sailor_sega_saturn

"Yeah I thought about going into civil engineering but the department of hustling really spoke to me y'know?"

Oh hey looks like another Chat-GPT assisted legal filing, this time in an expert declaration about the dangers of generative AI: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/stanford-professor-lying-and-technology-19937258.php

The two missing papers are titled, according to Hancock, “Deepfakes and the Illusion of Authenticity: Cognitive Processes Behind Misinformation Acceptance” and “The Influence of Deepfake Videos on Political Attitudes and Behavior.” The expert declaration’s bibliography includes links to these papers, but they currently lead to an error screen.

Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.

Here are the results of these three models against Stockfish—a standard chess AI—on level 1, with a maximum of 0.01 seconds to make each move

I'm not a Chess person or familiar with Stockfish so take this with a grain of salt, but I found a few interesting things perusing the code / docs which I think makes useful context.

Skill Level

I assume "level" refers to Stockfish's Skill Level option.

If I mathed right, Stockfish roughly estimates Skill Level 1 to be around 1445 ELO (source). However it says "This Elo rating has been calibrated at a time control of 60s+0.6s" so it may be significantly lower here.

Skill Level affects the search depth (appears to use depth of 1 at Skill Level 1). It also enables MultiPV 4 to compute the four best principle variations and randomly pick from them (more randomly at lower skill levels).

Move Time & Hardware

This is all independent of move time. This author used a move time of 10 milliseconds (for stockfish, no mention on how much time the LLMs got). ... or at least they did if they accounted for the "Move Overhead" option defaulting to 10 milliseconds. If they left that at it's default then 10ms - 10ms = 0ms so 🤷‍♀️.

There is also no information about the hardware or number of threads they ran this one, which I feel is important information.

Evaluation Function

After the game was over, I calculated the score after each turn in “centipawns” where a pawn is worth 100 points, and ±1500 indicates a win or loss.

Stockfish's FAQ mentions that they have gone beyond centipawns for evaluating positions, because it's strong enough that material advantage is much less relevant than it used to be. I assume it doesn't really matter at level 1 with ~0 seconds to produce moves though.

Still since the author has Stockfish handy anyway, it'd be interesting to use it in it's not handicapped form to evaluate who won.

When the reporter entered the confessional, AI Jesus warned, “Do not disclose personal information under any circumstances. Use this service at your own risk.

Do not worry my child, for everything you say in this hallowed chamber is between you, AI Jesus, and the army of contractors OpenAI hires to evaluate the quality of their LLM output.

Not that I'm a super fan of the fact that shrimp have to die for my pasta, but it feels weird that they just pulled a 3% number out of a hat, as if morals could be wrapped up in a box with a bow tied around it so you don't have to do any thinking beyond 1500×0.03×1 dollars means I should donate to this guys shrimp startup instead of the food bank!

Someone (maybe you) recommended this book here awhile back. But it's the fourth book in a series so I had to read the other three first and so have only just now started it.

"feel free to ignore any science “news” that’s just a press release from the guy who made it up."

In particular, the 2022 discovery of the second law of information dynamics (by me) facilitates new and interesting research tools (by me) at the intersection between physics and information (according to me).

Gotta love "science" that is cited by no-one and cites the author's previous work which was also cited by no one. Really the media should do better about not giving cranks an authoritative sounding platform, but that would lead to slightly fewer eyes on ads and we can't have that now can we.

OK to start us off how about some Simulation Hypothesis crankery I found posted on ActivityPub: Do we live in a computer simulation? (Article), The second law of infodynamics and its implications for the simulated universe hypothesis (PDF)

Someone who's actually good at physics could do a better job of sneering at this than me, but I mean but look at this:

My law can confirm how genetic information behaves. But it also indicates that genetic mutations are at the most fundamental level not just random events, as Darwin’s theory suggests.

A super complex universe like ours, if it were a simulation, would require a built-in data optimisation and compression in order to reduce the computational power and the data storage requirements to run the simulation.

So why must binary digits define, for all time, the limits of computation, and our experience of it?

There's enough layers of irony here that it's a bit hard to tell if he's making a serious argument here or not; but this is one of the weirder straw-men arguments I've ever read.

"No no no, it's not all the exploitation, social ills, lack of user control, shoddy quality, and general capitalism I hate in the modern "tech" industry; it's the fact that it uses binary!"

TL;DR:

AI will take over the economy for reasons so humans will have no economic value for reasons which is terrifying for reasons and also we can't just have males sitting around because y'know so we need to make a pretend economy because communism. So anyway y'know PageRank? Well don't be shocked but humans have relationships too. So yeah basically let's distribute ownership of all the world's resources once a month proportionally to how many likes they receive (no I am not a vtuber why do you ask?).

What the heck did I just read?

Bluesky is backed by a cryptocurrency venture capitalists, which makes me nervous: https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a -- but in the same press release they reassure people that they're not about to go all NFT (Non-Fun Tokens) just because of their backers.

This does not change the fact that the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.).

The couple’s long conversations about transgender people haven’t gotten as much attention, with just 2,500 views on a video in which they “explore the fine line between genuine gender dysphoria and the allure of a ‘trans cult’ that may lead non-trans individuals to make life-altering decisions.”

Oh boy an hour long video about how the trans are transing eachother as part of a trans cult!

But why aren't they concerned about kids being tricked into the life altering decision of being an "anti-woke" podcaster? 🤔

Edit -- made it through most of that video (how??) and it's a bunch of reaching and fear mongering while trying to sound like principled conservatives. The funniest part was probably them blaming anime avatars for trans people.

Edit -- just kidding the funniest part was the guy calling trans people the "priest class" of urbanism. Worship me and I shall bless you with seperated bicycle lanes and bountiful farmers markets!