• 1 Post
  • 891 Comments
Joined 1 年前
cake
Cake day: 2024年3月22日

help-circle
  • That’s probably true, but it also speaks to Ed Zitron’s latest piece about the rise of the Business Idiot. You can explain why Wikipedia disrupted previous encyclopedia providers in very specific terms: crowdsourced production to volunteer editors cuts costs massively and allows the product to be delivered free (which also increases the pool of possible editors and improves quality), and the strict* adherence to community standards and sourcing guidelines prevents the worse loss of truth and credibility that you may expect.

    But there is no such story that I can find for how Wikipedia gets disrupted by Gen AI. At worst it becomes a tool in the editor’s belt, but the fundamental economics and structure just aren’t impacted. But if you’re a business idiot then you can’t actually explain it either way and so of course it seems plausible



  • As the bioware nerd I am it makes my heart glad to see the Towers of Hanoi doing their part in this fight. And it seems like the published paper undersells how significant this problem is for the promptfondlers’ preferred narratives. Given how simple it is to scale the problem complexity for these scenarios, it seems likely that there isn’t a viable scaling-based solution here. No matter how big you make the context windows and how many steps the system is able to process it’s going to get out scaled by simply increasing some Ns in the puzzle itself.

    Diz and others with a better understanding of what’s actually under the hood have frequently referenced how bad Transformer models are at recursion and this seems like a pretty straightforward way to demonstrate that and one that I would expect to be pretty consistent.








  • A) “Why pay for ChatGPT when you could get a math grad student (or hell an undergrad for some of the basics) to do it for a couple of craft beers? If you find an applied math student they’d probably help out just for the joy of being acknowledged.” -My wife

    B) I had not known about the cluster fuck of 2016, but I can’t believe it was easier for the entire scientific establishment to rename a gene than to get Microsoft to introduce an option to disable automatic date detection, a feature that has never been actually useful enough to justify the amount it messes things up. I mean, I can believe it, butI it’s definitely on the list of proofs that we are not in God’s chosen timeline.





  • I guess that’s fair. I was focusing in on his attitude towards craft, which seems incompatible with actually taking pride in doing a good job as opposed to simply skating by. But while I still take issue with his attitude there and want to give him a clockwork orange-style refresher about tech debt I think a bigger problem is that he’s taking predictable problems of the median programmer trying to use these systems and saying, effectively, “get gud”. This is especially galling given that the tech here is going to replace or supplant the kind of junior developer roles that allowed fresh graduates to actually get that experience that allows you to shepherd the next generation of junior devs (or I guess LLM assistants now).





  • I mean I don’t doubt that some folks on the internet were absolute bastards about it. At the same time, while I’ve got a lot of love for Rian Johnson’s work and don’t have any room to criticize the process that creates it, I do have concerns. First off, while it’s artistically satisfying and a good personal defense, retreating into a bubble away from criticism doesn’t stop the economic and social repercussions of that criticism, which can definitely reflect back on the artistic product as it did when the far less interesting JJ Abrams was brought back to do the last Star Wars movie instead of letting Rian keep going. I don’t have a good solution for that, since fighting the internet hate machine isn’t something I’d wish on anyone, but it’s still a problem. This is especially the case with Gen AI here because the economic and social consequences that technology has on artistic production and creativity are the whole point of the criticism. Like, it’s not just that AI art is bad - we’ve seen plenty of bad art from human beings make it to theaters. Even if it gets less bad it’s replacing actual people with artistic visions and actual lives with a machine that is, somehow, even more of an environmental disaster and economic drain on society. It sounds like this is the kind of story that might be trying to engage with some of that in a meaningful way, but I don’t think that justifies actually using it here. Like, if you’re paying to enter the torment nexus in order to post up your propogands about how we shouldn’t have created the torment nexus, you’re still paying the fuckers who created the torment nexus for their creation of the torment nexus.