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Comment "Smaller than a hair" - no (Score 1) 15

If you read the article carefully, they are talking about lenses THINNER than a hair. I see several of the posts here thinking the width/radius of the lenses is this small, a reasonable mistake given the way this was written. Having a radius that small would severely reduce their light gathering ability, requiring very bright light or very dim images or very long exposure times.

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Comment Re:As expected (Score 1) 48

There is a way to us DNN/LLM "AI"s correctly; use them like a search engine.

Ask a hyper specific question, and scrutinize the answer given thoroughly.

In the same way that crowdsourced intelligence made google a useful tool for search, and social media created a great pool of questions and answers for that search to run over, DNN's are just an extension of search.

They are a wonderful improvement in the areas of (1) parsing the query and (2) re-jiggering the resultant hits.

(1) They can decode the user's question more accurately, and get a more searchable rewording of what the user is really looking for. Previous incarnations of search really needed you to find a magic word that matched perfectly to get the hits, and when you were using common words it became near impossible. But large language models seem able to do that with a much higher accuracy rate, and dont get hung up without magic keywords or magic phrases.

(2) Instead of merely presenting a raw list of sources, the LLM's actually read the pages, and try to parse out the specific bits you are searching for and ignore the rest of the page. They can also, to a limited extant, specialize the answer to match the query, based on interpolation of the page content. Again this is something that was previously impossible, and saves human time.

I would say, with judicious use of a search-engine DNN/LLM, any programmer should expect perhaps a 1% to 2% productivity increase on average.

Any programmer who tries to ask it to write code or solve problems will likely eat the worm, and suffer a 20%-50% decline in real productivity. Hopefully, any programmer caught doing this would face some kind of disciplinary action.

Comment Re:Here it comes (Score 4, Interesting) 45

I'm not sure online sales were ever part of Walmart's core competencies; I suspect they contracted all that stuff out to third parties.

The reason I suspect that is that one of my relatives bought a product from Walmart.com and needed to return it, so she called the number listed on the front page of the Walmart.com web site (and dialled it correctly; I later double-checked the call record on her phone against the walmart.com web page), and the representative who answered put her on hold, then forwarded her to a scammer who tried to trick her into allowing him to TeamViewer in to her computer remotely. When she refused, he got increasingly abusive and eventually hung up on her.

So whomever Walmart was contracting for online support, they were at least bribable, and arguably criminal.

Comment Re:We are so screwed (Score 5, Insightful) 207

Everybody in society must [...]

Solutions starting with "everybody in society must" have a long and celebrated tradition of going immediately (and often horrifically) pear-shaped, as it inevitably turns out that most of everybody doesn't want to, and therefore won't, and in many cases, can't.

For examples, see the Soviet Union's Communism, China's Great Leap Forward, the Khmer Rouge's agricultural collectivism, North Korea's juche, etc.

Comment Re:A lot of training here - still impressive (Score 1) 75

> It's not intelligence. It's processing.

Its like a souped up search engine;

Its very good at not only finding the answers to a query, but recognizing the question even if it is worded differently than it has been in the past, finding the existing answers, and presenting those answers even if it has to tweak or assemble or rearrange them.

What it cannot do is actually solve novel problems missing from its training set, any more than a search engine can find an match for a document that does not exist.

 

Comment Re:So then how long... (Score 2) 50

So how long before the jokes all comedians tell all sound the same (same theme, same setup, same punchline)?

Comedians will do anything that works to get a laugh, but sourcing jokes from ChatGPT (or similar) is not an effective way to get a laugh. Comedy is based on surprise, and LLMs are based on summarizing old material, so there's a bit of a mismatch there.

Comment Re:Why is suicide bad? (Score 1) 111

If it's the will of the person?

Because people aren't solitary islands whose deaths harm only themselves. Anyone who has lived on Earth for more than a few days has formed relationships with other people, and suicide is the murder of a person those people have a relationship with. Suicide harms everyone who interacts with or depends on that suicider for anything, in much the same way that the murder of that person would.

Being dead, after all, is just like being stupid, only people around you are bothered by it.

Yes, that is precisely the problem.

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