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leftzero

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leftzero ,

If the models are random then we shouldn’t be trusting them to do anything, let alone serious applications.

That’s not the reason we shouldn’t be using them for anything other than generating lorem ipsum style text or dialogue for non quest critical NPCs in games.

The reason is that, paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, LLMs don’t generate information, they generate information shaped sentences.

Specifically, an LLM takes a sequence of characters (not a word or text; LLMs have no concept of words, or text, or anything else for that matter; they’re just an application of statistics on large volumes of sequences of characters; no meaning or intelligence involved, artificial or not)… as I was saying, an LLM takes a sequence of characters, pushes it through its model, and outputs the sequence of characters most likely to follow it in the texts its model has been trained on (or rather, the most likely after discarding the ones its creators have labelled as politically incorrect).

That’s all they do, and they’ll excellent at it (or would be if it weren’t for the aforementioned filters), but that’ll never give you a cure for cancer unless there already was one in their training data.

They take texts written by humans, shred them, and give you their badly put back together dessicated corpses, drained of any and all meaning or information, but looking very convincingly (until you fact check them) like actually meaningful or informative texts.

That is what makes them dangerous. That and the fact that the bastards selling them are marketing them for the jobs they’re least capable of doing, that is, providing reliable information.

(And that’s while they can still be trained on meaningful and informative texts written by humans — inasmuch as anything found on reddit, facebook, or xitter can be considered to be meaningful or informative —, but given that a higher and higher percentage of the text on the internet is being generated by LLMs soon enough it’ll be impossible to train new models on anything but 99% LLM generated garbage, at which point the whole bubble will implode, as anyone who’s wasted time, paper, and toner playing with a photocopier or anyone familiar with the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” will already have realised… which is probably why the LLM peddlers are ignoring robots.txt and copyright laws in a desperate effort to scrape whatever’s left of the bottom of the barrel.)

leftzero ,

The problem is not them being random.

They are not random, that’s the point. They’re entirely deterministic and very precise, and they aren’t hiding anything; they will give you the most likely (not blacklisted) sequence of characters to follow your input according to their model. What they won’t give you is information, except by accident.

If they were random (hidden or not) they’d be harmless, no one would trust them any more than one of those eight ball toys, or your average horoscope.

The issue is that they’re very not random, so much that there’s no way to know if what they are saying bears any accidental semblance to the truth without fact checking… and that very soon they’ll have replaced any feasible way to fact check them, since all the supposed “facts” we’ll have access to will have been generated by LLMs train on LLM generated garbage.

leftzero ,

Amateurs. You don’t spray paint them, they’ll just clean it off.

What you do, is place a stencil with “fuck Elon” on them, spray rust protective clear lacquer over the general area, and remove the stencil.

They won’t notice until the next time it rains, when the words will show up in bright rust orange, much more harder to remove than any spray paint, and much harder to trace to you.

leftzero ,

Not all of France is like Paris, and the Seine is not a pool. (Plus, battery acid would probably count as a good attempt to clean it up, not as contamination.)

leftzero ,

Hades didn’t really seem like my kind of game, so I torrented it to try it out. Then I bought it, and later Hades 2, too.

I’ve also bought some comics I’d previously read on the computer, too, if they were good enough and I’ve come across a nice edition.

Clearview AI is Offering a Stake in Its Company to the People Whose Photos It Stole (petapixel.com)

Clearview AI, a facial recognition start-up that scraped more than 30 billion photos from social media, can’t afford to pay the settlement bill from its class-action lawsuit so is offering Americans a stake in its company instead....

leftzero ,

We should execute plenty. (Companies, not people, except possibly the CEOs.)

leftzero ,

The Bethesda that made Morrowind. 🤷‍♂️

leftzero ,

Call me basic, but of all the dinosaurs I’ve tasted chicken’s probably my favourite. 🤷‍♂️

leftzero ,

I will always cherish my bones, too. They give me support.

leftzero ,

Asimov didn’t design the three laws to make robots safe.

He designed them to make robots break in ways that’d make Powell and Donovan’s lives miserable in particularly hilarious (for the reader, not the victims) ways.

(They weren’t even designed for actual safety in-world; they were designed for the appearance of safety, to get people to buy robots despite the Frankenstein complex.)

leftzero ,

downright messianic

Yeah, tell that to the rest of the intelligent life in the galaxy…

Oh, wait, you can’t, because by the time humans got there these downright messianic robots had already murdered everything and hidden the evidence…

leftzero ,

it was not the person calling the police.

At this point anyone calling the police in the US is a necessary accomplice, and guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, aggravated battery, and probably several other crimes.

leftzero ,

Read the room, bot. 🤦‍♂️

leftzero ,

No, Mr. Hamster, I expect you to die.

leftzero ,

I often cackle maniacally when I solve something in a particularly effective way.

leftzero ,

To be fair, it also rusts when not under the rain.

leftzero ,

Those who saw tigers where there were none were more likely to pass on their genes than those that didn’t see the tiger hiding in the foliage.

And now their descendants see tigers in the stars.

Boeing Will Launch Starliner With Helium Leak (www.extremetech.com)

Boeing and NASA are moving ahead with the upcoming Starliner demonstration launch despite an active helium leak. The launch is now on the books for Saturday, June 1, at 12:25 p.m. EDT. If all goes as planned, Starliner will rendezvous with the International Space Station the following day and return to Earth on June 10. If not,...

leftzero , (edited )

They’ve launched dogs, monkeys, and whatnot before.

Sure, those were still way more skilled than Boeing executives, but there’s also uncrewed launches, so that’s no excuse.

Call them payload or cargo or ballast instead of astronauts if you want, what counts is launching the fuckers into space and (hopefully) not bringing them back.

leftzero ,

I trust NASA

They’ve killed 21 astronauts so far (not counting X-15 pilots), most of them through criminal negligence…

leftzero ,

Do it reproduce?

Not by themselves, no. They need to take over a cell’s replication machinery for that.

Do it evolve?

Yes, as they are subject to natural selection.

Do it try to survive?

I don’t think so, they don’t try anything to do anything, they just are… but the same can probably be said for most actually living organisms, including many relatively complex ones, so I don’t think it can be used as a way to determine if something is alive or not.

leftzero , (edited )

The thing, though, is… you take a virus, put it in a petri dish by itself, and it does… nothing.

It doesn’t have a metabolism, it doesn’t look for a host, it doesn’t do anything… it’s just an inert clump of organic matter. (Then again, probably the same could be said for, say, spores. Or pollen. Or raw DNA or even RNA. Are those alive…?)

But plug it into a cell and… well, it sort of breaks apart, injecting it’s RNA or DNA into the cell, and… that’s it for that particular instance of the virus.

Sure, the cell will then take that genetic payload and unwittingly use it to fabricate as many copies of the virus as it can… but at that point the original virus instance is just an empty protein husk… is it still alive…? Does “being alive” maybe not apply to individual virus particles, but to this whole process…?

Maybe being alive is not just a binary, but a scale (or something more complex) where you can fit anything from crystals or prions to us and who knows what else, maybe whole ecosystems, maybe the Gaia concept of a living world…

But we humans certainly do seem to like our black and white binary choices, even if viruses might be a triangular peg we’re trying to fit into either a round or square hole…

leftzero ,

Why rename the files when you could just categorise and index them…?

leftzero ,

Does this show as a gif for anyone else? I’m using sync and that just shows a static picture unless I click on it.

Paused (but playable) video on Connect for Lemmy.

leftzero ,

The nihilists should probably be represented by Black Hat…

This guy.

leftzero ,

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens (‘wise man’). In any case it’s an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

— Sir Terry Pratchett, The Globe (The Science of Discworld, #2), 2002

leftzero ,

LLM’s are not AI, though. They’re just fancy auto-complete. Just bigger Elizas, no closer to anything remotely resembling actual intelligence.

leftzero ,

Kugelblitzes might (theoretically) be a thing…

To wit, a sufficiently dense concentration of heat, light, or radiation could produce an event horizon similar to that of a black hole, which definitely would count as a noticeable relativistic effect.

leftzero ,

LLMs aren’t going to be designing anything; they’re just fancy auto complete engines with a tendency to hallucinate facts they haven’t been trained on.

LLMs are preventing real advancements in AI by focusing the attention and funding into what’s evidently a dead end.

leftzero ,

Proper AI definitely could.

LLMs…? Not a chance, absolute dead end, just a modern Eliza.

leftzero , (edited )

No, I’m a self-referential pattern recognition machine.

leftzero ,

Exactly, but LLMs are preventing further advances in AGI.

leftzero ,

LLMs are incapable of “recognising” any patterns they haven’t been trained on.

And they don’t really even recognise those, they’re just fancy auto complete engines, simply outputting the highest scored token from their training base based on their input.

They’re pattern matching machines; there’s no recognition, inner modelling of new knowledge, self referencing, or understanding of any kind, merely blind statistics.

They’re just bigger and fancier Eliza’s, and just as distant as Eliza was from any practical form of intelligence, artificial or natural.

While I personally do believe that achieving AGI¹, on a Turing machine is possible, LLMs and how they work are an excellent example in support of John Searle’s arguments against it with his Chinese room though experiment.

1— Or at least something equivalent to human intelligence, or better, in the measures by which we consider ourselves to be intelligent, though it’s arguable whether we can really be considered intelligent at all, or we’re just better, more complex, Chinese rooms.

leftzero ,

Because there are many aspects of what we understand as “actual thinking” (understanding concepts, learning, or solving puzzles, for instance) that LLMs are fundamentally incapable of achieving no matter how larger or more complex we make them or how much we optimise them.

They do one single thing (which, granted, they do relatively well): they take an input, they apply it to every token in their training data, generating a score for each of them, and they output the one with the highest score. And that’s all they do.

And that’s why, for instance, you’ll never be able to make a LLM that’s any good at playing chess, because there simply wouldn’t be enough atoms in the universe for it to store all possible states of the game, which it would need to have in its training model in order to auto complete its next move (and that’s not even accounting for the actual score computation, both in space and time).

They’re a cool fancy gimmick, possibly useful in certain cases as long as you can account for their hallucinations, but they’re not any closer to actual intelligence than Eliza ever was.

leftzero ,

I’m not talking about “machines” or any other generic term.

I’m talking specifically about LLMs. And their limitations are evident. For instance, maths is one of the many things they can’t do (and will never be able to do in any efficient way).

We have indeed, developed programs that play chess better than people (though sadly, until the LLM bubble pops we probably won’t get any further). But they’re not LLMs, or anything resembling an LLM. Because one of the other many things an LLM can’t do is play games of skill. Or reason. Or solve puzzles. Or even have a concept of strategy.

LLMs, again, can only do one single thing. And that’s to pick up the one card from their deck that’s been picked up most often after the sequence of cards on the table according to their training model.

That’s all they do. That’s all they’ll ever be able to do. Because that’s how they work. And, sure, with that you can make it look like they’re holding a conversation (until you ask them something that isn’t in their model), but that’s it.

They’ll put words after another according to statistics (not, keep that in mind, according to meaning, or strategy, or anything like that; they don’t, and can’t know or care what the words mean, or whether the sentence they’ve put together makes any sense, or whether what it’s stating is true or false), and that’s that.

They won’t play chess, they won’t write good innovative code, they won’t write original stories, and they won’t drive your car.

We don’t need to know how what we call consciousness works to know that. We just need to know how LLMs work. And that we most definitely do.

leftzero ,

All the money’s going into the LLM bubble, so there won’t be any left for actual AI research until it bursts.

leftzero ,

Some of them are inventing completely new ways of doing things

No, they’re not. All the money is now on the LLM autocomplete chatbots.

Real progress on AI won’t resume until after the LLM bubble has burst. (And even then investors will probably be wary of putting money in AI for probably a few decades, because LLMs are being marked as AI despite having little to do with it.)

It’s quite depressing, really.

leftzero ,

There are parts of the story and maps we simply can’t get to because they aren’t there yet (I imagine about 30 to 50%), and there’s a limit to how much we can improve our relationship with the various characters (which means that there’s probably a significant amount of voice acting we can’t hear yet), all of this clearly indicated as provisionally cut content (“you might be able to do this in the future”, “can’t go there yet”, “what happened after this is, for now, literally indescribable”, that kind of thing).

There’s also what’s clearly provisional concept art from time to time, and plenty of placeholder character models and art (plus keepsakes, and fish, the later even having generic descriptions), and there’s almost certainly missing gods and characters (though there’s no indication of which those might be and in which number).

So, yeah, it’s not complete, by a long shot.

That said, I’m fairly certain that there’s already as much content and story as in the complete first game, if not more, or at least it feels like it. And it’s just as fun.

leftzero ,

Several characters, all keepsakes, all fish except, I think, one, at least one background element…

The voice acting is all there

I’d be very surprised if the number of voiced characters isn’t significantly higher in the finished game. And, of course, we’re missing the top end of the relationship interactions with all characters, which will definitely be voice acted.

the mechanics are all there

I wouldn’t be surprised if we get some new mini games in certain parts of the map we can’t access yet.

Apart from these minor nitpickings, however, I completely agree (well, except that I haven’t had any crashes or significant bugs); I’m already enjoying the game as much as the first one, and I definitely feel I got my money’s worth, which is sadly quite unusual for too many supposedly complete games these days.

leftzero ,

Airlander 10

Thicc airship

Nice.

leftzero ,

It’s called xitter, and it’s full of xit(s).

leftzero ,

That cat was seeing a bird or bird equivalent when the picture was taken. It was almost certainly chirping, and probably wiggling its butt, preparing to pounce.

leftzero ,

Being able to fly greatly reduces the amount of predators that can eat you (as does being big, like elephants or whales, being generally out of sight and looking inedible, like naked mole rats, or being a walking extinction event that eradicates any predator stupid enough to mess with them, like humans, as long as we aren’t alone).

Most animals, especially small ones, generally will get eaten long before senescence becomes a problem, so they have no evolutionary pressure to select longer lived individuals.

Flying small animals, however, can escape predation often enough that that enough individuals die of natural causes that longer lived ones might have a sufficiently better chance of passing on their genes to be significant from an evolutionary standpoint.

So that’s probably why larger animals tend to live longer, and birds and bats (and naked mole rats and humans) live much longer than other animals of the same size. (Bats have similar lifespans to birds, some reaching 30 years.)

leftzero ,

Meh, good luck with that.

All my Reddit comments have just said “Comment redacted in protest against Reddit’s deranged attacks against third party apps, the community, and common sense. See you’ll in Lemmy or Kbin once this embarrassment of a site is done enshittifying itself out of existence. Monetize this, u/spez, you greedy little pigboy. 🖕” since I edited them before moving here. 🤷‍♂️

leftzero ,

Preposterous. Burritos are calzone.

leftzero ,

What I’m saying is cupcakes are valid options for all meals of the day.

Exactly! Q.E.D.!

leftzero ,

Not a telescope, but Barry Lyndon was shot using lenses designed specifically for the Apollo program to capture the dark side of the moon.

The large aperture of these lenses allowed Kubrick to shoot scenes lit only by candlelight, and helped make every frame look like a painting.

leftzero , (edited )

Yes, that’s a good example, though there are several other candlelit scenes in the film.

It might not be Kubrick’s most exciting film when it comes to plot, but it’s certainly remarkable and unique when it comes to its cinematography.

Definitely a must see (at least once) if you’re interested in cinema as a visual art.

leftzero ,

I don’t know about whales, but dolphins are well known to be absolute degenerates.

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