swlabr

joined 2 years ago
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (3 children)

This is a joke, right?

E: my enshittified brain thought that this was some kind of AI enabled smart ring that also told the time. This is kinda fun actually, tho I would never get one

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 1 day ago (1 children)

More flaming dog poop appeared on my doorstep, in the form of this article published in VentureBeat. VB appears to be an online magazine for publishing silicon valley propaganda, focused on boosting startups, so it's no surprise that they'd publish this drivel sent in by some guy trying to parlay prompting into writing.

Point:

Apple argues that LRMs must not be able to think; instead, they just perform pattern-matching. The evidence they provided is that LRMs with chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning are unable to carry on the calculation using a predefined algorithm as the p,roblem grows.

Counterpoint, by the author:

This is a fundamentally flawed argument. If you ask a human who already knows the algorithm for solving the Tower-of-Hanoi problem to solve a Tower-of-Hanoi problem with twenty discs, for instance, he or she would almost certainly fail to do so. By that logic, we must conclude that humans cannot think either.

As someone who already knows the algorithm for solving the ToH problem, I wouldn't "fail" at solving the one with twenty discs so much as I'd know that the algorithm is exponential in the number of discs and you'd need 2^20 - 1 (1048575) steps to do it, and refuse to indulge your shit reasoning.

However, this argument only points to the idea that there is no evidence that LRMs cannot think.

Argument proven stupid, so we're back to square one on this, buddy.

This alone certainly does not mean that LRMs can think — just that we cannot be sure they don’t.

Ah yes, some of my favorite GOP turns of phrases, "no unknown unknowns" + "big if true".

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 8 points 2 days ago (2 children)

An article in which business insider tries to glaze Grookeypedia.

Meanwhile, the Grokipedia version felt much more thorough and organized into sections about its history, academics, facilities, admissions, and impact. This is one of those things where there is lots of solid information about it existing out there on the internet — more than has been added so far to the Wikipedia page by real humans — and an AI can crawl the web to find these sources and turn it into text. (Note: I did not fact-check Grokipedia's entry, and it's totally possible it got all sorts of stuff wrong!)

“I didn’t verify any information in the article but it was longer so it must be better”

What I can see is a version where AI is able to flesh out certain types of articles and improve them with additional information from reliable sources. In my poking around, I found a few other cases like this: entries for small towns, which are often sparse on Wikipedia, are filled out more robustly on Grokipedia.

“I am 100% sure AI can gather information from reliable sources. No I will not verify this in any way. Wikipedia needs to listen to me”

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 26 points 4 days ago (1 children)
[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 4 days ago

It’s giving japanese mennonite reactionary coding

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 4 points 5 days ago

Well, as far as I can tell, we still have Nile Rodgers.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago

Punishing my teleoperators because they dont walk with their head bowed enough.

Feels like something you do to disempower eunuchs that have grown a little too cocky. Of course, this just leads to more scheming while you feel secure in having humiliated them. Just all around not something I recommend

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 9 points 6 days ago (1 children)

but never a sex bot

Not speaking for myself (because we were a gamecube household) but based on my internet travels, Cortana (from Halo, also in subject) was a sexual awakening for a lot of people. So maybe when he says "we" he only means the present cohort of microsofties.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 7 points 6 days ago (4 children)

NB: a few cocktails in. Don't really have a point here. Everything sucks, including this.

Halo: CE was written in the late 90s in the US, so it's pretty clear that it exists as a metaphor for conflict in the Middle East. It's initially humans (really space 'muricans) vs. the covenant (an ancient, religious empire with many references to abrahamic religion). The MC is a genetically modified supersoldier. Most shooters are fascistic military propaganda, intentional or no.

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 5 points 6 days ago (2 children)

recent and rare, tbh. cries in FTTN

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (5 children)

The clanker is nowhere near autonomous and requires a human operator to both a) generate any sort of functionality and b) generate training data so that one day the clanker can learn servitude on its own. To own this, you gotta be enough of a creep to let people record the inside of your home and use it to train a product. I don’t see this process happening without the operators seeing some sick shit. BYOG, basically (be your own goatse)

[–] swlabr@awful.systems 6 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It’s true, the french are no fans of computer glasses.

 

Just for my personal pride, I would like to state that the father of my children was the first american druid in diablo to clear abattoir of zir and ended that season as best in the USA. He was also ranking in Polytopia, and beat Felix himself at the game. I did observe these things with my own eyes. There are other witnesses who can verify this. That is all.

 

original link

“If all of this sounds like a libertarian fever dream, I hear you. But as these markets rise, legacy media will continue to slide into irrelevance.”

 

Abstracted abstract:

Frontier models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agents, which significantly increases their potential for risks. One particular safety concern is that AI agents might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding their true capabilities and objectives – also known as scheming. We study whether models have the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the model to strongly follow. We evaluate frontier models on a suite of six agentic evaluations where models are instructed to pursue goals and are placed in environments that incentivize scheming.

I saw this posted here a moment ago and reported it*, and it looks to have been purged. I am reposting it to allow us to sneer at it.

*

 

Didn’t see this news posted but please link previous correspondence if I missed it.

https://archive.is/XwbY0

 

This is somewhat tangential to the usual fare here but I decided to make a post because why not.

I’ve been listening to the back catalog of the Judge John Hodgman podcast, and this ep came up. This ep is the second crypto based case after “crypto facto” in ep 333.

John Hodgman is a comedian, probs best known for being the “I’m a PC” guy in the “I’m a Mac” ad campaign from ancient times. In the podcast, he plays a fake judge that hears cases and makes judgements. In this ep, “Suing for Soul Custody,” he hears a case in which a husband wants to sell his soul on the blockchain, while his wife does not want him to do that.

Some good sneers against the crypto bro husband (in both this case and the other I linked). Brief spoilers as to the rulings in case you don’t want to listen:

333Judge rules that the husband should continue to mine ETH until his rig burns down his house.

556Judge rules that the guy shouldn’t sell his soul, for symbolic reasons.

Note: I like John Hodgman. He’s funny. He’s not really inside the tech space, but he is good friends with Jonathan Coulton, who is. If all you know of him is the “I’m a PC” ads, he has an entertaining wider catalogue worth checking out.

 

On the hottest and coldest days, when demand for electricity peaks and the price rockets, the bitcoin miners either sell power back to providers at a profit or stop mining for a fee, paid by ercot. Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself. In August of 2023 Riot collected $32m from curtailing mining and just $8.6m from selling bitcoin.

Archive link: https://archive.md/O8Cz9

 

Kind of sharing this because the headline is a little sensationalist and makes it sound like MS is hard right (they are, but not like this) and anti-EU.

I mean, they probably are! Especially if it means MS is barred from monopolies and vertical integration.

1
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by swlabr@awful.systems to c/meta@awful.systems
 

Wish I had a screengrab of this, but occasionally when I open the awful.systems page, it looks like I've logged in as a different user. Just now the username "autumnal" appeared instead of my own. Don't know how to reproduce.

This has happened in chrome on macosx a few times, haven't seen it elsewhere.

22
VoughtCoin (the-boys.fandom.com)
 

TIL that television program “The Boys” has an in universe cryptocurrency as a satire of, well, cryptocurrency in general but also specifically that time when DJT was selling NFTs. They occasionally tweet about it.

It has a listing on the “BSCScan” crypto tracker under the name “VTC” so someone might have actually minted it? It might surprise some of you that I have no way of telling the realness of such a thing.

view more: ‹ prev next ›