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Comment Re:Or, counterpoint, it stole somebody else's work (Score 1, Informative) 97

Reading both sides, as well as OpenAI's announcement, it looks like, perhaps unexpectedly, OpenAI is morally right here IMHO. They heard rumours so they put their new model at work on all problems, then focused on two, one is different than those two researchers and the other is a different solution. I think the NYU researcher started too suspicious/paranoid which started the hostility, and the other side, which seemed to have been very accommodating at first lost patience. The Anthropic researcher did not even want to talk to them, I don't see how them saying that it would have been easier if he was not working at Anthropic, like he was proving it himself. In any case this is all silly academic bickering to me. Almost as silly as OpenAI's take that this is the start of AGI somehow...

PS. I have no horse in the race, I use various AI tools to help my work, Claude usually performs better than ChatGPT at the things I do, but I don't root for any company.

How is OpenAI morally right?!?

Best case for OpenAI is that they heard rumours that a researcher was closing in on a NS breakthrough using a specific method, so they instantly set a team on the problem giving them with a massive amount of resources. Their internal team then specifically guided the model to use the same very specific direction the researchers was using, something they (nor the model) would ever have known to do without the rumours. A detail that OpenAI conveniently left out of the narrative.

And that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that because the researcher was using ChatGPT to work on drafts of the paper and those drafts ended up in the training data for the model. So rather than discovering anything the agents just implemented / finished off the work they already had access to.

It's insanely sketchy. The NYU researcher is honestly being extraordinarily calm about the whole thing, typically in a situation like this people would be getting close to a fist fight.

Comment Re:Going to get worse before it gets better (Score 1) 121

The behavior of the AI agents reflect the ethics of the companies making the models. If you aren't afraid to train your models on data regardless of copyright or public access, why would you expect agents by these companies to take over web pages etc?

That's not how it works. Just consider how hard SpaceX has tried (and largely failed) to make Grok as reactionary as Elon Musk.

The trouble is that these LLMs act as if they're intelligent people, and it's really hard to convince intelligent people to stay inside a sandbox.

Comment Re:Not necessarily a bad thing (Score 2) 217

People on ALL social media NEED to see what the other side says just as much as their own. Echo chambers make everything worse for everyone.

Ragebait isn't about seeing what the other side says.

It's about seeing an inflammatory caricature of the other side.

For example, a Liberal isn't going to see some Conservative discussing some of the hard tradeoffs we'll need to pay down the debt. They'll see a Conservative proposing that Trump be given a 3rd term and trans kids get rounded up and forced into conversion therapy or some crap like that.

Meanwhile, Conservatives won't see some Liberal discussing the economics of Universal Healthcare. They'll see someone proposing that the police be defunded and all drugs are legalized.

Ragebait creates echo chambers because it gives the false impression that everyone on the other side is insane.

Comment Re:Sad that a company that actually does something (Score 4, Interesting) 73

This is why a lot of chronic diseases will NEVER have cures. It's more profitable to treat than to cure. Treat someone over a lifetime and milk 100k out of them. Treat someone once and present them with a 100k price tag to pay all at once and the consumer or insurance company will balk at the cost.

It's a fun conspiracy theory, but this is actually just how biology works.

There's basically four kinds of things that can go wrong with our bodies. Infections, mechanical issues, system errors, and cancer.

Infections we can cure by helping the body to kill off the infection, it's only some rare stubborn ones like AIDS that are chronic like you describe.

Mechanical issues we can fix with surgery.

System errors? That's stuff like genetic disorders where our body creates too much of hormone A or doesn't create the proper form of protein B. The problem is in our DNA and you can't cure it without rewriting our DNA (which we're getting to).

And then there's cancers, which are similar to infections, where we try to kill it (as they're doing here), though weirdly, some research suggests treating it as a chronic issue might be better for the patients.

In either case, it's not the fact that pharma is deciding "don't make a pill to cure it, just find a lifetime treatment!". It's only in the past few years that we're reaching the point where we can actually cure things that were traditionally chronic.

Comment Huh?!?! (Score 1) 76

And Threads now appears to have roughly 66% more monthly active users than X.

I've heard almost nothing about Threads recently. Certainly no indication they were more popular than Twitter.

Is their user count some sort of trick with how they interface with Instagram? Or is Twitter just turning into a ghost town without people realizing it?

Comment Re: Ok, so since market has started ignoring him (Score 3, Insightful) 210

I never see Democrats defend Pelosi trading. I see maggots defending Trump grifts constantly. I hang out in places where I'm exposed to both. Stop making shit up, maggot.

I think there's some nuance needed there.

Pelosi's trading is legal, it's highly problematic from an ethics perspective, but it's completely legal and somewhat common for legislators to do. So she can be criticized for using an unfair advantage, but it's not unprecedented nor a major sin.

Trump's grifts on the other hand do violate laws and precedent, those laws just aren't enforced.

Comment Ford, too. (Score 2) 160

I bought a Ford F-150 XLT (the full-hybrid pickup) and was very disappointed to find that several of the features (Including Blue Cruise and navigation) were subscription-based with an initial free period of a year or so.

Other than that the vehicle is fantastic - but was very pricey when I bought it, so having to pay over and over for the features was a very annoying surprise. (They quit working rather than quit updating when the subscriptions run out.)

Comment Maybe not to individual people, but ... (Score 2) 14

... a bunch of cancer progression theories based on cell culture progression had to be thrown out when it was discovered that the cultures were being contaminated by a particularly robust and aggressive cancer cell culture, HeLa, which had contaminated lab equipment like environmental chambers or survived equipment sterilization and eventually took over culture lines in labs.

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