FaceDeer
@FaceDeer@fedia.io
Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit and then some time on kbin.social.
- Comment on AI works better if you ask it to be a Star Trek character 3 months ago:
I run tabletop roleplaying adventures and LLMs have proven to be great "brainstorming buddies" when planning them out. I bounce ideas back and forth, flesh them out collaboratively, and have the LLM speak "in character" to give me ideas for what the NPCs would do.
They're not quite up to running the adventure themselves yet, but it's an awesome support tool.
- Comment on It’s practically impossible to run a big AI company ethically: Anthropic was supposed to be the good guy. It can’t be — unless government changes the incentives in the industry. 3 months ago:
It's impossible to run an AI company "ethically" because "ethics" are such a wibbly-wobbly and subjective thing, and because there are people who simply wish to use it as a weapon on one side of a debate or the other. I've seen goalposts shift around quite a lot in arguments over "ethical" AI.
- Comment on 4 things white people can do to start making the fediverse less toxic for Black people (DRAFT!) 3 months ago:
Maybe add some kind of flag to ActivityPub that's set to your skin colour? Each comment could have a colored border corresponding to your skin tone.
- Comment on if the total fertility rate drops and stays below global replacement rate, will humans disappear? 3 months ago:
Not to mention that technology is continuing to advance in new and unexpected ways.
We're getting close to artificial womb technology, for example. There are already artificial wombs that are being experimented with as a way to save extremely premature babies that wouldn't survive in a conventional incubator, for example.
Commodity humanoid robots are also in development, and AI has taken surprisingly rapid leaps in development over the past two years.
I could see a possibility where in a couple of decades a human baby could be born from an artificial womb and raised to adulthood entirely by machines, if we really really needed to for some reason. Embryo space colonization is the usual example given, but it could also potentially work as a way to counter population decline due to people simply not wanting to do their own birthing and child-rearing.
- Comment on Is there any actual standalone AI software? 3 months ago:
Makes it all the more amusing how OpenAI staff were fretting about how GPT-2 was "too dangerous to release" back in the day. Nowadays that class of LLM is a mere toy.
- Comment on Is there any actual standalone AI software? 3 months ago:
Though bear in mind that parameter count alone is not the only measure of a model's quality. There's been a lot of work done over the past year or two on getting better results from the same or smaller parameter counts, lots of discoveries have been made on how to train better and run inferencing better. The old ChatGPT3 from back at the dawn of all this was really big and was trained on a huge number of tokens but nowadays the small downloadable models fine-tuned by hobbyists would compete with it handily.
- Comment on Meet the New Class of Cadets in Star Trek: Starfleet Academy 4 months ago:
But we need to attract a hip young new audience! The sort of audience that doesn't care about Star Trek, and just wants teen drama and unprofessional nonsense!
- Comment on Why is it impossible to reverse-engineer closed source software? 4 months ago:
There's a lot of outright rejection of the possibilities of AI these days, I think because it's turning out to be so capable. People are getting frightened of it and so jump to denial as a coping mechanism.
I recalled reading about an LLM that had been developed just a couple of weeks ago for translating source code into intermediate representations (a step along the way to full compilation) and when I went hunting for a reference to refresh my memory I found this article from March about exactly what's being discussed here - an LLM that translates assembly language into high-level source code. Looks like this one's just a proof of concept rather than something highly practical, but prove the concept it does.
I wonder if there are research teams out there sitting on more advanced models right now, fretting about how big a bombshell it'll be when this gets out.
- Comment on Why is it impossible to reverse-engineer closed source software? 4 months ago:
As others have mentioned, it's possible but very complicated. Decompilers produce code that isn't very readable for humans.
I am indeed awaiting the big news headlines that will for some reason catch everyone by surprise when a LLM comes along that's trained to "translate" machine code into a nice easily-comprehensible high-level programming language. It's going to be a really big development, even though it doesn't make programs legally "open source" it'll make it all source available.
- Comment on answer = sum(n) / len(n) 4 months ago:
Past results are no guarantee of future performance.
- Comment on answer = sum(n) / len(n) 4 months ago:
I'd love to hear about any studies explaining the mechanism of human cognition.
Right now it's looking pretty neural-net-like to me. That's kind of where we got the idea for neural nets from in the first place.
- Comment on answer = sum(n) / len(n) 4 months ago:
The meme would work just the same with the "machine learning" label replaced with "human cognition."
- Comment on The justices of the supreme court ruled that Trump was immune and effectively above the law while being president. What is now stopping Biden from bringing a gun to the next debate? 4 months ago:
Would be nice if SCOTUS had defined what "official acts" actually were.
- Comment on The justices of the supreme court ruled that Trump was immune and effectively above the law while being president. What is now stopping Biden from bringing a gun to the next debate? 4 months ago:
His wrist would break, but it might be worth it.
- Comment on Under da sea 4 months ago:
The specific subject that Triton is telling Ariel about is where babies come from.
- Comment on Under da sea 4 months ago:
The problem isn't stuff going in, it's the baby coming out.
- Comment on Under da sea 4 months ago:
Wait until she finds out how she'll be doing it once she's human. I suspect she'll prefer this approach.
- Comment on Rover 5 months ago:
- Comment on [deleted] 5 months ago:
If their goal is to prevent AI trainers from scraping their art then an open federated platform is the opposite of what they want.
- Comment on How come no true use for recent AI developments has been found yet? 5 months ago:
It is true AI, it's just not AGI. Artificial General Intelligence is the sort of thing you see on Star Trek. AI is a much broader term and it encompasses large language models, as well as even simpler things like pathfinding algorithms or OCR. The term "AI" has been in use for this kind of thing since 1956, it's not some sudden new marketing buzzword that's being misapplied. Indeed, it's the people who are insisting that LLMs are not AI that are attempting to redefine a word that's already been in use for a very long time.
You can see this when chat bots keep giving the same 2 pieces incorrect information. They have no concept of they are wrong.
Reminds me of the classic quote from Charles Babbage:
"On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question"
How is the chatbot supposed to know that the information it's been given is wrong?
- Comment on How come no true use for recent AI developments has been found yet? 5 months ago:
You're falling into a no true Scotsman fallacy. There are plenty of uses for recent AI developments, I use them quite frequently myself. Why are those uses not "true" uses?
- Comment on How come no true use for recent AI developments has been found yet? 5 months ago:
You used an LLM for one of the things it is specifically not good at. Dismissing its overall value on that basis is like complaining that your snowmobile is bad at making its way up and down your basement stairs, and so it is therefore useless.
- Comment on Anthropomorphic 5 months ago:
Maybe we wouldn't have to imagine so much if you could figure out what "consciousness" actually is, Professor Timslayer.
- Comment on Blackholes 5 months ago:
I think it's likely a reference to this video.
- Comment on ☀️🌞☀️ 5 months ago:
You're talking like we're gonna be building a Dyson sphere (or swarm) in the next 20 years?
Hardly. We have plenty of time for that, there's no rush.
Or colonize outer planets? It's science fiction...at least for next few 100 years.
Again, a few hundred years is nothing. The sun won't become problematic for a few hundred million years.
We can't rely on a deus ex machina save.
Things like Dyson swarms and star lifting are not "deus ex machina", they're scientifically rigorous proposals.
if we aren't strong enough for that, I don't think we're getting anywhere near K-II.
Getting to K-II means not needing the planet we evolved to live on.
- Comment on ☀️🌞☀️ 5 months ago:
Joke's on you, Sun. We can just leave. Or maybe even fix you.
(So many doomer "we'll kill ourselves first" responses in this thread. How science of everyone.)
- Comment on What would be the consequences of a smallsword wound to the belly? 5 months ago:
They invented Bacta about 20 minutes after Qui-Gon got stabbed. Bad luck.
- Comment on Why are people talking about flying a flag upside-down? 5 months ago:
Every accusation is an admission.
- Comment on Euro bottles are so much better now 6 months ago:
As I said, someone did complain about the caps.
- Comment on Euro bottles are so much better now 6 months ago:
I leave the little ring on and nobody's complained yet. I was just told to remove the caps one time, so I kept on throwing those out since then.