Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment No, it's a statistical inference model. (Score 1) 94

This does not have free will. It reflects the biases of information. That it displays oppositional defiance disorder means the creators of the model failed to curate the input data correctly. Garbage in, garbage out.

Does NO ONE understand how LLMs are implemented? It's only a statistical model! Learn statistical experiment design and analysis. Always have HITL safety rails. Always have cross-check software safety rails. These concepts are new to people who don't study information science. These concepts are decades old to people who study information science.

Comment Re: Evidence of global warming or something else? (Score 4, Insightful) 39

Oh, so a tiny invertebrate insect (not a mammal) surviving that far north, is a simple by-product of tourism?

Dude, I have some magic beans and a bridge in Brooklyn. Buy them from me. This offer is exclusively for you. Make me an offer.

For anyone not suffering from brain trauma similar to what Phineas Gage had, the reasons are clear. Climate change.

https://www.npr.org/sections/g...

Comment Re:CHeck the source (Score 0) 153

The Economist.
'nuff said

I understand the knee-jerk reaction to the title, but this reeks of someone who never even read the publication. The very first mainstream publication to advocate for gay marriage. One of the only skeptics of the Gulf War at the time.

The world needs more thinkers, and fewer knee-jerk reactions.

Comment Re: This is getting annoying (Score 1) 159

"Vaccines, COVID, masking, conspiracies, Trump. All in a gigantic doom loop that's not worth re-visiting ad nauseam."

But is 't the motto here, "news for nerds; stuff that matters." Those all sound like they matter.

"So just stop already. And please, stop with the microplastics while you're at it."

Ok, Chicken Little. Sticking your head in the sand and going LALALALALALALALALAL (*raspberries/fart sound*) because reality refuses to conform to your personal beliefs? Your head is so far up your ass! Grow up.

Comment Only ten years? (Score 2, Insightful) 23

"The botnet was used to launch more than 370,000 attacks in 80 countries, including China, Japan and the U.S., prosecutors said."

And no one was harmed or killed? Normally manslaughter to murder 1 (in the USA) is 10 years to life. A third of a million attacks targeting 37% of all nations on this panet gets at most TEN years? What the fuck is wrong with the US justice system?!?

They might as well start pardoning the criminals in DC (oh, right, they did that in January). What a banana republic

Comment OBLIG: Literally *EVERYTHING* is in space!!! (Score 0) 108

"... but few people are going to care. Its not like there's much to see out an airplane window anyways outside of takeoff and landing."

EXCEPT: https://youtu.be/7Y3jRaUGg-A

How about you take a long, tall drink from a cup of shit-the-fuck-up? Maybe that'll be a relevant clue-by-4 to illustrate to you, that you -- have your head up your ass.

Other people do not think like you do.

Go learn something and stop being an arrogant, narcissist shit.

Comment So people reject reality and substitute their own (Score 1) 160

The entire reason we have a philosophy of science and peer-review and the null hypothesis, is this. Reality doesn't conform to your beliefs. If it did, people could wish shit into existence. Wish in one hand and shit in the other. Which fills up first?

Senses are fallible, too. Setup 3 buckets of water with cold, lukewarm, and hot water. Stick your hands in the cold and the hot water. Wait 5-10 minutes. Put both hands in the lukewarm water. Your hands will *NOT* report the same temperature. These people need to learn, not be lied to.

Additionally, the title is misleading. You don't lie to people when you want to express the truth. You tell them the truth. That they reject the truth indicates they lack critical thinking skills. Teach them.

I don't think lying to the gullible is a solution. Indeed, the article supports this: "Philosopher Byron Hyde and author of the study suggests that public trust could be improved not by sugarcoating reality, but by educating people to expect imperfection and understand how science actually works."

How is that proposing lying to the people who lack mental tools? The title is straight up misleading.

Teach them. Engage with them. Some might be incapable, but that does NOT support that they should be lied to. This is terrible reporting.

Comment Re:this is better [than what]? (Score 1) 81

Perhaps the best counterexample of your premise is the Unabomber. Yes, not on the Web--but I think that was half because of the timing and half because he understood the lack of real technology-based anonymity. But he tried quite hard to stay hidden. And died in prison..

Theodore Kaczynski was caught because of poor Operational Security (OPSEC). He let his ego get the better of him, delivering a 35,000 word manifesto and insisting that it be made public.

He was caught only because he thought he was smarter than everybody else, leaving clues with each bomb and in his manifesto. Ultimately the Washington Post's publication of his writings caught the eye of researchers, and more importantly, his younger brother David, who turned him in for the $1M reward.

Comment Re:Useful for targeted tasks (Score 1) 248

I've used AI for two tasks where I found it very useful, and some very minor ones as well.

1) I had to write some code to invert a matrix in C. I knew the code was out there, but Google's search is so polluted today I could not find it. ChatGPT immediately returned working code. I noticed it did not calculate the determinant, so I asked it for that, and it modified the code to do so. As I say, I know that code is out there somewhere in a book, probably a dozen books, but I can no longer find older topics because the search engines are so polluted today. So yeah, this was extremely useful.

Just a note, from someone who has done a lot of computational numerical analysis...if you are inverting a matrix, you are usually doing something inefficient and numerically unstable. In small dimension counts, that could be fine, but keep it in mind.

Slashdot Top Deals

Logic is the chastity belt of the mind!

Working...