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Comment Re:Spreading misinformation (Score 1) 146

I sort of agree with you, but the appropriate thing to do is to change the law, not to violate it in the name of "doing what's right". It's true that this would mean amending the constitution, and that's difficult, but they have the legal right to choose what they allow.

OTOH, it would be quite reasonable to deny that they are common carriers if they use editorial judgement as to what posts to allow. That would be an easier approach, and in line with what's been done in the past. I just feel that it's blatantly unconstitutional. (I think the Supreme Court disagrees with me, but that was the Warren court, perhaps the current one would agree...but probably not. That would limit the executive power.)

Comment A clearing house is needed (Score 3, Interesting) 8

We need a clearinghouse for photography and video as well. I'm guessing this is just for Microsoft AI. There needs to be one for all models wanting to use copyrighted content. It would suck to have to upload your stuff to 10 different clearinghouses.

something like this would help stop the bandwidth leeching going on right now on every site on the internet, in addition to the IP theft.

Comment Re:Do these links currently exist? (Score 1) 49

There are lots of domains were physical evidence is either missing or impossible, yet where many people feel the need to have certainty.

Actually, the space is even larger than that. Every area of expertise implies an area that is not being examined, since people have only finite intelligence and finite time to explore. So...I "believe" in the EWG multi-world interpretation of quantum physics (with a few modifications). This is a belief, because I'm nowhere near expert enough in the field to have detailed knowledge. I *do* acknowledge that there are other interpretations that fit the existing data equally well, but I find them...distasteful.

Also, I believe that my wife was a wonderful woman. This is not based on globally accessible knowledge, partially because "wonderful" is not well-defined.

Etc.

Comment Re:AI can't do anything 'new'. (Score 2) 33

You are wrong. AI has done mathematical proofs that were new. It *can* only be original by combining existing information into new patterns, but if the "rules of inference" are good, this can allow it to create something new and good.

OTOH, you are partially correct, in that it can't derive anything that wasn't already implicitly implied by the existing knowledge.,,because it can't currently run its own experiments.

N.B.: This is a comment about "AI" not about pure "LLM"s. Pure LLMs are a lot less reliable, because they've been designed to never admit that they are uncertain. And because they've been trained on the Internet.

Comment A human method for human works (Score 1) 33

A new validation mechanism is needed to verify and filter for human authored works in a large and growing variety of fields. This will likely involve being not lazy, and not relying on AI itself to vet for human created works. The current methods are obviously less and less usable as AI becomes more and more skilled at impersonating the tone and feel of human authored works.

I think this will necessarily mean a return to a more analog, labor intensive review of works and manual vetting of authors through social connections, voice calls, etc. to make sure the person actually exists. The problem and the solution is that it will create barriers that are harder to surmount to get your legitimate work published. Other commenters have mentioned the need for non-corporate or university independent citizen scientists to still be able to submit papers without a huge financial or labor burden. How do you reconcile that? How often does that actually happen?

The thing is, a lot of these tech companies rely on making everything automated for maximum profit margin with minimum labor. They just want a cash machine that prints money once set up and lightly maintained. That approach is antithetical to to the high-touch solution needed here.

What barriers would you use to stem the flood of fakes that are automatically or semi-automatically submitted, and then thoroughly vet the remainder? Fees for submission? Even a very low fee, say $20, would stop a lot of auto-generated fakes from being automatically submitted.

This problem is also very acute in the self publishing world - low quality re-hashes of fiction and fact-based books showing up on Amazon and elsewhere. Wikipedia articles turned into books, fiction books plagiarized into other fiction books. The scam is that if you upload 10,000 fake books, which are easy to generate, you just need a small percentage of them to sell every now and then to start making some serious money. It's very tempting, the tools are all there, and some people having nothing but time to set this type of grift in motion.

Comment Re:Deserve what you get (Score 1) 257

If the TV was appropriately cheaper for not having the smarts, the $30 might not seem like much. It's not exactly complicated to plug the chromecast into an HDMI input. The chromecast remote will be what you need most of the time since the chromecast itself can turn the TV on, select the correct input, etc and the remote also has an IR transmitter to handle the volume function.

Admittedly, assembling the Pi is a step up in knowledge many wouldn't manage.

Many people do manage to use a chromecast just fine.

It would be better to somehow ban enshittification, but even defining it legally would be a hard problem, much less getting the legislation past the gauntlet of industry lobbyists.

Comment Re:hyperscalers... (Score 1) 43

During the early years the laser was called "a solution in search of a problem". Don't try to estimate what current AIs can do by the applications that they are currently shoe-horned into.

OTOH, every speculation as to how AI will develop further is *speculative*. That explicitly includes the speculation that it will not get any better or more efficient. (And I'd call the speculation that "we've reached top AI" at least as silly as "AGI will show up tomorrow and solve all our problems".

Comment Re:Precedents only matter when SCOTUS says they do (Score 2, Informative) 169

yeah, that's why SCOTUS was not given Judicial Review powers in the Constitution and just declared fifteen years later that it had that ultimate power "because we have to".

The Legislature is supposed to manage this nonsense. It has been in a coma since 1995.

Comment Re:Vibe coding is the new self-driving (Score 1) 63

That matches my (limited) experience. Just for giggles, I let copilot (on Github) have a crack at a function in some of my code. Its suggested improvement made some sense in a vacuum, but in context it read more like someone who feels they must 'contribute' something and that's all they could find. It didn't seem to understand that the function would always be called in the context of a transaction and raising an exception will roll it back.

Comment Re:Same old song (Score 1) 63

I fail to see how this is any different than now or at any other point in CS education since at least the 1980s and possibly before.

There is a difference. If you learned Pascal as the wave of the future, you could always do FORTRAN or with a little re-training, C (pointers always left Pascal programmers a bit befuddled at first). If you bet on Java, you could always migrate to C or Python. Some of the IDEs do leave people a bit brain dead, but not so much they can't make the jump to a simple text editor and command line compiler. Even BASIC was OK though you'd have to un-learn a few bad habits.

But if you learn 'vibe coding', you are dead in the water without the AI. No amount of typing "Make a game like Wolfenstein 3D but in a shopping mall with perfume ladies that take half of your health points.." into the compiler will get you anywhere at all.

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