sxan

sxan, 4 months ago

The sad thing is that no amount of mocking the current state of ML today will prevent it from taking all of our jobs tomorrow. Yes, there will be a phase where programmers, like myself, who refuse to use LLM as a tool to produce work faster will be pushed out by those that will work with LLMs. However, I console myself with the belief that this phase will last not even a full generation, and even those collaborative devs will find themselves made redundant, and we’ll reach the same end without me having to eliminate the one enjoyable part of my job. I do not want to be reduced to being only a debugger for something else’s code.

Thing is, at the point AI becomes self-improving, the last bastion of human-led development will fall.

I guess mocking and laughing now is about all we can do.

sxan, 4 months ago

This is not a foregone conclusion.

Sure, I agree. There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. However, I’ve seen no evidence that it won’t happen, or that humans hold any inherent advantage over AI (as nascent as it may be, in the rude forms of LLMs and deep learning they’re currently in).

If you want something to reflect upon, your statement about how humans have an advantage of adaptability sounds exactly like the previous generation of grasping at inherant human superiority that would be our salvation: creativity. It wasn’t too long ago that people claimed that machines would never be able to compose a sonnet, or paint a “Starry Night,” and yet, creativity has been one of the first walls to fall. And anyone claiming that ML only copies and doesn’t produce anything original has obviously never studied the history of fine art.

Since noone would now claim that machines will never surpass humans in art, the goals have shifted to adaptability? This is an even easier hurdle. Computer hardware is evolving at speeds enormously faster than human hardware. With the exception of the few brief years at the start of our lives, computer software is more easily modified, updated, and improved than our poor connective neural networks. It isn’t even a competition: conputers are vastly more well equipped to adapt faster than we are. As soon as adaptability becomes a priority of focus, they’ll easily exceed us.

I do agree, there are a lot of ways this futur could not come to pass. Personally, I think it’s most likely we’ll extinct ourselves - or, at least, the society able to continue creating computers. However, we may hit hardware limits. Quantum computing could stall out. Or, we may find that the way we create AI cripples it the same way we are, with built-in biases, inefficiencies in thinking, or simply too high of resource demands for complexity much beyond what two humans can create with far less effort and very little motivation.

sxan, 4 months ago

You don’t get logged in to other accounts. Just follow people at their address, like you’d send an email. The server does the rest.

If your question is about finding people to follow, that’s another matter. Folks on other instances won’t show up in your searches unless someone on your instance already follows them. For popular people, that’s usually no problem. For others, you might get their address from their web page. In any case, once you have their address, you just… follow them. No matter where they are, follow them from your instance and it just works. You don’t have to “log in” anywhere else; that’s the “federated” part of the fediverse.

What’s most fantastic about it is that you can often follow accounts on entirely different platforms. How well this works depends on how well the platform supports the AP protocol, and fundamental models of data. But you can easily follow PixelFed accounts from a Mastodon account, and it works pretty well. It’s as if you could follow Instagram accounts from your Twitter account; that’s the killer feature of the Fediverse, IMO. Discovery is still clunky, and how these things interoperate in “World” can be kludgy. But the possibilities are really very revolutionary.