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cryptica commented on William Golding's Island of Savagery   historytoday.com/archive/... · Posted by u/samclemens
cryptica · 2 days ago
As I get older, I'm realizing that there's no such thing as 'human nature.' It's a broad spectrum. My view is that poor and average people are alright but as you get closer to power, people become increasingly corrupt and evil. Relationships become more calculated and transactional to the point that they become unpleasant; though apparently some people either don't feel this effect or maybe their hunger for power is so strong that it overrides those feelings... Or maybe it's a bit of both. In any case, by the time you get really close to power, all moderately normal people have been filtered out; both voluntarily and also because non-psychopaths generally struggle to fit in.

The psychopaths in power want to remove the moral element because it makes things unpredictable for them. They prefer everything to be kept stable and under control through blackmail and other forms of coercive leverage.

Something else I've found is that, as you get closer to power, people become much 'nicer' (superficially) but they are definitely more evil in reality if you look at their actions. It's like they make up for their evil deeds by being extra nice to people in person. Nowadays, when I meet people who are too friendly with their words, I immediately feel skeptical; I don't trust them.

cryptica commented on LLM Hallucinations in Practical Code Generation   dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/37... · Posted by u/appwiz
cryptica · 6 months ago
I suspect hallucinations in LLMs are the result of contradictions in their training sets which were trained into it.

I suspect it's just like with humans. People who learn quickly and don't carefully curate their knowledge to resolve contradictions as they learn, they tend to make similar mistakes when it comes to subjects which they did not invest much time fully studying.

If I was an AI researcher, what I would try to do is find the highest quality information possible concerning very few axiomatic topics, with as few contradictions as possible, then train it into the LLM until it can generate text and basic reasoning which is fully accurate... Then once we have this basic but fully rational AI, start feeding it new data but, before giving it any piece of data to learn from, you first ask the AI to indicate if this new data contradicts any of its current knowledge. You only let it update its weights with the new data as-is if it does not contradict its existing knowledge. If it does contradict its existing knowledge, either discard it or maybe feed it the data but with some synthetic preamble like "Some people believe that..." so that it's aware of the existence of this belief system but knows that it's not to be internalized as its own beliefs.

Or maybe there is a way to do this to detect contradictions by looking at the weights themselves. You can rollback a round of training if the weights update in a way which suggests that a conflicting piece of information was learned in a specific round of training. Maybe there can be a different ANN which looks at the weights of the LLM during training and it was trained to detect contradictions and decides when to rollback a round of training.

cryptica commented on Schools reviving shop class   wsj.com/us-news/education... · Posted by u/bookofjoe
cryptica · 10 months ago
This is an excellent subject to teach in schools. I'm a software developer and I felt like I benefited from woodwork and metalwork lessons at school. I think if the future generation is to automate systems, they will need to understand the manual processes.

Another thing that's needed through is to make it easier for young people to buy land in remote areas and/or to access funding to start companies. It's insane how difficult it is to obtain funding for any venture dealing in the word of atoms. I hear stories of young people moving to China to access opportunities; in the west, it feels like entrepreneurship in the space has been regulated out of existence.

It's bad enough that you have to compete with China on price and quality, but regulations make it essentially impossible.

cryptica commented on Australian Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill 2024   aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_... · Posted by u/arunc
cryptica · a year ago
I oppose the bill on principle. That said, I can see some positive that can come of it (for Australians) which has nothing to do with safety. Still, I'm not convinced that Australian politicians are actually working for Australian interests there. Also the timing seems bad. They should have done it before Elon bought Twitter. Now it looks totalitarian. Could be one of those bills pushed by foreign entities... Could be pushed to tarnish Australia to reduce the current insane levels of inbound capital flight to Australia. Many people really want to see a housing price crash, for example. Also, we shouldn't discount the desire that foreign entities have in controlling global narratives to shape global economics.
cryptica commented on Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers   news.alvaroduran.com/p/en... · Posted by u/fagnerbrack
cryptica · a year ago
It's just like it was with pen and paper... Everyone trusts what is written on the financial statement but when they come to withdraw the cash, all at once, suddenly everyone finds out that the gold isn't there.

It's the same with computer systems. The charts show something, but until enough people decide to all withdraw their money or sell their stock at the same time, nobody has any idea that the money or asset simply isn't there or nobody knows just how frothy the valuation is.

Social media and search algorithms are highly optimized to ensure that people don't sell or withdraw stuff at the same time. Modern media directs massive attention towards certain topics as a way to draw attention away from other topics which could collapse the economy.

Also, imagine a bank has a serious bug which causes millions or billions of dollars to disappear every year or creates extra illegitimate dollars. Imagine they only discover this bug after a few years of operation... How likely is it that they will report it to an authority? They didn't notice it for years, why not pretend they didn't notice it for a few MORE years... The incentive to delay the reckoning is an extremely powerful one.

cryptica commented on Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter   mashable.com/article/blue... · Posted by u/gnabgib
_DeadFred_ · a year ago
The confederate flag has only been raised inside our capital buildings once, and that was on Jan 6.
cryptica · a year ago
Well, you can't overthrow a government with a piece of cloth. So I still don't see how it could be called an insurrection.
cryptica commented on Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter   mashable.com/article/blue... · Posted by u/gnabgib
jazzyjackson · a year ago
I broadly agree with your perspective however I think you've missed that bluesky is specifically architected to facilitate the coexistence of bubbles : shared block lists, client based moderation, portability in case you account is banned from a particular host etc, Bluesky is well positioned for a future where cliques don't want to hear from one another
cryptica · a year ago
That's too bad but I guess if people want to silo themselves in, they should be allowed. I just hope that big corporations don't eventually coerce everyone into this through economic force.

I can see a future where corporations control the entire economy. Startups or parallel economy would be impossible due to regulatory moats and monetary asymmetries and everyone would be forced to lock themselves into a filter bubble in order to get a job... To survive.

Imagine knowing what's happening and not having the power refuse... And by that point, the power would be granted fully artificially out of a money printer, distributed straight into the coffers of select big corporations on the basis of secret mutual agreements between each other. All under the banner of MMT? This is beyond immoral.

More specific to your point, it makes sense why the entities behind the censorship push might still want a single platform, but simply with better 'siloing' capability. It's likely that the same people who want censorship, also want mass surveillance. Mind-bending to think that there exist a conflict between these two dystopian aspects! They really want to have the cake and eat it too.

cryptica commented on Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter   mashable.com/article/blue... · Posted by u/gnabgib
drivingmenuts · a year ago
And you don't think the desire to get away from Elon Musk and the MAGA crowd had anything to do with it? Nothing good was ever going to come about because of Elon's stupid acquisition. That was made painfully obvious when Xitter stopped paying their bills - I guess in the hopes that creditors would be forced to arbitrate lower payments on debts owed to them (which is bullshit for a billionaire to be doing, but you don't get to be a billionaire by being nice, fully ethical, moral or legal). Then we had a demonstration of sheer stupidity Elon told advertisers to fuck off, so they did, and now he's all hurt and lawsuity.

What good do you see in that? Who wouldn't want to get away from that stupidity?

cryptica · a year ago
From my perspective, X experience has improved a lot since Elon's acquisition.

What actually got worse materially? I hear a lot of gesturing 'Orange man bad', 'Elon help orange man, so Elon bad' but I cannot reach any of these conclusions from first principles looking at Trump's policies while he was President... Aside from the Jan 6 incident... But I don't see consensus there between either side so I do have some doubts and questions about the true nature of that incident. The fact is, nobody on Jan 6 had guns besides police officers. How can that possibly be an insurrection? Please correct me if I'm wrong there.

cryptica commented on Bluesky is on the verge of overtaking Threads in all the ways that matter   mashable.com/article/blue... · Posted by u/gnabgib
cryptica · a year ago
I refuse to use Bluesky because it is clearly being pushed on the masses, in collusion with mainstream media, as an alternative to X. Clearly another attempt by certain people to control information. It's shocking how people fall for this stuff over and over again.

I hope if backfires, mostly draws in users from existing speech-unfriendly platforms and then the number of social media platforms will multiply from here onward and a large number of platforms will compete based on who is most permissive with regards to speech.

Most of the highly suggestible masses already moved off X to Threads... So now that Bluesky is being pushed hard, I hope the suggestible people from Threads will switch over and split up their censorship ecosystems.

It makes sense from that perspective. The censored ecosystems should be separated into lots of small platforms because you need a lot of different filter bubbles to maintain the deceptions and impermeable information silos. A large centralized ecosystem will create too many opportunities for exposure to alternative information so it cannot be controlled as well.

In the future, there will be a different platform for every kind of delusion and each one will focus on its own delusion and will make up stories to discredit rival platforms so people always doubt information received outside.

It's a matter of time before large corporations start preventing their employees from using non-approved platforms. They'll probably use cybersecurity safety as an excuse. They might carry out hacking false flags on their own employees to convince them to not use other platforms they won't feel forced.

cryptica commented on Bird brain from the age of dinosaurs reveals roots of avian intelligence   cam.ac.uk/stories/roots-o... · Posted by u/gmays
bbor · a year ago
A) incredible article, one of the few where I didn’t feel compelled to give up and find the underlying paper. Well written, beautiful diagrams, appreciably concise. Thanks for posting!

B) The image of ~starlings hanging out with dinosaurs blew my mind. Talk about an odd juxtaposition! But I’m no dinosaur nerd, and haven’t seen the new generation of shows.

C) I just have to nitpick this to defend my buddies:

  Modern birds have some of the most advanced cognitive capabilities in the animal kingdom, comparable only with mammals.
Maybe true for vertebrates, but octopuses deserve a spot on that list!

cryptica · a year ago
Also cats are smarter than humans because they found a way to enslave humanity without even having to pretend to care about us. Dogs rank one level below, in that respect.

u/cryptica

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