jaschop @ jaschop @awful.systems

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152

Joined

1 yr. ago

While browsing the references of the paper, I found such a perfect evisceration of GenAI.

We have confused what we can write down with what we usefully know and compounded the error by supposing that because computers can help us write down more they can obviously help us know more.

The marks are on the knowledge worker - Kidd, Alison

That's from 1994 folks, they were talking about the wonder of relational databases.

https://www.byom.de/trashmails/

Decent functionality, and it didn't get flagged most of the time I used it.

The pivot-to-ai writeup is out, they did seed! I assume it's documented then.

Multinational corporations can act ethically after all.

Did they seed at least?

Not my place to tell you what to post, but I would have just made a link post to your blog. I found it more pleasant to read, and gave me an incentive to poke through your backlog. Entertaining stuff!

Less meta: you just prompted me to actually remember when my Internet journey actually began. Must have been early to mid oughts, mostly playing flash games on lego.com . I remember an elementary school buddy came over one day and helped me create the Email I'd use for 15 years, and introduced me to some regional forum that went offline many years ago.

Fits a pattern I've seen before. Kinda critical of OpenAI and not buying their PR wholesale, but also accepting the framing that AI is some kind of critical foundational tech instead of another shitty magic trick.

Okay "like that" is strong wording after that specific article. She seema to mix anecdotes, research, opinions and technical details in an entertaining and somewhat educative way.

I started liking https://izzys.casa after someone linked her meandering horror story on the C++ ecosystem on awful. All her posts seem to be written like that.

Can't be done vs. won't be done is a distinction. I said it was a nitpick.

The point would be, to roll it all into the ID issuing process. I think most EU IDs already have cryptographic identities built in. The certificate issuing should probably be a state service as well. The alternative would probably be, just mail your birth certificate and a 3D scan of your anus to the private age verification provider of your choice.

It of course all falls back to a central state authority. But the process wouldn't have to be more centralized and privacy-invasive than state IDs already are. Control of resident data could be kept at municipality level, and you wouldn't need a central approver, that gets a running feed of all my age-restricted activities.

Before I sound like I'm soying over ID verification, I'll add that all this junk can become insidious very quick, if it becomes easy to implement and gets used everywhere. I also detest beyond measure that my ID currently stores a scan of my fingerprint, and I hope the court-ordered deadline makes that shit illegal again in 2027.

I'll slightly nitpick the claim about the central ID register, because you can do a lot of this stuff decentralized with smart IDs.

I imagine it works like this: You somehow get your hands on a certificate that reads "yo, the controller of the key pair with public key a4c6... is over 18 - signed, new south wales records agency". You hook up your smart card to pass some cryptographic test, and voilá: you proved you have the ID of an adult and know their PIN.

Not that I advocate for IDing everytime you visit a website, but I guess I'd be fine with it for ordering weed online. I expect we'll get something like it in the EU, if we decide not to go full fucking surveillance state.

Apropos Bruce, I have this writeup sitting around half-finished, where I go over the AI chapters of A Hackers Mind and try to pinpoint his naivité (however you spell that) of the subject. I really should dump that in a Snubstack.

After reading his older article, I can totally see how he fits into one of the middle layers of the diagram in the UAntwerp paper. He moved beyond basic followership and knows enough to stan EA to potential recruits. But he hasn't advanced to the part where you score comfy research positions in backroom deals with rich benefactors. So AI doom is just one of those things he doesn't really get, but a lot of people he respects take it super seriously, so it's got to be something.

Amazing how well he it the nail on the head back then.

In the beginning, EA was mostly about fighting global poverty. Now it’s becoming more and more about funding computer science research to forestall an artificial intelligence–provoked apocalypse. At the risk of overgeneralizing, the computer science majors have convinced each other that the best way to save the world is to do computer science research. Compared to that, multiple attendees said, global poverty is a “rounding error.”

Coroner says it was sudoku.

A lot of points in here that I always wanted to confront Monero supporters with. It seems like the least scummy crypto out there, and I occasionally see generally lefty people stanning it, but it has the same fundamental flaws. Maybe the scammers are currently vacuumed up by the richer scamming grounds of eth/btc, but it wouldn't survive it's own success.

"In popular culture" section coming in clutch per usual:

The two Argentine developers, Jaun Linietsky & Ariel Manzur, were repeatedly tasked with updating the engine from a period of time from 2001 to 2014, and chose the name "Godot" due to its relation to the play, as it represents the never-ending wish of adding new features in the engine, which would get it closer to an exhaustive product, but would never actually be completed.

I don't know shit about these stats, and everything can be debated, but just wanted to say: don't let people get you down.

Feeling positive/hopeful isn't always appropriate about everything, but people in here are acting like it's a mental illness.

I'll add that such statistics are very much a moving target, since AVs are still "getting better every day". The software is (and will be) under constant development, and there will likely be tradeoffs between safety for pedestrians and convenience for passagers (e.g. how sensitive is the trigger for an emergency break?)

Looking at it as an ongoing relationship between AV operators, regulators and people makes a lot of sense to me. I agree with the points of the video, that operators will likely push for a "just safe enough" standard and try to offload responsibilities onto bystanders.

His Wikipedia article is quite a ride. Apparently he and a Stephen Chamberlain were recently found innocent for a bunch of fraud charges. They boil down to inflating the value of a SW company he sold to Hewlett-Packart. They died within a day of each other in unrelated accidents. Must be rough.

Dear god, my ribs are hurting after 2 paragraphs already.