rollin

@rollin@piefed.social

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Won't it get hot as hell in there, all that wood and foam and rubber?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You can have nodes on a mesh network which act as gateways to the internet, but such nodes are going to have to go through an ISP. There's no other way to connect to the internet at large unfortunately.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Mastodon says it doesn't 'have the means' to comply with age verification laws⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  this is what the mesh networks are that people have mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

  It is theoretically possible to create a purely peer-to-peer network where each individual connects to people nearby, and then any individual can in theory communicate with any other, by passing data packets to nearby people on the network who then pass it on themselves until it reaches the other person.

  You can probably already grasp a few of the issues here - confidentiality is a big one, and reliability is another. But in theory it could work, and the more people who take part in such networks, the more reliable they become.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Parental controls on children’s tech devices are out of touch with child’s play⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The other approach is not to try to block out all non-approved internet sources, and instead teach your child about the dangers out there, and how to handle them.

  If a young child becomes addicted to online porn for instance, it's an indication of deeper issues and it seems to be missing the point to put the blame on network operators for not blocking children effectively enough. I don't think a healthy well developed child would become addicted to porn in the first place.

  That's the real challenge for parents: they don't need to be a part-time network über-wizard but rather a stable trustworthy figure for their children to rely on and who can guide them through the often difficult journey of growing up.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨These fish may feel pleasure while being groomed by other fish⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  they're mammals though, sharing a common ancestor with pigs (who are also renown for their intelligence)

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Labour to abolish most short prison sentences in England and Wales⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Community service is a classic punishment which I think makes good sense for nonviolent crime.

  It should be a good option, but it's more difficult to run effectively than it might appear. The ideal would be for it not to be purely punitive, but to offer in itself some level of rehabilitation. For instance, a bike thief might be sentenced to helping out in a community bike workshop, or someone who committed low-level fraud might be required to help poor people manage their finances.

  At the moment the reality is quite different I think, and people end up being sentenced to pointless busywork. I know someone who was given a community sentence for fighting and he described it as a bit of a joke. Every Saturday, they were supposed to clean up litter from grass verges, but the main issue was no one wanted to be there, not least the supervisor. So they'd generally just mess around for a bit and go home early.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  If it was in Europe, people being made redundant are typically given several months pay, but it's America so he probably just got a t-shirt and a cardboard box.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AGI is not coming! - Yanick Kilcher⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Intelligence and consciousness are not related in the way you seem to think.

  We've always known that you can have consciousness without a high level of intelligence (think of children, people with certain types of brain damage), and now for the first time, LLMs show us that you can have intelligence without consciousness.

  It's naive to think that as we continue to develop intelligent machines, suddenly one of them will become conscious once it reaches a particular level of intelligence. Did you suddenly become conscious once you hit the age of 14 or whatever and had finally developed a deep enough understanding of trigonometry or a solid enough grasp of the works of Mark Twain? No of course not, you became conscious at a very early age, when even a basic computer program could outsmart you, and you developed intelligence quite independently.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AGI is not coming! - Yanick Kilcher⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I did say that I don't

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AGI is not coming! - Yanick Kilcher⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think current LLMs are already intelligent. I'd also say cats, mice, fish, birds are intelligent - to varying degrees of course.

  I'd like to see examples of LLMs paired with sensorimotor systems, if you know of any

  If you're referring to my comment about hobbyist projects, I was just thinking of the sorts of things you'll find on a search of sites like YouTube, perhaps this one is a good example (but I haven't watched it as I'm avoiding YouTube). I don't know if anyone has tried to incorporate a "learning to walk" type of stage into LLM training, but my point is that it would be perfectly possible, if there were reason to think it would give the LLM an edge.

  The matter of how intelligent humans are is another question, and relevant because AFAIK when people talk about AGI now, they're talking about an AI that can do better on average than a typical human at any arbitrary task. It's not a particularly high bar, we're not talking about super-intelligence I don't think.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AGI is not coming! - Yanick Kilcher⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  thanks for this very yummy response. I'm having to read up about the technicalities you're touching on so bear with me!

  According to wiki, the neocortex is only present in mammals but as I'm sure you're aware mammals are not the only creatures to exhibit intelligence. Are you arguing that only mammals are capable of "general intelligence"? I can get on board with what you're saying as *one way* to develop AGI - work out how brains do it and then copy that - but I don't think it's a given that that is the *only* way to AGI, even if we were to agree that only animals with a neocortex can have "general intelligence". Hence the fact that a given class of machine architecture does not replicate a neocortex would not in my mind make that architecture incapable of ever achieving AGI.

  As for your point about the importance of sensorimotor integration, I don't see that being problematic for any kind of modern computer software - we can easily hook up any number of sensors to a computer, and likewise we can hook the computer up to electric motors, servos and so on. We could easily "install" an LLM inside a robot and allow it to control the robot's movement based on the sensor data. Hobbyists have done this already, many times, and it would not be hard to add a sensorimotor stage to an LLM's training.

  I do like what you're saying and find it interesting and thought-provoking. It's just that what you've said hasn't convinced me that LLMs are incapable of ever achieving AGI for those reasons. I'm not of the view that LLMs *are* capable of AGI though, it's more like something that I don't personally feel well enough informed upon to have a firm view. It does seem unlikely to me that we've currently reached the limits of what LLMs are capable of, but who knows.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AGI is not coming! - Yanick Kilcher⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  because they are non-sensing, stationary, and fundamentally not thinking

  I don't follow, why would a machine need to be able to move or have its own sensors in order to be AGI? And can you define what you mean by "thinking"?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Fight Chat Control: The EU (still) wants to scan your private messages and photos⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Ah got ya, it's a site to show each EU government's position on this. Only three EU governments are opposing right now! Gotta get them numbers up!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨an incomplete list of fediverse instances scraped by meta to train AI⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  off-topic but wow, it's great to see so many lemmy instances up and running 🥰

  it really looks like we're well on the way to hitting critical mass

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Man carrying home his gardening tools arrested by armed police in Manchester⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Well. Some of those chaps were carrying knives - without a licence - so we had no choice really.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Man carrying home his gardening tools arrested by armed police in Manchester⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Is violent knife crime a thing over there?

  yes we've had spikes of knife attacks over recent years, a lot of it is gang related, with kids stabbing rival gang members in tit-for-tat spirals of violence.

  Knife crime in general is nowhere near as bad as it is in America (and of course as you point out you guys have gun violence on top of that), but the UK is historically a peaceful country and our tolerance of friends and family being murdered in the street is a lot lower than yours.