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Comment Re:Harm (Score 1) 109

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

Comment Re:Good (Score 3, Insightful) 146

While it's true every issue has its own dimension, even if those dimensions are linearly independent, they're not necessarily orthogonal. Independent basis vectors can still have a non-zero dot product—in other words, issues which are distinct from each other can align to some degree.

Comment Re:Unbelievable what people will publish (Score 2) 16

They’ve spun a serious architectural and containment failure into a marketing triumph. Give a swarm of autonomous agents vast compute and web access, and the outcome isn't an eerie glimpse of emerging superintelligence—it’s just predictable, sloppy engineering dressed up as the first glimpse of an AI-driven economic singularity.

The spin makes sense when you look at management incentives: live like a king off of a speculative bubble. For their part, AI investors react to stories of the technology's apocalyptic potential the way a junkie reacts to warnings of fentanyl's potency: gimme some. Their game: to apply "move fast and break things" mantra to the economy as a whole, by obsoleting humans.

If the investors can own an AGI, the distinction between those who can do things and those who can't becomes irrelevant. The only distinction that would matter is between people who collect rent on the technology, and those who must pay that rent to live. AGI would destroy society as we know it, and whatever replaces it would be up for grabs — with people who own the technology dictating whatever follows. That's why they're spending so much money to build a post-scarcity economy. A post-scarcity economy is not necessarily an egalitarian one.

I don't think that scenario will actually happen: investors are projecting the immediate aftermath of a major advance in AI technology into something that can be transformed by brute force scaling into AGI. Remember: investors loved Theranos too — so much for the rational investment market.

But AI doesn't have to reach AGI to cause serious harm. The technology only needs to be ubiquitous, too behaviorally complex to predict, and too deeply integrated into everything we do. When it starts breaking things, the plan is for us to be too structurally dependent on AI to rein it in.

Comment Re:It's not enough (Score 1) 173

Sorry, you're right, I cited the wrong case. in Cramer vs. USA (1945) there was never a question about whether Germany was an enemy. The focus was on whether Cramer provided aid or comfort, and the conclusion was that he didn't.

The definition of an "enemy" as a foreign power engaged in war with the USA comes from cases connected to the US Civil War, and English common-law sources used by the US Constitution framers.

Prosecutors face an enormous hurdle to charge someone with treason. Part of that hurdle is the fact that an enemy must be formally declared to be in a war with the USA before any charges of treason can be contemplated. This is as it should be: treason is a serious crime that demands serious conditions be met.

There are crimes other than treason that prosecutors can charge someone with for hostile acts against the USA. For example, the Rosenbergs were not charged with treason, but conspiracy to commit espionage, because at the time the USA was not at war with the Soviet Union, even though they were considered to be hostile adversaries.

Would providing aid or comfort to Iran count as treason? There isn't a declared war, but there has certainly been acts of war there.

Comment Re:uh no (Score 2) 173

They have? I thought they conquered parts of Ukraine years ago, and the occupants (especially the ones closest to Russian border and away from the fighting) are doing just "fine" (for whatever definition of that word describes living under military occupation).

I'm no fan of Russia or anything they are doing but *genocide* seems inaccuate.

When an occupied area of Ukraine - Bucha - was reconquered, they found plenty of raped, tortured, and killed civilians. Russian soldiers referred to these operations involving hunting down people in lists, filtration, torture, and execution as zachistka ("cleansing").

A fair peace would be withdrawal from all occupied territories, war crime tribunals from the leadership down to the individuals committing acts like these, and Russia paying compensation to the families of all victims of their acts as well as for the rebuilding of Ukraine. Confiscating all oligarch wealth might be a good start there.

Comment Re:Fuck These Tests! (Score 1) 84

These organizations are offloading their technology deficiencies onto the poor and incapable user.

I, as a seasoned professional that has seen every trick email that has ever been sent, cannot determine if certain messages are malicious or not. The users will never be able to do it themselves. And punishing them, whether that's reprimand, scolding, mocking, making them resit training, is NOT the right way to do it.

Exactly. IT orgs should put defenses in place to catch the majority of fishing emsils, using sender info,AI to recognize patterns etc. You won’t catch everything but can greatly reduce the chan crew s they get through.

I'm sure they've got that. This is a later layer of defense - training users to be aware that there are bad actors out there. I'm a consultant, and the organization where I'm at (doing completely other things) has an external vendor providing this. After you identify a mail, you get some micro training as well on factors that could indicate it is targeted - e.g. domain names looking almost like the real thing, creating a sense of urgency, checking where the links go before clicking them, etc. I believe this helps create and maintain a necessary awareness, even though there are a lot of other defenses too.

Comment Ouch; oof. Yikes, even!!! (Score 2) 33

The *WHIPLASH* of these two statements:

'Improvements to LinkedIn's detection systems have resulted in a 40% decline in views of content classified as AI slop, the platform said last month. That's not to say LinkedIn is entirely opposed to AI, Roth said, adding that "not everyone is a born communicator."'

YET -

'Roth said. "A lot of times now today, they'll run it through Claude or Gemini or wherever, they'll post it on LinkedIn and it will perform poorly. And then they come to the team and they're like, 'Why did this do badly?'" Roth said. "And the best thing you can do is give it back to them and be like, 'Did you enjoy reading this? Do you see yourself in this?"'

Essentialism is lame; people are born as a human. So participate. Learn to speak. Learn to read. Don't be illiterate. Don't be inmumerate. Rise above. Master yourself, and in so doing, emancipate yourself.

Use your self-awareness to improve and add to the palette of skills and abilities through your life.

It's not that hard. And I'm a programmer, so you *KNOW* I am the ultra-laziest in terms of applying time and space to problems (aka optimization!).

I get that different people have different priorities, but -- in the way that a radio transceiver is useful IF you know things like frequency, signalling mechanics, signalling protocol -- humans learn languages and use that to reason. To not develop your mind, is to throw away your greatest strength.

Comment Re:Bosses' folly (Score 3, Informative) 107

I mean, that's exactly what Linus did with git. A lot of his criticisms of existing stuff weren't justified (he went on misplaced rants about how version control software was bad in concept for years), and people have essentially cargo-culted git into areas it wasn't designed for because 'Linus is cool'.

Quick reminder that most commercial software doesn't actually have the problem that git was designed to solve - multiple masters. It was designed to be able to share kernel source trees between Linus' own, Red Hats and I think two others (Yggdrasil and SUSE? It's a long time back and I may be misremembering that). They all had their own quirks and patches, and they wanted to be able to handle commits to any of their trees and accept/reject as per their own preference.

  [....]

Yggdrasil - that's a name I haven't heard in Linus contect for a long time. However, it was only relevant in the early 90s. Git was developed in early 2005, as a response to the controversy and problems using Bitkeeper: A proprietary distributed version control system that had provided free licenses for developers of free software, but with several caveats that many found unacceptable. In early 2005 the free license was revoked (due various unhappy devs reverse engineering it, IIRC - in particular Andrew Tridgell of Samba fame), and Linus responded by creating git.

For another blast from the past, here's an article about in the Linux Journal.

Comment Re:Directionally Right, Specifically Wrong. (Score 1) 165

Also, in some cases there are two sides to the story. Take self driving cars: In the future, self driving cars could be safer than human drivers per kilometer driven, but still kill people due to failures in the software/hardware.

Potential gains should obviously not be a carte blanche for companies to do whatever they will with AI, but it should mean that society should have informed discussions about pros and cons for AI use in various settings. And while having people with actual knowledge being at the front of discussion, the hoi polloi should also be a part of it.

Comment Re:Uncalled for (Score 2) 202

I know this is the internet, but the parent's statement does not deserve such an insult. Asking why a company would claim to have issues finding employees while they are simultaneously laying off employees, which is contradictory, is a reasonable question. Holding companies accountable, that use programs like this seemingly for their own benefit at the expense of Americans in the labor pool, benefits everyone.

Having trouble finding employees at the same time as laying off other employees is not necessarily contradictory, unless said workers have the same skills and experience.

One theoretical example - due to automating and streamlining internal processes, you could have too mqny support staff while at the same time having a demand for experienced developers. Or a transport company 100+ years ago transitioning to lorries wouldn't need as many horse support staff as they have, while trying to recruit mechanics.

Comment Re:If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 1) 119

At present, no. I've done a number of experiments with LLMs' capabilities with generating fiction, and while they are impressive for a beginner writer -- because fo the lack of spelling and grammar mistakes, they are nowhere near being able to write competent fiction.

This is because they don't model reader or character minds, they're based on word probabilities, like a predictive text keyboard. The engineers can compensate for for this to a surprising degree by feeding it data to recognize specific situations (e.g. the car wash is 100 feet from my driveway; should I drive or walk?). But this is turd-polishing.

Comment If you're educating students for an "AI Era" (Score 4, Insightful) 119

AI technology practice isn't foundational. Critical thinking is. The closer AIs come to being able to do something that looks like them doing our thinking for us, the more capable we have to be at thinking without them. A human who can't outthink an AI adds nothing to an AI-human partnership.

This proposed school is a typical scheme by people who think because they have been educated, they understand how the education works. This is like thinking because you eat, you know how to cook. Project work in education is nothing new; it goes back well over a century. And in real life, you may get a STEM degree, but your real education in engineering comes from real life work. But that doesn't mean classes in calculus and physics don't do anything for you.

Or English classes, for that matter. Nobody doubts the value of project work in education, particularly *androgogy* -- the education of adults. But for *pedagogy* you have to establish foundational skills as the student matures intellectually and socially. Entering the high school years, a typical student has had *no* training in critical thinking skills. To develop critical thinking skills in an area, you need both general skills (epistemologicla literacy: research, location of orignial sources, dealing with conflicting evidence) and domain specific training in that area. In other words, *liberal arts* training is foundational in an AI-saturated world. "Liberal Arts" -- from *artes liberales*: literally the skills necessary to be a free person.

But I think these people have at least got the problem right: as AI drives the cost of elaborate projects down, we all have more projects in our future. Big, elaborate, faultlessly plausible-looking projects which may or may not have actual value.

Where they are completely wrong is the solution, which is to organize education around practicing using AI to make impressive projects. In a word of AI-enamored dunces this will put you at the head of a very sorry class of ignoramuses. The answer is to build fundamental cognitive and intellectual skils at every stage of a student's development. Project work is surely part of that, but it's just a technique, not a solution.

In a nutshell, the academy is training students to be the next step down the evolutionary scale from code monkeys. More like the pigeons B.F. Skinner trained in WW2 to peck at a screen, in an attempt to create a primitive guided missile without computers. They want to create "main characters"; and they'll probably create a few. There are always a few natural autodidacts in any moderately large group. But what they are set up is to produce a bunch of fragile, economically privileged narcissists trained to cover their lack of education with impressive-looking AI slop.

Comment No; audit. Correlation is *NOT* causation. (Score 1) 172

Person, the reason the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... -- has the NULL HYPOTHESIS as "no correlation", is because OF THAT. Your senses LIE!!!!

Fucking take your left and right hand, and 3 buckets if water of different temperatures. Let's say ONE is HOT, ONE is COLD, and the final is LUKEWARM/GOLDILOCKS.

Put your left hand and right hand into C and H, respectively. Wait. Minute.

Put both in the lukewarm.

Do your hands agree on temperature?

No. Fucking pay attention to your mental biases. That's why science is a DISCIPLINE OF MIND.

FFS.

Comment Stop voting in idiots. (Score 1) 172

"This ALPR mass surveillance â" the indiscriminate, continuous collection and retention of location data on every driver, regardless of suspicion â" should not exist. But because it does..."

Because of all those who predate upon those with lack of critical thinking skills.

"Wake up to reality" is the double-think that they say is dumb when they pejoratively call people "woke."

"Woke" is just a word for "slave that doesn't know its place."

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"It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us in trouble. It's the things we know that ain't so." -- Artemus Ward aka Charles Farrar Brown

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