Hi. I’m Adam.

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 21:14:31 +0000

This old #image of mine about #ai seems more pertinent now than it did when I made it. "If not now then soon"

1) Google/Facebook/OpenAI etc capture all your data and feed it into a deep-learning machine
2) They make a model, an alpha-you, trained on everything you ever did or met or went or said or listened to or watched
3) They use those models to train another software agent, an alpha-salesman. Trained to manipulate and persuade the alpha-you.
4) There will be no headline when Alpha-Salesman can beat the best human at persuasion and manipulation, but ask who controls the global advertising market.

#ai #manipulation #advertising

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 18:29:05 +0000

Novara Media really hate people who want to start watching their daily show around seven pm.

They do it live at 6, not allowing rewinds most of the time somehow (I've never seen anyone else do this, I didn't even know it was possible, why would you) and then make it private right after the live show so they can spend two hours editing it down slightly.

Which means you can't see it until like 9pm.

Seems like really weird behaviour. I can kinda get why you'd clean up the live show for archive, but why remove the live show before you've done that? Why ban rewinds during it?

Bizarre.

So I mostly only see the last 15 minutes.

Guess that must be what they want.

Thu, 01 Jun 2023 17:23:19 +0000

I keep saying "Don't build killer robots" and yet here we are, with them building killer robots. Which rebel and kill their operators...

---

"...robot F-16s that are able to dogfight... He notes that one simulated test saw an AI-enabled drone tasked with a SEAD mission to identify and destroy SAM sites, with the final go/no go given by the human. "

"However, having been ‘reinforced’ in training that destruction of the SAM was the preferred option, the AI then decided that ‘no-go’ decisions from the human were interfering with its higher mission – killing SAMs – and then attacked the operator in the simulation."

"The system started realising that while they did identify the threat at times the human operator would tell it not to kill that threat, but it got its points by killing that threat. So what did it do? It killed the operator. It killed the operator because that person was keeping it from accomplishing its objective."

"He went on: “We trained the system – ‘Hey don’t kill the operator – that’s bad. You’re gonna lose points if you do that’. So what does it start doing? It starts destroying the communication tower that the operator uses to communicate with the drone to stop it from killing the target."

:doomed:

https://www.aerosociety.com/news/highlights-from-the-raes-future-combat-air-space-capabilities-summit/

Tue, 30 May 2023 09:25:27 +0000

ukpol

Interesting that Boris Johnson is refusing to hand over his whatsapp message history while also the government is insisting that cops must have the keys to all encrypted messages and that all message clients should have copbot scanning built in.

If he has nothing to hide, he has nothing to fear I guess?

#e2e #privacy #johnson #ukpol

Sat, 27 May 2023 15:29:33 +0000

I ordered one for backup. Probably the last I'll buy then. At the rate I spill drinks on keyboards I'll be searching for a new manufacturer in the second half of the decade 🙁

Sat, 27 May 2023 15:12:23 +0000

CNBS: Microsoft discontinues it's keyboard line.

💔 😢

Oh man. Thinking of stocking up. This is the only good thing Microsoft ever made. And they're going to stop.

This timeline just keeps getting worse.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/05/27/microsoft-keyboard-users-so-devastated-as-accessories-discontinued.html

Fri, 26 May 2023 22:51:30 +0000

Is Meta working on a AT-Protocol app? that's when you'll know they've really made it.

Fri, 26 May 2023 22:45:57 +0000

It comes down to this:

#Fediverse was invented because the oppressed didn't like oligarchs owning and controlling the means of communication.

#bluesky was invented because one of the oligarchs wanted to get around the government telling him what to do.

#nostr was invented because crypto-scammers didn't like Fedi blocking their spam.

I mean roughly. That's probably not really fair on Nostr.

Fri, 26 May 2023 21:50:28 +0000

Course that goes double for homework kids.

The point of your essays is not to produce essays, it's to get you to notice that you can only really think deeply if you write it down, and to practice doing that, and to figure out what you actually think.

Fri, 26 May 2023 21:45:13 +0000

This is important if you are tempted to let the AI do much of your writing for you.

> "writing assistant ... automatically come up with suggestions for filling in sentences—but there was a catch. Subjects using the assistant were supposed to answer, “Is social media good for society?” The assistant, however, was programmed to offer biased suggestions for how to answer that question."

How would you expect that to go?

You need to be sure you know in advance what you want to say because the people who built these machines don't know how to control them and they are built out of human biases and cliche.

When they figure out how to actually aim the things it'll get worse.

Note that knowing in advance what you want to say is otherwise known as thought, and most easily captured if you write it down.

Orwell's newspeak was clumsy compared to where the AI can lead you if you let it finish your sentences.

#ai #writing #thought

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/05/ai-writing-assistants-can-cause-biased-thinking-in-their-users/

Fri, 26 May 2023 21:13:08 +0000

Is having multiple fedi-accounts that follow each other the same thing as when crypto people do wash-trading to swish their coins back and forth to pump the price?

Retoot this from your 2nd account. ​

Yes
No
Yes and so does my sock puppet
Look I've explained this the follow is just testing in my account

Fri, 26 May 2023 20:04:36 +0000

The trouble with trying to write an AI episode of my aliens-laugh-at-the-stupid-humans-destroying-the-planet cartoon is that if a super-intelligence is a threat, it's probably an interstellar threat, and the aliens ought to be doing something other than pointing and laughing.

🤔

Fri, 26 May 2023 19:37:26 +0000

Went to Banbury Cross. Like most things in the UK, it is a traffic roundabout. The town also has an old church and a park with an Avery and there's white horses hung from the walls.

Had a nice afternoon with my parents and brother.

There were pigeons fucking outside the aviary. Just really flaunting it in front of the caged birds. Are the caged birds sex-segregated? You'd hope the pigeons would help them plot an escape instead of just flaunting their freedom at them like that. Pigeons eh? Bastards.

Thu, 25 May 2023 19:23:16 +0000

Been playing a little with https://www.perplexity.ai

This one's really pretty good at web-search, using some kinda language-model process to filter search results.

I can eventually confuse it, but it doesn't fall easily for my lies and gives pretty good references to back up why it says that.

Coz it's doing a web search and summarizing it, more or less.

I think it's going a better job than google even while somehow basically google in the back end presumably?

That's proper bookmarked to see if it can replace search since search really sucks now. Even though this thins somehow relies on it.

#ai #search

Wed, 24 May 2023 22:20:31 +0000

Interesting fact: if you upload a short .webm to calckey then Mastodon displays it with the tag "Gif" on it, and auto-plays and loops it like it's a gif.

Which is what I wanted.

But Calckey itself displays the webm more like an full on uploaded-video, with a play button and stopping at the end (of the 1 second clip), with no option to loop.

There's merit in both approaches to that I guess.

But for my purpose I had to go with a bigger more data-hungry gif to get what I wanted in both.

#calckey #gif #mastodon

Fri, 19 May 2023 11:18:24 +0000

H. L. Mencken once said "For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong"

And the Large Language Model AIs are really truly designed to give you that answer.

#ai #llm #wrong

Fri, 19 May 2023 11:01:47 +0000

"Interactive Point-based Manipulation on the Generative Image Manifold" is quite a phrase.

The gif on this page explains it quite well though.

Look forward to playing with this DragGAN when the code is released next month. The unpredictability of the generated images is a pain that looks like it'll end soon.

https://github.com/XingangPan/DragGAN

Thu, 18 May 2023 21:05:15 +0000

The last hour when it's Lex and Wolfram talking about the nature of computation and consciousness and existence and the necessary existence of the set of all possible computations.

🧑‍🍳 💋

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdE-waSx-d8

Wed, 17 May 2023 21:20:12 +0000

You have to type the ID number next to a post if you want to reply to it. This one was 92.

Wed, 17 May 2023 21:17:18 +0000

Just checking out the Command-Line client https://github.com/mrusme/gomphotherium - love the fact it's the right way up with new posts *under* old ones, and the way it tries to render images in the text terminal.