Go check your privacy settings in Firefox - they've switched on sending data to advertisers by default as of Firefox 128. Even Google sent this setting out default off, probably having spoken to an actual lawyer who mentioned the GDPR.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02218-7
Might be slightly off topic, but interesting result using adversarial strategies against RL trained Go machines.
Quote: Humans able use the adversarial bots’ tactics to beat expert Go AI systems, does it still make sense to call those systems superhuman? “It’s a great question I definitely wrestled with,” Gleave says. “We’ve started saying ‘typically superhuman’.” David Wu, a computer scientist in New York City who first developed KataGo, says strong Go AIs are “superhuman on average” but not “superhuman in the worst cases”.
Me thinks the AI bros jumped the gun a little too early declaring victory on this one.
See, in StarCraft we would just say that the meta is evolving in order to accommodate this new strategy. Maybe Go needs to take a page from newer games in how these things are discussed.
this is simple. we just need to train a new model for every move. that way the adversarial bot won't know what weaknesses to exploit
Funniest fuckin' sentence I have read today:
First off, if you've read The Singularity Is Near, which was published 19 years ago in 2005, you should be aware that the sequel book is a lot less technical.
Wait, this guy published "is Near" twenty years ago and then UNIRONICALLY published "is Nearer"?
Come the fuck on, this has to be satire?
The sequel to "Apocalypse Now", "Apocalypse Even More Presently"
Muse is a new creative platform that can create your own AI-generated series so you can dive into a new world of storytelling without the need for personal content creation.
Who the fuck are these people and why do I not have a button that spreads Lego bricks across their floor?
Yeah, I always hated the part of art and storytelling where there was always a tiny and sometimes misshapen window into the human soul there. Better to do away with that and replace it with an endless parade of #sponsoredcontent. That way there's no risk of suddenly developing empathy or accidentally connecting with the people I'm exploiting as a billionaire VC.
From the just released GOP 2024 party platform (PDF), this is a single bullet point in CHAPTER THREE: BUILD THE GREATEST ECONOMY IN HISTORY:
Republicans will pave the way for future Economic Greatness by leading the World in Emerging Industries.
Crypto
Republicans will end Democrats’ unlawful and unAmerican Crypto crackdown and oppose the creation of a Central Bank Digital Currency. We will defend the right to mine Bitcoin, and ensure every American has the right to self-custody of their Digital Assets, and transact free from Government Surveillance and Control.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.
Expanding Freedom, Prosperity and Safety in Space
Under Republican Leadership, the United States will create a robust Manufacturing Industry in Near Earth Orbit, send American Astronauts back to the Moon, and onward to Mars, and enhance partnerships with the rapidly expanding Commercial Space sector to revolutionize our ability to access, live in, and develop assets in Space.
When your party platform is just a long-form weird tweet that you wrote after bong rips with Elon Musk.
unAmerican
This is somehow the worst thing Republicans did this year.
Human Flourishing
This term was already very iffy, but this cements it into being full on red flag territory.
When your party platform is just a long-form weird tweet that you wrote after bong rips with Elon Musk.
Wouldnt be surpised if we discover he is behind it, the whole manufacturing things in space (yes I also played SMAX Musk) has his smell over it. What makes this a bit more funny is that Musk has also been hired to help safely crash down the ISS into the sea (Personally considering the cost of lifting stuff out of our gravity I would try to keep it up there, if I wanted to build more things in space, but due to capitalism we cannot (really, the ISS is going to be trashed because figuring out who own what part and resolving all that is too hard, capital says no)). Which brings up a fantastic opportunity for a random person on twitter who has Musks ear. We can now put a city at risk of being crushed by the ISS by tweeting 'hey musk, make the ISS do a barrel roll'.
@gnomicutterance @dgerard Has the Republican writing style guide been updated to mandate that Weird Capitalisation thing that Cheeto Benito does or something?
Over at "work on climate" there's been an influx of companies that will greenwash using ChatGPT. One company I interviewed for (in my estimation it) boiled down to using ChatGPT to make generic greening recommendations for a business and attach hallucinated numbers that the client can then pass off for themselves.
Edit: is there a list of companies that use "prompt engineering" so that I can just avoid them?
https://xcancel.com/kitten_beloved/status/1810709361175691474
In which TPOT unites to yell at scooter because he isn’t down with mental health apartheid schemes.
"disorderly cities are required by the state religion"
When they are absolutely sure the tweet will not escape containment, they will just take assumptions like "a certain percentage of people has incurable Criminal Mind" as given and go from there.
that twitter account is absolutely something
looks at profile 'adorable and harmless' and then 2 tweets later, turns out they are racist.
(I’ll try put a decent summary of links on this later)
there’s a UK party that (aiui) committed electoral crimes by submitting non-existing genML-created people as candidates, a whole new usecase!
gonna be real fun to see that catching sunlight, if TNI manages to do due process right
what a coincidence, "aiui" is the sound I make when I get caught doing electoral crimes.
If you want more crazy, that political party is actually a limited company in which the leader is also the majority shareholder and the bylaws permit him to fire and appoint a majority of directors at will. I’m not sold on whether all those candidates were actually fake, but journalists from more credible outlets than Byline Times are no doubt working on physically tracking down every one off these candidates as we speak to verify their existence or otherwise.
found this linked in ed zitron comment section for some reason: https://www.funraniumlabs.com/2024/04/phil-vs-llms/
With a moment’s contemplation after reading it, I just realized how spectacularly bad this could go if, for example, you went to do a search for an chemical’s Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) and a Large Language Model (LLM) gave you back some bullshit advice to take in the event of hazmat exposure or fire.
joke's on you, MSDSs are already dogshit. these things only exist to cover ass of manufacturers and are filled with generic, useless advice https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/uselessness-msds https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/un-safety-data-sheets there is MSDS for sand, MSDS for tear gas and ethanol lists the same dangers, toxicity is overemphasized (because it's common) and some other dangers like explosiveness are underappreciated (because it's not), we don't even need LLMs for this, humans (lawyers mostly i guess) did the same on accident
also bonus points for first-principling what could have been instead of asking somebody that actually knows, like any proper rationalist would do. also, vinyl chloride is not reactive with water and spraying pressurized containers with water can be a sensible thing to do, because this cools them down, so it decreases pressure meaning it decreases risk of rupture, which would be a bad thing, if manageable for firefighters to do it safely. see: some fires involving propane tanks
An MSDS may not tell you what respirator to use;
Slander! MSDS will tell you to use the right one ("appropriate respirator"), it's your job to figure out what it is
I've been out-of-the-loop for a bit on the Nix drama. Is there a good summary of the last couple weeks?
Medium article about Yud came across my dash (I hope the link works).
Here's a link that bypasses the URL shortener.
Also: ew.
Perilous Waif follows the story of its narrator Alice Long, a cybernetically enhanced orphan with a variety of superhuman powers in the 25th century. One of these enhancements causes Alice’s body to grow very fast, giving her the body of a thirteen year old at just age six.
we've reached some zenith of insane facebook AI slop
hot Japanese cabin crew, barefoot, on a farm, with Jesus
(image)
a deficiency of tractors in the training data
a deficiency of tractors in the training data
Just one more dataset bro, i promise bro just one more dataset and it'll fix everything bro. bro just one more dataset
NSFW, Sterling on the weird language of LLMs
https://bruces.medium.com/preliminary-notes-on-the-delvish-dialect-by-bruce-sterling-ce68a476247b
If Books Could Kill back with Hanania's piece of work https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/afe6b965e80359c1edbb86f78bde3997
opening line "This book's so fucking stupid, I regret choosing it"
This released today: https://www.ic3.gov/Media/News/2024/240709.pdf
Cool (horrifying) look into one of the active Russian bot farms and their use of generative AI
So remember when Google Domains got sold off to Squarespace because it wasn't profitable enough and Google has the attention span of a squirrel?
Well that meant bye bye MFA for anyone who didn't check their email diligently enough, allegedly leading to a number of cryptocurrency domains getting hacked.
The cryptocurrency aspect is mostly just funny, but Google and Squarespace should know better than to effectively disable MFA out from under people. Tech companies put profit over people all the time. And then everyone blames the people for not being hyper-vigilant about computer security.
Edit: The tweet linked in that bleepingcomputer article is funny if this was indeed the issue: https://twitter.com/pendle_fi/status/1811683909509558562
Some "defi" company realized this could be a problem 22 hours before they were hacked. Even had time to write a tool to mitigate the impact of getting hacked. Got hacked anyway. Did they uhh... IDK change their password? Make sure MFA was set up? They don't say.
"Any messages beyond this tweet from anyone claiming to be from Pendle is a scam"
33 replies from scammers. Holy shit.
I know cryptocurrency people have a weirdly high tolerance for getting scammed and blaming the victim, but the twitter spam is constant now. You'd think they'd get tired of it at some point and switch to a platform that lets them moderate better.
presumes that people know there's better possible
soapbox.gif: you see a dynamic of this sort with a lot of people who have largely only ever interacted with "the internet" through vendor-mediated apps and shit. you can often pick up on it by people that speak in frames of "this app" - the app is their gateway to that engagement, and they have never known substantially otherwise. and it's a day-vs-night type difference in experiences in so many cases! there are some sites that I outright refuse to even open on mobile simply because the anti-nagblocker/etc capabilities that I have on RealComputer with RealOS (i.e.: not some artificially hobbled shit run by a monopolist fuckwad company) just completely block the annoying shit, whereas it is almost impossible to have that experience on mobile
and for so many people, the latter type (of experience/internet) is all they ever know
"toughened up our defenses" like adding DNS monitoring. so they just ... didn't have that before? for a user-facing public web service? cool.
(and yeah lol at how little detail the rest of this covers)
This happened a while ago and I still have mixed feelings about it: a band I like started a music label and named it p(doom): https://pdoomrecords.com/
Pedro Domingos tries tilting at the doomers
The doom prediction in question? Dec 31st 2024. It's been an honour serving with you lads. 🫡
Edit: as a super forecastor, my P(Connor will shut the fuck up due to being catastrophically wrong | I wake up on Jan 1st with a pounding hang over) = (1/10)^100
tesla: special treatment for those that might cause embarrassing press
gives all the “it works for me” type comments a whole new colour
This part of Ed Zitron's latest post jumped out at me:
While Acemoglu has some positive things to say — for example, that AI models could be trained to help scientists conceive of and test new materials (which happened last year) — his general verdict is quite harsh: that using generative AI and "too much automation too soon could create bottlenecks and other problems for firms that no longer have the flexibility and trouble-shooting capabilities that human capital provides."
Click, click, search... Oh:
The recent report from a group of scientists at Google who employ a combination of existing data sets, high-throughput density functional theory calculations of structural stability, and the tools of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to propose new compounds is an exciting advance. We examine the claims of this work here, unfortunately finding scant evidence for compounds that fulfill the trifecta of novelty, credibility, and utility.
Aaah!
PagerDuty suggestion popup: Resolve incidents faster with Generative AI. Join Early Access to try the new PD Copilot.
for orgs that require a written reason when you resolve an issue
petition to use the term "pyramid sucking" to refer to the activity of defending the Incredible Potential of AI, crypto, the metaverse, whatever the next thing is, etc
Alternate pitch could be pyramid plugging. There’s an added slant here that pyramids don’t have flared bases.
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
