CanadaPlus

@CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org

Formerly u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

CanadaPlus,

TBF they also had things like tapes pretty early on, and delay lines nearly since the start. The best comparison for punch cards would be text on a screen, because they were designed for the purpose of human interaction.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Are you serious? We’re on Lemmy.

Definitely Reddit.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Easy, you just have a human worker strip out anything that could be problematic, and try not to bring it up around your investors.

CanadaPlus,

I just have my desktop, which is an old laptop that never moves. If I’m anywhere else, I’m either disconnected or on mobile.

CanadaPlus,

Not yet, anyway.

CanadaPlus,

Yeah, the short-term outlook doesn’t look too dangerous right now. LLMs can do a lot of things we thought wouldn’t happen for a long time, but they still have major issues and are running out of easy scalability.

That being said, there’s a lot of different training schemes or integrations with classical algorithms that could be tried. ChatGPT knows a scary amount of stuff (inb4 Chinese room), it just doesn’t have any incentive to use it except to mimic human-generated text. I’m not saying it’s going to happen, but I think it’s premature to write off the possibility of an AI with complex planning capabilities in the next decade or so.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Chinese room, called it. Just with a dog instead.

I have this debate so often, I’m going to try something a bit different. Why don’t we start by laying down how LLMs do work. If you had to explain as fully as you could the algorithm we’re talking about, how would you do it?

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Yeah, sorry, I don’t want to invert burden of proof - or at least, I don’t want to ask anything unreasonable of you.

Okay, let’s talk just about the performance we measure - it wasn’t clear to me that’s what you mean from what you wrote. Natural language is inherently imprecise, so no bitterness intended, but in particular that’s how I read the section outside of the spoiler tag.

By some measures, it can do quite a bit of novel logic. I recall it drawing a unicorn using text commends in one published test, for example, which correctly had a horn, body and four legs. That requires combining concepts in a way that almost certainly isn’t directly in the training data, so it’s fair to say it’s not a mere search engine. Then again, sometimes it just doesn’t do what it’s asked, for example when adding two numbers - it will give a plausible looking result, but that’s all.

So, we have a blackbox, and we’re trying to decide if it could become an existential threat. Do we agree a computer just as smart as us probably would be? If so, that reduces to whether the blackbox could be just as smart as us eventually. Up until now, there’s been great reasons to say no, even about blackbox software. I know clippy could never have done it, because there’s forms of reasoning classical algorithms just couldn’t do, despite great effort - it doesn’t matter if clippy is closed source, because it was a classical algorithm.

On the other hand, what neural nets can’t do is a total unknown. GPT-n won’t add numbers directly, but it is able to correctly preform the steps, which you can show by putting it in a chain-of-thought framework. It just “chooses” not to, because that’s not how it was trained. GPT-n can’t organise a faction that threatens human autonomy, but we don’t know if that’s because it doesn’t know the steps, or because of the lack of memory and cost function to make it do that.

It’s a blackbox, there’s no known limits on what it could do, and it’s certain to be improved on quickly at least in some way. For this reason, I think it might become an existential threat, in some future iteration.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

It wasn’t so great if you were gay, either. Racism was mostly passe, but everyone thought Columbus was a cool guy and the natives disappeared on their own, which is not ideal.

Not being poor and the blissful delusion that history is over sound lit, but there are some hard edges to the era I hear about occasionally, as a Zoomer. And WTF is up with that song about rubbing your boner on people?

CanadaPlus,

I gravitate towards the ones I came up in, and that’s probably not a coincidence. I will say that flat design becomes self-defeating sometimes. Every damn Google icon looks the same.

CanadaPlus,

Dope. I grew up in a rural area where even in the 2000’s homophobia lingered pretty good. I could be wrong about Columbus, I guess, but he was definitely a hero at some point.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Yep, Too Close.

It was in Leave the World Behind, and if the characters weren’t taking it seriously I 100% would have thought it was a parody song.

CanadaPlus,

Yep, the other guy’s got it, it’s Too Close.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Yes! I spend way too much time wishing other people will mess up so I’m not worst in class, haha.

CanadaPlus,

Yeah, I can often do voices best too. It’s strange that a little piece of vibrating cartilage can be distinguished so well.

Regarding sleep quality, why did humans evolve to require full darkness?

I know evolution is governed by chance and it is random but does it make sense to “ruin” sleep if there’s light? I mean normally, outside, you never have pure darkness, there are the moon and stars even at night. In certain zones of the Earth we also have long periods of no sunshine and long periods of only sunshine....

CanadaPlus,

but even in the absolute middle of nowhere with no artificial lights, you’re going to be able to see fairly well.

I’m not sure I’d say fairly well. Maybe always well enough to not walk directly into a tree in otherwise open terrain. A full moon will be comfortable to walk around in, but new moons happen just as often, and sometimes the moon is below the horizon.

Source: Have walked around in the country at night.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

We’re diurnal, and have eyes optimised to see maximum colour and detail instead of well in dim light (at least by mammal standards). It makes sense we’d gravitate to fairly dark conditions to sleep, because while nature at night is not perfectly unlit, it’s still pretty dark. Darker than a developed-world urban area will ever get, for example.

That being said, many people are completely capable of sleeping in a bright area, myself included.

As for the bonus question, yes, the hormones at least work backwards in nocturnal animals. Melatonin wakes something like a shrew up.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Hmm. Are we talking a high canopy, and fairly level ground? I feel like I’d definitely break an ankle if I tried sprinting otherwise.

I never had too much trouble, but sometimes things hiding in tall grass would surprise me, and in heavily treed patches I’d occasionally hit a low branch I didn’t notice.

I also have to account for the fact that there was some light pollution, and I could always see skyglow from towns in the distance. I doubt land ever gets close, prehistoric or not, but in the darkest conditions that happen at sea apparently you can’t see your own hands.

CanadaPlus,

I could nitpick some of the details there, but instead maybe I’ll just ask what point you’re trying to make? A healthy human can still pick out something small way better than a goat.

CanadaPlus,

Optimised just means designed for something at the expense of other parameters. We lost our tepetum lucidum at some point in evolution, probably for the 3x-ish resolution gain, while becoming much more shit in lowlight in the process. That’s a tradeoff, but a good one for a tree-based diurnal frugivore.

Cats (for example) still have theirs, which means light as two chances to hit their retina, but means there’s an upper limit on how clear an image can be, exactly because there’s light bouncing around. It sounds like 20/100 is typical for them, from a quick search. Cats are traditionally thought to be dichromats, as well.

CanadaPlus,

Yeah, we played paintball even, but stopped because one guy ran straight off like a 6 foot mini cliff. A couple of us were chasing him and he just disappeared. Was freaky as shit like that scene from LotRs.

Lol, yup, that sounds right. I did that once, although it was only like 3 or 4 feet, and I didn’t like it one bit. Is was a sinkhole or something too, because it was cliff all around, and I had to find a spot to climb out. I didn’t visit that area again.

I forget where I heard about the sailing thing now. That would be a 1 on the Bortle dark sky scale, though.

CanadaPlus,

We actually have less genetic variation than most animals. There was a lot of bottlenecking in the paleolithic. And what little we do have is still mostly confined to Africa, because the rest or the world shared common ancestry as we left our original continent.

Like, 1 in 200 people is colourblind, or something? I don’t think that’s a reasonable argument that we’re not trichromats.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

Yeah, I’ve noticed the lack of insects, and also different plants growing than I remember from when I was a kid, not all too long ago. Every once in a while someone will be talking to me about the weather and how freakish it is, and they’ll suddenly get quiet if I use the word “climate” instead of just weather, because they were (and maybe still are?) denialists.

The thing about mammals is that at least some - ourselves included - can migrate. If we have to, we’ll set up banana plantations on Antarctica, and there’s no known scenario where it gets that bad. Others are not so lucky, though.

CanadaPlus, (edited )

I keep up with it - whether nuclear winter would happen is still controversial. It all comes down to how much of the houses-and-people smoke reaches the stratosphere, and there’s actually a ton of variables to do with ash type, rubble, sunlight absorption and so on that make it tricky. It’s not exactly the same as a wildfire.

I don’t really expect Russia to do it, no. It’s just kind of an omnipresent long term risk. And yeah, it certainly wouldn’t be the end of all humanity, and Australia would have a chance to pull through, although they’d have to fend off a lot of hungry invaders. There’s no worse scenario, though, except something cosmological deciding to show up this year out of 4.5 billion. If I hadn’t of mentioned it someone 100% would have come at me with it as a thing that could end civilisation, if not neccesarily the species.

CanadaPlus,

Yup.

  • All
  • Subscribed
  • Moderated
  • Favorites
  • •
  • JUstTest
  • ngwrru68w68
  • everett
  • InstantRegret
  • magazineikmin
  • thenastyranch
  • rosin
  • GTA5RPClips
  • Durango
  • Youngstown
  • slotface
  • khanakhh
  • kavyap
  • DreamBathrooms
  • provamag3
  • tacticalgear
  • osvaldo12
  • tester
  • cubers
  • cisconetworking
  • mdbf
  • ethstaker
  • modclub
  • Leos
  • anitta
  • normalnudes
  • megavids
  • lostlight
  • All magazines
    •