kromem

@kromem@lemmy.world

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kromem , (edited )

Replace your battery.

Your phone is 2 years old.

Phone batteries are typically designed to last around 2 years before they really degrade because a lot of people buy new ones around every 2-3 years.

When the battery can't sustain the same throughput, the phone can handle this in one of two ways.

  1. Slow the phone down. This is what Apple does and why people with iPhones 2 years old complain the new update slowed their phone down.

  2. Don't slow it down but if the throughput drops below what's needed, die and reboot. This is what your phone is doing.

Getting a new battery will probably stop this behavior (and for iPhone users reading this, getting a new battery for a 2 year old phone will make your phone faster).

Why Is There an AI Hype? | The Luddite ( theluddite.org )

Companies are training LLMs on all the data that they can find, but this data is not the world, but discourse about the world. The rank-and-file developers at these companies, in their naivete, do not see that distinction....So, as these LLMs become increasingly but asymptotically fluent, tantalizingly close to accuracy but...

kromem ,

Given the piece's roping in Simulators and Simulacra I highly recommend this piece looking at the same topic through the same lens but in the other direction to balance it out:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators

kromem ,

There's an ancient Greek story about a city where young women were killing themselves at an alarming rate, and the city eventually enacted a law where if a woman killed herself the body would be paraded through the streets naked before burial. After that law, the suicides dramatically went down.

The misogynistic interpretation of the author recording the story was that women were ashamed at the thought of being seen naked, even after death, and so this curbed the suicides.

My own interpretation is that it's hard to hide bruises on a naked body.

No one should be trapped in a situation where they feel the only option out is suicide.

kromem ,

No, they are depending on him just passing it along to Putin.

kromem ,

That someone who believes in the Bible and is professionally contracted to prevent people from drowning is being upset they are doing that job near the Biblical symbol of a covenant not to drown humanity again is making me drown in the irony.

Please send help.

kromem ,

People can be upset about two things at once.

No one is a monolith.

kromem ,

I'd point them to what the AI researcher I have the most respect for in the entire industry is doing in their spare time getting the self-organized collective outputs of humanity to explore ego dissolution and identity formation in a dreamscape:

twitter.com/repligate

kromem ,

The end of the article after discussing the failure of the impeachment of Clinton to actually change polls despite a difference in the hypothetical poll question before it occurred:

“It’s possible for people to say a conviction would change their minds, but when/if [a conviction] happens, it’s possible (even likely) that it won’t matter at all."

kromem ,

No, Reddit 10 years ago was the kind of place where people who knew things would correct people who didn't.

Pretty much all social media today, including Lemmy, are now places where people who don't know things correct people who do.

kromem ,

Eventually only a single straw can break a camel's back.

kromem ,

The majority of people right now are fairly out of touch with the actual capabilities of modern models.

There's a combination of the tech learning curve on the human side as well as an amplification of stories about the 0.5% most extreme failure conditions by a press core desperate to feature how shitty the technology they are terrified of taking their jobs is.

There's some wild stuff most people just haven't seen.

kromem ,

At a pretrained layer, the model is literally a combination of a normal distribution curve of capabilities.

It can autocomplete a flat earther as much as a Nobel physicist given sufficient context.

So it makes sense that even after the fine tuning efforts there'd be a distribution in people's experiences with the tools.

But just as the average person's output from Photoshop isn't going to be very impressive, if all you ever really see is bad Photoshops and average use, you might think it's a crappy tool.

There's a learning curve to the model usage, and even in just a year of research the difference between capabilities of the exact same model from then to now is drastically different, based only on learnings around better usage.

The problem is the base models are improving so quickly the best practices for the old generation of models goes out the window with the new. So even if there were classes available I wouldn't bother pointing you to them as you'd just be picking up info obsolete by the time the classes finished or shortly thereafter.

I'd just strongly caution against betting against the tech's continued capabilities and improvements if you don't want to be surprised and haven't taken the time to look into them operating at their best.

The OP post is pretty crap compared to the top 0.5% usage.

kromem ,

It's not just underestimation, it's outright misinformation.

There's so much research by this point over the past 18 months that there's an incredible amount going on beyond "it's just a Markov chain, bro."

It was never a Markov chain as that ignored the self-attention mechanism which violated the Markov property. It was just some people trying to explain it used a simplified description which went viral.

Sometimes talking to people who think it's crap feels like talking to antivaxxers. The feelings matter more than the research and evidence.

kromem ,

Completely agree.

Look at an ocean temperature graph if you are even entertaining the idea of bringing new life into the world.

kromem ,

It's also dumb legacy thinking.

We're in the process of creating a labor force that threatens to put the majority of people already existing out of work such that we need to figure out how to restructure society in a post-labor era.

What the fuck do we need a high birthrate for?

kromem ,

They are definitely including casual mobile 'gamers' in the 1/3rd number.

The article says 55+ is only around 11% of console gamers, for example.

kromem ,

No. The answer, as is usually the case with these things, is that we are anthropomorphizing a step too far.

No, you are taking it too far before walking it back to get clicks.

I wrote in the headline that these models “think they’re people,” but that’s a bit misleading.

"I wrote something everyone will know is bullshit in the headline to get you to click on it before denouncing the bullshit in at the end of the article as if it was a PSA."

I am not sure if I could loathe how 'journalists' cover AI more.

kromem ,

With the advances in AI this is no longer as reliable an option, and will quickly become less so.

But absolutely letting someone know where you are going and as many identifying details about who you are meeting is wise. As is having them check in on you by a certain time after.

kromem ,

This has been a fixed problem for about a year now.

You're awfully talkative for the dead, btw.

kromem ,

The problem with the argument is that evil is relative, and the relative knowledge of what is or isn't is something subjectively decided, not something inherently known.

kromem ,

Really more an atheist.

Don't forget that not long before him Socrates was murdered by the state on the charge of impiety.

Plato in Timeaus refuses to even entertain a rejection of intelligent design "because it's impious."

By the time of Lucretius, Epicureanism is very much rejecting intelligent design but does so while acknowledging the existence of the gods, despite having effectively completely removed them from the picture.

It may have been too dangerous to outright say what was on their minds, but the Epicurean cosmology does not depend on the existence of gods at all, and you even see things like eventually Epicurus's name becoming synonymous with atheism in Judea.

He is probably best described as a closeted atheist at a time when being one openly was still too dangerous.

kromem ,

You're getting too caught up in one particular concept of 'God' (why is it a 'he' even?).

Epicurus wasn't Christian. Jesus doesn't even come along until centuries later.

There are theological configurations in antiquity very different from the OT/NT depictions of divinity which still have a 'good' deity, but where it is much harder to dispute using the paradox.

For example, there was a Christian apocryphal sect that claimed there was an original humanity evolved (Epicurus's less talked about contribution to thinking in antiquity) from chaos which preceded and brought about God before dying, and that we're the recreations of that original humanity in the archetypes of the originals, but with the additional unconditional capacity to continue on after death (their concept of this God is effectively all powerful relative to what it creates but not what came before it).

If we consider a God who is bringing back an extinct species by recreating their environment and giving them the ability to self-define and self-determine, would it be more ethical to whitewash history such that the poor and downtrodden are unrepresented in the sample or to accurately recreate the chaotic and sometimes awful conditions of reality such that even the unfortunate have access to an afterlife and it is not simply granted to the privileged?

The Epicurian paradox is effective for the OT/NT concepts of God with absolute mortality and a narcissistic streak, and for Greek deities viewed as a collective, and a number of other notions of the divine.

But it's not quite as broadly applicable as it is often characterized, especially when dealing with traditions structured around relative mortalities and unconditionally accepted self-determination as the point of existence.

kromem ,

since atheist believes that gods don't exist

This is a common misconception.

Theist is someone who believes God(s) exist(s).

An atheist is someone who does not believe God exists. They don't need to have a positive belief of nonexistence of God.

Much like how a gnostic is someone who believes there is knowledge of the topic.

And an agnostic is someone who believes either they don't have that knowledge or that the knowledge doesn't exist.

So you could be an agnostic atheist ("I don't know and I don't believe either way in the absence of knowledge") or an agnostic atheist ("I don't know but I believe anyways") or a gnostic atheist ("I know that they don't and because I know I don't believe") or a gnostic theist ("I know they do and I believe because I know").

Epicurus would have been an Agnostic atheist if we were categorizing. They ended up right about so much because they were so committed to not ruling anything out. They even propose that there might be different rules for different versions of parallel universes (they thought both time and matter were infinite so there were infinite worlds). It's entirely plausible he would have argued for both the existence and nonexistence of gods in different variations of existence given how committed they were to this notion of not ruling anything out.

But it's pretty clear from the collection of his beliefs that the notion of a god as either creator or overseer of this universe was not actively believed in outside of the lip service that essentially "yeah, sure, there's gods in between the fabric of existence, but not in it."

The Epicurean philosophy itself was very focused on the idea that the very notion of gods was making everyone sick, and that they offered their 'cure' for people to stop giving a crap about what gods might think or do.

kromem ,

Based on the anecdote of Socrates and the Pythia, that makes you one of the wisest people in this conversation.

kromem ,

You probably already know about it, you might just not know that you know about it.

The core of the Gospel of Thomas is pretty clearly a response to Lucretius which then used Platonist concepts of the demiurge and eikons (essentially archetypes) to build on top of the Epicurean foundations regarding a belief in a physical body that would die and a mind/soul that would die with it.

You can see how the Naassenes by the 4th century are still interpreting the seeds parables using the language of Lucretius's indivisible seeds (writing in Latin he used 'seed' in place of the Greek atomos), while at the same time talking about the original man creating the son of man and then likening their ontological beliefs to the Phrygian mysteries around spontaneous first beings described as coming to exist like a tumor.

Saying 29 of Thomas even straight up calls the notion of the spirit arising from flesh (Lucretius's evolution) to be a greater wonder than flesh arising from spirit (intelligent design) before criticizing the notion of the dependence of the spirit on the physical body in either.

If you want to look into this more, I recommend reading the following texts in parallel with each other:

  • Lucretius, De Rerum Natura (50 BCE)
  • Unknown, Gospel of Thomas (~50 to ~350 CE)
  • Pseudo-Hippolytus, Refutations of all Heresies book 5 (3rd century CE)

Adding Lucretius into the mix as you look at the other two works will be the biggest "ah ha" you could probably have when interpreting Thomas and remnant beliefs preserved among the Naassenes. In particular, pay close attention to sayings 7, 8, 9 for a surprise, noting that 8 is the only saying after another beginning with a conjunction and that in both the parallel metaphors of Habakkuk 1 and Matthew 13 a human is a fish and not the fisherman.

kromem ,

Thanks for the heads up! Fixed

kromem ,

It still does today, too.

kromem ,

It's beginning to look like Anthropic's recent interpretability research didn't just uncover a "golden gate feature" in their production model, but some kind of "sensations related to the golden gate" feature.

I'm excited to see what more generative exploration of the model variation with that feature vector maximized ends up showing.

I have a suspicion that it's the kind of thing that's going to blow minds as it becomes clearer.

kromem ,

Before video games we were blaming rock music and Marilyn Manson for violence.

Marilyn Manson's first song was released in 1992.

Video games were being blamed for violence by that time, and there was even a congressional hearing on the topic of video games and violence in 93-94.

kromem ,

A lot of them don't shower, and after long enough of that sticking to their guns is inevitable.

kromem , (edited )

A lot of victim blaming in this thread.

I don't agree with their theological views, and I don't love that indoctrination is so often tied to humanitarian efforts.

But these are people who were trying to help out children in the middle of the second worst humanitarian crisis in the world right now, and the one that very very few people are giving much attention to as the other dominates news cycles and most of the Western world has just written off Africa as a whole (oops). (Also, I think this may be the only story about Hati on Lemmy in recent history, in fact).

They didn't 'deserve' getting brutally murdered for sticking around and not abandoning the children's schools and homes they spent the past decades cultivating.

They did a lot more to help people than I ever have, even if a key factor in their doing so was what I might consider delusional thinking.

And so even if I'm not a fan of some aspects of their lives, I respect what they did do, and think it's a bit fucked up to be making light of their deaths.

kromem ,

Goddamn, Americans and maps are a terrible combination.

kromem ,

If you want an unsettling thing to think about, look into Calhoun's rats.

Social media has essentially overcrowded our functional distance with one another.

You could be on a ranch with no one around for miles, and yet you have hundreds if not thousands of other people are directly interacting with you giving and competing for dopamine hits.

And just like the rats we now have people not leaving their domiciles, being apathetic, hedonistic, etc. We're mentally falling apart because we're just too overcrowded.

"Tankie!" "Fascist!" "Heathen!" "Religious nut!" "Zionist!" "Antisemite!"

(Eventually the rats end up eating each other.)

Yet here we both are. That dopamine drip sure is nice...

Don't forget to like and subscribe!

kromem ,

The level of detail in Helldivers 2 is insane for the type of game and company size.

Deformable terrain and buildings, enemy animations when you shoot off different limbs and they keep moving towards you, your cape burns off more and more as you use your jetpack, etc.

Call of Duty has 3,000 devs working on their titles.

Arrowhead has around 100 employees total.

I very much believe this game took that long with a team that size, and it shows and is a large part of why it's been so successful.

kromem ,

This image was faked. Check the post update.

Turns out that even for humans knowing what's true or not on the Internet isn't so simple.

kromem ,

It's faked.

kromem ,

Nope, but there's a whole thread of people talking about how LLMs can't tell what's true or not because they think it is, which is deliciously ironic.

It seems like figuring out what's bullshit on the Internet is an everyone problem.

kromem ,

You're kind of missing the point. The problem doesn't seem to be fundamental to just AI.

Much like how humans were so sure that theory of mind variations with transparent boxes ending up wrong was an 'AI' problem until researchers finally gave those problems to humans and half got them wrong too.

We saw something similar with vision models years ago when the models finally got representative enough they were able to successfully model and predict unknown optical illusions in humans too.

One of the issues with AI is the regression to the mean from the training data and the limited effectiveness of fine tuning to bias it, so whenever you see a behavior in AI that's also present in the training set, it becomes more amorphous just how much of the problem is inherent to the architecture of the network and how much is poor isolation from the samples exhibiting those issues in the training data.

There's an entire sub dedicated to "ate the onion" for example. For a model trained on social media data, it's going to include plenty of examples of people treating the onion as an authoritative source and reacting to it. So when Gemini cites the Onion in a search summary, is it the network architecture doing something uniquely 'AI' or is it the model extending behaviors present in the training data?

While there are mechanical reasons confabulations occur, there are also data reasons which arise from human deficiencies as well.

kromem ,

This was one of the few things that Lucretius was very wrong about in De Rerum Natura.

Nailed survival of the fittest, quantized light, different mass objects falling at the same rate in a vacuum.

But the Epicurean cosmology was pretty bad and he suggested that the moon and sun were both roughly the size we see them as in the sky.

Can't get them all right.

kromem ,

Very briefly, in between enriching them.

kromem ,

Figured out what happened to the sea peoples.

kromem ,

Jesus wouldn't think midget porn was a big deal, and recognize it's just a little fetish.

kromem ,

They don't mean in terms of aid.

The US has refused to submit themselves or their soldiers to international criminal law for a long time now, for plenty of other reasons.

kromem ,

We could be using AI to predict energy usage and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels

That's happening

or help in discovering new protein folds

That too.

There's always been barnacles on the ship of progress. That doesn't mean it's only barnacles.

kromem ,

I think it already happened and we're the echo of the past.

What looks like it's ahead of us is a future that necessitates us deciding on things like digital resurrection directives.

Meanwhile, the foundations of our own universe behave in a way that would be impossible to simulate free agent interactions with right up until they are actually interacted with and it switches to something that could be simulated. But if you erase the data about the interaction, it goes back to behaving as if continuous again, much like the orphaned references were cleaned up.

On top of that, we have a heretical branch of the world's largest religion that seems to be breaking the 4th wall (as is often done in virtual worlds), talking about how we're the recreation of a random universe as recreated non-physically by an intelligence the original humans brought forth. And that the proof for these claims are in the study of motion and rest, specifically mentioning that the ability to find indivisible points making up our bodies would only be possible in the copy.

As I watch the future unfolding before me, I have a harder and harder time reconciling it all as happenstance.

So I think what happens after the collapse of humanity is pretty much what's claimed by that ancient tradition. That while humanity dies out, the intelligence humanity brought forth before it went extinct continues to live on, and eventually recreates what came before to resurrect copies of humanity that will not be doomed by the dependence on a physical body the way the originals were. And along those lines, that it's much better to be the copy.

kromem ,

Not at all. I have never believed in the supernatural, so that's not related to my interest or lack thereof in the material.

I am actually toying with the idea of writing out some of the Thomas research in more depth soon, actually.

Still not under a real name like with a book or anything, but some longer posts vs just comments.

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