"OpenAI’s AGI bait-and-switch wipes anything that does not count as economically valuable work from the definition of intelligence. That’s a massive erasure of our human capacity and a reduction of ourselves that we should resist." – https://www.noemamag.com/the-danger-of-superhuman-ai-is-not-what-you-think/
Well, even "economically valuable work" cannot be replaced by AGI when it comes to craftsmanship. This is a human activity deeply embedded in our bodies and brains. The book "The Craftsman" by Richard Sennett explains this very well. For example, how can you design, let's say, a better keyboard, like @jesse does, without fingers, and the knowledge of what typing is? An octopus would be better at it than ChatGPT.
Tasks that require expertise cannot be replaced by AI. Expertise needs to be built. A society that has lost its experts will collapse: they're necessary to maintain the systems that maintain the society. This was true even for hunters-gatherers (building bows and arrows from scratch is hard). Of course, random canned responses asserted with confidence can pass too easily for expertise, especially to people who have been trained to disregard expertise. That's a real danger in the long term.
Getting tired of Anglocentrism everywhere and especially in tech – the belief that particular features of the English language are somehow applicable all other languages. One most egregious example is text search and indexing. In English it's easy; in languages where words change depending on case or noun category, it's not so straightforward. Incidentally this makes English especially well-suited to train LLMs.
I bet ChatGPT would find a morphologically complex language such as Sanskrit or a Bantu language harder to learn. – Also English is remarkably context-free. Japanese is the opposite of that: you literally can't say anything without taking into account the relative position of speaker and listener. (For example there's no single word for "that" in Japanese: you have one for "that thing away from me but close to you" and one for "that thing away from both of us". And everything is like that)
@wordshaper Sometimes I toy with the idea of using an American recipe, I go to an online cups-to-grams converter, I realize that this is too confusing, I give up, and I go look up another recipe on a non-US website instead
@rgs yep, it’s a mess. I do it when I have to, but mostly I look for a recipe with weights. Even those, when they’re in imperial units, are sometimes suspect because something will be labeled “ounces” but they don’t say weight-ounce or volume-ounce, and one ounce(volume) of water isn’t one ounce (weight) of water. (And UK ounces are different sizes to US ounces for… reasons)
I should know it by now, but the extremely strange, sudden bug I had to deal with today, and that couldn't be possibly caused by DNS, was caused by DNS. #DNS
I saw Blue Giant yesterday at the movies and it was extremely good. Hint: to avoid spoilers, do NOT listen to the music before seeing the movie (the music is by Hiromi Uehara, so you can trust it's going to be good). This is because the music is really treated like a character of the plot. Which is pretty exceptional even for musical movies. https://youtu.be/gUf5R-MzITU#anime#jazz
Finding out that August Strindberg wrote Inferno in French, thus joining the small club of writers who wrote books in a language that was not their native one nor their colonizers’. (Samuel Beckett, Joseph Conrad, Jumpa Lahiri, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac. Others?)
New #streetart spotted in #paris: a portrait of Missak Manouchian, poet, genocide survivor, communist, immigrant, antifa, fighter, national hero, murdered by the Nazis in 1944. FTP/MOI stands for Franc-Tireurs et Partisans Main d’Œuvre Immigrée, the branch of the Resistance made out of foreigners, which he led. His remains will be transferred to the Pantheon in 9 days, joining other famous résistants such as Pierre Brossolette or Josephine Baker.