Womble

joined 2 years ago
 

I think of AI as alternative intelligence. John McCarthy’s 1956 definition of artificial (distinct from natural) intelligence is old fashioned in a world where most things are either artificial or unnatural. Ultraprocessed food, flying, web-dating, fabrics, make your own list. Physicist and AI commentator, Max Tegmark, told the AI Action Summit in Paris, in February, that he prefers “autonomous intelligence”.

I prefer “alternative” because in all the fear and anger foaming around AI just now, its capacity to be “other” is what the human race needs. Our thinking is getting us nowhere fast, except towards extinction, via planetary collapse or global war.

Not a piece I think I completely agree with, but it's nice to hear from a creative writer who's thoughts on AI don't stop at indignation that they aren't receiving royalties from being included in a training set.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Not the parent, but LLMs dont solve anything, they allow more work with less effort expended in some spaces. Just as horse drawn plough didnt solve any problem that couldnt be solved by people tilling the earth by hand.

As an example my partner is an academic, the first step on working on a project is often doing a literature search of existing publications. This can be a long process and even more so if you are moving outside of your typical field into something adjacent (you have to learn what excatly you are looking for). I tried setting up a local hosted LLM powered research tool that you can ask it a question and it goes away, searches arxiv for relevant papers, refines its search query based on the abstracts it got back and iterates. At the end you get summaries of what it thinks is the current SotA for the asked question along with a list of links to papers that it thinks are relevant.

Its not perfect as you'd expect but it turns a minute typing out a well thought question into hours worth of head start into getting into the research surrounding your question (and does it all without sending any data to OpenAI et al). That getting you over the initial hump of not knowing exactly where to start is where I see a lot of the value of LLMs.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Trump has played one side of Kelogg's plan, cut off aid to Ukraine if they dont move toward peace. Now lets see if he follows though with the other side of it and dramatically ramp up aid to Ukraine if Russia dont move towards peace.

I hope he does but I'm not holding my breath.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I literally just asked to clarify your position, that you chose to project transphobia onto me from that says more about you than me.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Fair enough, I think its a rather bizarre take that we shouldnt try stop people who havent fully developed their reasoning capacities from harming themselves but at least you're consistent.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

Yeah, fair enough, I was refering to posts and comments not other metadata because that isnt publicly available just as a get request (as far as I'm aware)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 6 days ago (3 children)

Everything on the Fediverse is almost certainly scraped, and will be repeatedly. You cant "protect" content that is freely available on a public website.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 6 days ago

He served five terms because he was so good he was massively popular, the conservatives paniced and pushed for term limits afterwards as they were scared of the idea of people running with policies that benifted the majority of people repetedly getting long periods of power like that.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

And humble too!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yes, it probably would have been phrased better as "often" or "frequently", but you then saying it was entirely opinion and worse not even something they had the wit to come up with on their own was also poorly phased given that you then admitted it does happen.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago (4 children)

but if someone utters a thought that doesn’t fit the narrative you’re a nazi, a misogynist, an enlightened centrist, a capitalist, or whatever else can be thrown at you.

This is opinion, masquerading as fact, folks. It’s most likely a regurgitated opinion in my estimation, too.

So it's not opinion masquerading as fact, it is something that happens?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Its not like you have to go far to see it, Lemmy has lots of people who will shout you down for being a step right of Mao.

 

Once, anti-establishment youth disillusioned with mainstream politics headed left. Now increasing numbers are tilting right. Why?

Josh is 24 years old and works as a carer. It’s not easy work, but he prefers it to his old job in a supermarket: most of his clients are elderly and “just want someone there with them, because they’re lonely”. In his spare time Josh used to be into boxing. But lately he’s got into politics instead.

Like many of his gen Z contemporaries, he’s thoroughly disillusioned with the mainstream kind. “The two parties that have been in power for 100-plus years have done nothing. The economy’s a mess,” he scoffs. But if he sounds like the kind of anti-establishment young person who once rallied to the radical left, Josh’s frustration has taken him in another direction. An ardent leaver in his teens, who backed Boris Johnson in 2019, he now belongs to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

 

I considered leaving Twitter as soon as Elon Musk acquired it in 2022, just not wanting to be part of a community that could be bought, least of all by a man like him – the obnoxious “long hours at a high intensity” bullying of his staff began immediately. But I’ve had some of the most interesting conversations of my life on there, both randomly, ambling about, and solicited, for stories: “Anyone got catastrophically lonely during Covid?”; “Anyone hooked up with their secondary school boy/girlfriend?” We used to call it the place where you told the truth to strangers (Facebook was where you lied to your friends), and that wide-openness was reciprocal and gorgeous.

“Twitter has broken the mould,” Mulhall says. “It’s ostensibly a mainstream platform which now has bespoke moderation policies. Elon Musk is himself inculcated with radical right politics. So it’s behaving much more like a bespoke platform, created by the far right. This marks it out significantly from any other platform. And it’s extremely toxic, an order of magnitude worse, not least because, while it still has terms of service, they’re not necessarily implementing them.”

Global civil society, though, finds it incredibly difficult to reject the free speech argument out of hand, because the alternative is so dark: that a number of billionaires – not just Musk but also Thiel with Rumble, Parler’s original backer, Rebekah Mercer (daughter of Robert Mercer, funder of Breitbart), and, indirectly, billionaire sovereign actors such as Putin – are successfully changing society, destroying the trust we have in each other and in institutions. It’s much more comfortable to think they’re doing that by accident, because they just love “free speech”, than that they’re doing that on purpose. “Part of understanding the neo-reactionary and ‘dark enlightenment’ movements, is that these individuals don’t have any interest in the continuation of the status quo,”

 

Earlier this year, a Boeing aircraft's door plug fell out in flight – all because crucial bolts were missing. The incident shows why simple failures like this are often a sign of larger problems, says John Downer.

 

In a 1938 article, MIT’s president argued that technical progress didn’t mean fewer jobs. He’s still right.

Compton drew a sharp distinction between the consequences of technological progress on “industry as a whole” and the effects, often painful, on individuals.

For “industry as a whole,” he concluded, “technological unemployment is a myth.” That’s because, he argued, technology "has created so many new industries” and has expanded the market for many items by “lowering the cost of production to make a price within reach of large masses of purchasers.” In short, technological advances had created more jobs overall. The argument—and the question of whether it is still true—remains pertinent in the age of AI.

Then Compton abruptly switched perspectives, acknowledging that for some workers and communities, “technological unemployment may be a very serious social problem, as in a town whose mill has had to shut down, or in a craft which has been superseded by a new art.”

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