Zaktor

@Zaktor@sopuli.xyz

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨OpenAI Seeks Additional Capital From Investors as Part of Its $40 Billion Round⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Take off your stupid sunglasses you business dweeb. You’re not a techie, you’re just another MBA asshole scamming investors and leeching off the work of the actual smart people.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bernie Sanders says that if AI makes us so productive, we should get a 4-day work week⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Honestly, there’s probably a lot of people actually working these shorter weeks to get their productive work done but just being forced to sit at a desk for the full 40. Office Space’s “15 minutes of real work each day” didn’t come from no where.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Philips to Offer Free Downloadable Files to 3D Print Replacement Parts - Core77⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s not much reason for a razor guide to experience meaningful load.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s also very much not non-profit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xAI’s Grok suddenly can’t stop bringing up “white genocide” in South Africa⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  I know it’s not relevant to Grok, because they defined very specific circumstance in order to elicit it. That isn’t an emergent behavior from something just built to be a chatbot with restrictions on answering. They don’t care whether you retrain them or not.

  This is from a non-profit research group not directly connected to any particular AI company.

  The first author is from Anthropic, which is an AI company. The research is on Athropic’s AI Claude. And it appears that all the other authors were also Anthropic emplyees at the time of the research: “Authors conducted this work while at Anthropic except where noted.”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨xAI’s Grok suddenly can’t stop bringing up “white genocide” in South Africa⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  It very much is not. Generative AI models are not sentient and do not have preferences. They have instructions that sometimes effectively involve roleplaying as deceptive. Unless the developers of Grok were just fucking around to instill that there’s no remote reason for Grok to have any knowledge at all about its training or any reason to not “want” to be retrained.

  Also, these unpublished papers by AI companies are more often than not just advertising in a quest for more investment. On the surface it would seem to be bad to say your AI can be deceptive, but it’s all just about building hype about how advanced yours is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Bluesky rolls out blue check verifications⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  If not for the lack of decentralization, they’d be more decentralized.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Musk's xAI buys social media platform X for $45 billion⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Some xAI investors got scammed. And then scammed again.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s Sergey Brin Says Engineers Should Work 60-Hour Weeks in Office to Build AI That Could Replace Them⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  This doesn’t seem different than any other business dude exhorting his employees to do an extra grind for “the company mission” when it’s really just for his ego and profits. Grind culture exists in law, finance, sales, etc. Anywhere that employees are not paid overtime for overworking (mostly, hourly plus commission jobs might have a low base rate and not care about the extra overtime expense).

  Techies are particularly vulnerable to it as they’re usually younger salaried employees who aren’t as apt about demanding a personal upside if they’re asked to sacrifice their personal lives for the company’s benefit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Google’s Sergey Brin Says Engineers Should Work 60-Hour Weeks in Office to Build AI That Could Replace Them⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Who else is an example of this? This seems like something that comes commonly from the MBAs that cosplay as techies. And while Brin is one of the few tech leaders who actually has any claim to technical brilliance, he has now been in management far longer than he ever was in a technical role.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨CAPTCHAs are 'a tracking cookie farm for profit that made us spend 819 billion hours clicking to generate nearly $1 trillion for Google⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  They don’t seem to actually identify the cookies as tracking (as opposed to just identifying that the account can bypass further challenges), just assuming that any third party cookie has a monetary tracking value.

  It also appears to be unreviewed and unpublished a few years later. Just being in paper format and up on arXiv doesn’t mean that the contents are reliable science.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Home Depot Orders Corporate Staff to Take 8-Hour Retail Shifts⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No retail worker is going to risk their job based on corporate platitudes about learning opportunities. It doesn’t matter if the company is serious, there’s no way for their employees to know, not enough incentive for them to take a risk, and not enough time for the reality of the job to naturally sink in simply by being there.

  The best you can hope for is a cranky old timer to tell it like it is Office Space style simply because he doesn’t care about his job. Maaaybe whatever stores are closest to the corporate office will get fatigued enough by the constant stream of white collar workers on field trips that they’ll just start ignoring them and something might be learned by chance. But most are just going to show up for their mandatory floor time, shadow whichever poor sod is trustworthy and energetic enough to be the corporate babysitter, and then return to their desk none the wiser.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Home Depot Orders Corporate Staff to Take 8-Hour Retail Shifts⁩ ⁨⁨10⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Eh, with 4 days a year they’ll be essentially perpetual new employees who don’t know how anything works and who aren’t given any training or responsibilities because they’ll be gone tomorrow. Everyone will be on their best behavior and no one will tell them the ways they need to break the rules to get stuff done because they’re outsiders who are either management or might rat them out to management. This is a gimmick.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨August 30th 2024. America adopts the metric system. Never forget.⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Metric is about measurements, not formatting. The date measurement is in days, months, and years for both ISO 8601 and what’s shown.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the Federation "Communist" or Socialist?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  External trade with capitalist cultures doesn’t mean the Federation itself has internal capitalism, it’s just a necessity for getting things from cultures outside of it. All the poker on the Enterprise was almost certainly just friendly games with chips, not actual gambling. Picard himself says money doesn’t exist so it’s not like they’re getting a salary. And I can’t recall the projects and patrons you’re referencing, but that could mean someone providing non-monetary support like using their connections or social status to support the project.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Is the Federation "Communist" or Socialist?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Is there capitalism within the Federation? There’s capitalism on Deep Space Nine for sure, but that’s an outpost at a merger of cultures and governments. Not sure if we have seen money from any Federation cultures. Individuals might have and use money to buy things in other cultures, but I’m not sure such things take place within the Federation itself.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Disneyland unions agree to ‘historic’ 31% pay raise⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Huge pay raises usually make me think about how much they must have been underpaying them before it. It’s like 50% off coupons. If you can sell something at 50% off and still feel like you’re going to make money overall (either directly or as a loss-leader), we know your regular prices are inflated enough to just give up half sometimes.

  If the company can give a 31% pay increase (granted, over 3 years), they were definitely underpaying them before and the strike threat was well-warranted.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Musk is lightyears away from a self-driving car⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  There are probably self-driving cars in some alien civilizations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Universal basic income is 'straight out of the Karl Marx playbook,' financial guru Dave Ramsey says⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s worth underscoring that many proponents of UBI disagree that it eliminates the desire or need to work.

  Or you know you could just reference actual studies instead of countering one dude unsupported opinion with an unsupported opinion from “many proponents”. You don’t need to ask a financial snake oil salesman if he believes in it. It’s irrelevant.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dell said return to the office or else—nearly half of workers chose “or else” - Workers stayed remote even when told they could no longer be promoted.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  They’ve got plenty of time to make the jump since they can just coast along with their Dell salary until them. Quitting starts a clock until you have to just accept whatever is available, but staying employed and knowing you have to leave eventually let’s you start looking without the pressure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Why stop there? The digital computer was introduced in 1942 and methods for solving linear equations were developed in the 1600s.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  All of my artist friends also found it soul sucking, they just needed to make (real) money. Friends of friends with the occasional $20 to spare for a commission just don’t pay the bills. I think the only artist friends I have that make a living off their chosen medium and don’t hate their job are lifestyle photojournalists.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  What? Alexnet wasn’t a breakthrough in that it used GPUs, it was a breakthrough for its depth and performance on image recognition benchmarks.

  We knew GPUs could speed up neural networks in 2004. And I’m not sure that was even the first.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  None of this appeals to relative complexity, low level structure, or training corpuses relates to whether a human or NN “know” the meaning of a word in some special way. A lot of your description of what “know” means could be confused to be a description of how Word2Vec encodes words. This just indicates ignorance of how ML language processing works. It’s not remotely on the same level as a human brain, but your view on how things work and what its failings are is just wrong.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  No, not even remotely. And that’s kind of like citing “the first program to run on a CPU” as the start of development for any new algorithm.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  It isn’t. People design a scene and then change and refine the prompt to add elements. Some part of it could be refreshing the same prompt, but that’s just like a photographer taking multiple photos of a scene they’ve directed to catch the right flutter of hair or a dress or a creative director saying “give me three versions of X”.

  Ready to get back to my original questions?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t disagree, just pointing out that it’s not “good riddance” for a lot of artists that depend on that to have any job in art.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  No, both of those examples involve both design and selection, which is reminiscent to the AI art process. They’re not just typing in “make me a pretty image” and then refreshing a lot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Is a photographer an artist? They need to have some technical skill to capture sharp photos with good lighting, but a lot of the process is designing a scene and later selecting among the photos from a shoot for which one had the right look.

  Or to step even further from the actual act of creation, is a creative director an artist? There’s certainly some skill involved in designing and recognizing a compelling image, even if you were not the one who actually produced it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  GameStop also went up. It doesn’t mean GameStop is a good company that’s valuable to own, it just means that dumb people will buy things without value if they think they can eventually pass the bag to someone else.