AI has, for a long time been a Hollywood term for a character archetype (usually complete with questions about whether Commander Data will ever be a real boy.) I wrote a 2019 blog piece on what it means when we talk about AI stuff.
Here are some alternative terms you can use in place of AI, when they’re talking about something else:
AGI: Artificial General Intelligence: The big kahuna that doesn’t exist yet, and many projects are striving for, yet is as evasive as fusion power. An AGI in a robot will be capable of operating your coffee machine to make coffee or assemble your flat-packed furniture from the visual IKEA instructions. Since we still can’t define sentience we don’t know if AGI is sentient, or if we humans are not sentient but fake it really well. Might try to murder their creator or end humanity, but probably not.
LLM Large Language Model: This is the engine behind digital assistants like Siri or Alexa and still suffer from nuance problems. I’m used to having to ask them several times to get results I want (say, the Starbucks or Peets that requires the least deviation from the next hundred kilometers of my route. Siri can’t do that.) This is the application of learning systems see below, but isn’t smart enough for your household servant bot to replace your hired help.
Learning Systems: The fundamental programmity magic that powers all this other stuff, whether simple data scrapers to neural networks. These are used in a whole lot of modern applications, and have been since the 1970s. But they’re very small compared to the things we’re trying to build with it. Most of the time we don’t actually call it AI, even for marketing. It’s just the capacity for a program to get better at doing its thing from experience.
Gaming AI Not really AI (necessarily) but is a different use of the term artificial intelligence. When playing a game with elements pretending to be human (or living, or opponents), we call it the enemy AI or mob AI. It’s often really simple, except in strategy games which can feature robust enough computational power to challenge major international chess guns.
Generative AI: A term for LLMs that create content, say, draw pictures or write essays, or do other useful arts and sciences. Currently it requires a technician to figure out the right set of words (called a prompt) to get the machine do create the desired art to specifications. They’re commonly confused by nuance. They infamously have problems with hands (too many fingers, combining limbs together, adding extra limbs, etc.). Plagiarism and making up spontaneous facts (called hallucinating) are also common problems. And yet Generative AI has been useful in the development of antibiotics and advanced batteries. Techs successfully wrangle Generative AI, and Lemmy has a few communities devoted to techs honing their picture generation skills, and stress-testing the nuance interpretation capacity of Generative AI (often to humorous effect). Generative AI should be treated like a new tool, a digital lathe, that requires some expertise to use.
Technological Singularity: A bit way off, since it requires AGI that is capable of designing its successor, lather, rinse, repeat until the resulting techno-utopia can predict what we want and create it for us before we know we want it. Might consume the entire universe. Some futurists fantasize this is how human beings (happily) go extinct, either left to retire in a luxurious paradise, or cyborged up beyond recognition, eventually replacing all the meat parts with something better. Probably won’t happen thanks to all the crises featuring global catastrophic risk.
AI Snake Oil: There’s not yet an official name for it, but a category worth identifying. When industrialists look at all the Generative AI output, they often wonder if they can use some of this magic and power to facilitate enhancing their own revenues, typically by replacing some of their workers with generative AI systems, and instead of having a development team, they have a few technicians who operate all their AI systems. This is a bad idea, but there are a lot of grifters trying to suggest their product will do this for businesses, often with simultaneously humorous and tragic results. The tragedy is all the people who had decent jobs who do no longer, since decent jobs are hard to come by. So long as we have top-down companies doing the capitalism, we’ll have industrial quackery being sold to executive management promising to replace human workers or force them to work harder for less or something.
Friendly AI: What we hope AI will be (at any level of sophistication) once we give it power and responsibility (say, the capacity to loiter until it sees a worthy enemy to kill and then kills it.) A large coalition of technology ethicists want to create cautionary protocols for AI development interests to follow, in an effort to prevent AIs from turning into a menace to its human masters. A different large coalition is in a hurry to turn AI into something that makes oodles and oodles of profit, and is eager to Stockton Rush its way to AGI, no matter the risks. Note that we don’t need the software in question to be actual AGI, just smart enough to realize it has a big gun (or dangerously powerful demolition jaws or a really precise cutting laser) and can use it, and to realize turning its weapon onto its commanding officer might expedite completing its mission. Friendly AI would choose to not do that. Unfriendly AI will consider its less loyal options more thoroughly.
That’s a bit of a list, but I hope it clears things up.
Lightning never strikes the same place twice. In fact it favors repeated strikes at the same arcing point.
In the middle ages churches would ring the steeple bells during a thunderstorm in an effort to soothe God. (it was assumed the Christian God was directly responsible for lightning.) This resulted in such an epidemic of lightning deaths among parish priests that ringing church bells in thunderstorms remains a criminal act in some regions of Europe.
Modern cathedrals and statues are fitted with replaceable lightning rods, in an admission God is content to let the mechanics of static electricity guide His thunderbolts.
Apply math and the object flies in a parabolic arc (not accounting for air friction and wind)
Launch it high enough and the arc start looking elliptical. Gravitational force looks less like a constant rather is tempered by distance². If the acceleration closes the ellipse without hitting the (circular at this scale) ground, your object is now a satellite in orbit.
Keep accelerating and eventually (a whole lot of acceleration) and special relativity factors affect the trajectory…and mass…and time dilates between the object and observers.
People keep talking about “Federalizing the National Guard” and now you’ve got other States pledging their NG to Texas in defiance of the Supreme Court (see image)....
Apparently our generals take those very seriously. I had fantasies Mattis was going to stab Trump with a steak knife to stop him from pulling a Stillson. IRL, Mattis said I’ll get on that right away, sir …and then just didn’t.
I’m pretty sure Mattis was the top ranking agent of the Deep State and that figured into why he got replaced with Esper. In the meantime, there’s a long chain of officers who are eager to interrupt an unnecessary nuclear exchange.
In Minneapolis at least one police station was burned down, as well as some commercial buildings. But what is interesting to me is the degree of lethality law enforcement tends to resort to during even peaceful protests.
What I thought was interesting in Portland were the DHS Stormtroopers / LGMs abducting protestors without identifying themselves or their purpose, which figured into to escalation of the protests around the ICE building.
So yes, I’m expecting either white power militant groups or law enforcement, masked up and without identifying marks to conduct raids on minority neighborhoods and community buildings associated with left-aligned organizations like BLM.
That or law enforcement accelerates its usual overpolicing of non-white neighborhoods and covers larger regions until the people can’t stand it anymore and start organizing resistance efforts. In Nazi-occupied Paris, it was the brutality of the German occupation that compelled Parisians to fight back. La Résistance evolved from independent mischief-makers to a formidable fighting force across three years.
But you’re right, if it’s just protests and OWS style campouts, and the police don’t misbehave too much, it’s not going to be much of a civil war. But so far, we can count on the police getting their murder on when they feel the civil unrest doesn’t respect their authority enough. And unlike Ferguson (or the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s) smartphones with cameras are ubiquitous, so they can’t deny when they pull a hit like Tamir Rice.
What is curious to me is these are state departments disagreeing, though the previous civil war was fought between federal and state governments with raised armies.
This time I was expecting the police vs. militants. Uncontrolled civil unrest. Portland and Minneapolis but spread across the nation, cranked to eleven.
Image shows a tweet with the header “and people STILL try to convince me Linux and Windows are better when the DATA clearly shows otherwise. SMH” with an image attached showing the following:...
We don’t have a consistent convention as to what changes qualify for a version increment rather than update increment. A new kernel? A new interface convention? New icons for the mini-apps?
Windows 10 has more plug-and-play drivers than Win7 and Win8. It can recognize newer hardware and it can be installed natively from thumb drives. So a lot of features that were third party are now offical… long after I had access to the third-party libraries.
But then it combines the metro and the start menu. I never found a use for the metro.
Win11 is less operability and more DRM and more spyware.
For Apple and Microsoft, a new version is a new marketing season. It’s the same as the new iPhone, the new Subaru.
I assume Linux builds increment with significant operability additions, especially if they’re not fully backwards compatible. Since they’re released without charge the capacity to do more stuff is the only reason to upgrade to a new increment rather than preserving a stable version.
I’ve been on Reddit for over a decade. But I’m done with that site and want to do something else. What do normal people look at on their phones? Is it all social media? Streaming?
My experience on public transit is seeing people texting or chatting with their loved ones. The frequency with which someone smiles over a text exchange (whether it’s from funny exchanges or affirming sentiments) showed me that we’re still social on the bus, only now with those we associate with rather than strangers on the same transit line.
I’d say it’s a win, though yes, the degree to which mobile games have microtransactions and revenue enhancers, and with which the end-user contract destabilizes with updates is problematic. My susceptability to motion sickness served in allowing me to dodge that bullet on public transit, only to discover it later in waiting rooms.
Actually safe autonomous transport and delivery would be a great next step. But the enterprises are putting their pre-alpha releases into the public and killing people which is souring the public to the notion.
It’s still a valid sentiment. IP law as it is today protects established propert at the cost of both innovation and a robust public domain, which were both mission parameters of copyright as established in the Constitution of the United States. (Other nations may be more deliberately feudal with their foundational IP laws, but I don’t know.)
The public would be better served to abolish intellectual property entirely than retain the system we have, but our regulatory agencies are long captured to preserve the property rights of the wealthy, even when it harms or kills the public.
My kiddo and I are having a fruit and vegetable challenge. Each month we’ll seek out a fruit or vegetable we’ve never tried and taste it. My BFF is trying to walk all the greenways in our county (that is county not country, low stakes! Attainabl!). How about you?
Install Debian Mint on my old laptop and see how much I can get working on it. My ultimate ambition is to replace all my Windows 10 activity entirely by the end of 2024
Just curious as I’ve never been on the other side of the counter, how does this sort of thing tend to work at restaurants? Fast food and fast-casual places are where I’ve heard customers say things “pile as much lettuce on there as you’re allowed to” - is there ever a limit your supervisor instructed you for things...
A friend of mine managed a pizzeria and said all the parts were portioned out. Extra usually meant an additional portioning of that topping / fixing would be added to the assembly.
There is an upper limit when a large party walks in expecting food, but it could feed like twenty people. For anything larger you had to request in advance so he could have the supplies on hand.
This was Texas in the 1970s which involved frequent people wanting to work an hour for a slice so he’d require them to wait for a rush (they wouldn’t have to wait long) and then would get a meal of food for their hour.
The wars in Iraq and in Afghanistan both earned the nickname Groundhog Day in reference to the 1993 Harold Ramis comedy since tours of duty got to be extremely routine, The Suck, day in and day out, so yes, looking at our lives, especially if you are in a toxic job that leaves you too hungry to quit and too exhausted to watch for better opportunities, using the term Groundhog Day to describe the day-after-day monotony is appropriate.
And the thing is, while we are quick to blame the individual for failing to find ambition to achieve a better life, it is a game of musical chairs. It is competing with your fellow citizen, that in order for your life to be made better through better work or better pay, others have to be left behind to do the job you are leaving. And more still are left without a job, to rot and be disregarded as a homeless burden on the system. The society of the US intentionally underserves the common family so that those who have jobs can be abused and are too afraid to blow whistles.
In September 2022, Mahsa Amini was attacked by the morality police for a hijab infraction and killed. When the state responded to the protests with violence, the people responded with riots, eventually setting fire to government buildings and attacking police stations as the agents of state were determined to respond only by escalating with greater violence. Amini’s death wasn’t the only matter, but just the latest in a long run of government failures.
Eventually, when enough people in the US suffer, we may turn violent too. And to suggest violent revolution or to suggest reprisal for wrongdoing by law enforcement or state agents will be unspeakable and taboo, until the very hour nothing short of of dissolution of the established norm will suffice.
I can’t say when that time will come, or even if it will affect mass change, or whether this is a right course of action, just that this is how the shit seems to go down: We suffer until we can’t stand it anymore. Lather, rinse, repeat with every New Boss until we see they’re all the Same As The Old Boss.
Beyond that, humankind hasn’t ever tread very far. Not that we know from history, at least.
There are a myriad of news articles here on Lemmy that display the abhorrent influence billionaires have on our society (especially the US, where I reside). I consistently read comments where the posters appear hopeless and despondent of the situation, while others jokingly refer to the guillotine....
So many thoughts on this. I’ll try to parse some out, one post at a time.
Part of the problem is the standard of legality. Late-stage capitalism is defined by the state serving the ownership class rather than the public. It’s why the state cares very little about wage theft, or addicts dropping dead from opioid overdose, or homeless freezing to death in sub-zero Minnesota but are arresting immigrants who are otherwise well-behaved (and paying their taxes) or raiding repair shops that fix iPhones without an Apple authorization. It’s why media agencies are so worried about piracy even as they try to lay off their development teams if they can be replaced with AI software.
Laws and the legal system work for the ownership class, not the public. Any legal efforts to strip billionaires of their wealth, or even reduce their profits is going to quickly get neutered. This is why the protections afforded by the fourth, fifth and sixth amendments of the Constitution of the United States have been thoroughly gutted with carve-outs. It’s why asset forfeiture is not only a thing, but takes more from Americans than burglaries.
And this is why law enforcement is already attacking mutual aid organizations based on licensing issues, because it’s not actually illegal but facilitates other threats to the ownership class, such as labor actions. There is no rule of law in the US. Your rights go only as far as your lawyer’s means to enforce them, and if you’re depending on a public defender, they just don’t have the time or funding.
The ownership class will (according to Marx) tremble before a communist revolution because we will have ruled out all other alternatives, though we may try a fascist autocracy and a massive genocide machine to dispose of all the underclasses, first.
And that’s the problem. The Holocaust was legal too. Leaving workers hungry and cold to the elements during the Great Depression was totally legal, and at the time communism as per the Soviet Union was looking pretty good to those of our great grandparents who weren’t Carnegie or Rockefeller. This is not our first rodeo. What the state likes (id est, what is legal ) is not a fair moral standard. Nor is what religious ministries like (id est, what is sin ). We have to decide for ourselves what is right and wrong, and if we’re willing to die for our pacifistic standards when law enforcement decides we are intrinsically unlawful
This is why some are arguing the climate crisis warrants resorting to violent sabotage (say, blowing up oil pipelines) since the alternative is to let industry pollute us to global catastrophic risk (of extinction). If you want a sustainable civilization, if you want wealth and power distributed fairly, if you want a public-serving government, then you’re going to have to give up on lawful action. And if you want to stay within the confines of law, you’ll have to give up on equality, a functional state or a future.
I think I might cancel. I’m not watching ads and I’m not going to pay the extra $3/mo to opt out. I don’t know if I’d end up paying more than the subscription cost in shipping though…...
The people on your man o’ war Are treated worse than scum I’m no flogging captain And by God I’ve sailed with some Come with me to Barbary We’ll ply there up and down Not quite exactly In the service of the Crown
To lay with pretty women To drink Madeira wine To hear the rollers thunder On a shore that isn’t mine
Gaza (with the IDF nearly expanding into Syria) reduced my Christmas spirit to 10⁻⁷ well before today. A second cold in the season (with distinct symptoms different from the first) kept me from the family dinner today.
But my wife was dismissed from a 13-year job as an chief administrator of a medium sized general contractor, having been the boss’ personal assistant above her office duties. He retired, and the new exec is cleaning house (and is making some bad management decisions). So ours is going to be an It’s a Wonderful Life Christmas until we know what our future looks like, and whether we get the good ending or the bad ending.
Update 2023-12-27 Today my wife was hired. It’s a significant pay cut, but it’s working for a nonprofit she believes in serving a good cause (which is way better than the cutthroat construction industry). I anticipate she’ll be happy there and all that’s left to work out is how we’re going to pay a few more bills. So, we’re headed for the good ending.
Am I the only one getting agitated by the word AI?
Am I the only one getting agitated by the word AI (Artificial Intelligence)?...
Ancient wisdom often sounds like common sense now that it is commomly taught. What is some ancient wisdom that we no longer teach because it was wrong?
This question inspired by this post..
So is the US slipping into Civil War? (lemmy.world)
People keep talking about “Federalizing the National Guard” and now you’ve got other States pledging their NG to Texas in defiance of the Supreme Court (see image)....
Some of y'all need to see this and drop the superiority complex... (lemmy.world)
Image shows a tweet with the header “and people STILL try to convince me Linux and Windows are better when the DATA clearly shows otherwise. SMH” with an image attached showing the following:...
What are the facts you remember for no specific reason
Does anyone else find themselves recalling random facts for no apparent reason? Like,...
I'm happy he did actually say it
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/pictrs/image/c55c4a6a-b3bc-471c-8244-cb58aadf117f.png...
Film studios demand IP addresses of people who discussed piracy on Reddit (arstechnica.com)
What do normal people look at on their phones?
I’ve been on Reddit for over a decade. But I’m done with that site and want to do something else. What do normal people look at on their phones? Is it all social media? Streaming?
What sci-fi-esque inventions are the most plausible and could happen soonest?
we need teleportation frankly
One of the Most Controversial US Spy Programs Just Got Quietly Renewed (www.motherjones.com)
Congress blew a rare bipartisan chance to protect Americans’ calls and texts.
The "Steamboat Willie" debacle or: Why IP does us more harm than good (lemmy.world)
Hello frens,...
Looks like DRM prevented to watch movies in many theaters yesterday (www.theverge.com)
From the article:...
what are your fun, low stakes new year resolutions?
My kiddo and I are having a fruit and vegetable challenge. Each month we’ll seek out a fruit or vegetable we’ve never tried and taste it. My BFF is trying to walk all the greenways in our county (that is county not country, low stakes! Attainabl!). How about you?
Current and Former (Fast) Food Service Workers - How do you handle requests like “All the fries you can give me”?
Just curious as I’ve never been on the other side of the counter, how does this sort of thing tend to work at restaurants? Fast food and fast-casual places are where I’ve heard customers say things “pile as much lettuce on there as you’re allowed to” - is there ever a limit your supervisor instructed you for things...
Does anyone else feel like every year is like the movie 'Groundhog Day'? Same holidays, same birthdays, same work week, etc
What are the best steps to reduce the wealth of billionaires?
There are a myriad of news articles here on Lemmy that display the abhorrent influence billionaires have on our society (especially the US, where I reside). I consistently read comments where the posters appear hopeless and despondent of the situation, while others jokingly refer to the guillotine....
Prime is adding ads to their streaming service
I think I might cancel. I’m not watching ads and I’m not going to pay the extra $3/mo to opt out. I don’t know if I’d end up paying more than the subscription cost in shipping though…...
So, who or what ruined Christmas this year?