Zaktor
@Zaktor@sopuli.xyz
- Comment on Home Depot Orders Corporate Staff to Take 8-Hour Retail Shifts 5 weeks 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 5 weeks 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. 2 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? 3 months 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? 3 months 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 3 months 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 4 months 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 4 months 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. 4 months 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 4 months 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 4 months 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 4 months 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 4 months 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 4 months 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 4 months 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 4 months 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 5 months 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 5 months 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 5 months 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.
- Comment on 'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement 5 months ago:
The problem is that shit art is what employs a lot of artists. Like, in a post-scarcity society no one needing to spend any of their limited human lifestyle producing corporate art would be awesome, but right now that’s one of the few reliable ways an artist can actually get paid.
I’m most familiar with photography as I know several professional photographers. It’s not like they love shooting weddings and clothing ads, but they do that stuff anyway because the alternative is not using their actual expertise and just being a warm body at a random unrelated job.
- Comment on 'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement 5 months ago:
I’m referencing ChatGPT’s initial benchmarks to its capabilities to today. Observable improvements have been made in less than two years. Even if you just want to track time from the development of modern LLM transformers (All You Need is Attention/BERT), it’s still a short history with major gains (alexnet isn’t really meaningfully related). These haven’t been incremental changes on a slow and steady march to AI sometime in the scifi scale future.
- Comment on 'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement 5 months ago:
Except when it comes to LLM, the fact that the technology fundamentally operates by probabilisticly stringing together the next most likely word to appear in the sentence based on the frequency said words appeared in the training data is a fundamental limitation of the technology.
So long as a model has no regard for the actual you know, meaning of the word, it definitionally cannot create a truly meaningful sentence.
This is a misunderstanding of what “probabilistic word choice” can actually accomplish and the non-probabilistic systems that are incorporated into these systems. People also make mistakes and don’t actually “know” the meaning of words.
The belief system that humans have special cognizance unlearnable by observation is just mysticism.
- Comment on 'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement 5 months ago:
Bonus trivia, sometimes you may see a downvote on a Beehaw post. As far as I understand the system, that’s because someone on your server downvoted the thing. The system then sends it off to Beehaw to be recorded on the “real” post and Beehaw just doesn’t apply it.
- Comment on 'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement 5 months ago:
This is a post on the Beehaw server. They don’t collect downvotes.
- Comment on 'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement 5 months ago:
Yes? AI is a lot of things, and most have well-defined accuracy metrics that regularly exceed human performance. You’re likely already experiencing it as a mundane tool you don’t really think about.
If you’re referring specifically to generative AI, that’s still premature, but as I pointed out, the interactive chat form most people worry about is 18 months old and making shocking levels of performance gains. That’s not the perpetual “10 years away” it’s been for the last 50 years, that’s something that’s actually happening in the near term. Jobs are already being lost.
People are scared about AI taking over because they recognize it (rightfully) as a threat. That’s not because they’re worthless. If that were the case you’d have nothing to fear and wouldn’t be reacting so defensively.
- Comment on He has cancer — so he made an AI version of himself for his wife after he dies 5 months ago:
So just more patronizing. It’s their fucking life, you don’t know them.
- Comment on 'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement 5 months ago:
Except those things didn’t really solve any problems. Well, dotcom did, but that actually changed our society.
AI isn’t vaporware. A lot of it is premature (so maybe overblown right now) or just lies, but ChatGPT is 18 months old and look where it is. The core goal of AI is replacing human effort, which IS a problem wealthy people would very much like to solve and has a real monetary benefit whenever they can. It’s not going to just go away.
- Comment on 'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement 5 months ago:
Yeah. AI making images with six fingers was amusing, but people glommed onto it like it was the savior of the art world. “Human artists are superior because they can count fingers!” Except then the models updated and it wasn’t as much of a problem anymore. It felt good, but it was just a pleasant illusion for people with very real reasons to fear the tech.
None of these errors are inherent to the technology, they’re just bugs to correct, and there’s plenty of money and attention focused on fixing bugs. What we need is more attention focused on either preparing our economies to handle this shock or greatly strengthen enforcement on copyright (to stall development). A label like this post is about is a good step, but given how artistic professions already weren’t particularly safe and “organic” labeling only has modest impacts on consumer choice, we’re going to need more.
- Comment on 'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement 5 months ago:
You’re lovely. Don’t think I need to see anything you write ever again.
- Comment on 'LLM-free' is the new '100% organic' - Creators Are Fighting AI Anxiety With an ‘LLM-Free’ Movement 5 months ago:
Sometimes. Sometimes it’s more accurate than anyone in the village. And it’ll be reliably getting better. People relying on “AI is wrong sometimes” as the core plank of opposition aren’t going to have a lot of runway before it’s so much less error prone than people the complaint is irrelevant.
The jobs and the plagiarism aspects are real and damaging and won’t be solved with innovation. The “AI is dumb” is already only selectively true and almost all the technical effort is going toward reducing that. ChatGPT launched a year and a half ago.