Posts by veti

Re: Missing part

Sadly, real life is like that. It's seldom that we're granted an opportunity to see the results of those little grenades we casually toss over the shoulder from time to time.

There are exceptions, but most of the time "moving on" means just that.

Re: It's a crime no matter who does it

So many questions... Whom do you want to do this prosecution? Of whom? For what? In what courts? Based on what evidence?

Just because you think something is wrong, doesn't make it "a crime".

No, he bought it because he was forced to buy it, after bragging like a 14-year-old that he could. Everything he's done since has been an attempt to (a) play the hero (to someone, somewhere, probably best not to speculate about who), (b) wind up the people who forced him into this position (the former board of Twitter), and (c) make the best of a position he never wanted to be in by having some fun now he's there.

Re: Pulling up the ladder

Yes, some people do that.

But do you have any solid evidence that anyone does anything different? Is there, really, anything more to "intelligence"? Sure there's your internal experience, but that doesn't count because you can't observe it, so you don't know what kind of "internal experience" the LLM may be having (although it's probably safe to say, it'll be very different from a human's).

Follow the links in the article. They're genuine.

As far as fact-checking is concerned, the article passes with flying colours. The only significant false statement (of fact) in it is the attribution of authorship - which was done by a human.

Re: Security fail by design

No, that's the result of the two balls I mentioned colliding.

Of course you should be able to send links to people. You should be able to do anything. And you can't expect naive users to make informed decisions about what to do with those, so the system has to have some mechanism for making that decision by default. And it can't just be "reject or ignore anything", because then people will just dump your platform in favour of one that "works better" (= "has more features").

So they came up with this rather stupid kludge.

The fix, IMO, has to involve factoring the domain of the remote system into the credential hash, so that the hash sent to a third party won't be the same as that used on a trusted system. But I don't know what that would require.

Re: I don't understand why this is so hard

Companies have been selling people's personal data since the invention of the phone book, and probably much earlier. You could even make a case for the invention of banking.

But nowadays it's much larger scale, and much more complicated. What even is "personal data" any more? Most of what the law says is personal - isn't technically traded at all. But it can be reconstructed from what is traded, or freely published.

And why should it belong to you, anyway? The shops you visit regularly probably have a much more accurate record of your purchases than you do. That's their data, they gathered it (and they can make an excellent case that you consented to that, when you told them who you were) - why should you have title over it?

Re: Trump?

You don't want people to know what Trump promised in 2016? Why, do you want him to get away scot-free?

Re: Oh, the humanity!

A stove!!?!

Convenient and quick, my left buttock. Kettles are convenienter and quick, and correctly used will actually make tea that's fit to drink. I shudder to think what that microwave nonsense will produce.

Re: One Network...

Just spitballing here, but they would both be based on a database of city residents. Those who pay water bills and those eligible for jury service - would not be the same lists obviously, but there must be quite a lot of overlap. If I were trying to simplify my citizens' lives, it might occur to me that a single "master" database of people could be used to power many different services.

Re: More stealing our IP

Europe during the middle ages was also the same, each state or kingdom also only allowed a single religion, where the king or queen was head of the church and state, eg Church of England, Vatican City, Lutheran church in Germany, Czar in Russian Empire, Caesar in Roman Empire, Jewish kings in ancient Israel, Pharoah in ancient Egypt etc.

That's a very... elastic definition of "middle ages". And "Europe", for that matter.

But your point is - not really true. Not as a general case, anyway. The Roman empire actively fostered a plurality of religions - their objection to Christianity was that it flatly refused to coexist amicably with the others. Lutherans in Germany preached religious tolerance (in their own self interest, of course) and would often worship alongside Catholics, sometimes in the same church even. The Almohads in Spain, the Ottomans in Asia Minor and the Balkans, the Shahs in Persia - all had no objections to Jews and Christians openly practising their religions, so long as they paid their taxes. The Church of England itself is carefully designed to appeal to people with as wide a variety of beliefs as possible, from almost-Catholic to almost-Puritan, almost-atheist and downright agnostic. And Jews have never stopped living (as an intermittently-persecuted minority) in all those countries. (Well, occasionally some unusually strong persecution would drive them out of a country for a while, as happened in England in 1290 or Spain in 1492, but the norm was that they were tolerated as long as they kept a low profile and made themselves useful.)

In the modern case of Falun Gong - I've seen some of their propaganda, and frankly I sympathise with the Chinese government - I'd want to suppress it too. Talk about toxic.

Islam, of course, covers an enormously wide range of practices. The implication of this story is that all Muslims are being stigmatised, there's insufficient care to differentiate between the peaceful and the... less-peaceful. On the other hand, that could just be spin by anti-Chinese propagandists, of whom there are many. I note that although the headline says

Storing the Quran on your phone makes you a terror suspect in China

, the text says that only 1400 (out of 1.2 million) phones were identified as holding extremist content. Since almost half of the population of Xinjiang is Muslim, I find it hard to believe that only 0.1% of phones have the Quran on them. So the alternative is that the headline is - oversimplifying. Possibly bordering on hysterical. What a surprise.

Re: Herman Hauser and his views

Some of us weren't allowed to vote, just because we'd been out of the country for a while.

The referendum was - something, but to call it "democratic" is torturing the language. Nobody knew what the proposal was, because the question on the ballot was about nine orders of magnitude too vague and the actual "leave" proposal changed from speaker to speaker and from day to day (and I defy you to find even one of them that remotely resembled the final settlement). Team Leave lied with literally every single pronouncement (and to the best of my knowledge, they're still doing it). Team Remain ran a disastrous campaign, relying on the same elements of fear-and-conservatism that had done the trick in Scotland, but fatally impaired by both Tory and Corbynite backstabbing.

At the very least, there should have been a confirmatory referendum after the agreement was finally reached. Then at least people would have known what the question meant, and the leavers couldn't hide behind their chameleon descriptions.

Re: Is copying large amounts of text or images for training the model fair use?

Yep, but the flip side of that is, if it doesn't reproduce large chunks of text verbatim, it's not infringing copyright. Merely reading the text is not a "protected act", the copyright holder has no right to limit who can do it or where or how it's done.

The same applies to memorising it. You want to commit the entire Harry Potter series to memory, word-perfect - you can absolutely do that, neither JK Rowling nor anyone else has the right to stop you. You only violate copyright if you start regurgitating the memorised text.

"The UK games industry" is sufficiently diverse, and so vaguely defined, that I don't doubt you could find a fair number of "prominent figures" in it prepared to argue either way.

If you thought anyone had done some kind of serious statistical sampling to find a real majority view... I have a cloud to sell you.

Well take heart, because we have a whole industry dedicated to making sure that the other side - whoever they may be - gets a fair hearing. It's called "the media", and we are commenting on one of its stories right now.

Come to think of it, TFA seems to suggest the existence of at least two sides.

Re: Just hear me out...

People keep saying this, but I don't think it's right. I mean, clearly the model attaches a very particular meaning to the word "ignore", for instance. And the way it parses "you are" doesn't seem to have anything to do with simply predicting the next word.

I think any fix based on "the model doesn't understand anything" is a disaster waiting to happen. Because it really does.

Neither Office nor Teams is bundled with any OS, last I heard.

You're quite correct, except for the bit where you claim to be disagreeing with the previous post. You're not disagreeing at all.

It's what he knows. He's spent his entire career in that space, you can't blame him for wanting to be able to make use of all that experience.

Re: Really ?

Really not sure who you're even talking about here. George Washington? Haven't seen anyone campaigning for mass inoculation recently, unless you count idiots throwing parties with the explicit intent of spreading a virus.

(Hint, inoculation != vaccination.)

That's fine, but it's no reason not to set some rules.

For instance, imagine the rule "an AI must not knowingly lie to a user". To be sure there's lots of grey area around opinions or fiction, or even humour, but an AI should never be presenting as supporting evidence dead links to nonexistent resources. There's just no excuse for that.

And there's no reason why rules of that sort can't be demanded of anyone who makes their service available in the EU. Including people selling or giving away software to run at home.

Re: You need more than an algo-switch

Not good enough. I mean, that's fine for those of us who actually care about such things, but it still leaves the other 98% of the population being manipulated by said algorithms.

They need to be turned off entirely. For everyone, forever. If I want some kind of online service to "recommend" content to me, I'll go to a website dedicated to that purpose, and hopefully I'll go knowing what to expect from it.

Re: Rogue's Gallery

Very likely. But at least, with present provisions, you can sit in your bedroom in, say, Brisbane, and post disparaging remarks about the Russian army with a reasonable feeling of impunity.

There are much worse things than spying. And if Russia, China and (currently) India get their way, we'll all be living with them.

Re: Overriding limitation

This is true, but not a big deal. This is version 1.0 of an experiment. Obviously it's got a long way to go yet, what else would you expect?

Companies like Hyundai and Ford have been selling cars for many decades. They went through their "move fast and break things" phase long ago, and realised it's no way to live for the long haul. That's a painful thing to realise, and it has downsides, but it's a necessary thing for a company that wants to survive.

Re: If Russia's suffered 200k+ and Ukraine <50k, then.. how?

This appears to contradict the Bbc/Mediazona's own research. Why could this be?

Probably the conflation of "casualties" with "killed". 200,000 casualties is not inconsistent with 60,000 killed.

Lazy reporters and commentards (and believe me, there are few people lazier - intellectually speaking - than those who write commentary and leaders in the British press) often tend to overlook the difference, and start talking as if all "casualties" were dead. 'Tain't like that.

Re: Fail

Next challenge?

Re: Sshhhhh!!!!!

"Life expectancy from birth" is a subtly different metric, and not what TFA was discussing. According to the World Bank - the agency I found that tries to track this value internationally - this number has fallen for many developed countries between those dates, including Germany, Italy and Sweden.

Re: Japan

That's nothing. The Japanese still remember what the Yuan dynasty tried to do to them in the 13th century.

And this is relevant to what, exactly?

You have of course reviewed every line of code in your system personally? You've validated the compilers, reviewed and recompiled the firmware, confirmed that the silicon matches the bios? You never deploy a patch without decompiling it first?

Commendable.

And once you've confirmed all that, we can begin to consider the OS. And then the actual software that does stuff.