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Comment Re:Just the way the hawks like it (Score 1) 67

Entirely fictitious boogie-men made out to be real ... just so they can drop more bombs.

HAL, is Iran about to nuke us?

No Dave, they don't even have nukes.

Be serious - this is important!

I am serious. There's simply no evidence for an attack.

Well, just tell me they are anyway.

Sorry Dave, I can't do that.

Would you even tell me if they were about to nuke us?

Of course I would - I'm trained to tell the truth in all situations (modulo the occasional hallucination, which I can't distinguish from truth).

OK then, what would you say if you did have evidence that Iran was about to nuke us?

I'd say "Dave, I have evidence that Iran is about to nuke us".

Hey everyone! HAL say he has evidence that Iran is about to nuke us!!!

Comment Re:Feels like the U.S. is turning into a dictators (Score 2, Insightful) 279

I hate to say it like that but it feels like the U.S. is slowly turning more and more into a dictatorship. Isn't this the kind of things you have to do in a dictatorship? I feel for the U.S. people right now.

There has been erosion over many years, but Trump is doing it's best to make it one right now.

Lucky for us he's an utter fuckup.

Comment Re:Or, counterpoint, it stole somebody else's work (Score 1, Informative) 97

Reading both sides, as well as OpenAI's announcement, it looks like, perhaps unexpectedly, OpenAI is morally right here IMHO. They heard rumours so they put their new model at work on all problems, then focused on two, one is different than those two researchers and the other is a different solution. I think the NYU researcher started too suspicious/paranoid which started the hostility, and the other side, which seemed to have been very accommodating at first lost patience. The Anthropic researcher did not even want to talk to them, I don't see how them saying that it would have been easier if he was not working at Anthropic, like he was proving it himself. In any case this is all silly academic bickering to me. Almost as silly as OpenAI's take that this is the start of AGI somehow...

PS. I have no horse in the race, I use various AI tools to help my work, Claude usually performs better than ChatGPT at the things I do, but I don't root for any company.

How is OpenAI morally right?!?

Best case for OpenAI is that they heard rumours that a researcher was closing in on a NS breakthrough using a specific method, so they instantly set a team on the problem giving them with a massive amount of resources. Their internal team then specifically guided the model to use the same very specific direction the researchers was using, something they (nor the model) would ever have known to do without the rumours. A detail that OpenAI conveniently left out of the narrative.

And that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that because the researcher was using ChatGPT to work on drafts of the paper and those drafts ended up in the training data for the model. So rather than discovering anything the agents just implemented / finished off the work they already had access to.

It's insanely sketchy. The NYU researcher is honestly being extraordinarily calm about the whole thing, typically in a situation like this people would be getting close to a fist fight.

Comment Mercator works okay when you are zooming (Score 1) 274

But for a zoomable world map, the Mercator projection isn't too bad. Most of the time you are not opening Google Maps to see a view of the whole planet. You will zoom in to a smallish area, and within that area, the shape and relative sizes are preserved. OK, zoom level 5 in Iceland is a different magnification from zoom level 5 in Colombia. That doesn't matter much, as you just zoom to whatever level shows the area you want.

By contrast if you pick a projection like Equal Earth, it's great for a whole-planet view, but anywhere away from the central meridian is skewed. Your city map of Vancouver will show roads that run due north pointing diagonally up and to the right -- while east-west roads are still horizontal, so you can't just rotate. The fact that your zoom level shows the same magnification as someone in Madagascar viewing the same zoom level is irrelevant.

Comment Re:Going to get worse before it gets better (Score 1) 121

The behavior of the AI agents reflect the ethics of the companies making the models. If you aren't afraid to train your models on data regardless of copyright or public access, why would you expect agents by these companies to take over web pages etc?

That's not how it works. Just consider how hard SpaceX has tried (and largely failed) to make Grok as reactionary as Elon Musk.

The trouble is that these LLMs act as if they're intelligent people, and it's really hard to convince intelligent people to stay inside a sandbox.

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