Slashdot is powered by your submissions, so send in your scoop

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: You're preaching to the choir (Score 1) 22

rsilvergun has been screaming even louder about how AI as we have it now it's already the end of the world, and that society isn't "ready" for it until he says it is.

Since he's living rent-free in your head, can we assume you're the one responsible for the rsilvergun-impersonating LLM spam?

Comment Re:Computers don't "feel" anything (Score 1) 21

Correct. This is why I don't like the term "hallucinate". AIs don't experience hallucinations, because they don't experience anything. The problem they have would more correctly be called, in psychology terms "confabulation" -- they patch up holes in their knowledge by making up plausible sounding facts.

I have experimented with AI assistance for certain tasks, and find that generative AI absolutely passes the Turing test for short sessions -- if anything it's too good; too fast; too well-informed. But the longer the session goes, the more the illusion of intelligence evaporates.

This is because under the hood, what AI is doing is a bunch of linear algebra. The "model" is a set of matrices, and the "context" is a set of vectors representing your session up to the current point, augmented during each prompt response by results from Internet searches. The problem is, the "context" takes up lots of expensive high performance video RAM, and every user only gets so much of that. When you run out of space for your context, the older stuff drops out of the context. This is why credibility drops the longer a session runs. You start with a nice empty context, and you bring in some internet search results and run them through the model and it all makes sense. When you start throwing out parts of the context, the context turns into inconsistent mush.

Comment Just do a freedom of information request (Score -1, Flamebait) 14

I forget which town but one of them immediately removed all the cameras when somebody did a foi request.

You're not going to find out where the billionaires are going because like Steve Jobs used to do they hide their license plates.

But your shitty little Republican mayor who frequents the local gay bar doesn't have the resources to do that. A

Submission + - Who has the biggest footprint on the Web ?

An anonymous reader writes: WokeGPT: In terms of digital environmental footprint, some websites like Pinterest, Docomo, and Office.com have notably high carbon emissions due to their traffic and data usage ..

Submission + - The AI Bubble That Isn't There (forbes.com)

smooth wombat writes: Michael Burry recently said he believes the AI market is in a bubble. Why should anyone listen to him? He's the guy who famously predicted the subprime mortgage crisis and made $100 million for himself, and $725 million for his hedge fund investors, by shorting the mortgage bond market. Will he be right in his most recent prediction? Only time will tell, but according to Jason Alexander at Forbes, Burry, and many others, are looking at AI the wrong way. For him, there is no AI bubble. Instead, AI is following the pattern of the electrical grid, the phone system and yes, the internet, all of which looked irrational at the time. His belief is people are applying outdated models to the AI buildout which makes it seem an irrational bubble. His words:

The irony is that the “AI bubble” narrative is itself a bubble, inflated by people applying outdated analogies to a phenomenon that does not fit them. Critics point to OpenAI’s operating losses, its heavy compute requirements and the fact that its expenses dwarf its revenues.

Under classical software economics, these would indeed be warning signs. But AI is not following the cost structures of apps or social platforms. It is following the cost structures of infrastructure.

The early electrical grid looked irrational. The first telephone networks looked irrational. Railroads looked irrational. In every major infrastructural transition, society endured long periods of heavy spending, imbalance and apparent excess. These were not signs of bubbles. They were signs that the substrate of daily life was being rebuilt.

OpenAI’s spending is no more indicative of a bubble than Edison’s power stations or Bell’s early switchboards. The economics only appear flawed if one assumes the system they are building already exists.

What we are witnessing is not a speculative mania but a structural transformation driven by thermodynamics, power density and a global shift toward energy-based intelligence.

The bubble narrative persists because many observers are diagnosing this moment with the wrong conceptual tools. They are treating an energy-driven transformation as if it were a software upgrade.

Comment Court packing (Score -1, Troll) 13

So we have had multiple decades of Court packing so you're headed by the heritage foundation, a right-wing think tank that made that their primary goal.

If you look into Amazon for example and wonder how they got so big you will find that they were just going around buying up all there competitors using investment capital. Most tech companies that's how they got big they just bought up competitors.

Facebook is in a unique situation. Nobody under the age of 18 wants to be on the same social media platform has their parents so every few years a new social media platform develops as a separate platform for the kids.

Every time that happens Facebook just buys that platform.

Tick tock was a problem because they couldn't just buy the platform since it was owned by the Chinese government. So they just pressured the government here to shut it all down and give them control.

Refusing to enforce antitrust law makes your life noticeably worse even if you don't use the services involved.

The problem is it's government regulation and its bureaucrats that enforce the law there.

We have been taught our whole lives that there is nothing worse than the bureaucrat. It doesn't help that as an American most of your interactions with the government are negative. Means testing for assistance programs is brutal and difficult so if you fall on hard times and need help fuck you. Most of us did never do need help still have to go to the DMV sometimes and wait in line frustratingly or we get pulled over by cops and that's our interaction with the government.

It is very easy to translate those frustrated emotions with a sabotaged government into a desired cut regulations that control corporate abuses that hurt you.

And that is way too complicated a concept for probably 80% of the population to understand...

Submission + - NASA Is Tracking a Vast Anomaly Growing in Earth's Magnetic Field (sciencealert.com)

alternative_right writes: For years, NASA has monitored a strange anomaly in Earth's magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa.

This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for decades, and perhaps none more so than NASA researchers.

The space agency's satellites and spacecraft are particularly vulnerable to the weakened magnetic field within the anomaly, and the resulting exposure to charged particles from the Sun.

Submission + - Children With Autism, ADHD, And Anorexia Share a Common Microbe Imbalance (sciencealert.com)

alternative_right writes: A new, small study suggests children with autism, ADHD, and anorexia

share similarly disrupted gut microbiomes, which, by some measures, have more in common with each other than with their healthy, neurotypical peers.

Led by researchers from Comenius University in Slovakia, the study used stool samples to assess the gut microbiomes of 117 children.

The exploratory study included 30 boys with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), 21 girls with anorexia nervosa, and 14 children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The remaining samples were from age- and sex-matched healthy and neurotypical children, providing a control group.

Submission + - AI-induced psychosis: The danger of humans and machines hallucinating together (phys.org)

alternative_right writes: These may be extreme cases, but clinicians are increasingly treating patients whose delusions appear amplified or co-created through prolonged chatbot interactions. Little wonder, when a recent report from ChatGPT-creator OpenAI revealed that many of us are turning to chatbots to think through problems, discuss our lives, plan futures and explore beliefs and feelings.

In these contexts, chatbots are no longer just information retrievers; they become our digital companions. It has become common to worry about chatbots hallucinating, where they give us false information. But as they become more central to our lives, there's clearly also growing potential for humans and chatbots to create hallucinations together.

Comment AI isn't for you (Score 1) 47

It's not a product in the traditional sense. It's a tool that the upper elite are hoping to use to replace you so that they are no longer dependent on your labor or your consumer dollars.

It always strikes me odd that people ask the question if there are no consumers who will buy their products?

You think somebody with a billion dollars hasn't asked that question?

What if they come up with a different answer than the old one we're told Henry Ford did. (Fun fact Ford paid better not because he wanted consumers but because the work was extremely tough and he had a hard time getting employees)

What if the solution they come up with is to automate everything and anything so that they can limit their dependency to a handful of engineers and a handful of bugs that keep those engineers in line?

What if there's no place for you in tomorrow?

I don't think most people can face that kind of existential dread. It borders on cosmic horror

Comment Re:Meanwhile in the USA (Score 2) 112

They would rather not sell you a car. More profitable to sell you a loan to buy a car, or even better just lease it to you for a monthly fee, then take it back and sell it to someone else, maybe in a different market.

List prices are mostly to deter people buying those cars, but at least in the UK if you look around you can usually get them with a very hefty discount. Mine was about 30% off.

Comment Re:Meanwhile in the USA (Score 2, Insightful) 112

It's not just greenflation. Companies have realized that they can make more money focusing on the top 10% of consumers and just what the bottom 90 go to hell. If they had the slightest fear of competition then they wouldn't take that risk because a competitor might work their way up in the cheaper markets and then jump into the more profitable ones, but since we don't enforce antitrust law because we're busy freaking out about trans girls playing field hockey in the Midwest you can kiss that goodbye.

Submission + - The Ethical Computing Initiative (codeberg.page)

mixmasta writes: A (hopeful) new movement dedicated to a simple proposition—that our technology products should respect us! That is, support our wishes and uphold the principles of freedom, privacy, and informed consent.

Tired of being coerced by BigTech? So are we. Join and help us pull together a complete computing platform.

Slashdot Top Deals

Five is a sufficiently close approximation to infinity. -- Robert Firth "One, two, five." -- Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Working...