mountainb (u/mountainb)

mountainb commented on YouTube's sneaky AI 'experiment' theatlantic.com/technolog... · Posted by u/JumpCrisscross

kace91 · 4 months ago

Language is one of the silliest things in modern tech.

I speak fluent English, but my native language is Spanish. I should be the most basic case of bilingualism for an app to handle - my native language is popular, English is the poster child of second language you learn for global communication, the combination itself is common as well...

The amount of stupid assumptions apps and sites make about me is mindboggling.

"Your app and OS is set to English, you watch mostly English content, you use no subtitles and your subscriptions are mostly US-based. let's give you an extremely fake dub over the content you usually watch."

Reddit also auto translate the links I enter and makes them gibberish if I'm not logged in, chagpt switches languages halfway through a message regardless of what I use...It's becoming borderline hostile.

mountainb · 4 months ago

Try to drop a foreign phrase into MS Word to add a little color and watch it go completely berserk.

mountainb commented on Scamlexity: When agentic AI browsers get scammed guard.io/labs/scamlexity-... · Posted by u/mindracer

otterley · 4 months ago

I am a lawyer. I understood your first paragraph but didn’t understand the second. It reads like a drive-by shitpost, utterly lacking substance.

mountainb · 4 months ago

I think it has more to do with the various new meanings that have been attached to the word "agent" and the concept of "agency" by software and some parts of west coast culture. Those concepts do not really have much to do with the law of agency.

Lawyers don't come up with good ideas; their role is to explain why your good ideas are illegal. There's a good argument that AI agents cannot exercise legal agency. At the end of the day, corporations and partnerships are just piles of "natural persons" (you know, the type that mostly has two hands, two feet, a head, etc.).

The fact that corporate persons can have agency relationships does not necessarily mean that hypothetical computer persons can have agency relationships for this reason.

mountainb commented on Scientific fraud has become an 'industry,' analysis finds science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/pseudolus

TheBigSalad · 4 months ago

And this encourages the people with integrity to quit.

mountainb · 4 months ago

There are so many other ways to make money that don't involve crime. And there are even many crimes that make more money that are far less harmful to society.

mountainb commented on Scientific fraud has become an 'industry,' analysis finds science.org/content/artic... · Posted by u/pseudolus

snapcaster · 4 months ago

Why do people say "so little". How is an appointment to a high prestige job for life small stakes?

mountainb · 4 months ago

There's a more transparent and straightforward pathway to a lifetime appointment as a federal judge (which actually pays OK and has many social perks) than there is to a tenured professorship in most fields. Judges have Solomon-like-life-and-death power, and the lawyers who argue before them (often successful, high-status people in their own right) are professionally obligated to suck up.

By comparison almost all professorships are like becoming the most important hobo on a given street corner.

mountainb commented on I tried to replace myself with ChatGPT in my English class lithub.com/what-happened-... · Posted by u/lapcat

quailfarmer · 4 months ago

Part of the issue is with the purpose as you describe it. Sure, at top 10 schools, a trial by fire would result in much needed “growing up” as the gifted but undisciplined (speaking for myself and many users of this site) students find their way to more durable motivations. But at the vast majority of schools, a trial by fire would end with a lot of students burned.

Perhaps that begs the question, if those kids can’t handle self-directed education, why are we putting them there in the first place, but that’s definitely a grey area, and there are hundreds of thousands of students who are smart enough to do well in higher education and skilled work, but weren’t disciplined enough to handle what you’re describing as freshmen.

mountainb · 4 months ago

Many employers pay a premium for predictably elite cadres of students. The schools want to try to pass off mediocre graduates as having some of the elite special sauce even though only a small number of students have what it takes. We know exactly what to do to produce elite cadres by aggressive sorting. But the incentives created by the federal government encourage the institutions to extrude mediocre students like a chicken nugget machine produces processed meat product. Every hot student-nugget is worth a tens of thousands of dollars a year in freshly printed loan money directed towards administrators and rent on dorms and apartments irrespective of quality; so the incentive is to stuff the students with filler.

mountainb commented on The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality english.elpais.com/cultur... · Posted by u/geox

layer8 · 5 months ago

Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made. And I have a hard time finding a replacement that matches the quality of the old version. It’s a regularly reoccurring frustration.

My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature but reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to cutting some corners on every iteration, and hence to a slow decline in quality over the years.

mountainb · 5 months ago

It is often easier to make another sale of a downgraded product using earned customer goodwill than it is to continuously innovate, delight existing customers, and win new ones based on quality. It's less risky just to run a brand into the dirt, get paid, and screw any shareholders remaining.

Also many of these kinds of activities are illegal, but people do it anyway on the reasonable calculation that they won't be sued and that the government won't investigate them.

mountainb commented on LLM Inevitabilism tomrenner.com/posts/llm-i... · Posted by u/SwoopsFromAbove

ikr678 · 5 months ago

It's inevitable not because of any inherent quality of the tech, but because investors are demanding it be so and creating the incentives for 'inevitability'.

I also think EV vehicles are an 'inevitability' but I am much less offended by the EV future, as they still have to outcompete IC's, there are transitional options (hybrids), there are public transport alternatives, and at least local regulations appear to be keeping pace with the technical change.

AI inevitabilty so far seems to be only inevitable because I can't actually opt out of it when it gets pushed on me.

mountainb · 5 months ago

To use John Adams' separation of republics into the categories of "the many, the few, and the one," the few in our current day are unusually conflict-adverse both among each other and with respect to the people.

When faced with the current crisis, they look at the options for investment and they see some that will involve a lot of conflict with the many (changing the industrial employment arrangement, rearranging state entitlements), and they see see some that avoid conflict or change. Our few as they are got that way by outsourcing anything physical and material as much as possible and making everything "into computer." So they promote a self serving spiritual belief that because overinvesting in computers got them to their elevated positions, that even more computer is what the world needs more than anything else.

This approach also mollifies the many in a way that would be easily recognizable in any century to any classically educated person. Our few do not really know what the many are there for, but they figure that they might as well extract from the many through e.g. sports gambling apps and LLM girlfriends.

mountainb commented on AI Saved My Company from a 2-Year Litigation Nightmare tylertringas.com/ai-legal... · Posted by u/anitil

mountainb · 6 months ago

There's a lot of mental cycles being expended on "how to avoid going to court over contract litigation" when the answer could be provided by a bog-standard forum selection clause requiring arbitration from a template last updated in 1992 or indeed a chatbot; but you would have to ask it the right question.

Looking up the lawsuit in question but without reviewing the record, it looks like this was probably as much personal as it was business. This always makes cases a lot harder to settle. When it is just business, you can almost always work it out in numbers. When you screw over a wealthy man in a very personal and humiliating way, your contract case can become like divorce, which is only good for the lawyers and for no one else. Ask the chatbot to summarize "The Prince" for you and maybe this will be one of the points that it gives you.

mountainb commented on Doge Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to "Munch" Veterans Affairs Contracts propublica.org/article/tr... · Posted by u/afavour

ianhawes · 6 months ago

Not possible within the 30 day timeframe they were given.

mountainb · 6 months ago

With the right teams and resources, this could be done in a shorter time. With that team and skillset there was no way to complete this in a way that did not result in a lot of contract liability to the government and other silliness.

mountainb commented on Doge Developed Error-Prone AI Tool to "Munch" Veterans Affairs Contracts propublica.org/article/tr... · Posted by u/afavour

mountainb · 6 months ago

"That’s not possible — you have 90,000 contracts,” he said. “Unless you write some code. But even then it’s not really possible.”

This entirely possible with some lawyers, some business analysts, perhaps some hospital administrative consultants, and ordinary support staff. That team might even use LLMs in some capacity but not in the way described by the article. Reviewing 90,000 hospital and other service contracts sounds like just another project for a mid-sized or big law firm; or the government. That is how those contracts were created in the first place.

This is like the meme about someone's uncle talking about how there are these 90,000 contracts that no one knows how to review because we've forgotten how to do it. If there's something America still knows how to do it's how to review tens of thousands of turgid government contracts.