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 The Future Is Being Delivered by Chinese Drones 1 week ago:
I dunno, having rich peoples' purchases dropped on my property might not be a bad thing.
- Comment on THE NEXT CLANKER BETTER DO MY GODDAMN DISHES 1 week ago:
It's there so that all those humans who insist their lives will have no "meaning" without having to work for a living have something to work on for a living.
- Comment on THE NEXT CLANKER BETTER DO MY GODDAMN DISHES 1 week ago:
Always reminds me of this bit on the Conan O'Brien show.
- Comment on Is it realistic to hope that lemmy grows to the size of the bigger social media platforms? 1 week ago:
There are downsides to small-town life, though. Some of my views don't match the ones that are prevalent here, so I either end up getting hammered with downvotes or self-censoring when certain topics of discussion come up. And unlike Reddit it's not a big and diverse enough place that I can just go find a sub-community that is more tolerant.
- Comment on Is it realistic to hope that lemmy grows to the size of the bigger social media platforms? 1 week ago:
But surely if all those people join the Fediverse and see my insightful comments they'll change their views to align with mine, won't they?
- Comment on If copyright on a work expired immediately after death, would be that a bad or good idea? 1 week ago:
I think I'd prefer a flat timespan rather than a lifetime-dependent one. The two flaws I see with the lifetime-dependent one are:
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It can give wildly different opportunity to the rightsholder depending on how old they are and what their random life circumstances happen to be. A 20-year-old author could have 80 years' hold on their work whereas a 70-year-old one could have just 10. Unless Truck-kun randomly gets involved and sends that 20-year-old author into another world a day after he published.
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It creates an incentive to assassinate popular authors.
It also creates complexity for work-for-hire situations where a corporation owns a copyright, though that's already a special case so one could continue handling it separately.
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- Comment on If copyright on a work expired immediately after death, would be that a bad or good idea? 1 week ago:
So glad to see another reference to this guy's work in the wild.
As an amusing side note, the original term of copyright in the first law that established it (the British Copyright Act of 1710) was a flat 14 years, with a mechanism that allowed you to apply for only one extension of an additional 14 years. So most things would be 14 years, and whatever select things were particularly valuable or important could have 28 years. Under Pollock's analysis this is just about the perfect possible system. So by sheer coincidence this is something that we got right the first time and ever since then we've been "correcting" it to be less and less optimal.
- Comment on Do LLM modelers maintain a list of manual corrections fed by humans? 1 week ago:
I'm not a deep expert on LLMs, but I've been following their development and write code that uses them so I can think of two systemic approaches to "solving" the strawberry problem.
One is chain-of-thought reasoning, where the LLM does some preliminary note-taking (essentially talking to itself) before it gives a final answer. I've seen it tackle problems like this by saying "okay, how is strawberry spelled?", listing out the individual letters (presumably because somewhere in its training data was information that let it memorize the spellings of common tokens) and then counting them.
Another is the "agentic" approach, where it might be explicitly provided with functions that allow it to send the problem to specialized program code. Eg, there could be a count_letters(string, letter_to_count) function that it's able to call. I expect that sort of thing would only be present for an LLM that's working in a framework where that sort of question is known to be significant, though, and I'm not sure what that might be in the real world. Something helping users fill out forms, perhaps? Or a "language tutor" that's expected to be able to figure out whatever weird incorrect words a student might type?
There are also LLMs that don't tokenize and feed the literal string of characters into the neural network, but as far as I'm aware none of the commonly-used ones are like that. They're just research models for now.
- Comment on AI works better if you ask it to be a Star Trek character 1 year 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. 1 year 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!) 1 year 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? 1 year 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? 1 year 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? 1 year 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 1 year 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? 1 year 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? 1 year 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) 1 year ago:
Past results are no guarantee of future performance.
- Comment on answer = sum(n) / len(n) 1 year 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) 1 year 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? 1 year 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? 1 year ago:
His wrist would break, but it might be worth it.
- Comment on Under da sea 1 year ago:
The specific subject that Triton is telling Ariel about is where babies come from.
- Comment on Under da sea 1 year ago:
The problem isn't stuff going in, it's the baby coming out.
- Comment on Under da sea 1 year 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 1 year ago:
- Comment on [deleted] 1 year 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? 1 year 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? 1 year 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? 1 year 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.