200fifty

joined 1 year ago
[–] 200fifty@awful.systems 15 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (6 children)

"This technology is coming whether we like it or not, so we're going to make sure that we get it right," Adams said in a statement.

??? Who is "we" here. Is the technology going to be developed by aliens who beam it down to earth? Is a rogue AI developing self-driving cars for the purposes of annoying humanity into submission? Are they springing forth from the head of Zeus?

Seriously, can we go back to the days when tech boosters at least pretended technology was being developed by people to improve other people's lives? Now it seems like they just go "sucks to suck, idiots! this is the future now, get with it, grandpa!" and skateboard away into the sunset leaving everyone else to clean up their mess...

[–] 200fifty@awful.systems 48 points 8 months ago

Hey guys, great feature!

At least it can do this though:

[–] 200fifty@awful.systems 10 points 8 months ago (7 children)

yeah, I definitely think machine learning has obvious use cases to benefit the common good (youtube auto captions being Actually Pretty Decent Now is one that comes to mind easily) but I'm much less certain about most of the stuff being presently marketed as "AI"

[–] 200fifty@awful.systems 13 points 8 months ago (4 children)

Exchange presented without comment:

My prediction: the advance of tech by AI will far surpasse what it consume in energy.

To look at the energy consumption of current model is extremely short sighted. If AI create a new material, a new solar cell, advance fusion reactor is all of humanity that jump forward.

Furthermore new generation of AI accelerators and new algorithms will improve efficiency by order of magnitute, it's still early days.

For every good thing, come up with a bad.

The material created will be a better poison/virus. The algorithm to keep the fusion tokamak from going boom will be at best 99% correct. The new solar cell? More exotic materials required than the current.

Blind optimism is a vice we cannot afford.

The post you're responding to doesn't argue from blind optimism, it argued a reasonably-expected gain in net beneficial effects.

[–] 200fifty@awful.systems 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

When people say stuff like this it always makes me wonder "what pace, exactly?" Truthfully, I feel like hearing someone say "well, generative AI is such a fast-moving field" at this point is enough on its own to ping my BS detector.

Maybe it was forgivable to say it in May 2023, but at this point it definitely feels like progress has slowed down/leveled off. AI doesn't really seem to me to be significantly more capable than it was a year ago -- I guess OpenAI can generate videos now, but it's been almost a year since "will smith eating spaghetti," so...

[–] 200fifty@awful.systems 11 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I'm confused how this is even supposed to demonstrating "metacognition" or whatever? It's not discussing its own thought process or demonstrating awareness of its own internal state, it just said "this sentence might have been added to see if I was paying attention." Am I missing something here? Is it just that it said "I... paying attention"?

This is a thing humans already do sometimes in real life and discuss -- when I was in middle school, I'd sometimes put the word "banana" randomly into the middle of my essays to see if the teacher noticed -- so pardon me if I assume the LLM is doing this by the same means it does literally everything else, i.e. mimicking a human phrasing about a situation that occurred, rather than suddenly developing radical new capabilities that it has never demonstrated before even in situations where those would be useful.

[–] 200fifty@awful.systems 11 points 8 months ago

I feel like it was all over from the moment they made it talk in first person. No one had any illusions that Inferkit or NovelAI were general intelligences, because it was obvious that they were just language models autocompleting a sentence you typed in.

[–] 200fifty@awful.systems 5 points 9 months ago

this made me laugh out loud thank you

[–] 200fifty@awful.systems 15 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

of all the ways we’ve tried so far, Substack is working the best.

The sheer arrogance of this quote is really something to behold. It's "working the best" by what metric, exactly, sir? And who's the "we" that have tried various ways so far, because it's certainly not 'people on the internet,' many of whom have developed ways of dealing with Nazis which are significantly more effective than the substack method of 'literally give them money to use our platform'

[–] 200fifty@awful.systems 15 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (6 children)

When I was a kid (Nat Nanny)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_Nanny] was totally and completely lame, but the whole millennial generation grew up to adore content moderation. A strange authoritarian impulse.

Me when the mods unfairly ban me from my favorite video game forum circa 2009

(source: first HN thread)

[–] 200fifty@awful.systems 8 points 11 months ago (1 children)

even putting aside philosophy/ethics, have they never heard of common expressions like "too much of a good thing" or "the dose makes the poison"? it's just an extremely, extremely common idea basically everywhere except in the tech industry

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