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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Part of what makes these models so dangerous is that as they become more “powerful” or “accurate”, it becomes more and more difficult for people to determine where the remaining inaccuracies lie. Anything using them as a source are then more at risk of propagating those inaccuracies which the model may feed on further down the line, reinforcing them.

    Nevermind the fact that 100% is just statistically impossible, and they’ve clearly hit the point of diminishing returns some time ago so every 0.1% comes at increased cost and power. And, you know, any underlying biases.

    Just ridiculously unethical and dangerous.




  • Absolutely incorrect. Bullshit. And horseshoe theory itself is largely bullshit.

    (Succinct response taken from Reddit post discussing the topic)

    “Horseshoe Theory is slapping “theory” on a strawman to simplify WHY there’s crossover from two otherwise conflicting groups. It’s pseudo-intellectualizing it to make it seem smart.”

    This ignores the many, many reasons we keep telling you why we find it dangerous, inaccurate, and distasteful. You don’t offer a counter argument in your response so I can only assume it’s along the lines of, “technology is inevitable, would you have said the same if the Internet?” Which is also a fallacious argument. But go ahead, give me something better if I assume wrong.

    I can easily see why people would be furious their elected leader is abdicating thought and responsibility to an often wrong, unaccountably biased chat bot.

    Furthermore, your insistance continues to push an acceptance of AI on those who clearly don’t want it, contributing to the anger we feel at having it forced upon us


  • Oh yes, I think Peter Watts is a great author. He’s very good at tackling high concept ideas while also keeping it fun and interesting. Blindsight has a vampire in it in case there wasn’t already enough going on for you 😁

    Unrelated to the topic at hand, I also highly recommend Starfish by him. It was the first novel of his I read. A dark, psychological thriller about a bunch of misfits working a deep sea geothermal power plant and how they cope (or don’t) with the situation at hand.


  • Blindsight mentioned!

    The only explanation is that something has coded nonsense in a way that poses as a useful message; only after wasting time and effort does the deception becomes apparent. The signal functions to consume the resources of a recipient for zero payoff and reduced fitness. The signal is a virus.

    This has been my biggest problem with it. It places a cognitive load on me that wasn’t there before, having to cut through the noise.


  • I don’t really have a concise answer, but allow me to ramble from personal experience for a bit:

    I’m a sysadmin that was VERY heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. It was all I worked with professionally and really all I had ever used personally as well. I grew up with Windows 3.1 and just kept on from there, although I did mess with Linux from time to time.

    Microsoft continues to enshittify Windows in many well-documented ways. From small things like not letting you customize the Start menu and task bar, to things like microstuttering from all the data it’s trying to load over the web, to the ads it keeps trying to shove into various corners. A million little splinters that add up over time. Still, I considered myself a power user, someone able to make registry tweaks and PowerShell scripts to suit my needs.

    Arch isn’t particularly difficult for anyone who is comfortable with OSes and has excellent documentation. After installation it is extremely minimal, coming with a relatively bare set of applications to keep it functioning. Using the documentation to make small decisions for yourself like which photo viewer or paint app to install feels empowering. Having all those splinters from Windows disappear at once and be replaced with a system that feels both personal and trustworthy does, in a weird way, kind of border on an almost religious experience. You can laugh, but these are the tools that a lot of us live our daily lives on, for both work and play. Removing a bloated corporation from that chain of trust does feel liberating.


    As to why particularly Arch? I think it’s just that level of control. I admit it’s not for everyone, but again, if you’re at least somewhat technically inclined, I absolutely believe it can be a great first distro, especially for learning. Ubuntu has made some bad decisions recently, but even before that, I always found myself tinkering with every install until it became some sort of Franken-Debian monster. And I like pacman way better than apt, fight me, nerds.


  • The latest We’re In Hell revealed a new piece of the puzzle to me, Symbolic vs Connectionist AI.

    As a layman I want to be careful about overstepping the bounds of my own understanding, but from someone who has followed this closely for decades, read a lot of sci-fi, and dabbled in computer sciences, it’s always been kind of clear to me that AI would be more symbolic than connectionist. Of course it’s going to be a bit of both, but there really are a lot of people out there that believe in AI from the movies; that one day it will just “awaken” once a certain number of connections are made.

    Cons of Connectionist AI: Interpretability: Connectionist AI systems are often seen as “black boxes” due to their lack of transparency and interpretability.

    Transparency and accountability are negatives when being used for a large number of applications AI is currently being pushed for. This is just THE PURPOSE.

    Even taking a step back from the apocalyptic killer AI mentioned in the video, we see the same in healthcare. The system is beyond us, smarter than us, processing larger quantities of data and making connections our feeble human minds can’t comprehend. We don’t have to understand it, we just have to accept its results as infallible and we are being trained to do so. The system has marked you as extraneous and removed your support. This is the purpose.


    EDIT: In further response to the article itself, I’d like to point out that misalignment is a very real problem but is anthropomorphized in ways it absolutely should not be. I want to reference a positive AI video, AI learns to exploit a glitch in Trackmania. To be clear, I have nothing but immense respect for Yosh and his work writing his homegrown Trackmania AI. Even he anthropomorphizes the car and carrot, but understand how the rewards are a fairly simple system to maximize a numerical score.

    This is what LLMs are doing, they are maximizing a score by trying to serve you an answer that you find satisfactory to the prompt you provided. I’m not gonna source it, but we all know that a lot of people don’t want to hear the truth, they want to hear what they want to hear. Tech CEOs have been mercilessly beating the algorithm to do just that.

    Even stripped of all reason, language can convey meaning and emotion. It’s why sad songs make you cry, it’s why propaganda and advertising work, and it’s why that abusive ex got the better of you even though you KNEW you were smarter than that. None of us are so complex as we think. It’s not hard to see how an LLM will not only provide sensible response to a sad prompt, but may make efforts to infuse it with appropriate emotion. It’s hard coded into the language, they can’t be separated and the fact that the LLM wields emotion without understanding like a monkey with a gun is terrifying.

    Turning this stuff loose on the populace like this is so unethical there should be trials, but I doubt there ever will be.



  • What kind of source is GazeOn? Based off the top menu items, looks like a pro-AI rag. Biased source.

    To give them an ounce of credit, there are many factors that would prevent any sort of accurate reporting on those numbers. To take that credit away, they confidently harp on their own poorly sourced number of 75.

    Whether AI is explicitly stated as the cause, or even effective at the job functions its attempting to replace is irrelevant. Businesses are plowing ahead with it and it is certainly resulting in job cuts, to say nothing of the interference its causing in the hiring process once you’re unemployed.

    We need to temper our fears of an AI driven world, but we also need to treat the very real and observable consequences of it as the threat that it is.


  • There are so many ways in which big tech is complicit with what’s happening in the US right now, but corporations have no home.

    Lack of regulations, cozying up with an authoritarian, and a populace still with significant funds to drain keep them safely within bounds while things like the GDPR keep them at bay in Europe. But rest assured, once things become too difficult/drained over here, they’ll start pushing the boundaries. Likely through grassroots campaigns to make Europeans distrust the GDPR (what is the general consensus on this anyways? as an American it looks pretty good to me but I’ve never lived under it).

    Big tech is a behemoth unto itself, and will need to be fought as such. Put up strong protections now while you can.



  • This is the current problem with “misalignment”. It’s a real issue, but it’s not “AI lying to prevent itself from being shut off” as a lot of articles tend to anthropomorphize it. The issue is (generally speaking) it’s trying to maximize a numerical reward by providing responses to people that they find satisfactory. A legion of tech CEOs are flogging the algorithm to do just that, and as we all know, most people don’t actually want to hear the truth. They want to hear what they want to hear.

    LLMs are a poor stand in for actual AI, but they are at least proficient at the actual thing they are doing. Which leads us to things like this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKCynxiV_8I


  • Protontricks can help for some games. Personally I used it to install Openplanet for Trackmania which doesn’t have any sort of explicit Linux support specified.

    What Protontricks does is allow you to run installation files within the context of a steam game, as you mentioned. Simply launch Protontricks and select the game you’re trying to modify and it will mount it properly for you. Then choose “Run an arbitrary executable (.exe/.msi/.msu)” and proceed to run the installer as you would normally.

    Sometimes the path can still be a bit janky. For example when Openplanet wanted to install to the Trackmania directory as mounted through Protontricks, I had to specify: Z:\home<USERNAME>.steam\steam\steamapps\common\Trackmania.




  • That’s my disclaimer that my research on the topic was less than exhaustive when I posted it at midnight, smartasscool guy. I then when on to offer a legitimate, if simple answer with sources that I linked. I see now the error of my ways in trying to provider a sincere answer to a question instead of posting the same tired dunk as everyone else.

    I have learned the error of my ways and will carry this lesson with me into the future as we build this Lemmy community.