leftzero

joined 1 year ago
[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 12 points 1 month ago

Yeah but only because the drop happened to fall on a particularly cosmic crystal (cosmic enough to have a capitalised name and all; with an apostrophe in it, even!).

[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 1 month ago

What have dumpsters done to you..?

[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

a sane language

JavaScript

Pick one.

[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The point isn't to disable them, it's to write “fuck Elon” on them. 🤷‍♂️

(Plus, they're A.— electric vehicles, so not that many mechanical bits to disable, B.— Teslas, so they already do a pretty good job of getting disabled all by themselves, and C.— cybertrucks, so they already come pretty pre-disabled by design, the poor things.)

[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 2 months ago

The problem is not them being random.

They are not random, that's the point. They're entirely deterministic and very precise, and they aren't hiding anything; they will give you the most likely (not blacklisted) sequence of characters to follow your input according to their model. What they won't give you is information, except by accident.

If they were random (hidden or not) they'd be harmless, no one would trust them any more than one of those eight ball toys, or your average horoscope.

The issue is that they're very not random, so much that there's no way to know if what they are saying bears any accidental semblance to the truth without fact checking... and that very soon they'll have replaced any feasible way to fact check them, since all the supposed "facts" we'll have access to will have been generated by LLMs train on LLM generated garbage.

[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

If the models are random then we shouldn't be trusting them to do anything, let alone serious applications.

That's not the reason we shouldn't be using them for anything other than generating lorem ipsum style text or dialogue for non quest critical NPCs in games.

The reason is that, paraphrasing Neil Gaiman, LLMs don't generate information, they generate information shaped sentences.

Specifically, an LLM takes a sequence of characters (not a word or text; LLMs have no concept of words, or text, or anything else for that matter; they're just an application of statistics on large volumes of sequences of characters; no meaning or intelligence involved, artificial or not)... as I was saying, an LLM takes a sequence of characters, pushes it through its model, and outputs the sequence of characters most likely to follow it in the texts its model has been trained on (or rather, the most likely after discarding the ones its creators have labelled as politically incorrect).

That's all they do, and they'll excellent at it (or would be if it weren't for the aforementioned filters), but that'll never give you a cure for cancer unless there already was one in their training data.

They take texts written by humans, shred them, and give you their badly put back together dessicated corpses, drained of any and all meaning or information, but looking very convincingly (until you fact check them) like actually meaningful or informative texts.

That is what makes them dangerous. That and the fact that the bastards selling them are marketing them for the jobs they're least capable of doing, that is, providing reliable information.

(And that's while they can still be trained on meaningful and informative texts written by humans — inasmuch as anything found on reddit, facebook, or xitter can be considered to be meaningful or informative —, but given that a higher and higher percentage of the text on the internet is being generated by LLMs soon enough it'll be impossible to train new models on anything but 99% LLM generated garbage, at which point the whole bubble will implode, as anyone who's wasted time, paper, and toner playing with a photocopier or anyone familiar with the phrase “garbage in, garbage out” will already have realised... which is probably why the LLM peddlers are ignoring robots.txt and copyright laws in a desperate effort to scrape whatever's left of the bottom of the barrel.)

[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 56 points 2 months ago (5 children)

Amateurs. You don't spray paint them, they'll just clean it off.

What you do, is place a stencil with “fuck Elon” on them, spray rust protective clear lacquer over the general area, and remove the stencil.

They won't notice until the next time it rains, when the words will show up in bright rust orange, much more harder to remove than any spray paint, and much harder to trace to you.

[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Photocopy of a photocopy, for us older folks.

[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Not all of France is like Paris, and the Seine is not a pool. (Plus, battery acid would probably count as a good attempt to clean it up, not as contamination.)

[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Seriously, other languages at least adapt loanwords to their own grammar, orthography, and whatnot... English just grabs them as they are and runs away without looking back.

That's why you end up with the plural of radius being radii, or stuff like fiancé or façade (seriously, how are people who only speak English and have never seen a ç before in their lives supposed to know how to pronounce that‽)...

Of course it all comes from English being really three or four languages — (Anglo-)Saxon, Normand(/old French), and Norse — badly put together, so sprinkling bits of other languages on top didn't make much of a difference, when there were already about five different ways to pronounce, for instance, oo, and the whole vowel shift debacle didn't exactly help with this mess... but while other languages which may have had similar (if maybe less spectacular) growing pains eventually developed normative bodies, mostly from the eighteenth century onwards, that define and maintain a standard form of the language, English seems to have ignored all that and left grammar and orthography as a stylistic choice on the writers' part, and pronunciation as an exercise for the readers...

[–] leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Asimov didn't design the three laws to make robots safe.

He designed them to make robots break in ways that'd make Powell and Donovan's lives miserable in particularly hilarious (for the reader, not the victims) ways.

(They weren't even designed for actual safety in-world; they were designed for the appearance of safety, to get people to buy robots despite the Frankenstein complex.)

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