MrScruff (u/MrScruff)

MrScruff commented on Bringing Sexy Back. Internet surveillance has killed eroticism lux-magazine.com/article/... · Posted by u/eustoria

renewiltord · 23 days ago

Sounds like a too online person with too online friends. About ten years ago, I had an experience that pointed out the too online nature of people (in that case, myself).

It’s all in the culture of the social media bubble they’re in. I was on Reddit a lot. Reddit had just gone through the Great Hate of Hipsters (with their skinny jeans and ear gauges) and had moved on to a new target: Atheists.

The scorned atheist was (perhaps is?) stereotypically a nerdy young man with, notably, an affection for fedoras and pride in “euphoric” quotes.

All right, so I spent all this time on Reddit and it was clear to me: Americans think fedoras are weird and American girls can’t stand them. I don’t have a predilection for hats personally so this wasn’t a big deal but good to know. But I was a nerdy young man.

Then one day I was traveling with a group of friends, mostly girls, and we walked by a hat store. Completely confusingly, the girls were highly enthusiastic about us boys wearing the hats. Some of them specifically picked out the much hated fedora! For me!

I said something about atheist-kid-something and they looked at me confused till one of them said “oh it’s some Reddit thing; forget it, just try it on” and life just moved on.

So what was the deal? I’d assumed some highly-specific online view of a highly-specific online community was a property of society. It wasn’t. It’s a property of the people who are part of the highly-specific online community.

Anyway, I think this writer’s friends are part of some highly specific community with some kind of Twitter-like norms. And this supposed change in society is just a change in her local group.

MrScruff · 22 days ago

Great story and I think you're exactly right.

MrScruff commented on Bringing Sexy Back. Internet surveillance has killed eroticism lux-magazine.com/article/... · Posted by u/eustoria

EA-3167 · 23 days ago

That certainly isn’t my experience, and the example she gives imo says more about her neurotic friends than society.

MrScruff · 22 days ago

Yeah, while I mostly agree with the sentiment, I don't actually recognise any of the behaviours described in this article. It does sound like the behavioural traits of a certain subsection of certain generations, who's expectations and norms have been warped by overuse of social media. It all sounds incredibly exhausting and I genuinely feel sorry for those growing up in this climate.

MrScruff commented on Yann LeCun to depart Meta and launch AI startup focused on 'world models' nasdaq.com/articles/metas... · Posted by u/MindBreaker2605

fastball · a month ago

Really? From where I'm standing LeCun is a pompous researcher who had early success in his career, and has been capitalizing on that ever since. Have you read any of his papers from the last 20 years? 90% of his citations are to his own previous papers. From there, he missed the boat on LLMs and is now pretending everyone else is wrong so that he can feel better about it.

MrScruff · a month ago

His research group have introduced some pretty impactful research and open source models.

https://ai.meta.com/research/

MrScruff commented on Facts about throwing good parties atvbt.com/21-facts-about-... · Posted by u/cjbarber

swiftcoder · 2 months ago

I think there's a cultural element to how much of it people will know to do without being explicitly told what to do.

In the US successful gatherings tend to require a fair bit of wrangling - I've been to more than one potluck where everyone showed up with roughly the same dish...

MrScruff · 2 months ago

I think that goes everywhere though, I’ve been to at least one of every type of party described in this discussion thread in the last year and I’m not American.

MrScruff commented on The Case That A.I. Is Thinking newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/ascertain

dns_snek · 2 months ago

I meant it in the same way the previous commenter did:

> Having seen LLMs so many times produce incoherent, nonsensical and invalid chains of reasoning... LLMs are little more than RNGs. They are the tea leaves and you read whatever you want into them.

Of course LLMs are capable of generating solutions that aren't in their training data sets but they don't arrive at those solutions through any sort of rigorous reasoning. This means that while their solutions can be impressive at times they're not reliable, they go down wrong paths that they can never get out of and they become less reliable the more autonomy they're given.

MrScruff · 2 months ago

Sure, and I’ve seen the same. But I’ve also seen the amount to which they do that decrease rapidly over time, so if that trend continues would your opinion change?

I don’t think there’s any point in comparing to human intelligence when assessing machine intelligence, there’s zero reason to think it would have similar qualities. It’s quite clear for the foreseeable future it will be far below human intelligence in many areas, while already exceeding humans in some areas that we regard as signs of intelligence.

MrScruff commented on The Case That A.I. Is Thinking newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/ascertain

almosthere · 2 months ago

Well, a model by itself with data that emits a bunch of human written words is literally no different than what JIRA does when it reads a database table and shits it out to a screen, except maybe a lot more GPU usage.

I permit you, that yes, the data in the model is a LOT more cool, but some team could by hand, given billions of years (well probably at least 1 Octillion years), reproduce that model and save it to a disk. Again, no different than data stored in JIRA at that point.

So basically if you have that stance you'd have to agree that when we FIRST invented computers, we created intelligence that is "thinking".

MrScruff · 2 months ago

You're getting to the heart of the problem here. At what point in evolutionary history does "thinking" exist in biological machines? Is a jumping spider "thinking"? What about consciousness?

MrScruff commented on The Case That A.I. Is Thinking newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/ascertain

dns_snek · 2 months ago

No, that's decidedly not what is happening here.

One is saying "I've seen an LLM spectacularly fail at basic reasoning enough times to know that LLMs don't have a general ability to think" (but they can sometimes reproduce the appearance of doing so).

The other is trying to generalize "I've seen LLMs produce convincing thought processes therefore LLMs have the general ability to think" (and not just occasionally reproduce the appearance of doing so).

And indeed, only one of these is a valid generalization.

MrScruff · 2 months ago

When we say "think" in this context, do we just mean generalize? LLMs clearly generalize (you can give one a problem that is not exactly in it's training data and it can solve it), but perhaps not to the extent a human can. But then we're talking about degrees. If it was able to generalize at a higher level of abstraction maybe more people would regard it as "thinking".

MrScruff commented on Facts about throwing good parties atvbt.com/21-facts-about-... · Posted by u/cjbarber

swiftcoder · 2 months ago

I don't know about the Netherlands, but having spent a bit of time in Germany, you may be underestimating the mount of party planning that is ingrained into the various European cultures.

From an outside perspective, even fairly casual German gatherings feel like they are orchestrated with a level of precision that would do a military campaign proud - but the Germans I was with don't really seem to notice this (likely because they all already know their roles, and to them it's just part of their culture)

MrScruff · 2 months ago

I don’t think this is a specific cultural thing, in my experience some people host more curated gathering, some more relaxed and informal - doesn’t matter where you’re from. People just tend to think the way their social group does it is the ‘norm’.

MrScruff commented on Suno Studio, a Generative AI DAW suno.com/studio-welcome... · Posted by u/debrisapron

htrp · 3 months ago

>No one wants to see music played entirely from a computer during a live concert.

Tomorrowland begs to differ

MrScruff · 3 months ago

Yeah personally I don't give a toss about the person who created the music and their backstory or stage performance.

However I do care that the person who created the music made hundreds of micro decisions during the creation of the piece such that it is coherent, has personality and structure towards the goal of satisfying that individuals sense of aesthetics. Unsurprisingly this is not something you get from current AI generated music.

MrScruff commented on Suno Studio, a Generative AI DAW suno.com/studio-welcome... · Posted by u/debrisapron

80hd · 3 months ago

I wasn't expecting to, but I got chills listening to some Suno creations from artists who are clearly very talented at using this new medium.

Much like those of us hammering away at LLMs who eventually get incredible results through persistence, people are doing the same with these other AI tools, creating in an entirely new way.

I'm sure Suno are working hard on this and these AI tools can only come together as fast as we can figure out the UX for all this stuff, but I'm holding out for when I can guide the music with specific melodies using voice or midi.

For "conventional" musicians, we (or at least I) would love to have that level of control. Often we know exactly what it should sound like, but might not have session musicians or expensive VSTs (or patience) on hand to get exactly the sound we want. Currently we make do with what we have - but this tech could allow many to take their existing productions to the next level.

MrScruff · 3 months ago

What I've tend to find is that although almost everyone listens to some form of music, the average person tends to like things which are squarely in the middle of the gaussian curve, and that are inherently very predictable as though the creator had chosen the most stastically likely outcome for every creative decision they made while creating it. Similar trends with almost anything creative, cinema, literature, food etc.

This is basically what all the Suno creations sound like to me, which is to say they definitely have a market, but that market isn't for people who have a more than average interest in music.