RSS is a pretty good way around this. Disabling JavaScript is also a good option to cut down on the silliness. If it breaks the site, it was probably not worth reading.
I’d suspect there is significant growth of businesses acting as intermediaries for cloud storage. I think that other software providers have also realized that ransoming users data is a great way to extract predictable, hedge-fund-owner-pleasing revenue without performing useful work.
AEC software providers all do this. ProjectWise is worse than owning or renting a plain file server in every way I can imagine, yet every consultant in transportation dutifully cuts Bentley a five-figure check or larger every year so they can hold your project files hostage and pretend to develop software.
I think universal conscription is a good idea for the sole reason that everyone should get a bit of this perspective. The people who’ve never left the nice-people bubble of college and professional employment will go to completely inappropriate lengths to avoid feeling offended. You said the manager’s idea was maybe not as good as the other thing in a meeting? You just made an enemy for life. Meanwhile soldiers have productive and respectful working relationships with people who they physically fight with the day before because that’s a better alternative to however UCMJ allows your commander to screw up your life.
It’s a great exercise in personal growth for coping skills.
Look at it more like part of the education system.
Because that is what it is. Nobody gets sent to Afghanistan as part of conscription.
And, in my opinion, it has been some of the most valuable education I have got and something I'd definitely recommend my kids and my friends do if offered the opportunity.
I have quite a few German friends who looking back speak highly of their experience doing the civilian alternative service (they objected to military service). This was before the conscription was abolished in 2011.
Even though it was not military service, it put them in situation and workplaces that were different from their own experience and environment.
Similarly, in France some engineering schools required an internship in a factory to learn the perspective of blue-collar workers that the student might eventually manage but at 8 weeks only I don't think it gives as much perspective as what my German friends had.
"Nobody gets sent to Afghanistan as part of conscription".
You should be more careful with such statements as that's more exception than rule. If you're country goes to war, and it's not just some peace keeping mission, you can bet that whoever is at the time in army could be sent to the frontline.
AFAIK everybody who was sent to Afghanistan was either professionals or ordinary soldiers who applied.
If we end up in an attack on our homelands thats another thing.
But even then no ordinary conscript that reads HN (ok, possible exception for russians, but even they try to maintain a veneer of "voluntary" on it when they send conscripts) will be sent to abroad.
There are hundreds of thousands of people alive in the US right now who were drafted to fight in Vietnam. The only war with conscripts that the US didn’t send people abroad for is the civil war in the US
We didn’t have any conscripts in Afghanistan because we don’t have any conscripts at the moment. I can say that there were a lot of people that were deployed in the Middle East when they didn’t want to be. Especially for second and third tours. I personally have a friend who was told he was going to be on a ship in the Navy who ended up in Iraq.
> you can bet that whoever is at the time in army could be sent to the frontline.
Of course?! We've had a volunteer army for the last half century?! How can you claim professional service members are being conscripted and sent to conflict?
All Nordic countries, Switzerland and probably Austria.
Same goes for Taiwan and Israel.
Germany does not at the moment but can reintroduce it at a moments notice, and also they are taking steps to encouraging voluntary conscription like service.
Probably more 1st world nations, these were just the ones from the top of my head.
But how many of those will send conscripts abroad to fight? Norway won't, they rely on volunteers who have at least completed conscription or proffessional soldiers. Can't imagine that any of the others does it differently.
I worked with a very well educated Chinese man who had been caught up in that. He had a terrible, and on occasion terrifying, time. I'm pretty confident that it didn't make him a better party member. As far as I remember from what little he was willing to say about the time the only thing it made him better at was catching stray dogs to eat.
Xi Jinping himself had an awful time too according to a podcast I listened to about his life. But he later changed his tune in recent years when hyping up the old times became popular again, similar to the Stalin years is popular again in Russia.
Some variation of this was not uncommon in general. In USSR, college students were routinely used as forced agricultural labor during harvest season for up to 30 days. AFAIK something similar existed in other Soviet bloc countries.
My parents hated it, and I don't think I have ever met anyone who remembered that experience fondly for any reason. If anything, the kind of stories that people tell about it seem to imply that it was more divisive than uniting - the rural folk who were doing that as a permanent job were both resentful of "city slickers" and annoyed at the fact that they can't do it "properly", while the students would very quickly tire of being yelled at and start treating their hosts with contempt.
Did you choose to do that because you were going to "completely inappropriate lengths to avoid feeling offended" after being in a "nice-people bubble of college" ?
You go to school and learn that 2+2=4. You get a consulting job and learn 2+2= whatever the client says it is.
I wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the consulting engineer was incompetent. Sometimes a bureaucrat tells you to sharpen your pencils and come back with the answer That fits the budget they have if you want to keep your professional services contract going.
Yea and that's a violation of professional ethics. Being corrupt or working for a corrupt organization in no way justifies it. Professionals are trusted by society to act responsibly even when it's against the interests of their clients or employers.
There are benefits to in office work. I don’t consider them valuable enough to offset the cost of 10hrs of uncompensated time every week or doubling my mortgage cost. I hope tax codes will incentivize allowing remote work options given the reduced burden to transportation infrastructure.
Well, for the sake of clarity I would say Tor is safer only if it’s not a honey trap. That is not knowable as a user, but I think that suspicion is well-deserved.
I think the Middle East gave us a very clear example of how state actors may target channels in unexpected ways.
You know, I’m actually pretty surprised that there’s not more lobbying for some kind of tax incentives to promote remote work. It takes a lot of burden off transportation networks. Honestly, it’s probably cheaper than building more roads and more rail.
I suppose the best you can do is just use the commute cost in your calculations of what your compensation is worth. I made a lateral move to a company that offers hybrid work. The irony is the company I came from was all in office, but I worked exclusively with people outside of my office so I would drive to work just to interact with people on MSTeams.
Public transportation is also cheaper than building more and wider roads, but I'm not sure it's straightforward to sell this idea.
In the Americas most people are still fixated on owning a car.
In political debates in my city, public transportation is only ever talked about as a burden on the city's finances, never mind that car infrastructure costs many times more.
This reminds me of when cities in the Bay Area started considering restrictions on free meals at work, because local restaurants were annoyed it reduced their lunch crowd. I'm sure that same group has a vested interest in people commuting to jobs.
The disturbing societal implications speak for themselves. Personally, I suspect a significant fraction of transactions on Only Fans or “influencer” platforms are money laundering or social engineering campaigns by deeply resourced actors. There may be a large number of clients that are bots making random subscriptions to keep the network alive and large enough to make moving targeted funds harder to observe.
A plausible scenario might be an FBI agent paying a confidential informant without creating an unexplained income stream. The FBI and friends disclosed spending around $0.5B on informants. The truth could be more. We don’t know what other agencies around the world spend. I imagine they aren’t putting cash in brown bags under park benches.
To clarify, in this scenario, the confidential informant would be a streamer or an influencer - a person that has a sizeable following, operates in public, and creates a lot of attention? And that there's a large network of such informants and none of them were compromised (had their true nature exposed in public)?
You would be surprised how many people pay for OF content. The novelty is that the clients are picked using mainstream social media. Most actually believe they talk with the influencer while in reality the “influencer” doesn’t even know where its content is distributed(not that she cares). Chatters and voice-overs are the norm.
Please keep harping. The marketing myths that gets circulated about these models are creating very serious misunderstandings and misallocation of resources. I am hopeful that more cautious and careful dialogue like this will curb the notions of sentience or human intelligence that exciting headlines seemed to have put in the public discussion of these tools.
What’s the alternative? You can’t just say “don’t say that”. There needs to be something you can say instead, 5 syllables at the most, which evokes the same feeling of confident wrongness, without falling into anthropomorphism. It’s a tall order.
Confabulation is a term often brought forward as an alternative, but compared to hallucination almost noone knows what confabulation means. Metaphors like hallucinating might be anthropomorphizing, but they convey meaning well, so personally I look for other hills to die on.
Same with "it's not really AI", because no it's not, but language is fluid and that's alright.
it is perhaps wise to keep stronger characterizations, like "bullshit", for a soon to come future state where we need it as a descriptor to distinguish from "mere" hallucination.
Well, if you want to convey confident incorrectness - hallucination is definitely not the word, confabulate is far more like what is happening here. But, that's still anthropomorphizing. I'd prefer "incorrect response" or "bug."
Agree. Incorrect response, or faulty, or erroneous, and/or unsuitable.
We do not call it "hallucination" when a human provides unfounded, or dubious, or poorly-structured, or untrustworthy, or shallowly parroted, or patently wrong information.
We wouldn't have confidence in a colleague who "hallucinated" like this. What is the gain in having a system that generates rubbish for us?
You can say "Bullshit". LLMs bullshit all the time. Talk without regard to the truth or falsity of statements. It also doesn't pressupose that the trueness is known, nir deny it, so it should satisfy both camps; unlike hallucination which implies that truth and fiction are separate.
I wonder if there is some sort of transition between recalling declarative facts (some of which have been shown to be decodable from activations) on one hand and completing the sentence with the most fitting word on the other hand. The dream that "hallucination" can be eliminated requires that the two states be separable, yet it is not evident to me that these "facts" are at all accessible without a sentence to complete.
Technically, "bullshit" is the most accurate term. From "On Bullshit" by Professor Harry Frankfurt:
"What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong."
Both "hallucinations" and valuable output are produced by exactly the same process: bullshitting. LLMs do for bullshitting what computers do for arithmetic.
So the verb is "bullshitting" which does an even worse job of avoiding anthropomorphizing or attributing sentience to the model. At least "hallucinating" isn't done with conscious effort; "bullshitting" implies effort.
No, it ascribes accountability to the humans who employ a bullshitting machine to bullshit more effectively. It doesn't anthropomorphize anything, any more than "calculating" anthropomorphizes a computer doing arithmetic.
If you can ascribe accountability of "bullshitting" or "calculating" to the human who's using the machine then there's exactly no reason "thinking" or "writing" can't be ascribed to the human who's using the machine. There's no obvious line where the semantics of some words should or should not apply to a machine for behaviors that (up until recently) only applied to humans.
It just draws too many annoying comments and downvotes, and has been discussed ad nauseam on this forum and others - but I broadly agree. There are "features" with these applications where if I'm rude, or frustrated with the responses, the model will say things like "I'm not continuing this conversation."
How utterly absurd, it has no emotions, and there's no way that response was the result of a training set. It's just dumb marketing, all of it. And the real shame is (and the thing that actually pisses me off about the marketing/hype) that the useful things we actually have uncovered from ML or "AI" the last 10 years will be lost again in the inevitable AI winter we're facing following from whenever this market bubble collapses.
what you're referring to has nothing to do with how GPTs are pretrained or with hallucinations in and of themselves, and everything to do with how companies have reacted to the presence of hallucinations and general bad behavior, using a combination of fine tuning, RLHF, and keyword/phrase/pattern matching to "guide" the model and cut it off before it says something the company would regret (for a variety of reasons)
In other words, your complaints are ironically not about what the article is discussing, but about, for better or for worse, attempts to solve it.
I mean, in so many words that's precisely what I am complaining about. Their attempt to solve it is to make it appear more human. What's wrong with an error message? Or in this specific example - why bother at all? Why even stop the conversation? It's ridiculous.
RLHF is what was responsible for your frustration. You're assuming there is a scalable alternative. There is not.
> What's wrong with an error message?
You need a dataset for RLHF which provides an error message _only_ when appropriate. That is not yet possible. For the same reason the conversation stops.
> Or in this specific example - why bother at all? Why even stop the conversation? It's ridiculous.
They want a stop/refusal condition to prevent misuse. Adding one at all means sometimes stopping when the model should actually keep going. Not only is this subjective as hell, but there's still no method to cover every corner case (however objectively defined those may be).
You're correct to be frustrated with it, but it's not as though they have some other option that allows them to detect how and when to stop/not stop, error message/complain for every single human's preference patterns on the planet. Particularly not one that scales as well as RLHF on a custom dataset of manually written preferences. It's an area of active research for a reason.
