The question I wanted to raise is: are state-of-the-art artificial intelligences gaining the ability to create control loops, i.e. systems with goals and sensors.
Readit Newsrojobuffalo commented on Control loops ryanblakeley.net/p/contro... · Posted by u/rojobuffalo
rojobuffalo commented on Maybe people do care about performance and reliability buttondown.email/hillelwa... · Posted by u/soopurman
As a "one of these day devs" I only care about performance when it starts becoming a problem and I see nothing wrong with the way I'm going about this.
The problem is that performance and reliability are issues that creep up and by the time they're a problem, they are much more expensive to fix than if they had been first class priorities from the outset. Everyone who didn't care before finds new reasons to put it off because now it's so expensive to address.
ryanblakeley commented on Maybe people do care about performance and reliability buttondown.email/hillelwa... · Posted by u/soopurman
People don't directly care about performance and reliability, but it does affect their behavior.
Back in the day at reddit, for example, we could see an uplift in usage when we made the pages faster, there was nearly a direct correlation.
At Netflix we spent a lot of effort on reliability because every time we had a major outage, there was a dropoff in subscriptions with the cohort that had been affected.
And I've heard similar from other people in the reliability space -- that there is no direct impact on retention from availability issues, but you can see an effect in the long term.
What's the difference between caring and affecting behavior? If people cancel their subscriptions after a major outage, wouldn't it be reasonable to interpret that some of them cared about performance and reliability?
I know I care. If I pay for something and it sucks, I stop paying for it because it's not up to my expectations.
rojobuffalo commented on We come to bury ChatGPT, not to praise it danmcquillan.org/chatgpt.... · Posted by u/hesk
It's so weird to me when apparently tech-savvy people say ChatGPT "lies", or call it a bullshit generator and so on.
I mean - when you ask StableDiffusion to draw a dog astronaut, everyone gets that the image it returns is made-up, right? Nobody expects the AI to return only "true" images of existing things - it was trained on fictional images as well as photographs, and people understand that it can imagine new things beyond what it's seen. Nobody expects SD to emit an error like "I can't draw a dog astronaut because they don't exist".
So why do people expect ChatGPT to work differently? Even with developers who presumably understand the technical details, I constantly see people acting as if it was an error mode for ChatGPT to say something that isn't factually true about the world. How is that any different from calling SD a liar because it drew a dog astronaut?
Do you mean dog astronaut as an example of a lie? Because there have been dog astronauts.
It is my understanding that a mix of red and yellow frequencies would trigger the corresponding yellow and red-sensitive receptors, if it has them, but not orange.
That's my impression as well.
It's an interesting question. If you want to read more, the two researchers quoted in the book that I was summarizing are Justin Marshal and Mike Land. Each has a handful of papers that are cited in the bibliography.
Obligatory Ze Frank vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5FEj9U-CJM
The Oatmeal claims that, "the mantis shrimp sees a thermonuclear bomb of light and beauty." This piece contradicts that claim:
"Mantis shrimp have twelve photoreceptor classes. Humans have three. We derive a spectrum of colors through comparisons between our three classes; this is called the opponent process or opponency. Mantis shrimp do not do this. They collapse the spectrum into just twelve colors."
Ya, that's a lovely comic, but it appears to be a misconception. That comic is actually specifically called out in the book on page 107.
It's more like a 12 color lookup table.
> Every kind of red stimulates the bottom receptor of row 3. All shades of violet stimulate the top receptor on row 1
That's based on an experiment where they were trained to attack colored lights for a reward.
The comic also says they have 16 color receptors, but the other 4 (2 in the midband and 2 in the hemispheres), as far as anyone knows, aren't involved in color vision.
rojobuffalo commented on Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU mullvad.net/nl/blog/2023/... · Posted by u/Frisiavones
Maybe. Are you as open to the idea that those who oppose surveillance (that’s me) also have secret motives and engage in willful ignorance, so you can’t trust my anti-surveillance arguments? Because, the theory goes, even I don’t know the dark motives that are making me say those things?
Do you see how impossible any dialog becomes in that model?
If you frame it as ignorance, the next step is to enlighten the other side with the factual arguments you want to make. "The threat landscape isn't as bad as you claim it is." "Mass surveillance has downsides that are worse than you would think." If you assert deceptive intent, it kind of slides into character attacks.
It's true that people sometimes don't argue in good faith, and it's fair to question hidden motives. But I think if you have better facts, you should keep arguing the facts.
rojobuffalo commented on Stop the proposal on mass surveillance of the EU mullvad.net/nl/blog/2023/... · Posted by u/Frisiavones
I believe the idea is not that they hide their motives, but that they hide from their motives. May or may not be true, but still...
I think hide implies intent to deceive. It's often more like conscious and sub-conscious reasoning. We constantly tell a story to ourselves about our motives. We're impulsive and wrong a lot of the time. And nobody is the bad guy in their own story.
Maybe it's willful ignorance. Ignorance of the misuse and harm of mass surveillance.