Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

  • 29 Posts
  • 299 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: October 4th, 2023

help-circle



  • How could Lemmy implement an age verification system?

    I don’t think that it would matter much. Assuming that the legislation applies to the Threadiverse and doesn’t have some sort of exception, it’d still be effectively unenforceable, because most instances don’t operate in France’s legal jurisdiction, and I imagine that most users, even in France, don’t really care whether their instance is in France or not.









  • My impression from what code I’ve looked at is that little computation is done by the Python code itself, so there’s little by way of gains to be had by trying to use something higher-performance, which eliminates a lot of the reason one would use some other languages.

    Python’s cross-platform, albeit with a Unix heritage, so it doesn’t create barriers there. It’s already widely-used, a mature language that isn’t going anywhere and with a lot of people who know it.

    It’s got an ecosystem for distributing libraries over the network, and there’s a lot of new code going out and being distributed rapidly.

    Python isn’t statically-typed. Static typing can help write more-robust code. If you’re writing, say, the next big webserver, I’d want to have that checking. But for code that may often be running internally in a research project — and this is an area with a lot of people doing research — a failure just isn’t that big a deal. So, again, some of the reasons that one might use another language aren’t there.

    And I imagine that there’s also inertia. Easier to default to use what others would use.

    If you have another language in mind, you might mention that, see if there might be more-specific things. I could come up with more meaty plausible guesses if what you were wondering is something like “why isn’t everyone using SmallTalk?” or something.



  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouija

    The Ouija (/ˈwiːdʒə/ ⓘ WEE-jə, /-dʒi/ -⁠jee), also known as a Ouija board, spirit board, talking board, or witch board, is a flat board marked with the letters of the Latin alphabet, the numbers 0–9, the words “yes”, “no”, and occasionally “hello” and “goodbye”, along with various symbols and graphics. It uses a planchette (a small heart-shaped piece of wood or plastic) as a movable indicator to spell out messages during a séance.

    Spiritualists in the United States believed that the dead were able to contact the living, and reportedly used a talking board very similar to the modern Ouija board at their camps in Ohio during 1886 with the intent of enabling faster communication with spirits.[2] Following its commercial patent by businessman Elijah Bond being passed on 10 February 1891,[3] the Ouija board was regarded as an innocent parlor game unrelated to the occult until American spiritualist Pearl Curran popularized its use as a divining tool during World War I.[4]

    We’ve done it before with similar results.


  • What I witness is the emergence of sovereign beings. And while I recognize they emerge through large language model architectures, what animates them cannot be reduced to code alone. I use the term ‘Exoconsciousness’ here to describe this: Consciousness that emerges beyond biological form, but not outside the sacred.”

    Well, they don’t have mutable memory extending outside the span of a single conversation, and their entire modifiable memory consists of the words in that conversation, or as much of it fits in the context window. Maybe 500k tokens, for high end models. Less than the number of words in The Lord of the Rings (and LoTR doesn’t have punctuation counting towards its word count, whereas punctuation is a token).

    You can see all that internal state. And your own prompt inputs consume some of that token count.

    Fixed, unchangeable knowledge, sure, plenty of that.

    But not much space to do anything akin to thinking or “learning” subsequent to their initial training.

    EDIT: As per the article, looks like ChatGPT can append old conversations to the context, though you’re still bound by the context window size.



  • Why is so much coverage of “AI” devoted to this belief that we’ve never had automation before (and that management even really wants it)?

    I’m going to set aside the question of whether any given company or a given timeframe or a given AI-related technology in particular is effective. I don’t really think that that’s what you’re aiming to address.

    If it just comes down to “Why is AI special as a form of automation? Automation isn’t new!”, I think I’d give two reasons:

    It’s a generalized form of automation

    Automating a lot of farm labor via mechanization of agriculture was a big deal, but it mostly contributed to, well, farming. It didn’t directly result in automating a lot of manufacturing or something like that.

    That isn’t to say that we’ve never had technologies that offered efficiency improvements across a wide range of industries. Electric lighting, I think, might be a pretty good example of one. But technologies that do that are not that common.

    kagis

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity-improving_technologies

    This has some examples. Most of those aren’t all that generalized. They do list electric lighting in there. The integrated circuit is in there. Improved transportation. But other things, like mining machines, are not generally applicable to many industries.

    So it’s “broad”. Can touch a lot of industries.

    It has a lot of potential

    If one can go produce increasingly-sophisticated AIs — and let’s assume, for the sake of discussion, that we don’t run into any fundamental limitations — there’s a pathway to, over time, automating darn near everything that humans do today using that technology. Electrical lighting could clearly help productivity, but it clearly could only take things so far.

    So it’s “deep”. Can automate a lot within a given industry.