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Comment Re:Which is it? (Score 0) 126

A few days ago there was a story about how an AI store was failing horribly. It can't do that, but at the same time will destroy us?

Not "at the same time". You're conflating what AI can do now with what it will likely be able to do in a year or five, or 20.

Amodei and others are worried about what AI that doesn't yet exist may do, not about what current-generation AI can do. AI is getting better, very quickly, and unless there's some blocking obstacle that no one has been able to identify will at some point become far, far smarter than humans, individually or collectively. So before that happens, we need to figure out how to make sure that superintelligent AI wants to help us, and wants to do it in the right way.

Comment Didn't suck donny's dicky enough (Score 1) 73

SBF doesn't get a pardon because he didn't suck donny's nubbin. All those January 2016 MAGA cop-killing assholes got pardons.

SBF wants to have his case heard by SCOTUS but it doesn't work that way. You have to buy Uncle Thomas a 1/4mil motorcoach first, along with a laminated explanation story so he can tell everyone how he came by it while pulling himself by his bootstraps.

And finally, SBF is one weirdo with a gorilla-cookie girlfriend. If he had Kim K to speak for him, then, and only then,

Justice would be done!

Comment Re:TFA has no supporting data (Score 1) 200

The rebates on the batteries you earn over time, and to do so you must export some of your stored battery power back to the grid during peak hours.

Is this actually a substantial amount of energy? I'm in Utah (Rocky Mountain Power) and RMP also pays me to use my batteries... but the amount of energy they draw is tiny. 8-10 times per week they draw on my batteries, but it's like 4 kW peak draw (my batteries can sustain 20 kW), and generally for less than 30 seconds, so in any given week I'm only contributing like 0.2 kWh. As I understand it, this is because RMP uses my batteries not really to "serve loads", per se, but just as grid stabilization; brief backfill to keep the voltage from sagging.

Obviously my batteries do serve *my* loads, which reduces the load on the grid, but that's not what RMP pays me for.

Does CA make heavier use of residential batteries to feed the grid?

Comment Re:What a moron. (Score 1) 73

Most of his donations were to Democrats, so he has no chance for that. https://time.com/6241262/sam-b...

And JD Vance called him Hitler. Trump accepts changes of heart as long as they include sufficient groveling and self-humiliation. SBF's problem is he doesn't currently have any money, and doesn't have a lot of friends to put up cash for him either. If SCOTUS will overturn his fine on a technicality and he can get some or all of that money back, then he'll have the cash to buy a pardon. Obviously he needs to get it done in the next 2 years, four months.

Comment Protect Internet from Government Stupidity (Score -1, Troll) 51

The PIGS Act would be more appropriate. Studies show the Internet, access to it, and social media in particular, have no negative impact on teens. To the country, access to material on natural parts of life, growing up in society, and seeking information, acceptance, and methods of handling "teenhood" is improved.

No, the people who need to stay away from social media are lying grifting criminal rapists and their constant barrage of lies and threats. Some have created (or bought) their own social medium because their sociopathic posting is antithetical to truth, honest, reality, truth, and not trying to mobilize masses of gullible (non-teen) idiots.

The Protect Internet from Goverment Stupidity (PIGS) Act would remove political hacks, grandstanders, liars, thieves, cheats, carnies, and murderous LEOs from this public plaza.

Waking up tomorrow to no more blathering stupid made up stuff by cluless politicians would be helpful. Requiring proof of age and limiting expression of minors is harmful, stupid, and exactly what is expected of the thieves and self-dealers in government.

Comment Re:Can someone please explain... (Score 1) 97

...why a company with a 4 trillion dollar market capitalization and a quarter of a trillion dollars in cash needs to borrow lass than two billion dollars from the government?

Because it's almost always better to spend someone else's money than your own. Failing that, it's almost always better to spend future money rather than current money. The "almosts" are there because the terms have to be scrutinized, but if the terms are good... you hang onto the cash and revenues you have. Having cash gives you flexibility and enables you to take better advantage of opportunities. And if you end up not needing the cash for anything, you can always invest it. This may not be the first rule of business, but it's got to be in the top ten.

It's honestly a good rule for personal finances, as well. If someone offers you a million dollar loan at 2% interest, your immediate answer should be "Can I get more"? And for more quotidian stuff, it's better to front-load income and defer expenses whenever and wherever possible. Pay bills when they're due, not when they arrive. Use a credit card and pay the balance off every month, letting you keep your money in your account for longer, interest-free. These strategies allow you to make some money by investing it, of course, but mostly it gives you flexibility if you need it. Which if you have decent savings you never should... but it's still better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.

Comment Re:Nope (Score 1) 167

It cannot even actually explain it's answers. Instead it treats a request to explain as a request to come up with a plausible explanation.

There is an increasing body of evidence that this is also how human reasoning normally works. Usually, we make decisions first and only afterwards (if necessary) engage our reasoning ability to generate an explanation of our decision. Experiments show that we're actually just as good at explaining decisions that were the opposite of the ones we made, assuming we can first be tricked into believing that they were our decisions.

Of course there are cases where we engage in lengthy, logic-based sequences of reasoning to derive a conclusion, especially if we've spent many years in higher education that trains us to think that way. This is particularly true when we reason in groups, exchanging ideas and critiquing others' reasoning and conclusions. It appears that for most of human history this is probably the primary way we employed reason, though in such social reasoning the goal is less to ensure accurate results than it is for the most skilled and smartest debaters to get their way (thereby improving their genes' probability of survival)... though it's still the case that making better arguments is the best way to "win" and that better arguments are more likely to be at least directionally correct. I'm sure you've noticed that your own reasoning gets better when you attempt to order your thoughts to potentially present them to a critical listener. This even works quite well when the "listener" isn't able to be critical; hence the utility of "rubber duck debugging". Of course, discussing with an intelligent and listener who is engaged in trying to critique your reasoning and offers their own counterpoints for your critique works even better.

It shouldn't surprise us that AI exhibits similar characteristics. Their core structure is at least notionally modeled on the neural networks of our own brains, and they're trained on large bodies of our text. Their evolution over the last few years also models our thought processes. The first hugely-successful LLMs just produced output without any sort of "thought process". That quickly ran into limitations, then someone came up with the idea of feeding their output back in and enabling them to engage in "self-talk" during which they could evaluate, criticize and improve their conclusions. This "reasoning overlay" looks at least superficially similar to the stream-of-thought self-talk that we engage in when thinking our way logically through a problem. And again, much like us, when LLMs do engage in a longer chain of thought, they actually can explain their conclusions by looking at the sequence of steps they went through.

There are also ways in which human and AI cognition differs substantially, of course, and in many ways AI thinking is far inferior to human cognition. Some of this is based on their different approach to context. An AI with a 1M token context window can keep at its "fingertips" far more precise context then we can -- we struggle to remember more than about 7 numbers for more than a few seconds -- but we're much better at maintaining a "big picture", which we achieve not by remembering everything but by being better at selectively extracting the most salient bits (I expect that improving AI ability to do this will be one of the next large steps forward in capability).

Any way, the point is that AI "thinking" is far more similar to ours than you credit it to be.

We do not make a real AI, it will not try to kill us.

No one can really define what "real AI" is. As for whether it will try to kill us... it is utterly impossible for us to say what AI might or might not do as it continues to improve. Your point about its reward system is potentially valid, but with a little thought it's pretty easy to come up with ways in which a superintelligence might destroy us while trying to serve us. Even more to the point, we don't know what the "derived" motivation system inside the systems is. We can't look inside. Observing the self-talk stream-of-consciousness gives us some insight, insight that we actually can't have into humans' thought processes, but it's not definitive.

Do some reading about "instrumental" vs "final" goals. I highly recommend Nick Bostrom's book, "Superintelligence". It's pretty old and quite dated in a lot of ways, but it gives you the tools to think usefully about these questions.

Comment That's not what the study says. (Score 2) 105

USA Today headline: "Teen Reading Slumps... Due to Surge in Screen Time" isn't part of the study, and isn't proven by the study.

Grades are dropping, so if grades are an indication of reading ability then [age group divided] teen reading slumps. Sure. And the use of digital devices is on the rise -- they don't prove, but they say. It used to the boggieman was video games. Before that TV. Before that radio. Apparently EVERYTHING is the cause of people becoming stuipider.

> East Asia was the best-performing region. Chinese cities that participated in the test, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Taiwan had the best educational systems with Britain and Estonia the only countries outside the region that made it into the top 10 in reading, mathematics and science.

So why not break it out by country? Why not add a screentime column to the the matrix. Why not prove SOME causality SOMEWHERE. Too hard I guess.

When electric lights came out people detested them and persisted in using candles. When radio came out newspapers spoke out and lout against these stupefying machines that couldn't possibly distill a newspaper written by gumshoe street reporters over some voice in a box. TV was worse. How enrapting. Then video games. Then electronic toys.

The problems with a reduction in elementary language skills have more to do with the dumbification of schools, the "all child left behind to wait for that one child" and other idiotic programs. But China doesn't have them, nor does Estonia. And why isn't the rest of the FSU affected.

This is 100% non-science CRAP. There is no proven causal link. Just like with blue light now known NOT to affect sleep or salt now known NOT to affect blood pressure.

Go on teens, enjoy your surfing and keep getting B's and C's. School is a racket.

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