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119
Joined
1 yr. ago
  • According to some scholars, s-risks warrant serious consideration as they are not extremely unlikely and can arise from unforeseen scenarios.

    Guys I have found a way to phrase my anxiety in a way where every single word is extremely load-bearing

  • It’s the risk:benefit tradeoff always. Sure you can hold on to all your illiquid stock in a private company with transfer restrictions, but will that pay for a house or even a banana? Does it ever not. The “take a loan for liquidity until you can sell some stock” trick worked for a little bit but companies are wise to that too now, and don’t allow it.

    So people can pick between real money they can spend on stuff (or invest in a slightly less illiquid way) or being paper multimillionaires with no actual liquidity; not a hard choice imho.

  • Unsneering, I think because it has all sorts of invisible behaviors that work ok in isolation/for the common case but then eventually combine to bite you in the ass. Shellshock, for example; I think Thomas did a pretty decent rant about that one when it came out (damn, has it been more than 10 years already?)

  • Yeah, I grew up speaking a language that pronounces Latin closer to Italian than to English too (:

    This particular thing is actually doubly funny to me, whose first practical professional program was one that took German text with English words mixed in and used regex to transform the English terms into nonsense words that would get pronounced right by the German-only text-to-speech system. That was 2002.

  • It doesn’t matter. Vim is an emacs under the Finseth definition (which is my favorite way of riling up both vim and emacs people trying to keep the irrelevant editor war going). Those folks oughta find something else to center their entire personality around.

  • Here’s a pretty good sneer at the writing out of LLMs, with a focus on meaning https://www.experimental-history.com/p/28-slightly-rude-notes-on-writing

    Maybe that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it doesn’t mean anything because it didn’t cost the computer anything. When a human produces words, it signifies something. When a computer produces words, it only signifies the content of its training corpus and the tuning of its parameters.

    Also, on people:

    I see tons of essays called something like “On X” or “In Praise of Y” or “Meditations on Z,” and I always assume they’re under-baked. That’s a topic, not a take.

  • TechTakes @awful.systems
    antifuchs @awful.systems

    Nature: Al generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect

    Got the pointer to this from Allison Parrish who says it better than I could:

    it's a very compelling paper, with a super clever methodology, and (i'm paraphrasing/extrapolating) shows that "alignment" strategies like RLHF only work to ensure that it never seems like a white person is saying something overtly racist, rather than addressing the actual prejudice baked into the model.

    TechTakes @awful.systems
    antifuchs @awful.systems

    Yet another completely normal use of generative AI: not-obviously-illegal CSAM

    School student tells AI to put 20 other students’ faces on nude pictures, shares them in chat; it takes months for anyone including the school administrators to act because of some extremely, uh, dubious loophole.

    If someone does that in photoshop, it’s a crime; if they do it in AI pretending to be photoshop, it’s somehow not. Gotta love this legal system’s focus on minor technicalities rather than the harm done.

    TechTakes @awful.systems
    antifuchs @awful.systems

    The “I will piledrive you” post, discussed on the Better Offline podcast

    They have Nik Suresh (the author) on, as well as Robert Evans. I haven’t listened to it all yet, but it’s fun so far.

    FreeAssembly @awful.systems
    antifuchs @awful.systems

    Nix project: ban? What ban?

    discourse.nixos.org Should jonringer get his commit bit back?

    Hi, I haven’t read this thread and I don’t really care to read all of it. I’ve always intended to get back into the Nix community after the issues with community management are sorted to my satisfaction. If jonrigner gets his commit bit back, I’m gonna be gone for good. Create whatever future you...

    Should jonringer get his commit bit back?

    They invited that guy back. I do have to admit, I admire his inability to read a room.