JP Sugarbroad

@taral
98 Followers
89 Following
2.6K Posts
Only bites if asked nicely. he/him #1312 #gay #searchable
GitHubhttps://github.com/taralx
Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance.” Moxon’s Shaving Cream: “Never exonerate malice simply because it is also ignorant.”

at a job interview

"whats your biggest weakness?"

"understanding the semantics of a question but ignoring the pragmatics"

"could you give an me an example?"

"yes i could"

This. Is. Bonkers.

Edit - reports coming in of people finding this vid a bit stressful

The AI Great Leap Forward

In 1958, Mao ordered every village to produce steel. The steel was useless. The crops rotted. Today's top-down AI mandates are producing the same pattern: ba...

Han, Not Solo

RE: https://mas.to/@therightarticle/116300144161152058

If ever there was proof of the damage done by neoliberalism, this is it! The second wave (which killed 87,000 people in UK) was driven almost entirely by Sunak’s “eat out to help out”, and Johnson’s defying the experts to ‘save Christmas’.
It is extraordinary that you can kill tens of thousands of people with your obsession with the economy, and yet face absolutely no consequences.
Mind you, that’s nothing compared to the death toll that climate inaction will produce.

👁️: "algorithms that amplified harmful content because it generated enragement"
🧠: Wait what?
👁: "engagement"
🧠: Fits either way!

https://theconversation.com/two-verdicts-in-two-days-how-american-courts-are-rewriting-the-rules-for-big-tech-and-children-279401

Two verdicts in two days: How American courts are rewriting the rules for Big Tech and children

The verdicts in a case against Meta and another against Meta and Google have the potential to change how social media works – and it has little to do with financial penalties.

The Conversation

some Coinbase customers are horrified that the Coinbase app is encouraging them to gamble 

they're so close

#PredictionMarkets #Coinbase

My biggest problem with the concept of LLMs, even if they weren’t a giant plagiarism laundering machine and disaster for the environment, is that they introduce so much unpredictability into computing. I became a professional computer toucher because they do exactly what you tell them to. Not always what you wanted, but exactly what you asked for.

LLMs turn that upside down. They turn a very autistic do-what-you-say, say-what-you-mean commmunication style with the machine into a neurotypical conversation talking around the issue, but never directly addressing the substance of problem.

In any conversation I have with a person, I’m modeling their understanding of the topic at hand, trying to tailor my communication style to their needs. The same applies to programming languages and frameworks. If you work with a language the way its author intended it goes a lot easier.

But LLMs don’t have an understanding of the conversation. There is no intent. It’s just a mostly-likely-next-word generator on steroids. You’re trying to give directions to a lossily compressed copy of the entire works of human writing. There is no mind to model, and no predictability to the output.

If I wanted to spend my time communicating in a superficial, neurotypical style my autistic ass certainly wouldn’t have gone into computering. LLMs are the final act of the finance bros and capitalists wrestling modern technology away from the technically literate proletariat who built it.

"we are cancelling the free open source project tier you've been using for years, to be considered for the replacement tier you will need to post the following statement of partnership on your website about that is focused on how great our new AI features are"

Oh...we're in *that* stage of the hype decline.