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ajsadauskas , to technology
@ajsadauskas@aus.social avatar

It's time to call a spade a spade. ChatGPT isn't just hallucinating. It's a bullshit machine.

From TFA (thanks @mxtiffanyleigh for sharing):

"Bullshit is 'any utterance produced where a speaker has indifference towards the truth of the utterance'. That explanation, in turn, is divided into two "species": hard bullshit, which occurs when there is an agenda to mislead, or soft bullshit, which is uttered without agenda.

"ChatGPT is at minimum a soft bullshitter or a bullshit machine, because if it is not an agent then it can neither hold any attitudes towards truth nor towards deceiving hearers about its (or, perhaps more properly, its users') agenda."

https://futurism.com/the-byte/researchers-ai-chatgpt-hallucinations-terminology

@technology

heavyboots ,
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I totally agree that both seem to imply intent, but IMHO hallucinating is something that seems to imply not only more agency than an LLM has, but also less culpability. Like, “Aw, it’s sick and hallucinating, otherwise it would tell us the truth.”

Whereas calling it a bullshit machine still implies more intentionality than an LLM is capable of, but at least skews the perception of that intention more in the direction of “It’s making stuff up” which seems closer to the mechanisms behind an LLM to me.

I also love that the researchers actually took the time to not only provide the technical definition of bullshit, but also sub-categorized it too, lol.

heavyboots ,
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I would absolutely send him an email to the effect of

“Per our multiple verbal conversations, this is just to serve as notice that, in my professional opinion, your refusal to allow me to upgrade a system at risk of multiple security vulnerabilities on a platform that is no longer supported is a risk that you are choosing to accept against my advise.”

with a list of known major vulnerabilities attached if possible.

That way at least if this comes back to bite the company on the ass, he can’t say “Well he never told me this was a problem!”

heavyboots ,
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This is kinda genius, lol

heavyboots ,
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Why the hell can’t we have candidates this awesome on the ballot here in the US?! 😿

heavyboots ,
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Yes, and I voted for Bernie when he ran and I would absolutely vote for AOC if/when she does run. Just… the choices in this election cycle are wanna-be, half-demented dictator-for-life vs a “moderate” Democrat who, while he’s gotten a surprising amount done, isn’t exactly renowned for pushing the corporations hard on climate change.

heavyboots ,
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Yeah, it’s a pretty frustrating time to be leaning left. And given the chaos Trump would unleash, it’s not like there is any choice at all about whether or not to vote for Biden… 😿

heavyboots ,
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I saw the Marques Brownlee review of this and I have no idea why they actually released it to market? It looked so wildly undercooked.

heavyboots ,
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Let’s do it slightly differently, let’s make the mandatory retirement age for political office the median life expectancy age for the entire country. If the politicians, etc can manage to make everyone live longer, they can hold office longer.

Similarly, take away their separate and different medical coverage and put them on the same Medicare system everyone else in the country has to use.

heavyboots ,
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All we want is 1990s Google, guys. That’s really all we want. None of this AI BS that kind find a country in Africa that starts with a K, just Google without the evil enshitification layer on top.

heavyboots ,
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Huh. I used it pretty much since the start and I certainly don’t recall it being that bad? Like you got a lot of relevant content up front usually.

heavyboots ,
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Browsers love it!

Practically anything you write will execute without all that scope and well formed statements nonsense.

Mind you, number 2 is also its biggest flaw as well, but…

heavyboots ,
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The enshitification of Windows compared to macOS has really accelerated a lot recently it seems. I work with both daily and it is weird and irritating how much extra crap keeps getting hurled willy-nilly into Windows updates this last year.

heavyboots ,
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True, just observing that it’s happening much faster now than it did for the preceding iteration of Windows.

Google Podcasts is gone — and so is my faith in Google (www.theverge.com)

The Podcasts app is just the latest product to go through a process I’ve come to call The Google Cycle. It always goes the same way: the company launches a new service with grandiose language about how this fits its mission of organizing and making accessible the world’s information, quickly updates it with a couple of neat...

heavyboots ,
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Someone still had faith in Google???

heavyboots ,
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Ouch. They should either change the font or just ban 44 globally.

heavyboots , (edited )
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That website is completely borked. On Firefox, of all things. Temporary glitch? Working now.

heavyboots ,
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Weird! That’s what I’m on too and I’m getting a giant menu through the middle of the article. 🤔

EDIT: And now it works again. Must have been a temporary glitch, although I force-reloaded it a couple of times even…

heavyboots ,
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If you’re into Insta, be sure and check out PixelFed.

heavyboots ,
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Alternate view on how things went:

…substack.com/…/status-report-warning-signs-for-t…

heavyboots ,
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I would fucking rather pay not to have AI in my browser, FFS…

heavyboots ,
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There is no such thing as a good AI engine… all I really want from any AI engine is the ability to watermark everything it outputs as generated by an AI so it can later be filtered out when it’s discovered to be inaccurate or just simply plagiaristic.

heavyboots ,
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Honestly, a search engine companion is probably its least offensive case, you’re correct. Mostly, it makes me so mad because they are polluting our entire collected knowledge base, because there is no way to watermark anything as AI-generated (especially when it’s text, not images) which means that every search you make from here on out returns worse results. It’s like being forced to share the road with self-driving Teslas because the self-driving car companies (especially Tesla) have made us all involuntarily part of their beta test.

The “screw everyone else trying to use the same public resource” mentality is out of control.

heavyboots ,
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Yeah, but that’s unavoidable. Whereas, Tesla and Waymo, etc getting to use our roads for self-driving testing is just our government not doing their job to protect the roads adequately, IMHO. This is veering way off topic, but I just recently watched a video that had stats on Teslas and the fact they’re like 8.2x more likely to be in a crash than a standard level 2 car driving system.

heavyboots ,
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I mean this is all basically just more media clickbait on the theme of “how is this bad for Biden”.

“Biden called old while being exonerated of classified document prosecution! How is this bad for him?”

Bluesky is finally open to everyone. But will anyone come? We ask its CEO. (www.businessinsider.nl)

Graber is “optimistic about human potential, even though I’m realistic about human nature.” When Bluesky launched last year, it filled a gap that was desperately needed by people who were looking for alternatives to X, as it seemed like the ship formerly known as Twitter was possibly sinking. (Against all odds, it hasn’t...

heavyboots ,
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Last time I tried to use Blue Sky it was so incredibly broken. And that was like November 23? I assume at the time that Twitter was exploding with people jumping for life rafts it was even less feature complete. They probably would have just doomed themselves via word of mouth if hordes of people had come straight from Twitter to BS. At least this way they are managing expectations a little bit.

OTOH, having said that, I don’t understand why anyone would ever get onto a new commercial social media platform again now the Fediverse exists. Kick in a couple bucks a month to your server admins and the dev team and know that at least you’re not the product and not just building up something that is on the road to yet another enshitification.

heavyboots ,
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Haha, yes it is an unfortunately acronym their name makes.

heavyboots ,
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With respect to Blue Sky, which I was specifically addressing, it only has 3 million active users vs Mastodon’s 8 million right now though, which also somewhat obviates the whole network effect for new BS users. Not to mention since it is also decentralized, it does still suffer from the issue of instancing. About the only thing it may have going for it is an algorithm. I don’t honestly speak to that since I’ve only been there briefly, but since Twitter ran just fine without one and attracted tons of users (and got a lot of them angry when they switched to an algorithm), I suspect it isn’t a huge deciding factor for a lot of users.

I guess my point is… Blue Sky is still trying to launch and struggling. Mastodon is much more mature and only going to accelerate into the network effect more rapidly from here on out as well as standing a much better chance of not just being enshitified 5-7 years down the road, so when choosing between the two, I would definitely encourage any friends leaving Xitter to join Mastodon rather than Blue Sky.

Also, I feel like the users that care about algorithms and following Drake or whoever are just going to stick with Xitter anyway, because they really don’t care about all the “drama” of who owns it or what they are doing with their data.

heavyboots ,
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If you go straight to disconnect.blog literally all their content right now seems to be a hate-on against the AVP, lol.

I’m not saying I would ever buy one of these, but then again I didn’t buy an iPhone until the 3gs either.

Much more interesting view of the AVP from a more “the street finds its own uses” perspective here:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvkgmyfMPks

(Mind you, even he says at the end that he would never buy this particular model.)

It's been less than a day since I rolled my ankle bad, is it normal to already able to walk on it again?

Last night I fell down a flight of stairs and rolled my ankle bad. It’s black and blue and swollen but my s/o has no sympathy for me already. In context I only ask her to help me to the bathroom. Besides crawling, which I do now, should I duke it out more? I just don’t understand, I can’t physically put weight on...

heavyboots ,
@heavyboots@lemmy.ml avatar

I rolled the sh!t out of mine a few months back (loud popping noise when I went over the front of the foot around onto the side missing a stair) and spent a day limping around but it was pretty good after 24 hours. Still had to take it easy for a couple weeks though. But OTOH I can stand in the sides of my ankles normally so I’m flexible enough this is the first instance of damage ever because the angle was so extreme…

I agree RICE is the way and stay off it if it hurts.

heavyboots ,
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This is the fun of close-door testimony… we don’t have Fauci’s actual testimony, just some guy playing Faux News telephone about it and trying to pump more energy into the “why were we ever worried about COVID?” side.

heavyboots ,
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This isn’t technically fully biopunk because space ships and stuff, but the biology of the world in Prospector plays a huge role and I’d definitely recommend seeing it in part just because of how well they did portraying an alien world with a lot of weird alien quirks to it.

heavyboots ,
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I feel like it’s unfortunate they didn’t highlight the open source options where the customer is not the product as their article closer, but rather of a quote about how Reddit could be such a better place. Seems to entirely miss the point.

heavyboots ,
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Everyone absolutely thought the original click wheel iPod, the iPhone and the iPad were all doomed to fail. Hell, the Apple watch didn’t exactly get off to a hot start for that matter.

And back at the beginning, the Mac OS GUI. Yes, Steve Jobs saw the idea of a graphical GUI at Xerox Park, but what his engineers turned out is something completely different. And at the time it was easily as revolutionary as the touchscreen interface of the iPhone.

Actual duds by Apple that I can think of off the top of my head:

  • The Cube
  • The Mac IIcx
  • The Mac IIfx
  • Whatever that ungodly massive Unix box was that they branded as Apple
  • The liquid cooled G5 cheesgrater
heavyboots ,
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I had to do some googling, but it looks like it was the Apple Network Server that I’m thinking of.

512pixels.net/2012/03/apple-servers/

heavyboots ,
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So the gAslightIng is infesting even scientific publications now??

heavyboots , (edited )
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I hate this so much. Literally stopped using Perl and switched to PHP to get away from the “Look, ma! I can condense 6 comprehensible lines to one complete gibberish line that still works!” crowd.

I’m not saying I won’t use shorthand if/else format on very rare occasions where you have to do a bunch of different if else’s within your HTML for some reason, but in general, I try to avoid it.

heavyboots ,
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COP has been 110% co-opted and hamstrung.

heavyboots ,
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It’s Americanized Mexican, at best. Personally, I cannot stand the taste though, so I’m also not the best judge probably.

A poll: are followers-only posts on Mastodon public? (infosec.exchange)

On Mastodon, Followers-only posts are only visible to your followers – and to admins of any instances your followers on. But if you haven’t turned on “approve followes”, anybody who’s logged in to an instance you haven’t blocked can follow you and get access to your followers-only posts....

heavyboots ,
@heavyboots@lemmy.ml avatar

I mean it’s pretty much the same as Twitter? All your posts are public* and anyone can follow you unless you activate the follower approval option. It’s the first thing I did when I created my Mastodon account. (And the first thing I did on Twitter as well.)

  • Actually now I think about it, on Twitter I also made my account private immediately.
heavyboots ,
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I mean… it’s a process? I have a yahoo and a gmail account and I’ve switched like 95% of my stuff away from them to iCloud at this point. It just takes time and patience. As for logins, grab BitWarden and start using it to store passwords instead. Has the side benefit of letting you generate all randomized passwords as you switch to mail-based logins so theres no password duplication or patterns for anyone to analyze if a few different places lose your account credentials.

heavyboots ,
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Everyone is pretty good at spam detection these days. Also, this is a reason to have at least 2 email accounts—one you only give to close family and friends and one you use for commercial purposes.

And use throwaway/blockable for anything political too. (Apple has Hide My Email that lets you generate random email addresses linked to your primary that you can block with a click if they start to spam you hard immediately after.)

heavyboots ,
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Really? I rarely get spam at my Yahoo account that gets past the filter. 🤔

heavyboots ,
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The big box store chain esthetic. Ostensibly about passing value onto the customer (we put a roof over the products, what more do you want?) but probably more about maximizing shareholder value.

heavyboots ,
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Don’t legislate this! We’ve got it alllll under control!

heavyboots ,
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Oh man, I feel you. Worst thing for my last cat was he had to get radiation therapy for his hyperthyroidism. So he had never been away from home overnight and they have to keep them like 4 days until the radiation is out of their system enough to come home BUT they say no cuddling or sleeping next to them for another 3 days. He was SO SAD when I would push him away to the other side of the couch and when I had to lock him out of the bedroom for the first time ever.

heavyboots ,
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This. This is why I am in the “I still buy CDs” camp. DL the album and if I’m still listening to it a couple days later I buy the CD, assuming the artist still even releases on CD…

heavyboots ,
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Too bad they didn’t take a shot with the recording light on—I’m curious how obvious it is so I know what to look for in the future.

heavyboots ,
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The thing about a report like this is you could just as easily have gotten an asymptomatic COVID infection at some point and now be experiencing long COVID rather than symptoms as a result of the vaccine itself.

We have a person in the office who is now dead set against having any more vaccines because her blood pressure has increased a lot recently and she’s positive its vaccine-related. But that seems fairly unlikely, plus she has been someone who after a few vaccines started claiming she’d had doctors tell her that COVID wasn’t that bad, so she’s traveled a ton compared to almost everyone else in the office, which to my mind makes it much more likely she got an asymptomatic version and now is suffering after-effects of that.

But then again, I’m not medical professional either. This is just me pointing out that correlation is not causation.

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