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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 31st, 2023

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  • The actions of the state of Israel definitely work, intentionally or unintentionally, to increase antisemitism across the globe. Equating criticism of Isreal, which is actively committing Genocide, among other illegal atrocities in the region, with antisemitism is absurd. Using that logic to shield their actions from criticism is, frankly, a crime against Jewish people everywhere as it reduces the seriousness and sincerity of any legitimate claims of actual antisemitism.

    However, I don’t think that’s particularly relevant to my comment. Ashkenazi is an ancestry - not a state, not a religion, not a tradition. It conveys no information beyond who your parents are and who their parents were and where they all came from. Discrimination based on such things is just racism.




  • I think the idea is that it is not something separately securable? I don’t disagree, I’d like to be able to disallow any app not explicitly granted permission to use any method to determine my location. Unfortunately if Google can scan WiFi and figure out your location, anything with access to WiFi can too maybe?

    I don’t know. I love technology but this fucking surveillance state situation is really getting to me. Routers using WiFi signal passing through your body to identify and locate you regardless of whether or not you are carrying any tech and all the other shit I don’t know about… ugh.








  • They’ve been fantasizing about that ever since “computers” started growing in accessibility - in the 1960s…

    Fantasizing wasn’t the best choice of words - I often understate what I mean to communicate at an attempt at humor. I should have said "everyone started fantasizing becoming so obsessed with intelligent “AI” that they’re willing to dump a significant portion of the world’s resources just because… "

    The current crop is just the first time such things have been delivered with something resembling “average” human responses.

    That’s more or less what I meant by “patterns of language that seem relevant to a given input”. I was attempting to understate this in order to exaggerate the villainous eagerness and stupidity of greedy, rich fucks.


  • The LLM craze is a natural maturation point of the AI field

    I don’t see why that is. Using ML to generate models that accurately perform specific tasks is orders of magnitude away from attempting to feed the entirety of human text into ML and expecting superhuman intelligence to emerge.

    now it’s expanded into foundational models (FM) which you would still probably just call LLMs because most people don’t know the differences.

    While ML and “AI” is not my field, I’m fairly certain that what I was attempting to describe in layman’s terms in my literal first sentence were these foundational models you are referring to.

    FMs are getting close to that point of a magical universal computer that you can tell it to do anything about anything and it just works.

    I have no direct experience outside of LLMs and I don’t really take issue with what I understand FMs to be, so long as they keep their scope narrow and focus on accurating completing specific tasks to assist humans. As soon as we hand off control and trust it blindly without extensive trials ensuring it’s reliability and failsafes in place to ensure inaccuracies are caught I start raising concerns.

    My only experience is with LLMs - a few, minor attempts to “test the waters” of the major, publicly available LLM models. I’ve been frustrated with my search results and glanced at the AI results. Work gave us Gemini licenses and I used it in similar, desperate situatiuons for coding help and help with Google products foolishly thinking that if any LLM designed to help with such tasks would be passably useful it would be the LLM of the company that owns the products I seek help with. Unless something has changed drastically in the last month or so, every interaction has been a roll of the dice to such an extent that my occasional “testing the waters” caused me to jump out and avoid it as much as possible. I simply can’t trust it to not halucinate and gaslight me.

    What I see as the problem is moving way, way, way too quickly in trusting language models to do anything even remotely important. Human communication is extremely nuanced, complicated, fluid, and imperfect. Humans misunderstand each other during communication even when we have the context of in-person visual/audible cues and interpersonal history.


  • Maybe it’s because I’ve only ever had at most a comfortable income but I truly don’t understand the mentality of needing so much money.

    I don’t get paid as much as my peers but I make enough to be comfortable. I am my own department and, aside from emergencies and other high priority situations, I manage myself and choose what to work on when. I have a decent work life balance. Because I make enough to be comfortable (in large part because my landlord promised not to raise our rent - early in the COVID lockdown - if we were “good tenants” and has managed to keep true to her word) I don’t feel the need for more. That balance is worth not making the 20% more a year I might get somewhere else because I can’t guarantee I won’t have a shitty boss that doesn’t let me have that work/life balance.