leftzero
@leftzero@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on AIs can’t stop recommending nuclear strikes in war game simulations 1 day ago:
Story goes that Reagan got freaked out after watching the film and asked the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff if it’d be that easy to hack into the US military. After a week of looking into it came the answer: “no, the problem is much worse than that”, and fifteen months after having watched it signed the confidential directive “National Policy on Telecommunications and Automated Information Systems Security”, starting the implementation of cybersecurity measures in the country’s institutions.
- Comment on The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents 4 days ago:
More public money syphoned off to the parasitic corporations and dumber, easier to exploit proles.
Seems like a massive win for capitalism, really.
Until it all blows up on our faces, obviously, but when has capitalism ever cared about anything beyond the next quarter?
- Comment on The creator of systemd wants your entire system validated by SecureBoot 5 days ago:
Everything starts with good intentions.
No it doesn’t.
When it comes to privacy, politics, and capitalism, almost nothing starts with good intentions.
Most everything starts for the short term benefit of whoever starts it and any investors putting money into it, at the expense of everyone else and ignoring any future negative consequences unless profit can be extracted from them.
It hurting people the starter doesn’t like (even if it will come back to hurt the starter in the long time) is also a very important factor, though secondary to the short term profit one.
- Comment on The RAM shortage is coming for everything you care about 6 days ago:
Anyone remember RAMdisks?
- Comment on The green lean mean killing machine 1 week ago:
I wouldn’t trust books when it comes to hunting mushrooms.
Don’t go hunting mushrooms unless your family’s taken you hunting mushrooms since you were a kid (and even then only in regions you’re familiar with, and even then don’t pick any mushroom you’re not 110% certain of, and if you’re not an idiot), or accompanied by someone with that experience verifying every single mushroom you find before picking it up, and telling you why and how it’d’ve killed you or why it wouldn’t’ve tasted good.
- Comment on An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me 1 week ago:
Probably a lot of that in the data the model was trained on.
Garbage in, garbage out, as they say, especially when the machine is a rather inefficient garbage compactor.
- Comment on Dr. Oz pushes AI avatars as a fix for rural health care. Not so fast, critics say 1 week ago:
- Comment on An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me 1 week ago:
IMO they’re the same picture. In either case, the human enabling the bot’s actions should be blamed as if those were their own actions, regardless of their “intentions”.
Oh, definitely. It’s 100% the responsibility of the human behind the bot in either case.
But the second option is scarier, because there are a lot more ignorant idiots than malicious bastards.
If these unsupervised agents can be dangerous regardless of the intentions of the humans behind them, we should make the idiots using them aware that they’re playing with fire and they can get burnt, and burn other people in the process.
- Comment on An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me 1 week ago:
The point is that if predicting the next word leads to it setting up a website to attempt to character assassinate someone, that can have real world consequences, and cause serious harm.
Even if no one ever reads it, crawlers will pick it up, it will be added to other bots’ knowledge bases, and it will become very relevant when it pops up as fact when the victim is trying to get a job, or cross a border, or whatever.
And that’s just the beginning. As these agents get more and more complex (not smarter, of course, but able to access more tools) they’ll be able to affect the real world more and more. Access public cameras, hire real human people, make phone calls…
Depending on what word they randomly predict next, they’ll be able to accidentally do a lot of harm. And the idiots setting them up and letting them roam unsupervised don’t seem to realise that.
- Comment on An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me 1 week ago:
Transmetropolitan was truly prescient (except when it came to politics; turns out that if the president’s crimes and disregard for the constitution become public the press and the law don’t care, and just let him get on with it, making the whole point of the book moot).
- Comment on An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me 1 week ago:
Other bots that might be run by the company you’re trying to get a job in, the college you want to attend, the customs agent at the airport, the online shop you’re trying to buy from, the social network you’re trying to join…
These dystopian days a hit piece can do a lot of harm, even if no human ever reads it…
- Comment on An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me 1 week ago:
From what I read it was closed because it was tagged as a “good first issue”, which in that project are specifically stated to be a means to test new contributors on non-urgent issues that the existing contributors could easily solve, and which specifically prohibits generated code from being used (as it would make the whole point moot).
The agent completely ignored that, since it’s set up to push pull requests and doesn’t have the capability to comprehend context, or anything, for that matter, so the pull request was legitimately closed the instant the repository’s administrators realised it was generated code.
The quality (or lack thereof) of the code never even entered the question until the bot brought it up. It broke the rules, its pull request was closed because of that, and it went on to attempt to character assassinate the main developer.
It remains an open question whether it was set up to do that, or, more probably, did it by itself because the Markov chain came up with the wrong token.
And that’s the main point: unsupervised LLM-driven agents are dangerous, and we should be doing something about that danger.
- Comment on An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me 1 week ago:
The point is that there was no one at the wheel. Someone set the agent up, set it loose to do whatever the stochastic parrot told it to do, and kind of forgot about it.
Sure, if you put a brick on your car’s gas pedal and let it run down the street and it runs someone over it’s obviously your responsibility, and this is exactly the same case, but the idiots setting these agents up don’t realise that it’s the same case.
Some day one of these runaway unsupervised agents will manage to get on the dark web, hire a hitman, and get someone killed, because the LLM driving it will have pulled the words from some thriller in its training data, obviously without realising what they mean or the consequences of its actions, because those aren’t things a LLM is capable of, and the brainrotten idiot who set the agent up will be all like, wait, why are you blaming me, I didn’t tell it to do that, and some jury will have to deal with that shit.
The point of the article is that we should deal with that shit, and prevent it from happening if possible, before it inevitably happens.
- Comment on DoorDashers are getting paid to close Waymo's self-driving car doors 1 week ago:
Well, daemons, but still…
- Comment on DoorDashers are getting paid to close Waymo's self-driving car doors 1 week ago:
Tesla isn’t a good example of how anything is done in the industry, but rather of how not to do it.
I don’t doubt Tesla’s doors are designed to mutilate their customers, much like they’re designed to trap them inside in the event of a fire, probably because Musk’s ketamine addled brain though it’d be funny, but that’s not how any other company would do it, even if only because because lawsuits cost money and weaker locks are cheaper.
- Comment on Europe’s $24 Trillion Breakup With Visa and Mastercard Has Begun 2 weeks ago:
Yeah, but European unfathomable, or British unfathomable?
- Comment on Chatbots Make Terrible Doctors, New Study Finds 2 weeks ago:
LLMs don’t have the mind of a five year old, though.
They don’t have a mind at all.
They simply string words together according to statistical likelihood, without having any notion of what the words mean, or what words or meaning are; they don’t have any mechanism with which to have a notion.
They aren’t any more intelligent than old Markov chains (or than your average rock), they’re simply better at producing random text that looks like it could have been written by a human.
- Comment on Western Digital details 14-platter 3.5-inch HAMR HDD designs with 140 TB and beyond 2 weeks ago:
In a pinch the drive can also double as a flywheel battery.
- Comment on xkcd #3204: Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs 2 weeks ago:
Well, reptiles seem to have split pretty early on between the ancestors of lizards and snakes (and the lonely tuatara)), and the ancestors of turtles, crocodiles, and dinosaurs, the main differences seemingly being in the bones of the skull, and specifically for the group with the snakes and lizards in, the ability to self-amputate the tail (though that’s lost in many of their descendants), and the keratinized scales; you won’t see a turtle, crocodile, or dinosaur melting its whole skin in one go like lizards and snakes do, they’ll molt their scales (or feathers, or scutes) one at a time.
- Comment on xkcd #3204: Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs 2 weeks ago:
True, (some) snakes have also evolved specialized fangs.
Several times independently with significantly different designs, it seems.
- Comment on Neocities founder stuck in chatbot hell after Bing blocked 1.5 million sites 2 weeks ago:
Anyone who uses duckduckgo, since that’s where it gets its results from.
- Comment on xkcd #3204: Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs 2 weeks ago:
That one I’m not entirely sure about, but it seems that, in the same way being a mammal (from a bone perspective) is all about the teeth and inner ear, being a dinosaur is all about the hips (dinosaurs have an upright stance, with the legs under their bodies; even with the quadruped ones you can see how they’re really something evolved to walk on its hind legs walking on its hands and feet), and pterosaurs and their non-dinosaur ancestors just don’t have the right kind of hip.
It’s a bit muddy, though. Once you get into archosaurs and before you get into more specialised things like crocodiles, dinosaurs, or pterosaurs it’s mostly “this thing seems to be more closely related to this group than to this other group, so we’ll throw it in with them even if it doesn’t really look anything like them”.
There’s a small bipedal reptile, for instance, scleromuchlus, that’s been bundled up with pterosaurs because it apparently seems more related to them, even though if you look at an artist’s representation you’d assume it must be a dinosaur, but might in fact not fit in either group and be instead just a basal avemetatarsalian (or maybe even lower in the tree) with no other identified close relatives.
- Comment on xkcd #3204: Dinosaurs And Non-Dinosaurs 2 weeks ago:
The name (dimetrodon ≈ two teeth sizes) is also a clue, as teeth specialization is very much a synapsid (i.e., mammal and proto-mammal) thing.
- Comment on How do you communicate "sorry, my bad" when you make a mistake while driving? 2 weeks ago:
- Comment on Is it theoretically possible Trump and ICE are killing a very large number of immigrants (like 25% of those detained) and no one knows? 3 weeks ago:
Death flights have quite a long history, sadly, and were a favourite of far right South American dictatorships promoted by the USA…
- Comment on AI controls is coming to Firefox 3 weeks ago:
You listed a lot of very interesting features and probably convinced me to install it and give it a try, thanks, but again, what faults?
- Comment on the public demands ANSWERS 4 weeks ago:
Shark’s only smooth from front to back. Otherwise shark’s sandpaper.
- Comment on Microsoft just issued a second emergency OS update for Windows 11 this month 4 weeks ago:
It does, but onedrive has a tendency to hijack your user folders, moving them to the cloud and deleting them from your computer unless you opt out (I imagine the idea is that this will exceed the free capacity and you’ll be forced to pay for more space to be able to access your files, a good old ransom racket), so you might think you had your PST in your documents folder, but it’s actually on the cloud, being crawled all over by copilot…
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
Well, there was that little thing called the black death, if I recall correctly…
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
relatively stable between the twelfth and the eighteenth century
Hm… wasn’t there like a 33% dip back in the fourteenth, not counting subsequent migration to the cities and whatnot…?
