[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 20 hours ago
[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 15 points 1 day ago

it can guess their age and weight! It can even guess their socioeconomic group, and if they dye their hair.

But can it detect Inexplicable Cimmerian Vibes? Can it guess the haplogroup?

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 2 points 2 days ago

Fill the body with bullets, it's a tested method. Although Aperture might've patented it 🤔

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago

They're trying to kill the AGI by polluting the training data.

Project Wheatley

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago

Hegelian e-girls’ VIP “symposium”

Excuse the rather formal philosophical latin but qvid in fvck?

I tried looking through the post to find out what possibly they could have to do with Hegel and found

Thankfully, Matthew shared the Googledoc the e-girls had sent him with their prepared remarks. My commentary over the next several paragraphs will only make sense if you read over them (they’re mercifully short), so I’d urge everyone to open up the hyperlink and give it a quick look.

Okay, first of all, it's like 5 pages, "mercifully short" lol, go take a hike. Second,

Concrete philosophizing means applying insight to the alchemical transformation of everyday life.

This is in the first paragraph. I feel like reading this would make me devolve into an entire day of incoherent screaming and I have enough respect for my coworkers and loved ones to not subject them to that

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 2 days ago
  1. They don't & yall are "skeptical" of ID cards because it's the Mark of the Beast, so go figure
  2. Easy, regulate Big Tech to the ground until there's only Small-to-Medium Tech left
  3. Air, most of the time.
  4. Your mom.

Can I be a VP or at least Chief of Staff now

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

he signed up with a cryonics company called Alcor, which cryogenically freezes dead bodies so that they can be resurrected at some future date, when the necessary technology becomes available

wait wait wait wait, hold up, record scratch

I thought the cryogenics thing was about being frozen while alive so that you can be woken up in the future once we know how to extend human life to like hundreds of years or so, kinda like the Walt Disney urban legend. That at least has some intuitive appeal to it. Now you're telling me it's about literal fucking resurrection? Like they want to become lich kings or something? That's somehow an order of magnitude dumber, like you're not betting on "we figure out waking people up and cure cancer sometime in the future" you're betting on "WE WILL RAISE THE DEAD AND RELISH IN THE NEW AGE OF UNDEAD MAN"

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago

Alex Jones for one is convinced USA would "win" a nuclear war, so

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 13 points 3 days ago

Cosigned by the author I also include my two cents expounding on the cheque checker ML.

The most consequential failure mode — that both the text (...) and the numeric (...) converge on the same value that happens to be wrong (...) — is vanishingly unlikely. Even if that does happen, it's still not the end of the world.

I think extremely important is that this is a kind of error that even a human operator could conceivably make. It's not some unexplainable machine error, likely the scribbles were just exceedingly illegible on that one cheque. We're not introducing a completely new dangerous failure mode.

Compare that to, for example, using an LLM in lieu of a person in customer service. The failure mode here is that the system can manufacture things whole cloth and tell you to do a stupid and/or dangerous thing. Like tell you to put glue on pizza. No human operator would ever do that, and even if, then that's straight-up a prosecutable crime with a clear person responsible. Per previous analogy, it'd be a human operator that knowingly inputs fraudulent information from a cheque. But then again, there would be a human signature on the transaction and a person responsible.

So not only is a gigantic LLM matrix a terrible heuristic for most tasks - eg "how to solve my customer problem" - it introduces failure modes that are outlandish, essentially impossible with a human (or a specialised ML system) and leave no chain of responsibility. It's a real stinky ball of bull.

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 2 points 3 days ago

OT: Is there a standardised way of including alt text for pictures on Lemmy?

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 5 points 3 days ago

Nice Sneers For Winners 😥

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 9 points 4 days ago

A credible source on whether Nick Bostrom is a weirdo is Nick Bostrom cited verbatim

69
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by V0ldek@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

Turns out software engineering cannot be easily solved with a ~~small shell script~~ large language model.

The author of the article appears to be a genuine ML engineer, although some of his takes aged like fine milk. He seems to be shilling Google a bit too much for my taste. However, the sneer content is good nonetheless.

First off, the "Devin solves a task on Upwork" demo is 1. cherry picked, 2. not even correctly solved.

Second, and this is the absolutely fantastic golden nugget here, to show off its "bug solving capability" it creates its own nonsensical bugs and then reverses them. It's the ideal corporate worker, able to appear busy by creating useless work for itself out of thin air.

It also takes over 6 hours to perform this task, which would be reasonable for an experienced software engineer, but an experienced software engineer's workflow doesn't include burning a small nuclear explosion worth of energy while coding and then not actually solving the task. We don't drink that much coffee.

The next demo is a bait-and-switch again. In this case I think the author of the article fails to sneer quite as much as it's worthy -- the task the AI solves is writing test cases for finding the Least Common Multiple modulo a number. Come on, that task is fucking trivial, all those tests are oneliners! It's famously much easier to verify modulo arithmetic than it is to actually compute it. And it takes the AI an hour to do it!

It is a bit refreshing though that it didn't turn out DEVIN is just Dinesh, Eesha, Vikram, Ishani, and Niranjan working for $2/h from a slum in India.

175

I'm not sure if this fully fits into TechTakes mission statement, but "CEO thinks it's a-okay to abuse certificate trust to sell data to advertisers" is, in my opinion, a great snapshot of what brain worms live inside those people's heads.

In short, Facebook wiretapped Snapchat by sending data through their VPN company, Onavo. Installing it on your machine would add their certificates as trusted. Onavo would then intercept all communication to Snapchat and pretend the connection is TLS-secure by forging a Snapchat certificate and signing it with its own.

"Whenever someone asks a question about Snapchat, the answer is usually that because their traffic is encrypted, we have no analytics about them," Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a 2016 email to Javier Olivan.

"Given how quickly they're growing, it seems important to figure out a new way to get reliable analytics about them," Zuckerberg continued. "Perhaps we need to do panels or write custom software. You should figure out how to do this."

Zuckerberg ordered his engineers to "think outside the box" to break TLS encryption in a way that would allow them to quietly sell data to advertisers.

I'm sure the brave programmers that came up with and implemented this nonsense were very proud of their service. Jesus fucking cinammon crunch Christ.

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V0ldek

joined 7 months ago