Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:VERY sloppy (Score 1) 23

I'm pretty sure vibe coding is going to create any number of new vulnerabilities, but it's not quite clear to me from the summary what was the role of AI in this case. Was the vulnerability found in code developed by AI or was it found by AI in code developed in an unspecified manner?

Both of those issues are concerning, on different time scales. On a medium to long term, I expect we'll be flooded with vibe-developed apps, with all kinds of issues. The second issue is more concerning for the short term. I'm sure there are lots of undiscovered vulnerabilities in all kinds of software (as we have seen only last weeks, with the exploits in almost all Linux distributions). Lately attackers have started to use AI successfully in finding previously unknown vulnerabilities. This makes attackers more effective, as it will take some time until those avenues of attack get patched.

Comment Re:Damn, I'm old (Score 1) 80

Child, I had a Cyrix math co-processor for my 286 computer.

Damn youngsters with their PC ATs, grumble, grumble...

I had a good old XT, with a CGA green monochrome monitor, chock full with 640k of RAM (which, let me tell you, was sufficient for everybody!) and an enormous 20MB hard disk, so big the OS couldn't even conceive such a thing can exist - so I had to split it in a 4MB partition and a 16 Mb one!

You haven't had fun until you played "The Secret of Monkey Island" on a 320 x 200 pixels screen in 4 shades of green, with PC beep sounds.

Comment Re:What I don't like about Dawkins (Score 1) 386

The program is still deterministic - the output is determined *entirely* and deterministically by the input. (Where the input is the set of the prompt, the sequence of numbers returned by the calls for random(), and the LLM data model itself.)

Your "mistake", if we want to call it that, is treating the random() function as an innate quality of the LLM. It isn't it is simply part of the input.

Provide the the system with the same model, the same prompt, and the same sequence of numbers, and you WILL get the same answer, regardless of how complex the question is, or who asks it.

Comment Re:What I don't like about Dawkins (Score 1) 386

You absolutely can though. There is nothing stopping you from seeding the run with a single LLM, or even substituting the function definition for random() with:

random() { // determined by fair dice roll
        return 5;
}

We can trivially and easily do this.

And further, it seems you are now suggesting that substituting the above random function for this one:

random() { //
    input = ask-user-for-fair-dice-roll();
    return input;
}

and now you sit there rolling dice and inputing the results, and the computer program gains consciousness?

really?

Comment Re:What I don't like about Dawkins (Score 3, Interesting) 386

The difference, of course, is that we currently DO actually know EXACTLY how an LLM works. We can snapshot the model and seed the random number generator to make it generate exactly the same output from exactly the same input every single time. We can pause it, set breakpoints, inspect and dump data structures.

It IS simply a program running on a CPU, and using RAM.

Is it possible that's all humans are in the end? Sure its possible, I can't prove otherwise. But we are not remotely in a position to assert that its the case.

You invoke philosophy which is entirely appropriate. There are fairy tales for example of artists painting things so realistic that they come to life. And it poses an interesting question here: is there is a difference between a simulation and a real thing? Can a simulation of life, be "alive"? Or must it forever remain a simulation.

And a related, and perhaps ultimately simpler question is can a *turing machine simulation of life* be "alive".

A lovely illustration of the question:
https://xkcd.com/505/

Can what you and I perceive as our lives, the universe around us, and everything REALLY be underpinned by some guy in a desert pushing pebbles around in a big desert somewhere?

Can the arrangement of stones in a desert, and some guy updating moving them aorund, in some pattern he interprets as representing the information that describes our universe actually "BE" our universe?

Is is the pattern of rocks is JUST a pattern of rocks. Is the guy moving them around JUST moving them around. Is the interpretation of the pattern as a representation of the state of a universe, just that, a representation?

Or you truly think there is a galaxy with a planet with people on it having a conversation on slashdot,'frozen in time' waiting for some guy to move the rocks into the next pattern and that somehow results in the experience we are sharing right now?

Or put more succinctly - can an abstract representation of a thing be the thing? be it bits in a DRAM module memory or pebbles arranged in the sand? can it be the thing it represents? Can the painting of a zebra if its done skilfully enough be a zebra?

Comment Re:What I don't like about Dawkins (Score 4, Insightful) 386

The parent poster acknowledges this, they are saying the randomization is *introduced artificially*.

The same as any dice rolling app. All you have to do is seed the pseudorandom number generator the same for each run, and it will roll the same dice, in the same order, every time.

Likewise, if it wants to spit out the next word/phrase and 2 of them have 33% probability, and two have 17% ...

Then if you seed the random number generator with the same seed for every instance / run, you'll get the same output from the same input on the same model.

The system is entirely determininistic. The same as any other software, from the ghosts in pacman to the bots in quake arena, to a chess engine. We introduce "randomness" to make it more enjoyable, but its pseudorandomness, that we artificially insert. We could just as easily seed the random number generator the same way every time, and then it would do the exact same thing every time. None of these are actually thinking and making decisions.

Comment Re:Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Score 2) 50

Actually one should have read it, or not?

Its a mere 200 pages, and its the inspriration for "Blade Runner". Yeah, its worth reading.

Reading Philip K Dick for the prose itself is pretty much missing the point. The themes, ideas, and questions it poses are generally worth the effort.

The movie adaptations are hit and miss. Blade Runner I think was well done (not just as a movie on its own, but as an adaptation of the book)

The Minority Report movie adaptation on the other hand shits the bed so hard its painful to watch.

Comment That's all she wrote... (Score 2) 135

The end state probably isn't any single technology defeating state censorship. It's the cumulative weight of microSDs, Starlink terminals, VPNs, mesh radios, and eventual low-cost cubesats making comprehensive control economically and logistically unsustainable. The cost of enforcement keeps rising; the cost of circumvention keeps falling. That's a losing trajectory for the censors.

Comment Re:A missed opportunity (Score 1) 29

It wouldn't now. I agree. But I think Sam deserves some.. Credit for this current AI cycle. He was the one bold enough to unlesh LLM's and market them to the masses. Google was too timid to do it. Ironically, Open Ai was supposed to prevent this from happening. But Sam is Sam, asking him to show restraint is cuckoo bonkers, its like asking Epstein to start a preteen modeling agency so they don't get trafficked. It would take some one stupid as Musk to put him in charge.

Comment Re:Do dragons count? (Score 1) 44

AI isn't ready until it blames previous developers with an appropriate amount of profanity, before resolving in self loathing and self destructive alcoholism

# fuck this shit, fucking lscagg, fuck my life its fucking miller time, actually fuck it. inviting my friends johnny, jim and jack over , fucking three wise men are needed to wipe this fucking shit from my brain

Comment Re:just build housing (Score 0) 199

No, we don't actually need housing. It's a stinking lie that is perpetuated by Democrats.

We have 1.1 units of housing per family right now. And we're near the absolute record on per-capita housing. Don't believe me?

What we need are _jobs_ that are not concentrated in the Misery Centrals (aka downtowns of select large cities).

Slashdot Top Deals

"I've seen the forgeries I've sent out." -- John F. Haugh II (jfh@rpp386.Dallas.TX.US), about forging net news articles

Working...