partofthevoice

@partofthevoice@lemmy.zip

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Ars Technica Fires Reporter After AI Controversy Involving Fabricated Quotes⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  5% of the time? LLMs, from their own perspective, are only capable of hallucinating. There’s no difference in what they’re doing between cases we call “hallucinating” and “correct.” It’s the same process.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Windows 12 release date in 2026 possible, with AI features that may force CPU upgrades⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Are they loosing money on the OS? I don’t believe for a second that the capitalist company chooses less capital. But, maybe they’ve determined there’s more capital in less market share? What’s your theory, exactly?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your car’s tire sensors could be used to track you⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it had something to do with the embedded antennas, but I could be mistaken.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your car’s tire sensors could be used to track you⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  I spoke with my landlord about removing power to the home security cameras, because they were Ring. He obliged my request, but I later discovered that he (in private) regards my preference as that of a rebellious teenager in need of a cause. I had to let that sink in… I’m a rebel without a cause because I don’t sip from the same koolaid as he does. Wow.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Your car’s tire sensors could be used to track you⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Yep. I remember watching a documentary on how to disappear. Car tires and windshields were both covered, because they can contain traceable technology.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Amazon’s AWS reports outage after UAE data centre struck⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  We will learn that so much of their power comes from a docile society acting in predictable ways. They have the privilege of being about to concern themselves with how to control/influence us… not because that’s a privilege in its own right, but because they can afford to while relatively unhampered. Like if the sea and land were at battle, it’s akin to the land fortifying its sand armory, sand castles, sand moats, sand… a privilege the land can afford, only because it convinced the sea to lower its tide. We will learn, they’re a lot more vulnerable than they would like us to believe.

  Every second we can get them to spend thinking of their own defense, is a second we saved in our favor [which would surely have otherwise been spent determining how to further influence our behaviors].

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Teams’ invasive Wi‑Fi tracking sparks backlash as users say Microsoft crossed a line — “There must be a team at Microsoft tasked with making Teams worse”⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s a web client. I’ll use that from now on in I have to. Should I use any particular browser that prevents access to WiFi details?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨It's rude to show AI output to people | Alex Martsinovich⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve had these interactions with the head of my IT department. I asked to procure a license for jfrog artifactory. He literally copy/pasted a ChatGPT response to me that began like this:

  Here’s a breakdown of how JFrog Artifactory compares to using GitHub, NPM, or other language-specific package mangers (like Pypi)… … 1. Purpose and Functionality … **2. Workflow & Developer Experience … 3. Security and Compliance … ✅ When to use JFrog …

  It came with a bunch of theoretical risks that are completely resolved by the simple ability of just not being a complete fucking moron.

  It was really frustrating that I tried to talk with my IT leader, and instead found a proxy for ChatGPT. I lost a lot of respect for him.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Silicon Valley Rallies Behind Anthropic in A.I. Clash With Trump⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  This stuff is really scary when you think about it. If we keep getting closer to a reality where technology can silently monitor your every thought, with analysis and automation becoming evermore efficient, what’s bound to happen so long as the only thing stopping it from being used against us is moral standing? Eventually, someone somewhere can make something so trivially that it tips the scales in their favor so long as they lack the moral standing to not do so. Technology is a unique kind of threat, given especially the glorification that’s often given to its innovation. Skepticism could have been applied earlier.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨‘A feedback loop with no brake’: how an AI doomsday report shook US markets⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I think it’s supposed to work like, “well, even if you are right about the massive utility of AI, is that still what we should be aiming for?”

  It gets around the combative “you’re wrong, AI is garbage” argument. The people hoisting AI because they believe, even if it does suck, it’ll get better… those people can probably understand this argument much more easily.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Using huntarr? Perhaps you shouldn't.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Sounds like the solution would be a public code sharing platform that specifically bans AI generated code. Then, at least, we’re moving in the right direction. Do any alts to GitHub provide such a rule?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Loops is a new short form platform created by Pixelfed creator Daniel Supernault.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  We don’t want a monarchy. We want a spectacle fueled capitalistic society.

  Is there some trend in humanity, where it’s like… we don’t care if we suffer so long as it’s not to the benefit of someone else? We gotta build our own suffering machines of culture instead? What’s up with that?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras. Anger over ICE connections and privacy violations is fueling the sabotage.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s quite common to hear we’re living in a digital panopticon. See modern philosophers.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Across the US, people are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras. Anger over ICE connections and privacy violations is fueling the sabotage.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, I was actually thinking about acquiring one myself. I want to dissect it, hook it up to some monitoring equipment/ software, see what I can learn about it… functionality, vulnerability, anything. But I’m also worried about the potential I accidentally show up on a video feed stored somewhere remote. I’ve been checking eBay for them, but honestly… there are several right by my home. We’ll see what happens, in time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Researchers Dropped 1,000 AIs in Minecraft and Watched a Civilization Form⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Im no academic, so apologies for the lack of substance. I mostly just get stuck in rabbit holes reading about philosophy and consciousness while I should be working.

  Check out these theories for some interesting ideas:

  • Information Integration Theory
  • Global Workspace Theory
  • Recurrent Processing Theory
  • Higher Order Thought Theory

  My summarized take is that modeling consciousness is akin to modeling the three-body problem or the double-pendulum. Even if the system is deterministic and capable of being modeled, you’ll forever be bottlenecked by finite precision in your model. The system itself is one where errors grow exponentially. For example, tiny differences in the double pendulum’s initial angle (like 0.000001°) rapidly amplify over time to produce wildly different trajectories. It is computationally intractable without unlimited precision — hence, this is why I said you’d need to model the entire universe. This is deterministic chaos, and we have no reason to think human-brains aren’t heavily dependent on its utility.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Researchers Dropped 1,000 AIs in Minecraft and Watched a Civilization Form⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Information Integration Theory would suggest that phi (Φ) can be used to measure the degree to which a system generates irreducible, integrated cause–effect structure. The irreducible nature of something is exactly as you postulate: it cannot possibly be modeled mathematically. If it could, that would make it reducible to smaller parts.

  You can describe the function of the human brain mathematically, of course… For example, some low hanging fruit might be:

  • Define the system’s transition probabilities.
  • Define its cause–effect repertoires.
  • Define Φ mathematically.

  But that’s not going to model human experience. The experience isn’t reducible. That, instead, models something closer to the quality of experience. Human rationality is derived downstream of human experience. So it’s just not a fair argument to say that a tool mimicking only the downstream patterns of human experience will somehow also possess the upstream experience capacity, or even a relatable sense of rationality at all.

  I don’t think we’re going to get a deterministic explanation for human behavior, ever. Most likely just statistical truths. Unless you can somehow mathematically model the entire universe as well. Good luck, because now the endeavor sounds god-like.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Researchers Dropped 1,000 AIs in Minecraft and Watched a Civilization Form⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Humans aren’t rational creatures though… we use rationality as a tool, but tools designed to mimic rationality aren’t actually mimicking humans. Human intelligence has a lot to do with being irrational, arational, and sometimes deciding to use rationality as a means to an end. Societies are emergent from the social patterns produced via agents with those particular behaviors. Social patterns like morals, religion, culture, … It’s really not the same thing as stuffing a bunch of LLMs in a box. The LLMs don’t have the same capabilities for growth, failure, awareness thereof, … nor any of the natural pressures that would even incentivize such awareness. They’re just little feedforward algorithms stuck in a feedback loop with each other.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Facebook is absolutely cooked⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  We need a dumb browser.

  This browser doesn’t work for most shit, making it the best browser available for most shit you actually need to do.

  That’s a browser I can get behind.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I hacked ChatGPT and Google's AI – and it only took 20 minutes⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Whilst people really shouldn’t use <tool> as a <form of research>, many do, …

  Shit, I know where this is going.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Quantum teleportation demonstrated over existing fiber networks — Deutsche Telekom’s T‑Labs used commercially available Qunnect hardware for the demo, claims 90% average accuracy⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Quantum is a struggle for me to understand because, I feel like the current explanations don’t suffice why you can’t transmit information. To me, this still sounds perfectly viable for information transfer… just don’t encode information via polarization. You would encode it as a primitive derived from whether or not state collapse has happened yet or not.

  Using the same/similar mechanism they can use to determine collapse happens to both entangled particles at the same time time (faster than light), can they not also determine whether or not collapse has happened at all?

  Maybe it’s that checking for collapse will actually cause collapse, thus ruining the information channel. But, perhaps then, you just add more entangled particles. Have some mechanism established with “throwaway” particles that can have their state collapsed either as a chain reaction or via the polling process.

  Obviously I’m not the smarted person here… probably a lot wrong with my above assumption. But my point is really that explanations about quantum seem to be unsupportive to the claims they make about quantum.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Android will become a locked-down platform in 194 day⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Maybe the only good use of AI is someone automates reverse engineering drivers for mobile.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Piracy communities remain blocked on lemmy.world despite "Unremoval of Piracy Communities" announcement⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I would say the priest’s mistake wasn’t merely having (or displaying) and ideology, but associating it with mysticism disjointed from any empirical or rational inspection.

  That’s a good point, and it’s really what happens at a fundamental level when you decide your ideology is who you are. We all know someone whose identity is defined by what they consume, and we even joke sometimes like “you know if they’re vegan because they never stop talking about it.” It’s not rational to think the sanctity of an ideology should correspond with our own sanctity, but alas we fall into that trap so often as humans. How it happens can be like the frog in boiling water situation.

  How do you have a conversation about whether or not the person you’re talking to is a human worthy of the dignity of discourse? How do you have a debate with someone who shows up wearing boxing gloves (much less an AR-15)? At some point, censorship is a kindness. It means ending the conversation before we hit the point of fighting words and irreconcilable differences.

  300 years ago, someone would have said this instead:

  How do you have a conversation about whether or not god exists and we are all subjects to his teaching? How do you debate with someone who shows up wearing the sin of misguided faith?

  …all the while, they have no problem discussing the right way to punish your children versus a slave.

  300 years from now, we will be the barbarians. We aren’t elevated beyond the issues of our past. We aren’t more “enlightened” now. We’re doing the same stuff as before under the current cultural context. The only difference now is, we have more awareness of this dynamic while typically considering it just a thing of the past.

  We should have conversations with people because that helps them understand. Sometimes when we try to convince them to instead just bury the thoughts because they make you a bad person, all we actually do is inspire more curiosity and secrecy. What we certainly don’t do is figure out where these crazy ideas came from in the first place, which means we aren’t exactly solving the problem with any sense of longevity via the approach of censorship.

  My take is that we all need to be compassionate to humans by understanding that we are all the same pallet of color, just with different mixes and strokes. We are always becoming something, never a static identity. If you were born Hitler, then you’d have grown up to be Hitler. The real question is, how do we use this knowledge for the betterment of mankind?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Piracy communities remain blocked on lemmy.world despite "Unremoval of Piracy Communities" announcement⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Why is the priest allowed to just make shit up with nothing more than a bronze aged poorly translated manuscript to back him up? The boy should be able to ask away. It’s the priest that should be censored.

  I mostly agree-ish. But the priest is really a metaphor for us all. See, the priest happened to make a very human mistake: identify yourself with your ideology. The problem there is rather simple: ideology is unstable, and people compensate for that via censorship. The reason people compensate that way is more complex… it has to do with the relationship they’ve created between themselves and the ideology, codependency. If the ideology is attacked, it feels like a personal attack. If the ideology is destroyed, it can feel like philosophical death. People, like the priest, respond like an act of self-preservation.

  We do this with all kinds of topics. Sexism, racism, nazism, … the Right would also do this for communism and socialism. If someone came to you with a thought experiment to explore the merits of racism from an objective perspective, how easy would it be to participate? Not so much, reasonably so, I’d imagine.

  You run into this problem where now, you’re concerned with what should and shouldn’t be censored. That sounds great and all… but it really isn’t any better. When humanities experience of the world revolved around their connection with god, it made sense to censor the heathens. Common sense to do so, dare I say. That idea doesn’t look so good in retrospect, but what’s changed now is just the context we live in. What hasn’t changed is the problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Piracy communities remain blocked on lemmy.world despite "Unremoval of Piracy Communities" announcement⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I think the censorship arguments can definitely use some maturing… for example, what would you think of the cultural censorship that occurs with Nazi ideology? Probably want to keep that one, huh?

  We don’t necessarily want to do away with censorship, I think. But, I think in the most mature world, it would be healthy to.

  Why can’t the boy ask his priest about his most serious doubts regarding god, and receive an honest answer back? Why does the priest say the solution is faith, an inward focused quality to be solved at the individual-level?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨US Department of Homeland Security has reportedly demanded personal information about ICE's critics from Discord, Reddit, Google, and Meta—and at least 3 of those platforms have complied⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah. Discord know, Thiel and Palantir is their daddy (apparently).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Roblox, Reddit and Discord users compelled to use biometric ID system backed by Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not really. Free speech is a cultural construct. It doesn’t exist without a huge swath of pre-agreed norms regarding rights, speech, freedom, … I’ll have you know, there are modern philosophers who argue against human rights. They would say human rights language pretends to be objective and universal, but it floats without a metaphysical anchor (unlike in the past) and in practice they only exist if a sovereign power recognizes them.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Roblox, Reddit and Discord users compelled to use biometric ID system backed by Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The internet has been out for less time than some people have been alive. Are we sure we, as a species, know how to be an adult on the internet yet?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Roblox, Reddit and Discord users compelled to use biometric ID system backed by Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Not a bad idea. But AI is already subtly wrong as is. Just fill it with barely plausible sounding but completely garbage text,

  Idea bad, not. AI subtly already is wrong as. Text with plausible garbage fill.

  There should be an algorithmic way to do that starting from the posts/comments original text.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Rufus blames Microsoft for allegedly blocking latest Windows 11 ISO downloads⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Sequential updates are frustrating… I need to do that to my car, manually over USB, like 10 times (if I ever want CarPlay).

  Do they include migration steps from the prior version in each build? So effectively, you can only get to version n from version n-1?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Parents opt kids out of school computers, insisting on pen-and-paper instead⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  That makes a lot of sense. I think there’s plenty of research to back up your claim about writing helping memory, too. I used to try to remember things better by (1) writing it down, (2) reading it aloud, (3) thinking about the next level up.

  Number 3 is probably less useful outside fields where you’re constantly trying to “scale” systems… but in any case, it’s a thought experiment that happens to be really good at exposing the boundaries of concepts. Like… “okay, I built one server… now, what if I needed to manage a farm of 1000? What issues then become more pronounced?”

  Out of curiosity, do any of these platforms try to marry itself with paper workflows? Maybe stuff like:

  • teachers can submit a printable paper doc
  • students can print it out as needed, submit the finished result
  • students can take pictures of their handwritten notes and store them in a digital journal
  • platform comes with handwriting analysis, full-text-search, … all that jazz?