A lovely holiday with my parents, the GPT4 release sparks more AI conversation, the Fediverse continues to grow, and I have a date for the first public screening of my new Starship film! *Come!* *It’s this month!*
Me
Some stuff from my diary on the fediverse:
At the start of the month the politicians were arguing about refugees. It’s so depressing they way they try to outdo each other with cruelty. There’s apparently no place in politics for the view that desperate fleeing people should be welcomed and put to work improving the country.
The popcorn machine continues to show it’s value and let me tell you that Garlic Butter on Popcorn is a revelation but melted chocolate is mostly just messy .
Facebook announce a Fediverse project, but tech companies always announce vaporware when they feel threatened. Should we block them if they join? Probably. But maybe not if that prevents people from escaping.
A link tax is not the answer though, Facebook are right about that. Naughty Canada.
How do you fund these big social-media monsters once the advertisers leave? You could try a Dogecoin pump and dump like Elon Musk did. Not sure if it’s legal though.
Gary Lineker was on the news for not being on the football which is mostly just bemusing for a non-football person. But even more for my Observer Aliens laughing about it in the new cartoon I made.
My mum wanted a new laptop set up for her it came with a broken Firefox for some reason that wouldn’t let me install uBlock. But I got it set up nice, and also Android tablets for the whole family. There was a blog post describing how I set up Windows and Android these days.
The tarot-cards are nearly on sale at Amazon now, the AI was able to answer my questions even though topics like that are filled with spam in the search engines these days. It taught me the difference between a SKU and a GTIN-13 and a GTIN-14, which are things you need to know if you use Amazon for your online store fulfillment.
Finished the month with a lovely holiday in a countryside cabin with my parents and brother. Photo-thread about that.
Finally: every time I hear someone mindlessly parrot the phrase “stochastic parrot “without understanding, I fear that we will never take it seriously enough to avoid the AI doom. You don’t need understanding and sentience to destroy the whole world, especially if you define it so that only humans have those things.
Releases
A new cartoon! The Observers discover a planet where sports newscasters are censored for caring about refugees.
View here: https://dalliance.network/w/fNs7xjYzq7bpXE4yor2wFn
Upcoming Premier
My Three-Years-In-The-Making new film “Payment” will have it’s first public screening at the Kino short-film event in London on the 23rd April, at the Strongroom Bar.
More details here:
https://starshipsd.com/screen/
It would be lovely if you could come along!
Reading
The Lightness Of Being – Frank Wilczek
When Milan Kundara talked about the lightness of being he was talking about emotions and being a living being, but when Wilczek talks of the lightness of being he’s talking about how all of matter is made of light.
By which he means everything turns out to be quantum fields.
Light is quantum fields, electrons is quantum fields, protons are made of quarks that a quantum fields, and the forces are all quantum fields too. And thus the subtitle: Mass, Ether, and the Unification of Forces.
Published in 2008, before the Higgs was confirmed at CERN, it’s confident that the particle will be found, and so it was.
I’ve sometimes wondered why we say that the Luminiferous Aether doesn’t exist instead of saying it turns out to be a vector field of spinors carrying the electromagnetic forces. The electromagnetic field is indeed the thing which exists in all space and transmits light so why isn’t that the Luminiferous Aether?
This book seems to go even further and suggest that all of reality is but ripples in the Luminiferous Aether, which it turns out is a stack of a dozen or so quantum fields of spinors mediating all the forces and giving things mass.
Watching
South Park Season 26.
Oh my god, this show has been running for more than half my life, and it’s still great. The Canada/Royals “privacy tour” episode and the GPT co-written episode were both Peak South Park which is still an amazing thing to be.
Picard Season 3
The shape-shifters could be anyone! And Picard has a kid with Beverly Crusher?
Great Star Trek though, doing good work.
Links
AI
* GPT4 demoed as it was released
Interesting video where they clearly have practiced and know in advance what the machine is going to say. I guess it can have it’s stochastic knob turned to zero or use a preset random-seed.
It’s an impressive machine now, that much is true. But can it understand?
* Sabine Hossenfelder on how much GPT can “understand”
It comes down to what you mean by “understand” of course. People saying it’s just word frequentism, as though the model is simply a complex look-up table, are minimizing it too much I think. There *is* some understanding in these machines.
We have to try to understand to what extent, and hopefully in doing so learn more about what it is that understanding things really actually is.
* a paper on training AI to play Othello.
They feed nothing but the board-move notation into the machine, and when they look inside the machine they see not just a stochastic parrot, but a neural model of an Othello board representing game state.
Does the Othello-Bot therefore understand the board?
It represents the board in it’s circuits at least. I talked about this in Feb.
* Zvi’s long post about AI state of the art.
It’s interesting how the machine starts off well calibrated (things is says it’s 20% sure of are true 2/10 times), until you do the human-reinforcements learning to teach it not to be crazy and offensive, when it becomes as mis-calibrated as a human.
Human reinforcement can only put a mask on the monster, though, not change the monster’s deep inner workings.
* The Future Of Life Institute think we should pause development for six months.
“Therefore, we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.”
* Yudkowsky’s letter in Time Magazine He isn’t with the people asking for a six month pause, he really thinks we should all quit AI development immediately for much longer. And blow up any server farms that house too many GPUs.
* Yudkowsky was also on Lex’s show if you prefer that in longer and in video form. I talked about that as mentioned above.
Fediverse
* A Decoder/Recorder podcast interviewing Gargron, Mastodon’s CEO. CEO makes it sound fancy, but he thinks he’s just running a software project. He gets quite a bit of hate for not doing it the way everyone else thinks he should, even when he explicitly allows them to go do it the way they want too.
* Contrats to Gargron on getting married. Many happy returns! Or, no. That’s the wrong one. Hope it never happens again! Happily ever after!
* Techdirt as an article about the value social media provides.
Can you get the good without letting some creepy perverted spying maniac spying on every message and trying to manipulate you? Maybe, but not if it’s owned by a capitalist.
* Chris Trottier’s Mastodon thread on Big Social points out quite nicely why it can’t be done on their terms, why the networks need to be open and have no owners.
Misc
* Richard Murphy on the Small Boats “Crisis”
They made it up: “Let me be clear then. There need be no small boat crisis. It could be solved by rapid, easy to work out and simple policy changes. So let us stop pretending that Tory manufactured crises are real. They are not. They are its news agenda — but people suffer as a result. That is how callous they are.”
* Great video on police-car-chases. They should probably stop happening, they are not worth the risk to the lives of officers and the public and the suspects.
* PBS Spacetime explains the limits of our knowledge. We can only know about the space from which light may reach us, and soon our horizons will begin to shrink as the universe expands them beyond our light-cone. Currently we are still seeing new photons cross into our observable universe but one day, ten billion years from now, that’ll stop — and all that we can ever see will be in view.
After that it only gets less and less until one day we’re trapped with only own own galaxy reachable.
* Gary explains the difference between wealth and income and explains why the rich can’t leave if you tax their wealth: Their wealth *is* the country, it’s your mortgages and houses and businesses that are actually stuck here which they own. That is their wealth, and it can be taxed and they can’t take it away if they choose to leave.
more…
That’s just the highlights this month, there’s more in my full public bookmarks from my link-bot on the fediverse or an RSS feed
Around The Fediverse
We’re taking over the means of communication. ripping control from the surveillance capitalists and giving it to the users.
Notable Newbies
* Linux Torvolds who started the Linux Kernel
* Bandcamp United, a new union for workers at Bandcamp.
AI Again
* @inthehands@hachyderm.io looks at the code the AI wrote.
It’s copied one half of the game from a justToThePoint blog post.
Interesting to see two distinct styles mixed up in the code it’s output.
* @pisscotheque@godforsaken.website links to a drawing tool. You do the scribble, the AI will make it look more like a cartoon or photo.
* @janellecshane@wandering.shop finds a great use for the AI It is laughably *terrible* at Ascii-art
Misc
* @Gargron@mastodon.social on Facebook’s Fediverse project “If Meta is really working on a new ActivityPub-powered social network, I see it as a very positive signal overall–my personal feelings towards Meta notwithstanding.”
* @TexasObserver@texasobserver.social is saved from closure! They raised funds on the fedi after the closure was announced, but can that scale to all the local newspapers?
* @mattgreencomed@mastodonapp.uk did a video on the budget statement. Most insightful of the day I reckon.
* @mxtthxw@mxtthxw.art has an album out “This is #NormalFriday so we release our new EP #LetDown today!”
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