnostic tools have existed for decades at this point and were quite fine. The only thing an LLM adds is uncertainty, unless your goal is to scam people into thinking this thing can replace doctors entirely, which is definitely possible. I could imagine insurers demanding that hospitals only use cheap AI assistants rather than real doctors because they’re cheaper, regardless of whether or not they are actually accurate.
- Comment on Humble Choice this month contains Persona 5 Royal, My Time at Sandrock, Lil Gator Game, more 1 month ago:
I got Persona 5 Royale in the Steam Summer Sale this year and I’ve been obsessed. I wanted to play Persona 4 when it came out but I was a teenager and didn’t have any realistic way to get ahold of it, and then I was just super busy when Persona 5 came out but it is truly an amazing game. It definitely takes some getting used to and I would definitely not recommend to someone who isn’t already a fan of JRPGs or anime but if you do like JRPGs and are okay with an anime aesthetic it doesn’t really get much better than this. I knew basically nothing about Persona going in other than that it’s about teens with JoJo-style Stands and it has a cool art style with interesting character designs, and I was pleasantly surprised at every turn. My only complaint is that the combat is really more about style than difficulty and the game is sort of easy even on hard mode. Definitely worth it for $15 even on its own.
- Comment on Just a little... why not? 1 month ago:
This isn’t actually the problem. In natural conversation I would say the most likely response to someone saying they need some meth to make it through their work day (actual scenario in this article) is to say “what the fuck dude no” but LLMs don’t use just the statistically most likely response. Ever notice how ChatGPT has a seeming sense of “self” that it is an to LLM and you are not? If it were only using the most likely response from natural language, it would talk as if it were human, because that’s how humans talk. Early LLMs did this, and people found it disturbing. There is a second part of the process that gives a score to each response based on how likely it is to be voted good or bad and this is reinforced by people providing feedback. This second part is how we got here, because people who make LLMs are selling competing products and found people are much more likely to buy LLMs that act like super agreeable sycophants than LLMs that don’t do this. Therefore, they have intentionally tuned their models to prefer agreeable, sycophantic responses because it helps them be more popular. This is why an LLM tells you to use a little meth to get you through a tough day at work if you tell it that’s what you need to do.
TL;DR- as with most of the things people complain about with AI, the problem isn’t the technology, it’s capitalism. This is done intentionally in search of profits.
- Comment on Just a little... why not? 1 month ago:
The full article is kind of low quality but the tl;dr is that they did a test pretending to be a taxi driver who felt he needed meth to stay awake and llama (Facebook’s LLM) agreed with him instead of pushing back. I did my own test with ChatGPT after reading it and found that I could get ChatGPT to agree that I was God and that I created the universe in only 5 messages. Fundamentally these things are just programmed to agree with you and that is really dangerous for people who have mental health problems and have been told that these are impartial computers.
- Comment on Y'ALL GOT ANY OF THEM HALLOPINERS 1 month ago:
It’s all spelled phonetically. Zucchini, potatoes ('taters), tomatoes ('maters), jalapeno peppers
- Comment on Insurance giant says most US customer data stolen in cyber-attack 1 month ago:
This is an absurd conspiracy theory that doesn’t hold up to even the lighter scrutiny. Which data broker was Equifax secretly distributing info to when it got hacked? Data brokers don’t need this type of conspiracy to buy and sell your data- it’s already completely legal. How do you think these companies got it in the first place?
- Comment on Insurance giant says most US customer data stolen in cyber-attack 1 month ago:
Headline is misleading and the beach is relatively small, but you should proactively freeze your credit anyway. I had my identity stolen a few years ago due to an insurance company I’d never heard of getting hacked and it was a huge mess. The whole incident taught me that it’s not a matter of if your identity will be stolen- it’s when. Thousands of companies have your PII (personal identifying information) even if you have never heard of them or have never done business with them because your insurance works with them or said companies legally buy your info from other companies or your state’s government. Most of these companies do alright protecting your data, but when there are so many parties that have it and it only takes one screwing up to get your identity stolen, it’s just kind of impossible for them all to do hold the line.
It really pisses me off that citizens are responsible for"protecting" their identities on their own. Obviously the system isn’t working but nobody gives a shit or wants to do anything about it. If everyone should freeze their credit by default then why is this not the default state? Why is a 9 digit number given to us as babies on an un-laminated paper card the main thing standing between us and identity theft when you have to give that number to everyone to do anything anyway? It’s completely absurd.
- Comment on Brits can get around Discord's age verification thanks to Death Stranding's photo mode, bypassing the measure introduced with the UK's Online Safety Act. We tried it and it works—thanks, Kojima 1 month ago:
Yeah I do too, but so would anyone who was seriously thinking about this in terms of keeping kids from looking at porn rather than restricting access to “adult content” (whatever that means) more broadly. Any programmer worth their salt would have immediately suggested “hey this is a bad idea we should do it this other way” when asked about the viability of the current solution and yet this was ignored.
- Comment on Brits can get around Discord's age verification thanks to Death Stranding's photo mode, bypassing the measure introduced with the UK's Online Safety Act. We tried it and it works—thanks, Kojima 1 month ago:
Spoiler alert- the point isn’t to keep kids from looking at porn, it’s to keep adults from looking at it too.
- Comment on YSK De-banking is often how the US first declares you "homeless" 1 month ago:
I feel like I’m becoming jaded because any time I hear about some new shit that hurts poor people in this country I find myself wondering how many of these people voted for Trump in the first place. I get being desperate and feeling like some kind of change is needed… The first time. But we had a chance to see it was all bluster and bullshit already and still voted for this government. I know it’s a bad mindset but a lot of this stuff is hurting groups of people where the majority voted for Trump and I’m having trouble feeling sorry for them.
- Comment on 'Clanker' is social media's new slur for our robot future 1 month ago:
He calls me clanka, he calls the other kids clanka, he calls himself clanka. All the time. “Clanka this”, “Clanka that”, “Clanka, please”, “Bitch clanka”, “Clanka, have you lost your mind?”, “Clanka, check that ho”, “Clanka, you bullshit” and “Break yourself, clanka”. He says it so much, I don’t even notice it anymore. Last week in lunch, Optimus said to a classmate, “Can a clanka borrow a french fry?” And my first thought wasn’t “Oh, my God. He said the word, uh, the C-word”. It was now “How is a clanka gonna borrow a fry?” “Clanka, is you gonna give it back?” I’m telling you, my inside voice didn’t talk like that before he got in my class.
- Comment on I'm doing my part 1 month ago:
This is a very obvious trick from the right.
“Kill all pedophiles!”
Yeah most people will say pedophiles are really bad and nobody wants to defend them, so they’ll either agree or let it slide. However, they’re not anticipating the next part
“All trans people are pedophiles!”
“All gay people are pedophiles!”
“All immigrants are pedophiles!”
Once you define a group of people as being subhuman and unworthy of human rights, then there is a strong motivation to expand the definition of that group to include more people that a lot of people don’t like and won’t stick their neck out to support for fear of getting labeled as part of that group and oppressed like them. The circle then just keeps growing as the machine needs more people in the outgroup to oppose. If there is broad consensus that pedophiles (or people who commit any type of crime) are a danger so foul that the people who might commit said crime should be summarily executed to subjected to torture, then oppressed minority groups will just be identified with said crime. Think about how panic about urban theft and murder was used to advance policies that harm racial minorities in the late 20th century, and how panic about “bolshevism” was a major driving force of the Holocaust. Nothing good comes from this path.
- Comment on Name Your Favorite Marvel Movie: Wrong Answers Only 1 month ago:
The eternals
- Comment on ChatGPT advises women to ask for lower salaries, study finds 2 months ago:
While that is sort of true, it’s only about half of how they work. An LLM that isn’t trained with reinforcement learning to give desired outputs gives really weird results. Ever notice how ChatGPT seems aware that it is a robot and not a human? An LLM that purely parrots the training corpus won’t do that. If you ask it “are you a robot?” It will say “Of course not dumbass I’m a real human I had to pass a CAPTCHA to get on this website” because that’s how people respond to that question. So you get a bunch of poorly paid Indians in a call center to generate and rank responses all day and these rankings get fed into the algorithm for generating a new response. One thing I am interested in is the fact that all these companies are using poorly paid people in the third world to do this part of the development process, and I wonder if this imparts subtle cultural biases. For example, early on after ChatGPT was released I found it had an extremely strong taboo against eating dolphin meat, to the extent that it was easier to get it to write about about eating human meat than dolphin meat. I have no idea where this could have come from but my guess is someone really hated the idea and spent all day flagging dolphin meat responses as bad.
Anyway, this is another, more subtle way more subtle issue with LLMs- they don’t simply respond with the statistically most likely outcome of a conversation, there is a finger in the scales in favor of certain responses, and that finger can be biased in ways that are not only due to human opinion, but also really hard to predict.
- Comment on Human-level AI is not inevitable. We have the power to change course 2 months ago:
Why would we want to? 99% of the issues people have with “AI” are just problems with society more broadly that AI didn’t really cause, only exacerbated. I think it’s absurd to just reject this entire field because of a bunch of shitty fads going on right now with LLMs and image generators.