Yeah, but other than that, what has Elon Musk ever done for us?

To add to the parent post, the paper appears to be the first step in the scientific method: "Notice a trend".

The next steps will be "form a hypothesis", "construct a test to confirm or deny the hypothesis", "perform the test"... and so on.

In this specific case, "perform the test" might be impossible to do for ethical reasons - you can't take people at random and sit them down in front of a LLM and test their level of psychosis before and after, because of that pesky "do no harm" rule.

But we might be able to find people who have had their psychosis levels measured before LLMs became available, and whose LLM accounts will accurately show how much LLM usage they have, and we can then remeasure their levels of psychosis and see if this correlates with LLM account usage.

Or some other test like that.

The paper appears to be an attempt to raise the issue and start a conversation. From the abstract:

From the parent post:

I'm also heavily influenced by TV, and have spent a lot of time trying to sort out beliefs that come from TV from beliefs that come from experience or research.

I'm constantly presented with a situation or belief and have to pause to reflect and say "I believe that because it was on TV, it's probably not real". Many of my opinions on the police, government agencies, other countries, world events, and social constructs come not from experience, but on how they were portrayed on TV.

We're hard-wired to believe what people tell us, it's a cognitive shortcut in an environment where you can't know anything, but lots and lots of what we think today are only dramatic choices intended to provoke emotional response. (Compare with news reporting today. On both sides.)

For example, I've met people who won't go hiking because of all the bugs, skunks, poison ivy, and bears.

Assuming that LLMs are content neutral, I think in 10 years or so we're going to find people whose worldview is a greatly amplified version of random events that were highlighted when they were kids.

LLAMA was [illegally] released into the public three years ago (to the day - March 3, 2023), and it's estimated that ten years of AI improvements happened in the subsequent 6 months. People were doing all sorts of things with LLMs that meta hadn't thought of, or didn't have time to develop. Such as text-to-audio, local LLM use, and automated manuscript generation.

All these attempts at monetizing the LLMs are, at the same time, holding back the progress of AI development. If OpenAI wants to leap ahead of the competition, they should put their language model online and see what the community comes up with.

I get it - training a LLM takes roughly $100 million for the initial dataset, and companies need to recoup this expense.

Still, I'm saddened that I can only use the system for purposes that the company approves of, and in ways that they have already thought of.

There's a lot of potential there, and we're not making good use of that.

Yes, because those are totally a real thing.

You are not telling the whole story here.

I'm currently in the middle of a $15,000 purchase dispute with a Chinese vendor (for a CNC system). The device arrived non-functional, the merchant's customer service is wildly non-useful and time consuming, and after 3 months of dikking around I've decided to send it back.

I have clear E-mail evidence from the merchant acknowledging the problem, the CC company yanked back the payment and is forcing the merchant to issue an RMA for the device.

The credit card company isn't on my side, nor are they on the side of the merchant - they are on the side of honest transactions, and they police those transactions for me.

Twice I've had my CC info stolen at a restaurant(*), the CC company detected fradulent purchases, and issued me a new card. A couple of times they incorrectly detected fraud, and a quick phone call sorted that out.

All of this is value added to using a credit card.

It's not *just* rent seeking on transactions, it's also providing a service: "peace of mind" in your purchases.

If anyone is interested, ask ChatGPT about the Fair Credit Reporting Act as regards to dispute resolution. If you receive a defective product, you have 60 days from the statement (not the purchase, but the statement) to initiate a dispute, and there are several "states" the dispute can be in, such as "vendor is working with the customer to resolve the issue".

It's not just rent seeking, the extra 5% CC fee for the purchase is for "peace of mind".

(*) Don't let the CC out of your sight. If the waitress takes the CC away from your table, she can easily write down the number and security code before bringing it back.

I was surprised to discover that you can purchase a 30TB hard drive for about half a grand.

That's 30,000 gigabytes, or about 30,000 hours of recorded video. How much of a person's life could be recorded on this?

There's about 8800 hours in a year, but you're asleep for 1/3 of that so call it 6000 hours. You can get 5 years of continuous video of your life on a device the size of a paperback book. If you can compress the video of your mundane activities, such as driving to/from work or waiting in line, only record single frames every second during these times, or do lower resolution during those times with key frames at higher resolution, you might get away with 4,000 hours of continuous video in a year. Probably less.

So this new disk could conceivable make a continuous record of 30 years of someones' life - all the interactions, all the people, all the information you see, all the places you've been.

(And probably more, probably more like 50 years. And if cloud storage is easily available everywhere, you wouldn't even need the appliance on you.)

This will inevitably lead to some interesting social changes.

For example, 50 Years of video using an AI assistant to search through and answer your questions (have I met that person before?) would be quite useful.

Also, the AI could train itself on your video and behaviour. The AI could then simulate you once you're gone.

Lots of possibilities here...

I think what we need is (a conceptual model of) two modes of personal knowledge.

One mode is your personal area of expertise. You could be a web app programmer, or biomedical researcher, or welder, or plumber, or whatever. You have all the knowledge you need to participate in your field without help.

The other side is "everything else". You use AI to get you by the tasks you need to accomplish, because it's too difficult or onerous to go and read the documentation for everything.

For example, just yesterday I wanted to convert an existing laptop windows partition into a VM to run on my office computer under VirtualBox. It took 12 hours of back-and-forth with ChatGPT, and I understood most of the actions at every step, but I could not have recited the steps needed. It's all sdisk and VboxManage and ntfsclone commands that I didn't know existed, but that made sense in context. I didn't know how to do it, but I knew how to describe what needed to be done, and I knew how to sanity check the steps.

For the two modes, perhaps we need an oral exam for each student to verify that they actually know their area of expertise. Or something similar: a proctored exam in a secure location, for example.

If the student shows competence in their area of expertise, then the education system can simply ignore everything else and let the student use AI as much as they want.

Just a thought. File under "changes in culture brought about by AI".

According to the developer, WMI is required for their licensing system.

It sucks, really. Before I bought hardware I surveyed the available software packages, LightBurn was best in class and they supported linux.

About a year later, they dropped linux support.

Does it handle Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI)?

Anyone know?

(I use LightBurn for some laser cutters. It only runs on Windows and there's no viable substitute. Wine fails because it didn't handle WMI)

One of my favorite lines of all time comes from that movie:

"Sometimes, you just can't get rid of a bomb!"

Here's a video of China's greening efforts.

If China keeps on the way it's been going, eventually the whole country will be green!

A simpler explanation would be that he's not a fascist.

CPB might have been useful 50 years ago, but with today's technology and access you can find all sorts of really good educational videos online.

And with the online stuff you can choose to avoid the ones that are politically biased.

Or seek them out. Both kinds are available in the new media.

Some years ago I took the NH tax burden and compared it to CA and tried to come up with an explanation. NH has no income tax or sales tax, most of its revenue comes from business taxes. NH property taxes fund local, not state, budgets.

I couldn't figure out why the numbers were so different. I've just now redone that calculation, and here's the results:

NH spends $5640 per person on state services, CA spends $12,500. More than double.

NH spends $850,000 per square mile, CA spends $1,960,000. More than double.

(California has 28x the population of NH, and about 17x the land area.)

About 1/3 of California state budget comes from the federal government, about 1/3 of NH state budget comes from the federal government.

California has a long seacoast with ports of entry for shipping, a warm, sunny environment, the biggest tech sector in the US, and lots of worldwide industry such as the movie industry, Disneyland, vinyards, and tourism. When I originally did the calculation it had Spacex, Tesla, and Oracle and a number of others.

New Hampshire has skiing and hiking.

California should be swimming in money, but it's not. It periodically skirts with bankruptcy, and everyone complains that you can't get anything done due to regulations. Despite having oil wells and refineries in state, energy prices are through the roof. (CA electricity prices are about 2x the prices in FL.)

I'm totally not seeing the difference. How does a podunk little state like NH have such a high quality lifestyle, while CA has opportunity, variety, culture, but at high cost and stress.

I'd be interested in any explanation people have.

Is this really a concern?

If your organization is doing (ethically) good work, does it really matter where the money comes from?

Accepting money from the mafia, or from a repressive government, doesn't in any way promote those ideals. And if you *didn't* accept the money it would be used by the original owners which are (per the assumptions) of lower ethical standards, so wouldn't it be better to have the money used by someone who is doing good?

I'm reminded of Mother Teresa, who famously accepted donations from anywhere to further her goals, including people with questionable human rights records. Should she have stopped trying to ease the suffering because of where the money came from*?

I don't see it.

If someone can explain why it would be morally wrong to accept the money, I'd like to hear it.

(*) Some controversy over Mother Teresa's actions, but so far as I can tell it's mostly information. But in this case I'm using her perceived legacy as a paradigm without commenting on whether it's correct or not.

I am seriously confused about the rationale here.

You thought Dell was a good fit for your next purchase. You've done some research, and Dell appears to have met your needs for quality and price.

The owners of Dell pledged $625 billion to a system that should help children in various ways. There have been a lot of complaints recently from young people about how the system has failed them: housing is too expensive, not enough high paying jobs, they can't afford to get married, own a home, and have kids.

This donation seems like it would be a start towards fixing this. Perhaps other high-end donors will add to the accounts.

Having an easy way to add to your children's future over time seems like it would help fixing this, it's simple and a "no brainer" for parents: they don't have to learn financing or do research or set up accounts, everyone online will be analyzing the accounts and tell whether they are a good idea. Parents can focus on parenting and rely on expert analysis for whether this is a good idea.

And you are so miffed at this that... for some reason... you've decided to boycott Dell and spend your money elsewhere?

I'm completely at sea here. In what universe does your decision make sense?

Addendum: Looking over the edit page of this post, it occurs to me that there is a universe where "jacks smirking reven" is not a US citizen, and is just making troll posts to foment divisiveness in America. I've seen a lot of really funny news accounts (example) of political shitposters on X being from foreign nations. Are we in that universe?

And will Slashdot ever add the "account based in" feature?

(BTW, I'm from the US, I promise :-)