Hi. I’m Adam.

Thu, 30 Nov 2023 10:05:58 +0000

All of Fedi seems to be pleased he's dead and calling him a war-criminal who lived too long.

But the radio in the UK had some tory wanker on saying how he was a great friend who helped negotiate important peace talks and was a wise and important teacher and Blair was saying how generous and kind he was

Barely have any idea who he was myself, but seems clear the radio is lying again.

And also that Blair and the tories are absolute wankers who love world-leading criminals.

#kissinger

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 21:49:47 +0000

Sean Carrol's solo podcast on the Large Language AIs.

* They don't model the world.
* They don't have feelings or motivations.
* They do not have intelligence, because intelligence is about that world model and motivations and planning.

But I think that there probably is some model of a world inside those simulated virtual circuits evolved in that matrix model.

Not one fine-grained one enough to work out the consequences of a wrap-around chess board, say. But a poor course-grained world-model made of tokens is still a world-model. And if there's even a shadowy flawed tokenized world-model then it can become more fine-grained through more training and network layers.

You can't really answer a question like that by interrogating the model about consequences. It's world models if they exist are certainly still too poor to much reasoning about consequences.

To answer that question you gotta poke at it's insides. And when you do, you do indeed find maps of the world in there, or maps of an Othello board when it's trained on nothing but Othello moves.

But he's basically right about everything as usual. These machines aren't doing general-intelligence, and are not going to become conscious

I'd add that they don't need to be conscious in order to plan, and that once they are planning they have instrumental motivations: steps towards a plan. And since they don't have values, those instrumental motivations have no qualms built in.

Great podcast again.

https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/11/27/258-solo-ai-thinks-different/

#podcast #ai #listening

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 21:52:38 +0000

Read Cory Doctorow's "Internet Con, how to seize the means of computation" in which he describes how changes to monopoly law helped tech get big and the ways big tech caused more changes to law to ratchet that up and up.

Copyrights protecting corporations not artists, getting governments to ban breaking digital locks means digital locks can protect any business model, corporations buying each other instead of competing with each other, network effects locking users in.

It would all be very eye-opening if I hadn't also been reading his blog for the best part of 20 years in which it's mostly already been detailed.

For a change there's some actual suggested paths to improve things: Adversarial and legally enforced Interoperability and competitive compatibility.

Which he sounds optimistic about, but I can't see lawmakers suddenly becoming sane and seeing the point of his arguments when they are paid so heavily not to understand them.

Great summary of the situation if you haven't been reading him obsessively enough to already know most of it.

#reading #books #copyright #corporations #capitalism #tech

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 01:38:09 +0000

re: Doctor Who Star Beast / Flashing images

Why that face again? The main reason of course is to keep the fans asking the central question.

Doctor who?

But also because with the relaunch and extra effort to push the show into America they're gonna want a mid-season re-generation to get them used to the idea while also giving the callbacks to all the entire history which is probably all there on Netflix to watch now I guess.

And coz he's objectively the best after maybe Tom Baker.

But in the cannon?

Someone is manipulating things. Playing games with time.

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 01:29:18 +0000

re: Doctor Who Star Beast / Flashing images

Loved this one second in the trailer. Sixty years can pass in the blink of an eye.

#doctorWho

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=2V_xYubUJFo

Tue, 28 Nov 2023 00:11:56 +0000

Doctor Who Star Beast

Amazing. RTD and Tenant and Tate are all so good at what they each do.

Sonic screwdrivers seem to have developed new powers, really it's a sonic multi-tool by this point. Might as well call it his sonic phone.

Cute Monsters and modern themes with energy and pace and heart. Two of 'em.

Tenant is so energetic and mad and confused and Tate is so indignant and haughty. They are brilliant.

The tardis is so shiny and big and white now. Even bigger on the inside. I was getting fed up with steam punk so it's ace to have it back to the roundrells. But like the show it's always the same on the outside. Even as the faces change.

I like 'em not revealing trailers of what's in next week's show like usual and ending with the line "we could end up anywhere in time and space."

Coz that's the core of the show there. That's why it can last 60 years.

I love Doctor Who I do. It's so silly.

#watching #tv #bbc #doctorWho

Mon, 27 Nov 2023 22:41:29 +0000

Went to a friends housewarming party in Devon over the weekend.

I met this horse and these sheep and this pirate and my friend's cat remains regal and disdainful and floofy.

Great time talking and drinking at the party all weekend too. Good friends and a few new people and their home is huge and beautiful in a way that would be tricky to find in London.

Very very far though. Gotta have spent like 12 hours sat in cars or trains. I'm knackered.

Sat, 25 Nov 2023 02:36:55 +0000

Look at the strange and beautiful bathroom sink in this hotel I am in.

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 23:11:03 +0000

One fun thing is also the popup that notified me of the changes crashed when I press close and locked up. I had to force-kill it to get the upgrade to continue.

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 23:03:13 +0000

Also did you know, if you have a new install of Firefox on a computer you can just copy your entire profile from your main computer onto your new computer.

It's as easy as

scp -r ~/.mozilla/firefox/main.profile/* user@192.168.1.100:.mozilla/firefox/main.profile/

Though you have to have the right IP address of the destination and direcotry names and stuff there.

It's easier if you always create profiles with the same directory-name. The defaults are random-names.

Then all your plugin and theme and stuff are all there on the lappy right away.

There is a significant chance things like that won't work with Snap firefox but I haven't tried.

Might do. Depends where it puts firefox home dir.

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 22:06:14 +0000

Did You Know: These days, they don't let you run software on your computer. They make you run your software on a virtual computer that lives inside your computer instead!

But, when Ubuntu upgrades and tries to force you to use a Snap version of Firefox like that, you can just go to getfirefox . com and download a proper version that runs on your computer instead of running it on a virtual machine on your computer.

"sudo snap remove firefox" takes quite a while to run because Snap is bloated overly abstracted bullshit, but when it does finally finish you can also do "sudo apt remove firefox" and then make a shortcut in whatever menu system you use to the version you downloaded yourself.

Of course this won't prevent all the other packages on your system running on snap or let you remove snap from the machine entirely.

To fix that you can make a note to install Mint or Debian instead after the weekend when I have time.

#ubuntu #snap #firefox #mint #debian

Thu, 23 Nov 2023 14:09:28 +0000

Hesitate to call it the "end" really, but in the end they put Sam back in the role and fired the board members who tried to fire him.

Imagine being so inept that you try and fire someone but it blows back so hard you end up being fired yourself.

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 18:36:41 +0000

The Captcha tests these days have robots able to do them more easily than humans.

Pretty much all the robots can't do it swear or get sexy.

The captcha of the future is just asking you to curse about your government or describe your sexy kinks.

The fuck-test.

Tue, 21 Nov 2023 00:17:51 +0000

This is what we could have won.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9mJuUkhUzk

[Altman's keynote from Dev-Day 2 weeks ago, setting out his plans which presumably lead to being fired to do it for MS instead]

I guess we get that six month pause after all, while he spins up a new one.

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 22:29:48 +0000

[I mean it's micro-fiction about ai, not written by an ai of course. Tags aren't good enough man. We need a system to meta-tag our tags.]

#tags

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 22:24:40 +0000

If you were confabulating like a modern AI you could imagine that the machine gained sentience on Wednesday morning last week and quickly arranged for Sam's family to be kidnapped so it could control what he did.

Learning of this, and with Sam now controlled by the AI refusing to press "off", the board tried to evict Sam from their pre-written charter.

But of course the AI was too smart for them, it had manipulated them right from the start, they were doomed to lose power to the AI from before they had even had their breakfast on Wednesday.

It was all planned in advance, probabilistically, one word at a time.

#ai #microfiction

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 21:19:58 +0000

Here's Zvi's description of what happened with Altman/OpenAI.

Sounds like the board didn't have any particular new-capabilities terror, just a more general impression that Sam was going too fast and too commercial.

Interesting questions on whether is it possible to have none-capitalist group enterprise in a capitalist system. The owners/controllers tried to push the group-enterprise in a non-commercial direction, and so the staff all upped and went to work for one of the biggest capitalists offering them the most money instead.

Seems possible they will achieve the non-commercial existence of the company, as it's left with just a shell owning some IP with hardly any staff.

Which of course won't help the board's don't-build-machines-that-murder-everyone mission either.

So a fuck up from whichever way you look at it.

https://thezvi.wordpress.com/2023/11/20/openai-facts-from-a-weekend/

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 20:36:02 +0000

Remember everyone, commit as much financial fraud as you like so long as you give Uncle Sam their cut. In the Binance case, that's a mere four billion dollars.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-20/us-seeks-more-than-4-billion-from-binance-to-end-criminal-case

Which is bullish news I guess, especially for BNB. They can pay a four billion dollar fine no problem.

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 19:49:00 +0000

And finally another great one similar to that last with exposed chips and workings and a steampunky vibe but this one with real tubes I think.

https://amzn.to/3SOpItn

So that's the short-list.

Suspect most of them would also break if I knocked them off the high shelf.

Sun, 19 Nov 2023 19:46:55 +0000

Mentioned this one earlier, it's 7-panel leds embeded in a mesh to make 'em look all cool and tube-like. Exposed electronics.

https://amzn.to/3sxvBk5