Hi, I'm Anthony and I'm a computer scientist
@prologic I said nothing about an international violent response. You added that 🤔
If someone punches you in the face over and over again, you don't stand there and take it to avoid "begetting violence". You stop them from punching you, and do your best to ensure they never punch you again. That's not "violence begets violence". That's rationality.
This demands a response from Europe, the world, not just Ukraine.
Seems to me you could write a script that:
and basically pollute the entire information ecosystem there in a matter of a few months? How long before some malicious actor does this? Maybe it's being done already 🤷
What an asinine, short-sighted decision. An astonishing number of companies are actively reducing headcount because their executives believe they can use this newfangled AI stuff to replace people. But, like the dot com boom and subsequent bust, many of the companies going this direction are going to face serious problems when the hypefest dies down and the reality of what this tech can and can't do sinks in.
We really, really need to stop trusting important stuff to corporations. They are not tooled to last.
@lyse @movq I've always liked the sound of crows, and I really really hate the sound of motorized vehicles, so I also find it absurd. I've come to think that some people are at some level afraid of nature, and nature sounds remind them of it.
@movq wow. I'd trade crow sounds for car sounds, or jet sounds, or leaf blower sounds, or lawn mower sounds, or.....100% of the time.
As far as fighting the birds goes, maybe they're right, but probably it'd be better to re-balance the ecosystem so that crows aren't so dominant? At least there are things to try. When it comes to reducing how much air travel people use, it takes a terrorist attack or a pandemic to affect it.
@prologic You more or less need a data center to run one of these adequately (well, train...you can run a trained one with a little less hardware). I think that's the idea--no one can run them locally, they have to rent them (and we know how much SaaS companies and VCs love the rental model of computing).
There's a lot of promising research-grade work being done right now to produce models that can be run on a human-scale (not data-center-scale) computing setup. I suspect those will become more commonly deployed in the next few years.
@movq I was visiting Germany once, and saw a guy try to load his bicycle onto the bike racks they have on the front of city buses. There were rules about when you could do that, which were posted on the bus stop sign, and I guess the guy thought this was a time when he could do that. But no, the bus driver disagreed. The bus driver got off the bus with a rule book, flipped it open to what I guess were the rules about bikes on the bus, and showed him the rules. The guy pointed at the sign, the bus driver said no and pointed at the book, and they went back and forth for I don't know how long. It felt a lot like these videos lol
@obsidian-roundup how many damn AI plugins does obsidian need? This shit is so annoying; it's sucking the oxygen out of every other development effort.
@prologic I think those headsets were not particularly usable for things like web browsing because the resolution was too low, something like 1080p if I recall correctly. A very small screen at that resolution close to your eye is going to look grainy. You'd need 4k at least, I think, before you could realistically have text and stuff like that be zoomable and readable for low vision people. The hardware isn't quite there yet, and the headsets that can do that kind of resolution are extremely expensive.
But yeah, even so I can imagine the metaverse wouldn't be very helpful for low vision people as things stand today, even with higher resolution. I've played VR games and that was fine, but I've never tried to do work of any kind.
I guess where I'm coming from is that even though I'm low vision, I can work effectively on a modern OS because of the accessibility features. I also do a lot of crap like take pictures of things with my smartphone then zoom into the picture to see detail (like words on street signs) that my eyes can't see normally. That feels very much like rudimentary augmented reality that an appropriately-designed headset could mostly automate. VR/AR/metaverse isn't there yet, but it seems at least possible for the hardware and software to develop accessibility features that would make it workable for low vision people.
@eldersnake interesting, because some people are writing articles declaring the metaverse dead: https://www.businessinsider.com/metaverse-dead-obituary-facebook-mark-zuckerberg-tech-fad-ai-chatgpt-2023-5
@prologic It's a fun challenge to see how many words you can say without expressing any ideas at all. Maybe this GPT stuff should be trained to do that!
Let’s assume for a moment that an answer to a question would be met with so many words you don’t know what the answer was at all. Why? Why do this? Is this a stereotype of academics and philosophers? If so, it’s not a very straight-forward way of thinking, let alone answering a simple question.
Well, I can't know what's in these peoples' minds and hearts. Personally I think it's a way of dissembling, of sowing doubt, and of maintaining plausible deniability. The strategy is to persuade as many people as possible to change their minds, and then force the remaining people to accept the idea because they think too many other people believe it.
Let's say you want, for whatever reason, to get a lot of people to accept an idea that you know most people find horrible. The last thing you should do is express the idea clearly and concisely and repeat it over and over again. All you'd accomplish is to cement people's resistance to you, and label yourself as a person who harbors horrible ideas that they don't like. So you can't do that.
What do you do instead? The entire field of "rhetoric", dating back at least to Plato and Aristotle (400 years BC), is all about this. How to persuade people to accept your idea, even when they resist it. There are way too many techniques to summarize in a twt, but it seems almost obvious that you have to use more words and to use misleading or at least embellished or warped descriptions of things, because that's the opposite of clearly and concisely expressing yourself, which would directly lead to people rejecting your idea.
That's how I think of it anyway.
@prologic hmm, dunno about the recency of that line of thought. I suspect though that given his (recent or not) history, if someone directly asked him "do you support rape" he would not say "no", he'd go on one of these rambling answers about property crime like he did in the video. Maybe I'm mind poisoned by being around academics my whole career, but that way of talking is how an academic gives you an answer they know will be unpopular. PhD = Piled Higher And Deeper, after all right? In other words, if he doesn't say "no" right away, he's saying "yes", except with so many words there's some uncertainty about whether he actually meant yes. And he damn well knows that, and that's why I give him no slack.
There are people in academia who believe adult men should be able to have sex with children, legally, too. They use the same manner of talking about it that Peterson uses. We need to stop tolerating this, and draw hard red lines. No, that's bad, no matter how many words you use to say it. No, don't express doubts about it, because that provides justification and talking points to the people who actually carry out the acts.
I may have misspoken in my haste/anguish. I don't know of any examples of Ben Shapiro advocating rape. I do know them of Jordan Peterson. He's known for that, but I've seen it myself. So, to be clear, I don't know if Ben Shapiro is a rape apologist and have no evidence of that. Wouldn't surprise me frankly because the set of ideas he does talk about tends to include being A-OK with crimes against women, but anyway.
Taking Jordan Peterson asn an example, the only thing he “preaches” (if you want to call it that) is to be honest with yourself and to take responsibility.
This is simply untrue. Read the articles I posted, seriously.
In a tweet in one of the articles I posted, Peterson states there is no white supremacy in Canada. This is blatantly false. It is disinformation. Peterson has made statements that rape is OK (he uses "fancy" language like "women should be naturally converted into mothers" but unpack that a bit--what he means is legalized rape followed by forced conception). He is openly anti-LGBTQ and refuses to use peoples' preferred pronouns. He seems to believe that women who wear makeup at work are asking to be sexually harassed.
He's using his platform in academia to pretend that straight, white men are somehow the most aggrieved group in the world and everyone else is just whining and can get fucked. The patron saint of Men's Rights Activists and incels. I find him odious.
@prologic omg yes! They are both ultra-right-wing assholes! The worst of the worst! Please tell me you don't listen to these guys' brain poison?
12 Reasons Why No One Should Ever Listen to Jordan Peterson Ever Again
Here's why Jordan Peterson is the f*cking worst.: "his ideology quickly morphed into one that reinforces hatred, discrimination, and the oppression of marginalized groups"
ANGRY WHITE MEN MAR. 30, 2016 A History of Piers Morgan’s Terrible Opinions
Piers Morgan Is Now an Asshole of Record-Breaking Proportions
You're posting Piers Morgan/Jordan Peterson videos lmao???
I have no interest in doing anything about it, even if I had the time (which I don't), but these kind of thing happen all day every day to countless people. My silly blog post isn't worth getting up in arms about, but there are artists and other creators who pour countless hours, heart and soul into their work, only to have it taken in exactly this way. That's one of the reasons I'm so extremely negative about the spate of "AI" tools that have popped up recently. They are powered by theft.
There's a link to the blog post, but they extracted a summary in hopes of keeping people in Google properties (something they've been called out on many times).
I was never contacted to ask if I was OK with Google extracting a summary of my blog post and sticking it on the web site. There is a very clear copyright designation at the bottom of each page, including that one. So, by putting their own brand over my text, they violated my copyright. Straightforward theft right there.
@darch So a fiction novel, which is labelled "fiction", is a lie? I still don't understand. The word "lie" entails an intention to deceive, but fiction writing does not intend to deceive.
@carsten You are conflating "aiming your eyes at" with "viewing art". These are fundamentally different activities.
There is (I assure you there will be, don’t know what it is yet…) a price to be paid for this convenience.
Exactly prologic, and that's why I'm negative about these sorts of things. I'm almost 50, I've been around this tech hype cycle a bunch of times. Look at what happened with Facebook. When it first appeared, people loved it and signed up and shared incredibly detailed information about themselves on it. Facebook made it very easy and convenient for almost anyone, even people who had limited understanding of the internet or computers, to get connected with their friends and family. And now here we are today, where 80% of people in surveys say they don't trust Facebook with their private data, where they think Facebook commits crimes and should be broken up or at least taken to task in a big way, etc etc etc. Facebook has been fined many billions of dollars and faces endless federal lawsuits in the US alone for its horrible practices. Yet Facebook is still exploitative. It's a societal cancer.
All signs suggest this generative AI stuff is going to go exactly the same way. That is the inevitable course of these things in the present climate, because the tech sector is largely run by sociopathic billionaires, because the tech sector is not regulated in any meaningful way, and because the tech press / tech media has no scruples. Some new tech thing generates hype, people get excited and sign up to use it, then when the people who own the tech think they have a critical mass of users, they clamp everything down and start doing whatever it is they wanted to do from the start. They'll break laws, steal your shit, cause mass suffering, who knows what. They won't stop until they are stopped by mass protest from us, and the government action that follows.
That's a huge price to pay for a little bit of convenience, a price we pay and continue to pay for decades. We all know better by now. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves? It doesn't make sense. It's insane.
I have to write so many emails to so many idiots who have no idea what they are doing
So it sounds to me like the pressure is to reduce how much time you waste on idiots, which to my mind is a very good reason to use a text generator! I guess in that case you don't mind too much whether the company making the AI owns your prompt text?
I'd really like to see tools like this that you can run on your desktop or phone, so they don't send your hard work off to someone else and give a company a chance to take it from you.
(1) You go to the store and buy a microwave pizza. You go home, put it in the microwave, heat it up. Maybe it's not quite the way you like it, so you put some red pepper on it, maybe some oregano.
Are you a pizza chef? No. Do we know what your cooking is like? Also no.
(2) You create a prompt for StableDiffusion to make a picture of an elephant. What pops out isn't quite to your liking. You adjust the prompt, tweak it a bunch, till the elephant looks pretty cool.
Are you an artist? No. Do we know what your art is like? Also no.
The elephant is "fake art" in a similar sense to how a microwave pizza is "fake pizza". That's what I meant by that word. The microwave pizza is a sort of "simulation of pizza", in this sense. The generated elephant picture is a simulation of art, in a similar sense, though it's even worse than that and is probably more of a simulacrum of art since you can't "consume" an AI-generated image the way you "consume" art.
@carsten @lyse I also think it is best called fake. Art is created by human beings, for human beings. It mediates a relationship between two people, and is a means of expression.
A computer has no inner life, no feelings, no experience of the world. It is not sentient. It has no life. There's nothing "in" there for it to express. It's just generating pixels in patterns we've learned to recognize. These AI technologies are carefully crafted to fool people into experiencing the things they experience when they look at human-made art, but it is an empty experience.
@carsten yeesh, it's a for-pay company I wouldn't give them the output of your mind for free and train their AI for them.
@prologic I would politely suggest again that we not react to people with bad attitudes who talk shit about yarn. If twt is forked, it should be forked to add features that are otherwise not possible. Not to appease people who will probably never be appeased.
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