Hackworth
@Hackworth@piefed.ca
- Comment on Ask AI: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? 2 days ago:
“Are you suggesting I ghost ride the whip?”
- Comment on Ask AI: I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive? 2 days ago:
Yup. And it didn’t feel the need to write a paper about it.
- Comment on How does a person get on the No Gun List without commiting a crime? My brother was diagnosed with BIpolar and others he doesn't even want the option ten year down the road. 5 days ago:
Caveat on the drug thing: There is a list of who has a medical cannabis Rx. And I suppose any prescription… do opiods count?
- Comment on A succulent meal 5 days ago:
-Dr. Steve Brule
- Comment on AI safety leader says 'world is in peril' and quits to study poetry 6 days ago:
So what I meant by “doubt they’ll be able to play the good guy for long” is exactly that no corpo is your friend. But I also believe perfect is the enemy of good, or at least better. I want to encourage companies to be better, knowing full well that they will not be perfect. Since Anthropic doesn’t make image/video/audio generators, they may just not see CSAM as a directly related concern for the company. A PAC doesn’t have to address every harm to be a source of good.
As for self-harm, that’s an alignment concern, the main thing they do research on. And based on what they’ve published, they know that perfect alignment is not in our foreseeable future. They’ve made a lot of recent improvements that make it demonstrably harder to push a bot to dark traits. But they know damn well they can’t prevent it without some structural breakthroughs. And who knows if those will ever come?
I read that 404 media piece when it got posted here, and this is also probably that guy’s fault. And frankly, Dario’s energy creeps me out. I’m not putting Anthropic on a pedestal here, they’re just… the least bad… for now?
- Comment on AI safety leader says 'world is in peril' and quits to study poetry 6 days ago:
They’re advocating for transparency and for states to be able to have their own AI laws. I see that as positive. And as part of that transparency, Anthropic publishes its system prompts, which go through with every message. They devote a significant portion to mental health, suicide prevention, not enabling mania, etc. So I wouldn’t say they see it as “acceptable.”
- Comment on AI safety leader says 'world is in peril' and quits to study poetry 6 days ago:
FWIW, Anthropic did just fund a pro-regulation super PAC to oppose OpenAI’s pro-Trump/anti-regulation PACs, and:
The Pentagon is at odds with artificial-intelligence developer Anthropic over safeguards that would prevent the government from deploying its technology to target weapons autonomously and conduct U.S. domestic surveillance. Reuters
But I kinda doubt they’ll be able to play the good guy for long.
- Comment on Forget your astral sign, which Muppet do you want to be? 1 week ago:
Uh huh
- Comment on People don't really know their own motivation for their actions 1 week ago:
Bastian had shown the lion [Grograman, the Many-Colored Death] the inscription on the reverse side of the Gem [Auryn]. ‘What do you suppose it means?’ he asked. ‘"DO WHAT YOU WISH.” That must mean I can do anything I feel like. Don’t you think so?
All at once Grogramann’s face looked alarmingly grave , and his eyes glowed. ’No,’ he said in his deep, rumbling voice. ‘It means that you must do what you really and truly want. And nothing is more difficult.’
‘What I really and truly want? What do you mean by that?’
It’s your own deepest secret and you yourself don’t know it.’
‘How can I find out?’
‘By going the way of your wishes, from one to another, from first to last. It will take you to what you really and truly want.’
‘That doesn’t sound so hard,’ said Bastian.
‘It is the most dangerous of all journeys.’
‘Why?’ Bastian asked. ‘I’m not afraid.’
‘That isn’t it,’ Grograman rumbled. ‘It requires the greatest honesty and vigilance, because there’s no other journey on which it’s so easy to lose yourself forever.’
‘Do you mean because our wishes aren’t always good?’ Bastian asked.
The lion lashed the sand he was lying on with his tail. His ears lay flat, he screwed up his nose, and his eyes flashed fire. Involuntarily Bastian ducked when Grograman’s voice once again made the earth tremble: ‘What do you know about wishes? How would you know what’s good and what isn’t?’ -The Neverending Story by Michael Ende
- Comment on We are not the same 1 week ago:
You could have done both.
- Comment on This "March for Billionaires" event in SF happening today 1 week ago:
The billionaires will teleoperate robots for the march.
- Comment on smh 3 weeks ago:
Thank you. I’ve only ever seen “mi.” for miles.
- Comment on How?!? 3 weeks ago:
Oompa Loompa doompety doo.
- Comment on Denominator, go Mercator 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on LLMs are already doing fascists a favor by ensuring that anything that is reasonably eloquently formulated on social media is automatically suspected of having been written by LLMs. 5 weeks ago:
I’ve looked into it a little. If all you want to do is listen, I don’t think ya need a cert. And the transmit one isn’t that hard to get. They removed the Morse requirement, though you can still get a higher tier certification for learning it. There are a surprising number of ham antennas and generators in my neighborhood.
- Comment on Bandcamp bans purely AI-generated music from its platform 5 weeks ago:
Suno.com is basically this. It even allows users to comment on the songs.
- Comment on LLMs are already doing fascists a favor by ensuring that anything that is reasonably eloquently formulated on social media is automatically suspected of having been written by LLMs. 5 weeks ago:
I downloaded 17 years worth of my comments before overwriting and deleting my old reddit account. Been thinking about QLoRA fine-tuning Qwen on those comments. Not for use on the internet or anything, just so I can streamline the process of arguing with myself.
- Comment on Where are the marketing volunteers? 5 weeks ago:
As a practitioner of that dark art, I fear you know not what you summon. You don’t really want Lemmy to be popular, not in a way that traditional marketing is going to make it popular.
- Comment on The Death of DeviantArt and the art-site shaped hole haunting the Internet -- Multi-hyphenate 1 month ago:
[image of Clippy]
- Comment on When I was a kid, computers expanded your mind and your freedoms, bringing power to the individual. With AI, now it does the thinking for you, takes your job, gives power only to a few billionaires. 1 month ago:
If you put [brackets] around the word before your (parened link), it’ll make it an actual link.
- Comment on When I was a kid, computers expanded your mind and your freedoms, bringing power to the individual. With AI, now it does the thinking for you, takes your job, gives power only to a few billionaires. 1 month ago:
LLMs are both deliberately and unwittingly programmed to be biased.
I mean, it sounds like you’re mirroring the paper’s sentiments too. A big part of Clark’s point is that interactions between humans and generative AI need to take into account the biases of the human and the AI.
The lesson is that it is the detailed shape of each specific human-AI coalition or interaction that matters. The social and technological factors that determine better or worse outcomes in this regard are not yet fully understood, and should be a major focus of new work in the field of human-AI interaction. […] We now need to become experts at estimating the likely reliability of a response given both the subject matter and our level of skill at orchestrating a series of prompts. We must also learn to adjust our levels of trust
And as I am not, Clark is not really calling Plato a crank. That’s not the point of using the quote.
And yet, perhaps there was an element of truth even in the worries raised in the Phaedrus. […] Empirical studies have shown that the use of online search can lead people to judge that they know more ‘in the biological brain’ than they actually do, and can make people over-estimate how well they would perform under technologically unaided quiz conditions.
I don’t think anyone is claiming that new technology necessarily leads to progress that is good for humanity.
- Comment on When I was a kid, computers expanded your mind and your freedoms, bringing power to the individual. With AI, now it does the thinking for you, takes your job, gives power only to a few billionaires. 1 month ago:
I talked about the way in which Plato’s concerns were valid and expressed similar fears about misuse. The linked article is about how to approach the specific technology.
- Comment on When I was a kid, computers expanded your mind and your freedoms, bringing power to the individual. With AI, now it does the thinking for you, takes your job, gives power only to a few billionaires. 1 month ago:
This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. - Plato on the invention of writing in The Phaedrus
Every notable invention associated with language (and communication in general) has elicited similar reactions. And I don’t think Plato is wholly wrong, here. With each level of abstraction from the oral tradition, the social landscape of meaning is further externalized. But that doesn’t mean the personal landscape of meaning must be. AI only does the thinking for you if that’s what you use it for.
- Comment on Google sues web scraper for sucking up search results ‘at an astonishing scale’ 1 month ago:
<Three Spidermen Point>
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 1 month ago:
As I understand it, CLIP (and other text encoders in diffusion models) aren’t trained like LLMs, exactly. They’re trained on image/text pairing, which ya get from the metadata creators upload with their photos in Adobe Stock. That said, Adobe hasn’t published their entire architecture.
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 1 month ago:
The Firefly image generator is a diffusion model, and the Firefly video generator is a diffusion transformer. LLMs aren’t involved in either process. I believe there are some ChatGPT integrations with Reader and Acrobat, but that’s unrelated to Firefly.
- Comment on New Ways to Corrupt LLMs: The wacky things statistical-correlation machines like LLMs do – and how they might get us killed
2 months ago:
Here’s a metaphor/framework I’ve found useful but am trying to refine, so feedback welcome.
Visualize the deforming rubber sheet model commonly used to depict masses distorting spacetime. Your goal is to roll a ball onto the sheet from one side such that it rolls into a stable or slowly decaying orbit of a specific mass. You begin aiming for a mass on the outer perimeter of the sheet. But with each roll, you must aim for a mass further toward the center. The longer you roll, the more masses sit between you and your goal, to be rolled past or slingshot-ed around. As soon as you fail to hit a goal, you lose. But you can continue to play indefinitely.
The model’s latent space is the sheet. The prompt is your rolling of the ball. The response is the path the ball takes. And the good (useful, correct, original, whatever your goal was) response is the orbit of the mass you’re aiming for. As the context window grows, there are more pitfalls the model can fall into. Until you lose, there’s a phase transition, and the model starts going way off the rails. This phase transition was formalized mathematically in this paper from August.
The masses are attractors that have been studied at different levels of abstraction. And the metaphor/framework seems to work at different levels as well, as if the deformed rubber sheet is a fractal with self-similarity across scale.
One level up: the sheet becomes the trained alignment, the masses become potential roles the LLM can play, and the rolled ball is the RLHF or fine-tuning. So we see the same kind of phase transition in both prompting (from useful to hallucinatory) and in training.
Two levels down: the sheet becomes the neuron architecture, the masses become potential next words, and the rolled ball is the transformer process.
In reality, the rubber sheet has like 40,000 dimensions, and I’m sure a ton is lost in the reduction.
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 2 months ago:
Adobe’s image generator (Firefly) is trained only on images from Adobe Stock.
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 2 months ago:
Coincidentally, this paper published yesterday indicates that LLMs are worse at coding the closer you get to the low level like assembly or binary. Or more precisely, ya stop seeing improvements pretty early on in scaling up the models. If I’m reading it right, which I’m probably not.
- Comment on Larian CEO Responds to Divinity Gen AI Backlash: 'We Are Neither Releasing a Game With Any AI Components, Nor Are We Looking at Trimming Down Teams to Replace Them With AI' 2 months ago:
There are AI’s that are ethically trained. There are AI’s that run on local hardware. We’ll eventually need AI ratings to distinguish use types, I suppose.
