I don’t find myself having nearly as many occasions to make use of them as you do, but I do think that all the misplaced AGI hype makes it hard to evaluate the actually technological advancement that LLMs represent. Like, being able to statistically model language to the degree these things do is neat, and I would be more surprised if it wasn’t possible to use that to do some useful and powerful things. But just like how it’s impossible to separate the underlying math of the cryptocurrency sphere from the ideology of technolibertarian griftocracy, everything that the LLM space has produced is poisoned on some level by millenarian technofascism. Like, the degree to which our economy and culture have been warped by these things is entirely a product of the people who think that they’re going to spit out a God that makes whoever does so first king of the world forever. All the actual useful things people are getting from it are around the edges and happening in spite of the demands to remove guardrails and quality checks and human accountability from these systems. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the underlying mathematics is without value and can’t be part of good and useful systems in the future. Machine Learning as a whole had already demonstrated the value in automated pattern identification and reproduction in a variety of fields from medical diagnostics to pastry sales.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m strongly in favor of throwing out all this bathwater even if there might be a baby in there somewhere. I just think that “hard to evaluate independently” isn’t necessarily the same thing as “without value in other contexts”.

Christ Almighty just @ me next time. The other element of this dynamic is that non-technical managers or users, who would previously have heard about these vulnerabilities from our IT security group who are equipped with our specific context, are now hearing it from OpenAI’s marketing copy.

Nah, my computer can totally do math on its own. Wanna see?

cos(4)

Bam!

7²

Get mathed on!

4E183

See, your human brain can’t even do math like that.

I imagine they’re running into the same issue that github is, just on a lesser scale.

Generative AI is an extractive and oppressive technology with the goal of faking and replacing human creativity, and because it can’t feel pain, it is used as an industrial drone army stapling together bad systems that we rather should have overcome.

Yeah this is a good one.

All I’m getting from this is that if we truly believed in market-based solutions we would change the incentive structure by equipping elementary school students with rocket-propelled grenades.

You know, it seems like ever since the Heartbleed debacle we can get a rough sense of how complex a vulnerability is by examining how much explanatory text or context on normal system operation is required to explain it to a layman.

“I asked it to make me an admin and it just… did it” might be the literal minimum level of complexity by that standard.

They’re backed into a corner where any number high enough to not be embarrassing for everyone involved is wildly unrealistic and any realistic number is going to be embarrassingly low. Trying to leave blanks so that someone else has to provide the actual numbers is basically the only option that doesn’t involve committing lots of fraud.

Meanwhile I, as usual, appreciated the tl;dr because while I did in fact read I had fully forgotten what I had read by the time I came back to this tab. More of a tl;adhdr, I guess.

Also in that context it seems like millenarianism is specifically bad at actually doing anything about the harms it’s worried about. Whether you want to curb fossil fuel usage or just get sinners to repent before it’s too late, doomsday prophecy is actively bad at motivating anyone other than the prophet themselves.

Now I’m imagining a biomechanical turbocharger that captures the energy of exhaust gas being expelled to increase pressure and efficiency of the air intake.

I think we might need to ask Tumblr user cybersmith about that and I don’t think anyone wants to hear from Tumblr user cybersmith.

So wait, if you recategorize all the hardest parts as “preparing the site” then the project speeds up significantly?

I mean they absolutely do, but nature and economics have their say. Like, you can make money selling homeopathy, because people who falsely believe in homeopathy are a market segment, but you can’t otherwise make money doing homeopathy because it doesn’t work. Similarly you can speculate on anything and come out ahead with the right combination of luck, publicity, and timing, but taking advantage of short-term volatility or noise in the market isn’t the same as actually doing something effective, and the farther away from truth you push the market the more damage it’s going to cause snapping back to reality.

That’s the beauty of it all. If I win, I get to be a king. If I lose, I get to be a legend.

We could unironically live in this world if only the powers that be would allow it. I’ve personally radicalized at least 3 basic bitches with this fact.

What’s that XKCD that goes over the ways that capitalists would be ruthlessly exploiting all those “secrets they don’t want you to know” for incredible profits?

The comments have some real gems too.

Fair. I’ve reweighted in DALYs. The net goes up, because my customers’ remaining DALYs are low. Thanks for the push.

What if an AI did the same thing that Mirai is already doing only we spent far more money on the attempt and we were almost certainly legally liable for the consequences?

And yet so much less plausible than “diamondoid nanobacteria” or whatever it is. I think the problem is that you can recognize all the words without having read the same obscure sci-fi stories as Yud.