UnderpantsWeevil
@UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
- Comment on THIS always annoys me. 16 hours ago:
“Had a friend at a business report that the business was casually doing fraud to lower their tax liability.”
“Oh yeah? Well I had a friend who reported he is a talking monkey who lives in Mars.”
“Damn, both of these stories sound equally far-fetched and unbelievable.”
- Comment on THIS always annoys me. 16 hours ago:
They can lie and misreport. And if nobody in the state/federal bureaucracy follow up, they get away with it.
- Comment on THIS always annoys me. 16 hours ago:
Why do they never offer to match donations?
Why would they bother? It costs them next to nothing to stick an ad on the screen. But matching donations would be far more expensive.
Besides “matching donations” has always been a scam. These agreements inevitably amount to “Person/Org X agrees to donate up to $X in matching funds”. But $X is so small that its trivial to hit. And I’ve never heard of someone failing to get the whole amount regardless of the donation rate.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 4 days ago:
Similarly, people who speak and read chinese struggle to read entire sentences written in pinyin.
Because pinyin was implemented by the Russians to teach Chinese to people who use Cyrillic characters. Would make as much sense to call out people who can’t use Katakana.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 4 days ago:
why humans can’t produce the IPA spelling words they can say, /nɔr kæn ðeɪ ˈizəli rid θɪŋz ˈrɪtən ˈpjʊrli ɪn aɪ pi ˈeɪ/ despite the fact that it should be simple to – they understand the sounds after all
That’s just access to the right keyboard interface. Humans can and do produce those spellings with additional effort or advanced tool sets.
humans must be fundamentally stupid because of this one curious artifact.
Humans turns oatmeal into essays via a curios lump of muscle is an impressive enough trick on its face.
LLMs have 95% of the work of human intelligence handled for them and still stumble on the last bits.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 4 days ago:
Yes.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 days ago:
But I don’t feel that Steam alone accounts for PC gaming.
If we’re putting the SteamDeck against Nintendo, I’d say the natural comparison is Steam exclusives against Nintendo exclusives.
Even on my Steam Deck, I use GOG, Epic, and itch.io quite regularly.
Sure. Because it is functionally just a computer with a Valve-branded Linux distro. But there are PC games ported to Mobile. I’m not going to count all Android phones to the “PC” side of the aisle just because I can install Balatro on my OnePlus.
The whole reason the Steam Deck exists is to compete as a portable full sized hand-held console comparable to the Switch. If you’re not talking about portable consoles, you’re not really talking apples-to-apples. Anyone crammed into the coach end on an airplane can tell you the quality of life difference between a gaming laptop and a hand-held.
- Comment on Anon wants this 5 days ago:
- Comment on Anon wants this 5 days ago:
No no. It’s the perfectly round unblemished skin and hair that’s so full-bodied it practically defies gravity.
- Comment on [deleted] 5 days ago:
So no, Steam Deck didn’t outsell the Switch 2. It didn’t need to.
I don’t disagree with the sentiment. I would still consider the Steam Deck a “failure” if it couldn’t move enough units to justify its production cost, but it looks like they’re still churning them out, so… eh, it’s not great but its fine.
I would argue that merely comparing generic PC sales to Switch sales also misses the mark. At the very least, you’d focus on unique Steam installs or Active Steam Accounts if you’re really interested in counting the success of Steam relative to Nintendo.
Even then, what you’re really competing with isn’t “SteamDeck sales v. Switch sales”. I’d say its “SteamDeck sales per $1 advertising spent v. …” Given that Nintendo spent around $730M in advertising last year and Valve spent under $100M, it seems that Nintendo has to spend roughly $50/unit to move a Switch relative to Valve coming in closer to $40/unit.
It’s very difficult to compare popularity under two wildly divergent marketing strategies.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 5 days ago:
But an LLM as a node in a framework that can call a python library
Isn’t how these systems are configured. They’re just not that sophisticated.
So much of what Sam Alton is doing is brute force, which is why he thinks he needs a $1T investment in new power to build his next iteration model.
Deepseek gets at the edges of this through their partitioned model. But you’re still asking a lot for a machine to intuit whether a query can be solved with some exigent python query the system has yet to identify.
It doesn’t scale to AGI but it does reduce hallucinations
It has to scale to AGI, because a central premise of AGI is a system that can improve itself.
It just doesn’t match the OpenAI development model, which is to just scrape and sort data hoping the Internet already has the solution to every problem.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 5 days ago:
When people refer to agents, is this what they are supposed to be doing?
That’s not how LLMs operate, no. They aggregate raw text and sift for popular answers to common queries.
ChatGPT is one step removed from posting your question to Quora.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 5 days ago:
one should be impressed that the Chinese Room is so capable despite being a completely deterministic machine.
I’d be more impressed if the room could tell me how many "r"s are in Strawberry inside five minutes.
If one day we discover that the human brain works on much simpler principles
Human biology, famous for being simple and straightforward.
- Comment on Blurble 5 days ago:
how the color is represented in the mental image you have in your head.
That’s not a color, its an abstraction of a memory
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 6 days ago:
Google Search premiered
- Comment on Blurble 6 days ago:
If you read the first 3 panels as being historically accurate
The first panel is a challenge by the author, which is real at least in so far as it’s a sentiment the author actually has.
The next two are filler.
The fourth is an invented response.
- Comment on Blurble 6 days ago:
Looking at the last panel
The last panel is a fantasy by the artist.
It’s a thought experiment, reminds me of zen Buddhist koans. “What is the sound of one clapping hand?” or “What did your face look like before your parents were born?” don’t have an answer.
You can answer these questions. People just get anger when you do, because they want the question to be mystical rather than nonsensical. When they get silly-but-correct answers, it denudes the questions of their woo-woo faux-wisdom.
So you have to fall back on even vaguer and more imprecise language, to try and obscure the original badly worded riddle.
- Comment on Blurble 6 days ago:
The task isn’t about physically creating a color but about imaging it.
How on earth do you tell someone they haven’t imagined a new color? That’s quite literally impossible to assert or deny.
You made it into a counting problem
It is inherently a counting problem because of how sight and color recognition functions.
It’s even impossible to imagine.
It is impossible to for a second party tell a first party that they have been unsuccessful in imagining something.
- Comment on Blurble 6 days ago:
Which is the point of the meme
The point is based on a faulty understanding of creativity. It’s not a counting problem.
Besides, how is your method creative?
It’s not. The problem isn’t a problem of creativity. That’s the underlying flaw in the comic’s conceit. “Give me a color that’s not a composite of primary colors” is an impossible task because of how we define the concept of colors, not because an individual is incapable of coming up with a color permutation that has never been seen before.
- Comment on Blurble 6 days ago:
What do you mean “hasn’t been produced before”? That comes with a huge burden of proof.
Sure. But, again, that’s not a question of creativity, just an exhaustive exercise of proving uniqueness.
It isn’t a new color by any meaningful definition.
Because color isn’t an invented concept, it is a perceived wavelength value/range. Asking for a “new color” is like asking for a “new number”.
Under your broader definition of color, we’ve already found the three or seven or I guess nine if you want to count black/white, existing colors. The only way to “invent” new colors is to expand the spectrum by which humans perceive light.
Understanding how light works and how one might accomplish this takes creativity. But if we’re excluding ultraviolet or infrared because they’re outside the natural visual spectrum, all we can creatively accomplish is proving we’ve exhausted the range of available colors.
- Comment on Blurble 6 days ago:
but “light blue” isn’t a new color. It’s part of the blue spectrum
A spectrum isn’t a color, its a range of wavelengths. “Light Blue” is a narrower range of wavelengths with higher brightness value than the “Dark Blue” end.
We define a unique “color” as a specific combination of hue, saturation, and brightness value. “Inventing” a new color is just a question of finding a combination of attributes that hasn’t been produced before. Thanks to the midpoint theorum, you can do this right up to the point of Plank’s constant.
- Comment on AGI achieved 🤖 6 days ago:
LLM wasn’t made for this
There’s a thought experiment that challenges the concept of cognition, called The Chinese Room. What it essentially postulates is a conversation between two people, one of whom is speaking Chinese and getting responses in Chinese. And the first speaker wonders “Does my conversation partner really understand what I’m saying or am I just getting elaborate stock answers from a big library of pre-defined replies?”
The LLM is literally a Chinese Room. And one way we can know this is through these interactions. The machine isn’t analyzing the fundamental meaning of what I’m saying, it is simply mapping the words I’ve input onto a big catalog of responses and giving me a standard output. In this case, the problem the machine is running into is a legacy meme about people miscounting the number of "r"s in the word Strawberry. So “2” is the stock response it knows via the meme reference, even though a much simpler and dumber machine that was designed to handle this basic input question could have come up with the answer faster and more accurately.
When you hear people complain about how the LLM “wasn’t made for this”, what they’re really complaining about is their own shitty methodology. They build a glorified card catalog. A device that can only take inputs, feed them through a massive library of responses, and sift out the highest probability answer without actually knowing what the inputs or outputs signify cognitively.
Even if you want to argue that having a natural language search engine is useful (damn, wish we had a tool that did exactly this back in August of 1996, amirite?), the implementation of the current iteration of these tools is dogshit because the developers did a dogshit job of sanitizing and rationalizing their library of data.
Imagine asking a librarian “What was happening in Los Angeles in the Summer of 1989?” and that person fetching you back a stack of history textbooks, a stack of Sci-Fi screenplays, a stack of regional newspapers, and a stack of Iron-Man comic books all given equal weight? Imagine hearing the plot of the Terminator and Escape from LA intercut with local elections and the Loma Prieta earthquake.
That’s modern LLMs in a nutshell.
- Comment on Blurble 6 days ago:
Pick any two adjacent known colors. Find the wavelength midpoint between these colors. Determine if this is a known color. Repeat until you’ve found an unclassified color.
This isn’t an imagination problem, its a math problem.
- Comment on Press F to pay respects 6 days ago:
F
- Comment on Press F to pay respects 6 days ago:
the lead admin just got burnt out. He asked the community for volunteers to moderate the instance and apparently nobody showed up.
:-/
- Comment on the cake is a lie 6 days ago:
Everyone needs to go through an ethics committee because of pieces of shits.
I mean, recently, yes.
But also, “everyone” is the universe of researchers attached to the public university/publication system.
Meanwhile, in the private sector… Elon Musk Company Neuralink Given Free Pass for Animal Welfare Act Violations, USDA Reveals in Letter to Congress
Elon Musk’s brain-computer interface company Neuralink violated the federal Animal Welfare Act and received a free pass from the agency responsible for enforcing the law. That’s what the U.S. Department of Agriculture told members of Congress last week in a response to letters sent in December and May. Those letters, led by Reps. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), requested updates from the agency about a reported USDA Office of Inspector General investigation into Neuralink and recent revelations that the company’s internal animal research oversight board was stacked with members who have conflicts of interest. In his July 14 response, USDA Secretary Thomas Vilsack neither confirmed nor denied the existence of an investigation, but he did confirm that a troubling 2019 incident would have been recorded as a violation of the law if not for the existence of a since rescinded agency policy designed to remove such incidents from public records. The agency agreed to stop applying the policy in 2021 as part of a lawsuit settlement.
- Comment on Press F to pay respects 6 days ago:
Lemme.ee got so toxic that the admins bailed. Nobody in the community supported the leads or stepped up to replace them. Whomever was fronting the money to keep the instance hosted got fed up and decided to shut it down.
Now there’s a big ceremonial cry-in for an instance that ate itself with dysfunction, because… idfk.
- Comment on Anon watches a romance movie 1 week ago:
The OG premise of The Office was similar to Seinfeld. They were all supposed to be awful people. Jim and Dwight and Michael were just three different flavors of incel. Jim hitting on a soon-to-be-married woman was supposed to be off-putting and gross. The front office guys treating the back office guys like trash was supposed to be elitist and revolting.
But because the writers needed to give you someone to root for, and because Jim was the “hot one” in a show full of normal looking people (aka the writers room from a bunch of sitcoms who thought it would be funny to have a show where they play each other’s characters), they had to justify Pam breaking up and getting together with Jim. And then they had to turn the Jim/Pam arc into Friends. And then they had to turn the Dwight/Angela and Michael/Jan arcs into Friends. And by the final season they were just, like, “Fuck it, this show is now the same as Friends.”
- Comment on Hell 1 week ago:
Christ, tell me about it
- Comment on Hell 1 week ago:
Okay, but this is less of a question and more of me having 10,000 choices to make that I’m not actually allowed to decide.
So can you just sit on the phone with me and tell me which buttons I can press without getting fired?
