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ArbitraryValue

@ ArbitraryValue @sh.itjust.works

Posts
2
Comments
735
Joined
3 yr. ago

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  • The Egyptians weren't always shy, but there do appear to be traces of green paint.

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  • In case anyone is curious: the ancestors of house spiders lived in caves. They're adapted to live in very dry environments, which is why they can survive indoors while most other spiders can't.

  • AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information, government trial finds

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  • So far "more data" has been the solution to most problems, but I don't think we're close to the limit of how much useful information can be learned from the data even if we're close to the limit of how much data is available. Look at the AIs that can't draw hands. There are already many pictures of hands from every angle in their training data. Maybe just having ten times as many pictures of hands would solve the problem, but I'm confident that if that was not possible then doing more with the existing pictures would also work.* Algorithm design just needs some time to catch up.

    *I know that the data that is running out is text data. This is just an analogy.

  • Ukrainian drones now spray 4,000° F thermite streams right into Russian trenches

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  • What occasions are you referring to? I know people claim that Israeli use of white phosphorous munitions is illegal, but the law is actually quite specific about what an incendiary weapon is. Incendiary effects caused by weapons that were not designed with the specific purpose of causing incendiary effects are not prohibited. (As far as I can tell, even the deliberate use of such weapons in order to cause incendiary effects is allowed.) This is extremely permissive, because no reasonable country would actually agree not to use a weapon that it considered effective. Something like the firebombing of Dresden is banned, but little else.

    Incendiary weapons do not include:

    (i) Munitions which may have incidental incendiary effects, such as illuminants, tracers, smoke or signalling systems;

    (ii) Munitions designed to combine penetration, blast or fragmentation effects with an additional incendiary effect, such as armour-piercing projectiles, fragmentation shells, explosive bombs and similar combined-effects munitions in which the incendiary effect is not specifically designed to cause burn injury to persons, but to be used against military objectives, such as armoured vehicles, aircraft and installations or facilities.

  • AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information, government trial finds

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  • The issue I have with referring to the current situation as a bubble is that this isn't just hype. The technology really is amazing, and far better than what people had been expecting. I do think that most current attempts to commercialize it are premature, but there's such a big first-mover advantage that it makes sense to keep losing money on attempts that are too early in order to succeed as soon as it is possible to do so.

  • AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information, government trial finds

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  • Multiple studies are showing that training on data contaminated with LLM output makes LLMs worse, but there's no inherent reason why LLMs must be trained on this data. As you say, people are aware of it and they're going to be avoiding it. At the very least, they will compare the newly trained LLM to their best existing one and if the new one is worse, they won't switch over. The era of being able to download the entire internet (so to speak) is over but this means that AI will be getting better more slowly, not that it will be getting worse.

  • AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information, government trial finds

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  • I don't disagree, but before the recent breakthroughs I would have said that AI is like fusion power in the sense that it has been 50 years away for 50 years. If the current approach doesn't get us there, who knows how long it will take to discover one that does?

  • AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information, government trial finds

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  • It would be odd if AI somehow got worse. I mean, wouldn't they just revert to a backup?

    Anyway, I think (1) is extremely unlikely but I would add (3) the existing algorithms are fundamentally insufficient for AGI no matter how much they're scaled up. A breakthrough is necessary which may not happen for a long time.

    I think (3) is true but I also thought that the existing algorithms were fundamentally insufficient for getting to where we are now, and I was wrong. It turns out that they did just need to be scaled up...

  • AI worse than humans in every way at summarising information, government trial finds

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  • The important thing here isn't that the AI is worse than humans. It's than the AI is worth comparing to humans. Humans stay the same while software can quickly improve by orders of magnitude.

  • Ukrainian drones now spray 4,000° F thermite streams right into Russian trenches

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  • This is what international law has to say about incendiary weapons:

    1. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make the civilian population as such, individual civilians or civilian objects the object of attack by incendiary weapons.
    1. It is prohibited in all circumstances to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by air-delivered incendiary weapons.
    1. It is further prohibited to make any military objective located within a concentration of civilians the object of attack by means of incendiary weapons other than air-delivered incendiary weapons, except when such military objective is clearly separated from the concentration of civilians and all feasible precautions are taken with a view to limiting the incendiary effects to the military objective and to avoiding, and in any event to minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects.
    1. It is prohibited to make forests or other kinds of plant cover the object of attack by incendiary weapons except when such natural elements are used to cover, conceal or camouflage combatants or other military objectives, or are themselves military objectives.

    This treeline is clearly not located within a concentration of civilians and it is concealing (or plausibly believed to be concealing) enemy combatants and therefore the use of incendiary weapons is unambiguously legal.

  • TIL That each missile fired by Israels Iron Dome cost anywhere between 40k to 50k US per missile

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  • That's actually a very low price for an anti-air missile. For comparison, the Stinger shoulder-fired missile costs more than twice as much. A Patriot missile costs four million dollars (but is much more capable). Presumably minimizing cost was a high priority when this missile was designed. Nonetheless, the cost asymmetry is one reason why degrading the ability of Hamas and Hezbollah to fire missiles at Israel is important.

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  • Yeah, I think it's something a GP will prescribe.

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  • Vitamin deficiencies are easy to detect and to treat, and there's no sense in spending months or years hoping to find the right anti-depressant before checking for them. Heck, I wish my issues were caused by vitamin deficiencies.

  • Envy

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  • I too drive with my cellphone in one hand and my gut in the other.

  • TIL that at age 17, in 1980, Jodie Foster already had a decent handle on why some in the US are so thick about the situation in Palestine

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  • It's funny because I have the opposite impression. Some Americans feel guilty after studying American history. (Why feel guilty? You're not the ones responsible.) These Americans seek to absolve themselves of that perceived guilt by identifying something far away that matches the "white vs non white" pattern that they're looking for, so that they can feel righteous by condemning it without actually having to change how they live their own lives.

  • Post-apocalyptic jobs

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  • Most scientific and engineering skills would also be useless if civilization collapses. For example, I am a scientific software developer. Most of my work has been for medical research, which is something people tend to respect. However, I wouldn't be able to do anything useful with numerical modelling in a survival situation. My limited skills as an amateur home renovator would be far more relevant.

  • "Now everyone will have an easy reference table at hand!"

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  • I'm a biochemist and I think the periodic table is easy to memorize. "Hydrogen, blah blah blah, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen" and that's it. Wait, hold on, sodium and chlorine are also on there somewhere...

  • Bill Clinton, 78, takes shot at Donald Trump’s age during DNC speech: ‘I’m still younger’

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  • Wow, I didn't realize that they were about the same age. I just assumed that Clinton, who was last elected president twenty-eight years ago, was way older.

  • The Trump campaign just tweeted something really racist

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  • That picture was taken near where I live in Manhattan. The issue of migrants has been very divisive even here in NYC, a Democratic stronghold where over a third of the population was born outside of the USA and blacks and Hispanics together make up about half the population. Overall, the majority of New Yorkers still hold pro-immigration views, but 41% of New Yorkers want to build Trump's wall. (50% are opposed and the rest are undecided. This data is from the Siena College survey.)

    I can't find data specifically about the attitudes of black New Yorkers but according to nationwide data from PRRI:

    from 2017 to 2021, the percentage of Black Americans who favored building a wall at the southern border of the United States rose, from 15% to 34%. Yet this percentage is significantly lower compared to the general population (45%).

    Note that that's before the peak of the migrant influx.

    I suspect that you're underestimating how many Americans, including immigrant Americans and black Americans, oppose the current immigration policy. I'm not saying that the majority of them will be happy with Trump's depictions of immigrants, but enough might be for this to plausibly increase support for Trump even among Americans who aren't native-born whites.