RubyRidgeRandy (u/RubyRidgeRandy)

RubyRidgeRandy commented on Microsoft has not stopped forcing Edge on Windows 11 users ctrl.blog/entry/windows-s... · Posted by u/extr0pian

topaz0 · 3 years ago

> [Windows 10/11] fades into the background

I strongly disagree with this. When I am forced to use windows, I am constantly fighting with it to not be obnoxious. It takes many seconds to do something as simple as bring up an explorer window. I can't count the number of times I have had to dig into menus to disable this or that ad panel or other bloatware. In linux, I occasionally have to figure out how something works and fix it, but there are generally many months between those events, when everything just works and gets out of my way.

RubyRidgeRandy · 3 years ago

super+e, clicking the explorer button? I think you're being purposefully difficult here.

I cannot list any of the bugs I have had with Windows off the top of my head, but I can with linux. Driver issues, Pulse audio randomly playing static, updates breaking my system, fractional scaling not working, I could go on.

RubyRidgeRandy commented on Chrome now tracks users and shares a “topic” list with advertisers arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/edvinbesic

skybrian · 3 years ago

Looking at 'Ad topics' in Chrome settings, they seem extremely generic and barely count as targeting. If disclosing these topics to a bunch of websites harms me, I don't see how? I don't care who knows them.

Here you go:

   * Arts & Entertainment
   * Computers & Electronics
   * Internet & telecom
   * News
   * Online communities

Seems reasonably accurate, but so what? What am I missing?

RubyRidgeRandy · 3 years ago

At the end of the day, I think the categories are very broad and better respect people's privacy compared to what we had before. Some people in the privacy community seem to think advertising and tracking in any form should not exist and will always make a stink about whatever incarnation they take.

These proposals were made directly because of legislation like GDPR. It's not as if Google got up one day and said "Let's make our job harder."

RubyRidgeRandy commented on The antitrust trial against Google is starting in September thebignewsletter.com/p/th... · Posted by u/gcheong

WirelessGigabit · 3 years ago

The problem here is authority. What makes you an authority on a subject? Books written? Credentials (diploma?)? References?

These things aren't all true in real life, and on the internet it's even easier to fake all of that.

In the beginning Google went by 'amount of text' (which is why you read everybody's life story on how they had sex next to a magma flow in Hawaii which created the idea of doing burnt ends on a pizza stone), references (remember all those backlinks which would boost your page). Credentials are a lot harder to track. There is no API at my school where you can put in my name and see my credentials (and all you'd see is 'we got governments subsidies for this person, which is why we let him pass').

And all of this worked at the start. Knowledgeable people naturally had references on the web, as only knowledgeable people were on the web.

Now we literally have people writing text purely to make it look like their website has more content on them, even if it is remotely related to what they serve.

Great example, even posted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36740400

Or any coding problem where you end up on logrocket / some partitioning app / some generated website with which has an 'answer' for KB0000000 -> KB9999999...

RubyRidgeRandy · 3 years ago

I work (partly) in SEO. One of the main issues that affects search and will get even worse in the future is the post-scarcity environment of the web when it comes to information. Say you had five websites for that each have identical cookie recipes. If you optimize search rankings by click-through rating, eventually all the sites will have similar copy, titles, and page descriptions. If you optimize for bounce rate, you knock out sites that get to the point but also knock out sites that crappy and have bad ui/ux. What about core web vitals? Well again, everyone will catch up eventually. Anything that can be gamified will eventually be gamed.

Now instead of 5 sites with identical recipes, what about 500? 5,000? 5,000,000? How can you even rank them in a meaningful way and does it matter to the end user?

There will be too much of a supply of information, especially when ai ramps up, that no one website will have unique value outside of local significance or if it was made by your mom or someone you like. I think it will be crazy to see what the web looks like 10 years from now. It could be vastly different.

RubyRidgeRandy commented on US universities need to stop elitist discrimination that Europe abandoned bloomberg.com/opinion/art... · Posted by u/xqcgrek2

RubyRidgeRandy · 3 years ago

If you use ublock origin or brave, you can turn on the bypass payways clean filter within brave or you can subscribe to the list on filterlists.com

RubyRidgeRandy commented on Intuitionism en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Int... · Posted by u/rotartsi

circlefavshape · 3 years ago

I've been thinking about this recently, and realised that your framing here casts humans as separate from the rest of reality. Your sense organs and your brain are part of things-in-and-and-of-themselves.

RubyRidgeRandy · 3 years ago

I don't think it does. Humans are agents within reality and have perceptions of reality. Your brain having a representation in this reality that might be different from 'true reality' doesn't change the argument at all.

RubyRidgeRandy commented on Intuitionism en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Int... · Posted by u/rotartsi

simonh · 3 years ago

I would agree that everything we experience is a model of the world that we construct from sense data, interpreted by our sensory systems and cognitive faculties. Donald Hoffman is good on this and worth looking up, although I disagree with some of his conclusions.

That doesn't mean the external physical world doesn't exist, the information we use to construct that model must come from somewhere, and we can deduce that the source is a persistent and consistent one.

The philosopher Husserl said: “The tree plain and simple, the thing of nature, is as different as it can be from this perceived tree as such, which as perceptual meaning belongs to the perception, and that inseparably.”

He came up with the idea of the noema which is our experience of something, and noesis which is our conscious act of perception. For me, that's our act of interpretation of our sensory perceptions. Sometimes this all goes wrong and we construct a flawed model that does not correspond perfectly to actual external reality, such as when we are deceived by optical illusions, stage magic or just hallucinate. Fortunately we can test and correct our perceptions through action in the physical world.

I'm an out-and-out physicalist but I think he is quite correct, we must distinguish between our internal perception of things and how things actually are. Fortunately science is extremely powerful in this regard. It has allowed us to decouple our model of the world from the limitations of our perceptual system, and come up with rigorous models of reality such as Relativity and Quantum Mechanics that are not tied to direct interpretation by our perceptive systems.

RubyRidgeRandy · 3 years ago

I think there is a hard limit to what we know and what we can assume to know based of this point and in logic by the Münchhausen trilemma. It's interesting to think of the source of sense data as persistent or consistent when it could just be that our sense organs reduce varied data into persistent experience.

When we look at a tree, it could very well be that the source of the tree is very much like the tree we experience, but it could also be wildly different. When we see a tree in a video game, we know there is no real source tree just like it, just ones and zeroes. I disagree that science fixes this problem. Tools are still just measuring the physical world. For example, if you used a tool to measure some aspect of the tree, you are still measuring the representation of the tree in this world. If I use the video game analogy again, my point is that you wouldn't be able to see true underlying 'source code' of the game tree by looking at it in the game.

RubyRidgeRandy commented on Intuitionism en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Int... · Posted by u/rotartsi

RubyRidgeRandy · 3 years ago

Because humans never experience anything in and of itself, but only the output of the interaction between sensory data and a brain, literally everything is purely the result of human mental activity.

RubyRidgeRandy commented on New in Chrome 113 developer.chrome.com/blog... · Posted by u/feross

cj · 3 years ago

I honestly think this move toward "less tracking" (3rd party cookie restrictions) is having the opposite intended effect.

It used to be you could just "clear your cookies" and you'd have a virtually clean identity on the internet. Now basically every ad platform, including Google Ads, is heavily encouraging the use of "first party data" - aka name, email addresses, phone numbers, mailing addresses - as a way to target customers. Google Ads help docs specifically cite the phasing out of cookies as the reason advertisers should send Google as much "first party data" as possible.

In effect, that means "clearing your cookies" will do nothing if you're the average Google users who's still logged into chrome/google after clearing your cookies.

And instead of Google + ad networks just having your data in cookies, now they have your name, email, mailing address, zip code, etc provided to them on the backend with no way for the consumer to easily opt out or delete their data.

Edit: adding another supporting example: for advertisers tracking conversions, it’s no longer good enough to just fire a conversion pixel on a checkout page. Now it’s heavily encouraged to send the user’s personal data (email, name, phone, etc) along with the conversion pixel/tag so Google (or whatever ad platform) can match the conversion to clicks without cookies at all. This type of conversion tracking was not pushed or encouraged until browsers started phasing out 3rd party cookies.

Edit 2: Google has even gone as far as adding a setting to their AdWords tracking tag that automatically scrapes the HTML of a page in search of anything that resembles a user’s email address or phone number to make it easier to collect first party data automatically.

RubyRidgeRandy · 3 years ago

Now you can just not have an account or any first party data given to a customer, or with tools like anonaddy and fake people generator, you can spoof first party data that won't be matched when hashed and compared across different platforms.

I'm curious, would you purchase a membership to youtube if it included absolutely no tracking, sharing of first-party data, or advertising at all?

RubyRidgeRandy commented on Peter Gabriel: AI competition statement petergabriel.com/news/ai-... · Posted by u/bravogamma

spacephysics · 3 years ago

I think we can look at history and see how revolutionary technologies changed the landscape of society.

No one knows really the magnitude of AI, but if we take the two extremes, AI takes all our jobs, and AI is just some stats that has no real utility, we’ll probably land somewhere in the middle.

Personally, I’m trying to learn these technologies to augment my current work. I’m treating it like going from using Notepad to program Java, over to a full fledged IDE. Not a perfect analogy, I know.

Given its inevitability, I think it’s logical to try and use it to our advantage as workers. If it ends up taking our jobs anyways, at least we tried. If it doesn’t take our jobs outright, then we’ll still be behind those that use the AI products as tools that augment their productivity, leading to a game of catch-up.

Even with the 6 month hiatus proposed, AI versions will still be released by those that refuse to follow the agreement. We’re in an AI arms race against the likes of other world super powers. And the morality of some are quite questionable (not that US’ morality is perfect by any means)

RubyRidgeRandy · 3 years ago

I firmly believe that once ai is in a position to replace programmers and other white collar workers, it's more of "we're all fucked" moment. Society would have to so radically change once we reach even that infantile level of post-scarcity, when a large portion of society that loses their jobs, that we have to have serious discussions about what life is supposed to be about and what our places in society are.

when there is no more desire to be quenched, when there are no jobs to do, when we have solved all disease, what do we do? Man has been defined so much by his suffering and toil, that when we take it away we are in an environment that we are not prepared for in any kind of sense.

RubyRidgeRandy commented on Eight things to know about large language models [pdf] cims.nyu.edu/~sbowman/eig... · Posted by u/tim_sw

jawiggins · 3 years ago

> 6. Human performance on a task isn’t an upper bound on LLM performance

Is that true? Because LLMs are trained on the work of human: a LLM that learned all of the content of the articles would at best yield output equal to that of the human writing.

The reasons the author gives seem unfounded to me:

> First, they are trained on far more data than any human sees

If the human writer has access to google (everyone in modern society) this point is moot.

> In addition, they are often given additional training using reinforcement learning before being deployed.

If this is human in the loop RL, then the upper bound would still be the human training it. If it isn't, refer to #1.

RubyRidgeRandy · 3 years ago

I don't agree with you. Human knowledge itself is not bound only to the previous knowledge before it, so why wouldn't AI be any different? This is more of where AGI will shine, but I still think LLMs can produce novel innovation.

There's also a difference between having access to and being able to 'comprehend' all previous works in a given genre for generating music, that a human simply won't have the ability to process and recall when creating their own music and the AI could surpass. Humans simply having access to information is different than using information.