TehPers
@TehPers@beehaw.org
- Comment on Google mapped the brain and nervous system of a fruit fly, and modders forced it to play Doom 20 hours ago:
This. Unlike the people using actual brains, these simulated brains are, for the most part, just linear algebra and no more a lifeform than a LLM. They lack all of the components of organic life, lack all the chemicals that make a real lifeform actually “feel”, and so on.
- Comment on OpenAI admits it didn't disclose rogue AI wiki hijacking incident 4 days ago:
If nobody receives a criminal conviction for illegal hacking, then there was no hacking.
So pick one. Is it illegal hacking? Or is it marketing? You can’t choose both.
- Comment on ‘We’re plausibly close to crossing the line’: are warnings of uncontrollable AI coming true? 6 days ago:
Remember when Claude Mythos/Fable was the end of the world?
I guess you can’t end the world if the world already ended in 2012.
- Comment on ‘We’re plausibly close to crossing the line’: are warnings of uncontrollable AI coming true? 6 days ago:
No.
- Comment on 1 week ago:
It’s mostly just management dictating from the top-down. I’ve heard everything from “it’s our company’s direction” to “investors are only funding AI expenses” and nothing actually grounded on (B2C) customer feedback.
- Comment on Microsoft Paint and Photos Embed Server-Issued GUIDs as Invisible Watermarks in Locally-Generated Images 1 week ago:
Notepad had a “Copilot” button at one point. No clue if it’s still there though since I’m fully on Linux now.
- Comment on US says Chinese hackers broke into Justice Department, NASA, Federal Reserve, Senate, and more 2 weeks ago:
On the one hand, you can’t really believe the US government these days. On the other, the same can be said about the Chinese government.
You know what would solve this, though? Make the government actually exciting to work for. Get people excited to work there, and you’ll find some talented security people who can lock things down. Instead, all the good positions are offered by companies, and the government isn’t on anyone’s radar especially after Trump/Musk fucked around with it and fired everyone.
For all the money spent pointlessly on military, you could hire the most talented people in the country to run government services and you wouldn’t even need to sacrifice anything in the military if you just allow them to shop around and buy from the companies that won’t bend them over and beg for it. Hell, you could do all that and still provide healthcare to the entire nation.
- Comment on Meta Just Paid Nearly $17 Billion To Make Sure It Gets To Write The Kid Safety Rules For Every Other Social Media Platform 2 weeks ago:
This is such a reach. The best argument Mike can give in favor of face filters is that they’re free speech, apparently, which is dubious (we’ve already decided that under-13s don’t get any social media “speech” at all). Maybe Mike is in favor of removing that caveat too.
It’s also wrong. Meta has no obligation under the US constitution to protect anyone’s speech, nor does any private individual or business. This is just a case of “free speech absolutism” (aka “freeze peach absolutism”).
What might (and likely would) be unconstitutional would be a law forbidding children from posting modified pictures of themselves anywhere online.
- Comment on Colorado: to test the 911 service, you must first place a normal call to the 911 center. WTF, they don’t think you might be unable to do that? 2 weeks ago:
Within the US, you should be able to make a 911 call with a phone that has no service as long as it’s able to connect to the cell tower at all.
I don’t really have any recommendations on how to test this, though. If you have a phone with service, or a phone that once had service but doesn’t anymore, then those would be the devices I’d recommend reaching for in an emergency.
- Comment on Question about the 4 hardest videogames among mods combinations and original games either those are not officially pc ported videogames. 2 weeks ago:
It’s a wall of text that lists too many requirements to keep track of at once.
Are you looking for hard souls-like games on PC? There’s a lot of good ones out there, but if you find them easy, it might be worth doing a challenge run (no damage, not allowed items or certain mechanics, etc). For example, I had a friend do a no-damage Sekiro run at max difficulty.
- Comment on Local officials face death threats and gunfire over AI data center projects — More than 500 towns restrict builds as councils shutter public comment 2 weeks ago:
The article gives only one example that I can find, and it reeks of “the opposition is threatening us and so we should ignore them”. Their example of the threats against the Marshall City Council members was dropped because the police “did not identify sufficient evidence” that a crime had been committed.
- Comment on Local officials face death threats and gunfire over AI data center projects — More than 500 towns restrict builds as councils shutter public comment 2 weeks ago:
Who’s sending them death threats for not persuing data centers projects? Elon Musk?
More generally, a politician who upsets their voters this much is a failed politician. Even when the populace is split, you can find things that they agree on and work towards that.
- Comment on Sony Reminds PS Users They Don't Own Digital Games 2 weeks ago:
This. Software is only ever licensed to you, never given.
What’s important isn’t that it’s licensed (paid software has to be because it’s trivially reproducible), but what the terms of the license state. I’ve read game EULAs that, to my surprise, allowed you to transfer your license once to somebody else (along with instructions on how to do it). I’ve also read shitty EULAs, which is the vast majority of them.
The biggest scam is when licenses can be unilaterally changed, which is sadly most of them.
From a game preservation standpoint, the license should be nonrevocable, perpetual, and the game should be DRM-free. Using Steam games as an example, Steam is a DRM, but many games can be played without Steam by simply deleting the Steam API library from the game directory. Those would be playable regardless of whether Steam even exists anymore.
- Comment on ASML stands for Advanced Semiconductor Materials and Laser, and was an American company, so when did it become a French company? 2 weeks ago:
Did you know non American companies are also allowed to have English names?
This is even funnier when you consider how prevalent English is in NL.
- Comment on One In Five Drivers Switches Off The Safety Tech Meant To Save Their Lives 2 weeks ago:
Mine lets me adjust follow distance as well, so I don’t actually blame the car. It’s just not the right feature for me when I have no idea if the car 3 lanes over is going to cut across the entire highway to take an exit at the last second. Or for when I’m zipper merging and I have the dipshit who tailgates the car merging in front of me. And so on.
- Comment on One In Five Drivers Switches Off The Safety Tech Meant To Save Their Lives 2 weeks ago:
unusable in city, highly situational outside. very annoying when someone merges just in front of you.
I agree with this, which is why I find myself mostly using it on long stretches of highway.
sooner or later it will stop working, because it will have trouble reading the lines. people are terrible at monitoring automatic system, that is the lesson we learned from airline cockpits, and i will rather drive my car, than anxiously wait for the moment what the half-assed system stops working. on top of that, my car start obnoxious alarm once it decides i am not holding the steering wheel tight enough, which is about 20 seconds after activation of this function.
Maybe I’m missing something here, but at least on my car, lane keep assist only corrects you when you’re drifting out of the lane. The system that keeps you centered in the lane is called “active lane keep” which is only enabled for me when I also have cruise control turned on.
I rarely use active lane keep, but when I do, it’s on a mostly empty highway. Also, I’m not the kind of driver who does shit while driving, so it’s quick at least for me to correct it if it’s wrong (and it occasionally is).
ehm, are you using your turn indicators?
When another lane merges into mine? No. The car still has no idea where my lane is though because the line on my right (for the US - I assume left in the UK?) disappears for a short time.
(i admittedly don’t have personal experience with such system)
Maybe some experience would do some good then? All it shows me is a number for my speed, a speed limit sign, and sometimes it’ll pick up school zones or no passing zones. It’s tiny and at the very periphery of my vision.
- Comment on One In Five Drivers Switches Off The Safety Tech Meant To Save Their Lives 2 weeks ago:
Oh, this makes sense. I don’t think I ever once used sport mode on my old car, and I rarely have a use for it on my new one (basically only if I feel like taking it to a track which is on my list but not anytime soon). Sport mode doesn’t make much sense outside of actual sport cars anyway.
I’ve seen eco modes, but those seem to be mostly on hybrids I believe? If I could have gotten one, I’d probably have it set to that the whole time for local driving, but hybrids are so popular here that it wasn’t a reasonable option sadly.
- Comment on One In Five Drivers Switches Off The Safety Tech Meant To Save Their Lives 2 weeks ago:
By heavy traffic, I’m referring to bumper-to-bumper traffic. I’ve found that I can’t get it to stop anywhere near the car in front of me, always preferring to leave several cars of space. Sure, it’s safer that way, but it’s annoying when the person behind you is laying on the horn while people constantly cut you off.
Driving myself in those situations is generally just less stressful.
- Comment on One In Five Drivers Switches Off The Safety Tech Meant To Save Their Lives 2 weeks ago:
Now that I own a car that has any of these features…
25.9 percent of owners whose cars have adaptive cruise control never switch it on
Why? Lack of knowledge? With mine, I use it regularly on the highway outside of heavy traffic. It’s very nice, actually.
Nearly 18 percent steer clear of lane-keeping assist
Mine, I keep on for the most part. Theres an easy access button to turn it off when it becomes annoying though, which is only really when dealing with lanes merging.
21.3 percent disable automatic emergency braking outright
I couldn’t tell you from memory where this setting is. It has only triggered once for me, which was when parking on a weird hill. I was only moving about half a mph though so whatever, and it let me override it.
Voice assistants go unused by 17.8 percent.
Well, yeah. My options are fucking Gemini, Siri (but I have no iPhone), or Alexa. Fuck those all.
Augmented reality head-up displays fare no better: 17.1 percent of drivers who have one refuse to turn it on, and a further 7 percent don’t know how to operate it.
I’m sorry, what?
Having the current speed and relevant traffic signs in the windshield is amazing. It makes it so much easier and less dangerous to check the speed. Sure, you can eyeball it while driving, but there are times where knowing the exact speed is important, like when driving past speed cameras. Also, quick access to the speed limit is incredibly useful when driving in new areas.
The rest of the listed features are just as confusing to me. You bought a car with massage seats. You don’t use them? Seriously?
Remote start, I don’t use either, but I haven’t had a use for it yet. To begin with, there’s no benefit to idling the engine, and the weather here has been great so no need to ventilate the car or run the AC/heater.
45.7 percent of respondents say they regularly use reversing cameras
At least in the US, every new car has them. So are people going out of their way to ignore them? Or only that many people have cars with these cameras?
While almost all new cars have them, just 27.3 percent of respondents say they regularly use their vehicle’s driving mode. Those aged 25 to 34 were more likely to use them, at 38.3 percent.
… as opposed to what? The parking mode? Or is this automatic vs manual?
- Comment on LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins – Sean Carroll podcast w/Dr. Chandra Sripada 3 weeks ago:
We’re comparing this to the observable behaviors of humans, though. Humanity engages in unsupervised learning without a scoring function (let alone a differentiable one) and, as a result, can not only train on the fly, but can also find its own ways to self-evaluate its learning. Humans also have hormones which change how the brain works even further.
This is also all disregarding the ability for the human mind to become faster and more accurate on recall when it has more knowledge to search in a field. LLMs can’t recall very effectively, instead becoming less effective the more information it needs to search.
- Comment on LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins – Sean Carroll podcast w/Dr. Chandra Sripada 3 weeks ago:
Llm’s that only have one glyph per token can easily count this
[Citation needed]
There’s no difference between counting tokens containing the letter “r” and tokens solely representing the letter “r”. To begin with, this assumes the way we encode words in our brain is by tokenizing each letter, which we pretty much know to be false (we can process words without seeing evry ltr of th wrd and even think about them without it being mentioned).
yeah we train in bursts because it’s computationally cheaper, this hardly means anything important.
No, this is not how neural networks work at all.
We train in bursts because we need a ground truth/scoring function to guide the learning, which means we need a way to guide the model in the right direction. Even with unsupervised learning, the model has a way to determine whether it’s going in the right direction, like with GANs.
Neural networks are also incapable of synthesizing completely new skills from its own weights. Humans have been doing that for the entirety of human history.
- Comment on LLMs and Humans are Cognitive Cousins – Sean Carroll podcast w/Dr. Chandra Sripada 3 weeks ago:
What a dumb question. “Cognition” is an abstract concept that just leads to debate over its definition, except that it’s commonly understood that humans have cognition.
This entire interview also seems predicated on the belief that neural networks work fundamentally the same as human brains, which is an oversimplification of brains. To begin with, neural networks cannot train themselves at inference time (context windows aren’t training). Also, humanity has barely a concept of how the brain works and regularly learns new things about it. What we do know is that they are more complex than a bunch of connected neurons, and that we have no way of modelling something we don’t yet fully understand.
So do neural networks have cognition? If they did, then we’ve had cognitive AIs for longer than I’ve been alive.
The rest of the interview is imaginative fiction based on what they think the model is doing predicated on what Anthropic likes to advertise their models do.
As basic evidence, if I tell you that the word “strawberry” has 3 "r"s, you can remember that. You can recall that no matter how many conversations we have in between when I told you that and when I asked you again.
If I teach you how to count how many "r"s there are in the word “strawberry”, you learn a skill. In the future, if I ask how many "r"s there are in the word “strawberry”, you can count them using your new skill.
If I teach a LLM how many there are or how to count the letters, it can only use that skill or knowlege if it can effectively search for it. Its ability to execute skills (which, to begin with, isn’t it executing the skills but it asking something else to do them) is diminished the more skills it gains access to, and its “knowlege” (aka long-term storage) becomes diluted when it has access to more of it.
This is blatantly untrue of humans, who can process knowlege and skills they learn, efficiently and quickly search them, and actually get faster and more accurate as they develop related skills and learn related knowlege.
- Comment on ChatGPT, LLMs, and Automating the Fun Out of Roleplaying: Don’t let billionaires poison the beautiful creative collaboration at the heart of TTRPGs 3 weeks ago:
You:
So why is more pollution from subject A acceptable, but less from subject B isn’t?
My response (in response to another comment):
It being drowned out by the advocacy against AI doesn’t mean those voices disappeared, just that there are louder voices now.
You, with the nihilistic doomerism take:
By virtue of even posting, YOU are pushing datacenter demand.
Me, responding to the subject:
people are upset about all the evils. Being more or less upset about one or the other is irrelevant. You’re just choosing to cherry pick one thing that everyone who’s upset should ignore.
What was that about comment history?
Anyway, in response to this:
What matters (at least now) is the number of services it provides.
If you’re looking for things to improve, then you prioritise the places where improvement will have the most effect.
Anyway, if we want to reduce the environmental argument down as much as you are, then we might as well eliminate nearly all life on earth because living creatures produce emissions and consume water. Point is, your counterargument is complete nonsense and reductionist.
People can be upset by multiple things at once despite your best attempts to argue otherwise.
- Comment on ChatGPT, LLMs, and Automating the Fun Out of Roleplaying: Don’t let billionaires poison the beautiful creative collaboration at the heart of TTRPGs 3 weeks ago:
Current non-AI datacenters run all of every other service on the internet.
Current AI datacenters run one class of services.
This is like saying "Europe uses
- Comment on IP can’t save you from AI 3 weeks ago:
you better license it AGPL 3.0 or you’re part of the problem.
They ignore copyright. License it however you want, but they’ll still train off your content.
- Comment on ChatGPT, LLMs, and Automating the Fun Out of Roleplaying: Don’t let billionaires poison the beautiful creative collaboration at the heart of TTRPGs 3 weeks ago:
By virtue of even posting, YOU are pushing datacenter demand. These comments don’t just live in the ether.
I write software for a living. There’s an enormous difference between a text-based service that functionally runs as a primitive CRUD and a compute-heavy service like LLM inferencing. The latter runs on servers that individually consume multiple kilowatts while the former can run on a raspberry pi but gains efficiency by sharing a server that consumes maybe 1kW with dozens of other people. Heck, Lemmy doesn’t even need to do video transcoding like all the toxic social media sites do.
The point being you are MORE upset about the lesser evil, not that one is justified evil and the other isn’t.
No, people are upset about all the evils. Being more or less upset about one or the other is irrelevant. You’re just choosing to cherry pick one thing that everyone who’s upset should ignore.
- Comment on ChatGPT, LLMs, and Automating the Fun Out of Roleplaying: Don’t let billionaires poison the beautiful creative collaboration at the heart of TTRPGs 3 weeks ago:
Just adding to your comment lol.
- Comment on ChatGPT, LLMs, and Automating the Fun Out of Roleplaying: Don’t let billionaires poison the beautiful creative collaboration at the heart of TTRPGs 3 weeks ago:
Before AI, people had been advocating against the meat industry, and had pushed for reduced water usage in agriculture and homes, which led to stricter rules against lawns in drought-prone areas. It being drowned out by the advocacy against AI doesn’t mean those voices disappeared, just that there are louder voices now.
I do enjoy the classic “they’re doing bad so I can too” fallacy, though.
- Comment on PBS station fears losing 50TB of data after being ghosted by cloud storage provider 4 weeks ago:
With how much shit PBS (and the former CPB) have taken these past two years, it’s shocking they could keep the data in any data center. Also, given that this is in a deep red state, I can’t imagine them getting a lot of support there.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
You can block Facebook ads by blocking the Facebook domains. This is what I do, anyway.
Even if you get through the ads, there’s nothing of value there. At best, you’re maintaining superficial relationships while wading through AI slop and ragebait. If you haven’t actually talked to the person in years, consider whether there’s even a real connection there or if you’re just inflating each other’s egos by pressing a like button every couple weeks.