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  Regarding this: https://social.vivaldi.net/users/lproven/statuses/117087977477686112 Putting aside "The Point Prover Has Entered The Chat" aspect of this response, if we are serious about whether or not people can fluently differentiate LLM text from human-written text, we're not going to understand how or whether we can do it if our basis is a series of KPIs like # of languages we speak, education level we've attained, this or that credential, and so on.(1) None of those thin...

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  We saw three lynxes bobcats on the property today. A mama and two kittens, it seems. Edit: A biologist informed us these were almost surely bobcats, not lynxes, based on the pictures we took. Still, quite lovely. #maine #lynx #lynxes #wildlife #bobcat

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  Processed some apples today. We've already had a bunch drop. I made about a quart of applesauce and roughly the same amount of cider. I'm experimenting with fruit pectin this year, which I haven't tried making before. Judging by the fruit still on the trees we'll get ~3x more maybe. Not bad given that I do this opportunistically (as opposed to systematically cultivating an orchard). #maine #autumn #fall

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  Pro AI tip: yes, they are using all of your user data and will store and use it forever. The primary function of the apps is to collect that data and subsequently claim ownership over your thoughts and ideas. "AGI" is not an algorithm. It is human thought and ideation decoupled from the individual and decontextualized. It is a Mechanical Turk with a long enough chain of digital intermediaries that perception of the intrinsic humanity in its operation is obscured. #AGI #AI #GenAI #Gen...

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  Pro AI tip: yes, they are using all of your user data and will store and use it forever. The primary function of the apps is to collect that data and subsequently claim ownership over your thoughts and ideas. "AGI" is not an algorithm. It is human thought and ideation decoupled from the individual and decontextualized. It is a Mechanical Turk with a long enough chain of digital intermediaries that perception of the intrinsic humanity in its operation is obscured. #AGI #AI #GenAI #Gen...

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  Re: https://circumstances.run/users/davidgerard/statuses/117259736641848841 I think the language "it will fall" is telling. AI is laying siege to your silly little math and computer science problems. Once it's done it'll move on and ________. It's fascinating that there are people who think like this about a computer program. #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs

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  A sector that reaches for small world solutions to large world problems would tend to generate large world problems, along the way spitting out doomsayers dimly aware of the contradiction but unable to articulate it in part because they do not comprehend their own techniques. P(doom) is what someone invested in small world thinking comes to when they can't face that small world thinking will always be small, the "doom" being the horizon they struggle to see beyond. Apparently Jacob...

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  It is remarkable to me that you cannot directly copy-paste the text of an error message out of the Chrome web console. The advice I find about copying the "object" to a global variable and then stringifying, or variants of this, are insane. The web runs on text. The console is displaying text on my screen, which means the "object" was already converted to text. This is gratuitous bureaucracy. I have to fill out the appropriate form to access text I can see with eyes. Maybe I...

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  Re: https://lipn.info/@mevenlennonbertrand/116997917683191056 To riff on this a bit from a very different field at a very different scale, as a pretext to share an anecdote: When I was a graduate student I spent a fair amount of time (an embarrassing amount of time) trying to get a computer to learn how to play Tic-Tac-Toe (naughts and crosses) by self play, given minimal help. Why? Because it turns out to be significantly harder than you might think based on the simplicity of the game...

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  Amy sufficiently advanced book scanning project is indistinguishable from book burning https://mstdn.ca/@dbattistella/117004005387778336 #AI #GenAI #Anthropic #books #BookBurning

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  Re: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/116961677110890384 I've taken part in numerous computer science research projects that involved IRB review. I believe the system can work, even for cases like the above post. But Google and Stanford are bad actors that are taken at their word, and no system, IRB based or otherwise, is going to function properly if it cannot appropriately metabolize this reality. I was once in a meeting where a Google X person gushed about a project that used smart...

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  Re: https://social.freebitcoin.gay/users/drew/statuses/01KY7HAXB9R8BZ60CXWB3P2B7Y I think the most important question is: why does anyone comply with what one incurious, self-centered, and self-important man, Linus Torvalds, says? Why is that most important? Because Linux does not belong to Linus Torvalds. It belongs to the world. Torvalds only gets to dictate if the people who are best-positioned to take that power from him fail to do so. From where I sit (as an outsider), he should have been...

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  A lone quintillionaire cannot enjoy the outputs of the fully automated luxury capitalism machine if there is no surrounding human world to luxuriate in.

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  I think I earned some kind of dad achievement today by twisting my beard up in a screwdriver trying to take the doorknob off my son's bedroom door, which he locked from the inside and for which we had no key

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  The USA is engaged in a war of choice to defeat itself. It certainly is a special moment. https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/midweek-update-20-each-day-the-us #USPol #USWar #TrumpWar #US #Iran #geopolitics

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  It's interesting (*) to me how sex robot/sex chatbot vendors pivot to classrooms and students in a climate where the so-called grownups in the room are regularly screaming about CSAM and introducing all manner of surveillance in response. Replikka: https://theluddite.org/post/replika.htmlRealDoll: https://neuromatch.social/users/jonny/statuses/116939614764592845 (and the links)#AI #education #SexBots #SexDolls (*) I'm using "interesting" as a tepid stand-in for a mix of emot...

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  @Arindam@universeodon.com This says little-to-nothing about the "ongoing energy disruption this is causing and what the likely effects will be", nor about the absence of public dialog about it, which were the topics of my post.

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  Yellow-orange skies from Canadian wildfire smoke, ever-worsening news about federal agents murdering an innocent person for no discernible reason, and the US continuing along its "war crimes as policy" trajectory. The Dystopia Index is high in Maine today. #maine #dystopia #USPol #MEPol #ClimateChange #wildfires

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  @yoginho@spore.social Seems to be right up your alley, if you haven't come across it already: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262053617/towards-a-biosemiotic-theoretical-biology/

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  Re: https://infosec.exchange/users/lcamtuf/statuses/116901998490591428 I don't find it surprising that people send LLM-generated docs, publish LLM-generated blog posts, etc. Writing is a chore and there's this big button labeled "get it done". Writing can be many things, but a chore? That's not something I entirely understand. I don't mean to sound like I'm hollering at this single point from this person's post, but it's a sentiment I've seen expressed b...

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  Billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham on SpaceX and AI: "we should wish that it’s hype, because if it’s not, it’s a lot worse." From https://global.morningstar.com/en-gb/stocks/jeremy-grantham-spacex-it-will-be-amazing-if-it-doesnt-collapse #AI #SpaceX #hype #billionaires #economy #finance #investors

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  Only a mind so subdued by slop and propaganda and advertising, a mind unpracticed in observation and inquiry and imagination—only such a mind could be complacent as its pockets are picked to fund that most terrible of horrors. Into the Gap

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  It's like having a second brain. #fungus #LeafyBrain

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  @soletan@brandenburg.social @christineburns This is not a "plan", it's carnival barking.

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  Re: https://social.wildeboer.net/users/jwildeboer/statuses/116860157329810170 I realize this is beside the point, but personally I view the fact that code review is not considered interesting as a serious failure of computer science education. I'm invested in the latter, so it stands out for me. On the whole writers tend to love to read. I think they love it in part because their education led them to realize that learning to read well is both a good in itself and helps you become a better...

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  A bit of a rant: the US culture wars have made it difficult to find reasonable, helpful parenting advice online. #US #USPol #CultureWar #parenting

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  @celenity@infosec.exchange Mozilla’s “generative AI” features haven’t really made their way to Android You would clearly know better than I would, but are you certain of this? I have IronFox 146.0 on my phone and extensions.ml.enable is set to true; I didn't touch it so I assume this is the default setting. This is one of the settings that controls the Firefox AI Runtime, which as I understand it allows one to run transformers (generative AI) locally.

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  My wife has a new article in The Conversation honoring women's power from her perspective as a classicist in time for Mother's Day. From ancient goddesses to modern peace activists − Mother’s Day celebrates women’s political power On Mother’s Day, Americans go all out with gift-buying and dining out to honor the women in their lives. In fact, according to some estimates, consumer spending in the United States on this day is around US$34 billion. This consumerist emphasis has long been...

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  Re: https://better.boston/users/athorn/statuses/116539002124892696 This is good news. ShotSpotter doesn't work, and functions to launder racism. Somehow the spotters are always installed in, and the "shots" are always "detected" in, certain kinds of neighborhoods, and you can probably guess which ones. I worked in Cambridge for many years, and more than once a police officer showed up at my place of work to demand security camera footage from us because ShotSpotter had...

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  Technology demands that the world be a subset of itself.