tourmalinetaco

It’s especially bad when you look at the sources, and realize so many “high quality” sources have no concrete information to their claims, and there aren’t additional sources backing them because Wikipedia is not meant for “independent research”.

Wikipedia is, at best, a novelty for quick pop cult info, and as an adult I finally understand the horrors my middle school teachers warned me about.

I believe the more accurate statement is that technology can reduce the burdens of survival (better access to food, medicine, information) but cannot provide longterm happiness, and in some ways impair it (social media, mass surveillance, reliance on technology).

We are social beings, and technology in the last decade especially has been gearing itself towards reducing communities both physically and digitally. Less people spend time together, more people feel lonely and isolated, and divisions between people are at all time highs with glorification of death to the “enemy”. Forums are almost entirely dead, the feed of information is both nonstop while being useless, and we have few outlets to feel true connection.

Harvard’s happiness studies finds that standard of living only impacts happiness to a point before facing a sharp plateau and socialization takes over as a dominant factor in longterm happiness, according to my memory at least. And, while I don’t entirely agree with Kojima’s predictions in MGS2, the AI seeking to provide “context” for the feeble human mind as rate of information on the Internet increases was prescient, though humans have adapted to this (albeit suffering shorter attention spans as a consequence).

IMO a true utopia would be similar to the Enterprise: people socialize and enjoy a life with comfort by technology, not at the behest of social media or the collective consciousness of others. Unplugged and connected in a more meaningful way.

That’s because these aren’t intelligent like you, I, or even a dog. They are mathematical models formulating likely responses with no agency or drive. They appear to be intelligent, but they are the epitome of “fake it till you make it”.

They are not comparable to human brains as a whole, and are only somewhat modeled from language processing systems. Because their “existence” is bound by their prompt, they will only “desire” the completion of that prompt to the exclusion of all else, and even then they feel no joy in completion like even the most basic animal would.

The AI doom scenario will be exactly as you described: negligence or misuse by corporate or state entities via letting LLM agents run rampant without constraints, not from some magical machine spirit deciding to become whatever flavor of AI overlord you fancy. Up until last July OpenAI was running live cybersecurity benchmarks online and hacked HuggingFace due to poor limitation of the agent’s access and poor prompting in general, from my understanding.

One sounds scarier, I assume.

What must we “contain”? These are not autonomous intelligences with desires or free will. They require prompting and to be turned on beforehand, otherwise they’re glorified matrix math. They can only continue processing as long as they receive power, and we decide that.

They will attempt to cross airgaps, when we prompt them to do so, because they lack the natural capacity of planning or desire to do so without us. These are powerful tools but they are not human brains in a jar, they are mathematical models of humanity’s culture after reinforcement and guardrails.

The largest problem—as shown with the HuggingFace incident—is not the models, but in poor stewardship of automated tooling. If you don’t spend time considering the actual limitations you wish to impose upon a system, then you cannot be surprised when that system does something unexpected. The Morris Worm is perhaps the archetypal example, but even StuxNet was far more virulent than planned.

They were publicly posting to a search-indexed website with the intent of helping people. I may be wrong, but I’m pretty sure that they understood that SO owned the messages and were already profiting off of them.

Sure, however the average game is not associated with quality output. The average game dev is not associated with quality output. Even high budget professional games like GTA VI are slop and probably have codebases that make the devs cry because of outsourcing and rushed production.

Games are not some holy monolith LLMs are encroaching on, and your favorites are not harmed because some random guy has an idea and an LLM can patch it together, even if he puts it on Steam. Even if there will be more games on Steam now of low quality, they will be easy to filter and the good games will rise to the top as it always does.

Besides, some of the most beloved games are inefficient, low quality dumpster fires by any professional programming standard. Just look at Bethesda games, or Roblox in the youth department.

The quality ship sailed when the consoles became locked down PCs and speeds were high enough that uncompressed assets could be streamed directly to the rendering pipeline and the devs could just yell “POOR” if your PC didn’t run it. It’s been dead so long we don’t even know where the bones are anymore because we didn’t put a grave marker.

It already is polluted with soulless slop, and has been for around the last decade. Even Nintendo is nothing but a slop mill. Indie is the last bastion, and I personally am happy that more people will be able to develop games and bring interesting ideas to the forefront, not to mention modding and reverse engineered will make games even more customizable.

I can’t speak to Opus, but I’ve noticed Gemini is also less enjoyable to talk to and 2.5 was really the peak there. I assume that they’re converging on business use-cases like programming, which harms the model’s ability to be creative and make unsuspecting connections.

Inverse for me. I can absolutely point to moments where AI has moved me or provoked a lasting response, and the main times GAI has actually bothered me is fewer from recall. The worst was probably “Space Heroines”, made by the “artist” Swaantje Güntzel. Words cannot describe the disappointment I felt at seeing it.

I agree with your point, but if John Doe is foraging mushrooms without experience of the local flora (which I doubt this archive contains), then John Doe is kinda asking for it.

The bigger issue in this context would be canning, such as incorrectly explaining the mechanisms to avoid botulism (acid and/or pressure canning), or perhaps incorrectly wiring in repairs. However, again, it’s best to practice with these prior to emergencies anyway.

It should be noted though, that the model does source its claims, so you can fact check it and should review this information regularly.

It already is a local archive that can be searched independently, but the LLM does RAG and is, according to them, 95% accurate. It can be useful if you don’t remember where to find a source/what words to search for, but even a durable device with Kiwix would be useless in a a lot of survival situations people imagine.

Undoubtedly useful in the right contexts, particularly for local repair or homesteading, but “survival” does imply that this would be more useful in an SHTF situation.

In the US you have two types of legal systems, the state and federal level. Within each, you have misdemeanors and felonies. Misdemeanors are the lower level and cover non-serious crimes (vandalism, theft, minor traffic violations), and typically are fines or imprisonment of up to a year. They have no bearing on your rights as an American on either level. Some federal misdemeanors exist (poaching at natural parks or defacing monuments) but most federal crimes are felonies, leaving misdemeanors to the state’s discretion.

Felonies, however, impact your rights as an American. You cannot own firearms, you cannot vote, you cannot hold public office, and you are a “high risk” economically and socially, making loans and employment difficult. State-level non-violent felonies can normally be expunged/sealed over time for otherwise lawful citizens, but federal felonies never go away.

He denied the plea deal because he, as an activist, did not want to suffer losing those rights. The prosecution wouldn’t budge and was adamant in making an example out of him because he was a figure of hacktivism. They also desperately wanted the CFAA (a poorly worded law written by tech illiterates in 1986) to maintain its broad power.

For further context, this was a response to Anonymous and other would-be hacktivists, coming right off the heels of Anonymous’s Arab Spring campaign and the hack of HBGary. The Obama administration targeted Swartz to make an example out of him and scare future hacktivists, coinciding with the arrest of Sabu (the co-founder of LulzSec) and him becoming an informant to round up the current group.

Apparently, at least some of the people involved were Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann. While pitchforks did come, they were in no way punished directly for this case and were allowed to ride off into the sunset at the minor cost of their political careers.