FriendOfDeSoto

u/FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website
8 posts · 1.5k comments

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The further into the future you are trying to predict the weather, the more the reliability drops. The last time I heard a meteorologist talk about it, it was 5 days into the future for a specific location. Anything more than that was as reliable as reading tea leaves. You can say it'll rain in Asia 10 days from now but you cannot say with any certainty it'll rain in this village.

The climate which we ruined will provide us with punishment. Warmer oceans will give us stronger tropical storms. But they've gotten pretty good at detecting and outlining their likely paths. That sort of predicting is likely to improve with more storms and more data. Another suitable punishment is torrential train causing flash flooding. In the places with good satellite cover, they can see that and warn people with an hour's lead time or thereabouts. The time span is short but the prediction accuracy is good.

We as consumers are not good judges of the weatherpeople. We look at our phones and form an opinion. But we don't investigate where the data came from, which LLM may have added its hallucinations, and what other corners may have been cut to get us this information, which we don't pay for. So we see it's pissing down outside, the forecast was for blue skies, ergo the weatherpeople are getting worse at their job. When it is more likely the quality of the free data declined or somebody asked ChatGPT and Claude.

I agree with you. I think it's a bot and thus should be banned, as per the rules.

Just block and move on is okay for trolls and sock puppets. I don't think that's a good strategy for bots. You don't see them any more but they keep posting using bandwidth. They're building up a profile with engagement that will make it harder to get banned down the line when they start using the account for something worse.

There are few feces filled salvoes flung at Melon Usk that I would object to. This is not one of them. The question I have though is this: do we need a new Twitter? It had its time in the sun but most people look back at it through rose tinted glasses. Before the takeover by the son of South African emerald mine owners, Twitter was in deep trouble. It had cultural relevance but was a financial flop. It benefited from being the first service of its kind with sufficient reach. I don't think Twitter would have survived without the Nazi saluting shithead either. Its decline would have been more graceful by comparison. It would have done it without the bullshit tsunami emanating from the top, it wouldn't have had the money to digitally undress people or other adventures in so-called AI, but I believe it would have faded anyway. People have split up from the one consensus platform to many different ones and making people switch is hard. So coming back now with a new Twitter is like announcing we will electrocute another Topsy next week. That turned heads more than a century ago but we have moved on.

I don't like the direction Google is taking Android. I'm not in favor of this enforced developer registration.

"Seems to" is not the same as "did." With a couple of LLMs and a bit of time others could've dropped these rave reviews as well. It isn't far fetched that it is Google. But from a PR point of view they'd be stupid if it was them. They gain nothing but bad headlines from a stunt like that. So we probably need a bit more proof than some screenshots.

The "why no more risky video games?" post was mentioned in this thread. If it was moderator intervention and you remember the post title and instance it was on you can try to look up the modlog and see if you can find it there. Open the web version and scroll down to the bottom to see the link.

I use a third-party client that puts the baby emoji by the user name for new accounts. In the age of bots and repeat sock puppet account offenders, you reply to baby emojis in great detail at your own peril. You could make it part of your routine that if you wrote more than 100 words in reply to somebody you snap a quick screenshot of the post before you move on.

It is a bugbear for some, irregardless of when the first example was documented. Loose/lose has the potential to be such an annoyance. For some people.

The word "new" can carry a connotation of "recent" but it more literally implies "the latest version." For all intensive purposes, I did not mean to imply the controversy about the metaphorical use of "literally" was a recent development.

This will literally be the new literally, I guess.

Spelling conventions have taken quite a hit in the age of automated subtitles. We're devolving to the 1600s where this was more vibe based. I think there is also an element of wanting to show human frailty in content so no one suspects you of pushing slop.

Thanks for your comment. They demonstrated something and I didn't mean to dismiss that out of hand. It can be one data point hopefully among many.

But this time this new paradigm is very much controlled by the wealthiest of the wealthy.

I think that was true with the socials to a point as well, all aflush with venture capital and people like Peter Thiel dicking about there as well. I think radio and television needed capital as well to get going. And the printing press wasn't cheap either and Gutenberg needed investors. So I think it's a retread at scale as well.

We don't believe everything we read, hear, see, and come across on social media either. The resistance to so-called AI is already building up. People who don't use it at all, people who try to avoid it, and businesses are regretting letting a lot of people go for this crap. We'll find a way to filter out the bullshit as well. Nobody jumps out of their seat when a train comes out of the tunnel on the silver screen any more. Consider that image as apocryphal and metaphorical in this context.

But now they want a court to treat that click as though an 8-year-old knowingly negotiated away her right to have these issues heard. It's insulting.

In the court of public opinion, sharpen your pitchforks, light your torches, and move on Roblox HQ. This is objectively a silly argument.

Made in a court of law. Where lawyers play by different established rules. Where they are often compelled by those rules to pursue every possible avenue to get the best result for their client. Where they may be held accountable when mishandling their case. Where company execs push their own moral compass out of the way not because they believe this argument but out of a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders. It's a clusterfuck of obligations.

My gut feeling is they probably know this argument won't hold up in court. But it may just knock whatever punishment awaits them down a peg or two.

The researchers cautioned, however, that, because they did not have a control group of people given counterarguments by humans, they could not definitively say the 30% reversal rate reflected an effect unique to AI.

This study may be considered one data point and if others add to it, okay. But until then, this is not worth getting outraged over.

Also, if you are in a position to change this dramatic outcome by altering a train's course or pushing a person off a bridge, you probably won't have the time to ask an LLM to enter into a philosophical debate with you. So this measured a highly theoretical change of mind about a virtually never to be encountered philosophical dilemma. The remote likelihood of such situations landing in their lap must have been very present in the participants' minds while answering. It's like playing with monopoly money or shooting a bunch of NPCs. A study about a more life-like scenario (political beliefs, cultural norms, work practices, etc.) which ticks all requirements of a well peer-reviewed study would probably be more insightful.

We are also retreading all the debates about misinformation from when the web came about and then again with the advent of social media. Which had previously been held when movable type came about in Europe. Or the advent of radio and TV. The long arm of history shows we're getting better at dealing with these changes.