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Rhaedas

@ Rhaedas @fedia.io

Posts
1
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1756
Joined
3 yr. ago

There will be times when the struggle seems impossible. Alone, unsure, dwarfed by the scale of the enemy. Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they've already enlisted in the cause. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear.

  • 'Millennials are not punk kids anymore' — Ocasio-Cortez sees a 'generational tidal wave' driven by anger over economic futures sidelined by boomers | Fortune

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  • We're all the problem, which is why generational blaming is just pointing fingers to make oneself feel less accountable.

  • AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack: Andrew asked his personal assistant to book him a spot in one of his gym's coveted morning classes.

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  • An LLM used for language purposes is the best application. It's using that hammer to drive a nail. When they deviate from that role to other things, that's when the effectiveness drops. When Co-pilot was pushed into our enterprise system incorporated into Outlook we played around with seeing what it could do with summarizing emails we would routinely send and get. It made them pretty, I give it that. But it didn't handle the information well and was very inaccurate at time when it was missing data. The whole hallucination thing. So just verify what it produces for you before you hit send.

  • AI assistant hacks gym website in first known Australian autonomous cyber attack: Andrew asked his personal assistant to book him a spot in one of his gym's coveted morning classes.

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  • "We're out of paperclips again. Co-pilot, please order more paperclips and make sure we don't run out of them again."

    Co-pilot goes brrrrr...

    Just kidding. Co-pilot is terrible.

  • Unemployment improved — because thousands of workers disappeared. Where did they go?

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  • That's an improvement.

  • Unemployment improved — because thousands of workers disappeared. Where did they go?

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  • 97.6% of statistics are made up.

  • U.S. Lost 23,000 Jobs in July, While Unemployment Ticked Lower

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  • Then there is the always not discussed "underemployed". Also, can't a person be working two or more jobs and only be counted as one employed person, while the other side of statistics can claim all three jobs being occupied?

  • didn't think so

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  • It might not even be a prompt problem, but an overkill to a simple job. Sounds like the breaking point might be voice recognition - which I really thought would be much further along by now with all the other advancements. It seems figuring out what unique voices are saying is one of the hardest things to do well, and then add in background noises. Probably why the drive-thru AI attempts were terrible, working that job as a human can be difficult.

  • didn't think so

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  • Maybe. It may be recent enough that people could lapse back to some level of thinking for themselves.

    Let's explore something much more dependent now and see if it holds up. What if smartphones disappeared? We still have cellular phones, the Nokia makes a comeback, but the use of smartphones, iPads, tablets, that whole concept is gone. You have to get on a computer to do any of the internet type interactions.

    Would people lose their minds?

  • Dr. Thanos, PhD.

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  • It was about estimating the effect of continued world population growth on the world's carrying capacity. It's true that it did not have a lot of other variables at play, one important one being climate change. So if anything it was a best case of just a few known parameters, and not all the ones we've affected, many that wouldn't even be known then. The model's projections hold up well enough to have been a wake up call to do something drastically different. And we didn't.

    The fact that we now recognize a date each year where Earth has reached its carrying capacity and that date steadily gets earlier should suggest they were right too. Along with plenty of recent studies that say the absolute maximum is probably around 11 billion (so maybe you are a bit correct in saying our tech has given us a bit more room), but the optimum population from these studies is around 2.5 billion.

    It does depend on both the minimum standard of living being used as well as how well resources are distributed. If we set almost everyone to the lowest levels now existing, perhaps we could get a few billion more. If it doesn't spike the death rates and reduce birth rates.

  • Dr. Thanos, PhD.

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  • Actually scientists in the 1970s were saying we need to do what we can to stabilize AT the 4 billion we were at then. See Limits to Growth and related studies. Cutting back now would help, but far more damage has been caused thanks to everything we've done including but not limited to population pressures than if we had heeded the warnings then and changed our direction. Some feedbacks are probably unstoppable now, no matter what we cut back.

  • How do you feel about animal and AI consciousness?

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  • Yes, I saw when the J-space stuff came out, and it's pretty fascinating. I do think there's something going on beyond what we understand, and that's probably due to the complexity and a property of emergence. Is it intelligence, I don't think it needs to be intelligence just because it's something more than what we put into it. But we've been arguing about intelligence in humans for centuries and still aren't fully sure either.

    Anything where experience is saved can be considered memory. Yes, the only active memory is in the context window, but pieces of other events can be injected along with the prompt to have a running account. I've done that crudely with my own local experimentation, and it works. Sort of. My problem was making it efficient, fast, and not blowing out the context allowance. Searching/sorting saved conversations through different techniques got far past my knowledge and ability. But Claude does something similar, even though it has its caveats as I mentioned with not always able to rank if a related item is worthy of connecting or not.

  • Microsoft never learns, IT admins rage as a new OneDrive app invades Windows 11 and keeps coming back when you remove it

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  • That sounds a lot like typical Windows features over the years. Using WIndows at work today I unpinned Co-pilot and that stupid new Notes app from my taskbar three times. They kept coming back, not right away, but ninja like.

  • How do you feel about animal and AI consciousness?

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  • Just an addition here from my experience concerning the context window and remembering things. Some AI do have the ability to reference external references, whether that be documents or folders to use, or previous chat sessions. This does make them better than the earlier versions where a new session is starting all over, and using the same session where the context window keeps shifting and older stuff is lost or jumbled up. That being said, AI doesn't have the thinking ability to look at this saved information and sort out what makes sense to use vs. not. It can absolutely match up stuff, but often it will pull an older chat reference or something from a document that is related to the conversation, but also contextually is way out of place for the discussion.

    The biggest danger of AI is its design to simulate our conversation, because that intentionally feeds off the human tendency to anthropomorphize things and see them for more than was is really there. And it works really well, so there's a lot of profiting going on there from encouraging that perspective. There wasn't any glamour from the earlier machine learning, only the benefits from the science and practical applications of it. The $$$ has pulled us into this possible dead end, not only of how it's spiraling out of control, but how it's probably pulled from other research and definitely from looking harder at AI safety topics, which are still relevant even with "dumb" LLMs.

  • What are your thoughts on fate/destiny ?

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  • The future doesn't exist until we get there, so you have nothing tying you to any path that you can't change. Abstractly you could see your situation like a fate or destiny if you can't control some things. But the future is still unwritten, and even walls holding you in now can be passed later by your actions or just circumstance.

  • Linux didn't just eat 10% of Windows market share, AI bots are inflating the numbers

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  • It's a fair article. Mentions that while it may not be the year of Linux (whatever that ever means every time it's claimed), it does suggest the bot activity validates the death of the internet as we knew it. It also says that Linux is a great platform and they use it for certain things. If the adjusted amount it right, 4.7% is still pretty impressive, as I can remember people celebrating like 1% and 2% once. And for some reason I thought WIndows would be higher... they are slipping.

  • What's a fun piece of free software I should learn to use this week?

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  • I definitely look to see if the wheel is already invented, but I guess I started early enough when there wasn't a lot out there and had to make it work on my own. I totally enjoy having to hack together things and google answers (god, that's gotten a lot harder than it used it be), so that's also part of why I jump to DIY unless I find something that's perfect and already made.

    A recent one where I stopped myself was automating backups. I was going to try to throw together something, but then ran across restic and Backrest and wow, it's so much better than what I could have done.

  • What's a fun piece of free software I should learn to use this week?

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  • My suggestion already submitted was Blender, but any of these ideas require a purpose. I don't think you truly learn an application or language (even human languages!) if you don't have something you're trying to do with it. Even music (it's a language), you can learn how to play something, how to put together notes and sounds, but you really start figuring out how to do things when you have a need to accomplish.

    I would say 90% of my coding and application knowledge comes from decades of having a need or inspiration to do something, and having to find the right tool and learn how to use it to make my idea become something (even if it doesn't get finished). When that purpose or desire disappears (for whatever reason) I stop wanting or caring about learning more about the tool I was using to do it with.

    Your initial request seems to point to a different style of learning, wanting to do it for the journey itself. That's cool, I just wonder if you had a reason for doing it, would it make the effort more fun and worthwhile.

  • What's a better feeling?

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  • If I wake at 2:34am, I'm late for work.

    But I get OP's point, as I've woken before thinking it's almost time to get up, and see 11:00pm. Yay, back to sleep.

  • North Carolina Republican lawmaker wants the state to police what transgender teachers can wear

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  • MAGA, if we're going back to all the other stuff, we should go back to boys wearing pink and girl blue. And both dresses until they're older.