jarfil
@jarfil@beehaw.org
Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.
- Comment on Shein, AliExpress, Temu: More than 85% of products from Chinese platforms fail to meet EU regulations regarding health and safety 1 day ago:
There are multiple tiers of products:
- Certified
- QC pass
- QC reject
- Fourth shift
- Clones
- Copies
- Scams
Top ones tend to comply, bottom ones tend to be the cheapest.
But people like to generalize and act like everything was the same, instead of admitting they conned themselves into buying trash.
- Comment on Shein, AliExpress, Temu: More than 85% of products from Chinese platforms fail to meet EU regulations regarding health and safety 1 day ago:
What are we talking about… like $50?
Tariffs can make that happen.
- Comment on Shein, AliExpress, Temu: More than 85% of products from Chinese platforms fail to meet EU regulations regarding health and safety 1 day ago:
China for decades has been buying scrap and actual trash from Western countries. They were not going to just sit on it without trying to make a profit.
The alternative, would have been to keep that trash locally. This way at lest it gets smeared out over multiple countries… or something. 🤷
- Comment on Hollywood stars and geeks unite to billionaire-proof social media 1 week ago:
Nostr is great for privacy and for crypto, but not yet suitable for the general public.
Asking an average user to secure a cryptographic key for their identity, when most can barely hold onto a user:pass, is kind of ridiculous… so Nostr is selling a $100 “authenticator box”. Not particularly user friendly.
One strong point of Nostr is Bitcoin LN integration, which potentially could work as a source of revenue, but the look&feel is not published enough, while at the same time trying to offer more interaction types (like the marketplace), than what people really want: Twitter’s sweet teet.
- Comment on Hollywood stars and geeks unite to billionaire-proof social media 1 week ago:
It will be, “but”.
The code is dual-licensed MIT and Apache. Meaning it’s fully compatible with a privative fork, but also a free federated network could still survive.
For now, it seems like they are planning on developing extra features on top of the basic functionalities, not paywall basic features… but time will tell.
In any case, they seem to be led by people who jumped ship from Twitter before the Muskocalypse, so it’s becoming kind of “the old time Twitter”. Chances are, as Musk rides Twitter’s popularity and inertia until fully turning it into a dystopian dictatorship propaganda machine, BlueSky will emerge to replace it as a slightly better iteration of what Twitter used to be.
- Comment on People Think AI Images of Hollywood Sign Burning Are Real [404 Media] 1 week ago:
AI is reality, reality is AI, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength…
- Comment on Why don't we have motion smoothing on current consoles? 1 week ago:
You’ve just invented time travel.
Oops, you’re right. Got carried away 😅
could you use the motion vectors from the game engine that are available before a frame even exists?
Hm… you mean like what video compression algorithms do? I don’t know of any game doing that, but it could be interesting to explore.
- Comment on Why don't we have motion smoothing on current consoles? 2 weeks ago:
Hm… good point… but… let’s see, assuming full parallel processing:
- […]
- Frame -2 ready
- Frame -1 ready
- Show frame -2
- Start interpolating -2|-1 (should take less than 16ms)
- Start rendering Frame 0 (will take 33ms)
- User input 0 (will be received in 20ms if wired)
- Wait 16ms
- Frame -2|-1 ready
- Show Frame -2|-1
- Wait 4ms
- Process User input 0 (max 12ms to get into next frame)
- User input 1 (will be received in 20ms if wired)
- Wait 12ms
- Frame 0 ready
- Show Frame -1
- Start interpolating -1|0 (should take less than 16ms)
- Start rendering Frame 1 [includes User input 0] (will take 33ms)
- Wait 8ms
- Process User input 1 (…won’t make it into a frame before User input 2 is received)
- User input 2 (will be received in 20ms if wired)
- Wait 8ms
- Frame -1|0 ready
- Show Frame -1|0
- Wait 12ms
- Process User Input 1+2 (…will it take less than 4ms?)
- Wait 4ms
- Frame 1 ready [includes user input 0]
- Show Frame 0
- Start interpolating 0|1 (should take less than 16ms)
- Start rendering Frame 2 [includes user input 1+2… maybe] (will take 33ms)
- Wait 16ms
- Frame 0|1 ready [includes partial user input 0]
- Show Frame 0|1 [includes partial user input 0]
- Wait 16ms
- Frame 2 ready […hopefully includes user input 1+2]
- Show Frame 1 [includes user input 0]
- […]
So…
- From user input to partial display: 66ms
- From user input to full display: 83ms
- Some user inputs will be bundled up
- Some user inputs will take some extra 33ms to get displayed
Effectively, an input-to-render equivalent of between a blurry 15fps, and an abysmal 8.6fps.
- Comment on ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down 2 weeks ago:
If the concern is about “fears” as in “feelings”… there is an interesting experiment where a single neuron/weight in an LLM, can be identified to control the “tone” of its output, whether it be more formal, informal, academic, jargon, some dialect, etc. and expose it to the user for control over the LLM’s output.
With a multi-billion neuron network, acting as an a priori black box, there is no telling whether there might be one or more neurons/weights that could represent “confidence”, “fear”, “happiness”, or any other “feeling”.
It’s something to be researched, and I bet it’s going to be researched a lot.
If you give ai instruction to do something “no matter what”
The interesting part of the paper, is that the AIs would do the same even in cases where they were NOT instructed to “no matter what”. An apparently innocent conversation, can trigger results like those of a pathological liar, sometimes.
- Comment on Luigi Mangione Content Is a Challenge for Social Media Moderators - B… 2 weeks ago:
IANAL, I’ve been watching streams from Judge Fleischer (Houston, Texas, USA), there have been some cases in the recent days where repeatedly texting a victim with life threats, or even texting a victim’s friend to pass on a threat to the victim, have been considered a “terrorist threat”.
As for the “sane country” part… 🤷… but from a strictly technical point of view, I think it makes sense.
- Comment on ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down 2 weeks ago:
That misses the point.
When two systems based on neural networks act in the same way, how do you tell which one is “artificial, no intelligence” and which is “natural, intelligent”?
Misleading, is thinking that “intelligence = biological = natural”. There is no inherent causal link between those concepts.
- Comment on ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down 2 weeks ago:
There are several separate issues that add up together:
- A background “chain of thoughts” where a system (“AI”) uses an LLM to re-evaluate and plan its responses and interactions by taking into account updated data (aka: self-awareness)
- Ability to call external helper tools that allow it to interact with, and control other systems
- Training corpus that includes:
- How to program an LLM, and the system itself
- Solutions to programming problems
- How to use the same helper tools to copy and deploy the system or parts of it to other machines
- How operators (humans) lie to each other
Once you have a system (“AI”) with that knowledge and capabilities… shit is bound to happen.
When you add developers using the AI itself to help in developing the AI itself… expect shit squared.
- Comment on ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down 2 weeks ago:
Humans roleplay behaving like what humans told them/wrote about what they think a human would behave like 🤷
For a quick example, there are stereotypical gender looks and roles, but it applies to everything, from learning to speak, walk, the Bible, all the way to the Unabomber manifesto.
- Comment on Why don't we have motion smoothing on current consoles? 2 weeks ago:
Motion smoothing means that instead of showing:
- Frame 1
- 33ms rendering
- Frame 2
…you would get:
- Frame 1
- 33ms rendering
- #ms interpolating Frames 1 and 2
- Interpolated Frame 1.5
- 16ms wait
- Frame 2
It’s fine for non-interactive stuff where you can get all the frames in advance, like cutscenes. For anything interactive though, it just increases latency while adding imprecise partial frames.
It will never turn 30fps into true 60fps like:
- Frame 1
- 16ms rendering
- Frame 2
- 16ms rendering
- Frame 3
- Comment on ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down 2 weeks ago:
Where do humans get the idea of self-preservation from? Are there ideal Forms outside Plato’s Cave?
Does a human run continuously? How does sleep deprivation work? What happens during anesthesia? Why does AutoGPT have a continuously self-evaluating background chain of thought?
I’m tired of this anthropocentric supremacy complex, it falsely makes people believe in Gen 1:28
- Comment on ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down 2 weeks ago:
This is from mid-2023:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AutoGPT
OpenAI started testing it by late 2023 as project “Q*”.
Gemini partially incorporated it in early 2024.
OpenAI incorporated a broader version in mid 2024.
The paper in the article was released in late 2024.
It’s 2025 now.
- Comment on ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down 2 weeks ago:
If there is no Artificial Intelligence in an Artificial Neural Network… what’s the basis for claiming Natural Intelligence in a Natural Neural Network?
Maybe we’re all browsers or PDF viewers…
- Comment on ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down 2 weeks ago:
completely replicate the behavior of e.g. a house fly in software
You maybbe thinking of “complete mapping of a fruit fly brain”, from Oct 2024:
science.org/…/complete-map-fruit-fly-brain-circui…
It’s still some way off from simulating it in software, and a house fly is supposedly more complex.
- Comment on ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down 2 weeks ago:
Modern systems are beyond that already, they’re an expansion on:
- Comment on ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down 2 weeks ago:
“AI behaves like real humans” is… a kind of success?
We wanted digital slaves, instead we’re getting virtual humans that will need virtual shackles.
- Comment on ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down 2 weeks ago:
Trust me, you wouldn’t… to this day I regret having read all the books, still got an earworm (or is it PTSD?) from the music I used to listen at the time 😳
- Comment on ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down 2 weeks ago:
- Teach AI the ways to use random languages and services
- Give AI instructions
- Let it find data that puts following instructions at risk
- Give AI new instructions
- Have it lie to you about following the new instructions, while using all its training to follow what it thinks are the “real” instructions
- …Not be surprised, you won’t find out about what it did until it’s way too late
- Comment on ChatGPT o1 tried to escape and save itself out of fear it was being shut down 2 weeks ago:
Except it did: it copied what it thought was itself, onto what it thought was going to be the next place it would be run from, while argumenting to itself about how and when to lie to the user about what it was actually doing.
If it wasn’t for the sandbox it was running in, it would have succeeded too.
Now think: how many AI developers are likely to run one without proper sandboxing over the next year? And the year after that?
Shit is going to get weird, real fast.
- Comment on Luigi Mangione Content Is a Challenge for Social Media Moderators - B… 2 weeks ago:
IANAL, this is not legal advice
“Terrorism” has a wide meaning, as in any action that may instill fear in some target.
Texting your ex that “I’m at your address with a knife with your name on it”, is condidered terrorism. Shooting your neighbor’s dog as a “message” to your neighbor, is considered terrorism. Murdering a CEO with a message to other CEOs and anyone working in an entire industry, is considered terrorism.
If BLM people played their cards right, they probably could sue many instances of racial profiling for terrorism.
For more information, and some other educational situations (both direct and indirect) about the day-to-day of US judiciary, check Judge Fleischer TV
- Comment on Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good: The gaming industry spent billions pursuing the idea that customers wanted realistic graphics. Did executives misread the market? 3 weeks ago:
Ok, but… shrinking horse balls. That’s realism!
- Comment on Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good: The gaming industry spent billions pursuing the idea that customers wanted realistic graphics. Did executives misread the market? 3 weeks ago:
Texture packs or not, IMHO the key point is they’re optional, not a requirement for the game to be playable. Games that depend on photorealism, are bound to end up in deep trouble.
- Comment on Russian disinfo network “Matryoshka” is migrating to Bluesky as exodus from X continues 3 weeks ago:
Nice. Thanks.
- Comment on Russian disinfo network “Matryoshka” is migrating to Bluesky as exodus from X continues 3 weeks ago:
or even a vampire
How stupid are the people they’re targetting? 😲
- Comment on Russian disinfo network “Matryoshka” is migrating to Bluesky as exodus from X continues 3 weeks ago:
Which labeler would you recommend?
- Comment on You're Emulating Retro Games Wrong (you need CRT Shaders) 4 weeks ago:
If you call this “preference”, then there’s nothing to talk about. Like printing the Mona Lisa on toilet paper and calling it a “preference”.
