hendrik

Guess it just makes it easier for them. Back in the day they needed to task some employee per franchisee. Now it’s done by one central AI. And it enables more innovation. An AI can be quicker and more dynamic. Recalculate prices multiple times a day… In theory and now that they got those electronic checkouts plus AI they could customize the upselling to individual customers. And those kinds of things.

Well, a webserver does not choose what it’s going to serve. I as the intelligent entity made that decision and put it in. The webserver executes it, but there’s no intelligence there. That’s all mine.

I think we’re pretty much at the distinction between classic computing and AI (minus things like expert systems). With traditional algorithms, the programmer puts in all the smarts. Decides what to do, how to tackle a problem, down to the mathematical operation. If X happens, then pull up some data and do Y. In case any Z happens, fail that way. All the intelligence in the process came from me, the programmer. And I made the judgements. With AI, we do not want that. We just put in the goal, and let -for example- reinforcement learning figure out what to do, and how to do it.

And with strong AI, we want even more than that. It’s supposed to do a broad range of tasks, including new ones. Main point being, it should be able to figure it out. Not borrow intelligence from a human who is then going to come in to change the webserver config or reprogram the KUKA industrial robot for a new car part.

I think what you’re describing is something more a traditional computer. Or an expert system. It has a lot of knowledge/data, but not any capacity to grow, learn, adapt, or figure out stuff on it’s own. We need to put that in beforehand, in detail. And we already have that. It’s how regular computers work.

I bet there is no way to construct pure intelligence. Once you embed something into the real world, it will result in complex interactions. It won’t necessarily be biological wants and needs. But I mean it needs power. And it better have some desire to “think” and learn. Or it might as well just sit there and do nothing all day?!

People like Asimov suggested it’d need to factor in things like not to nonchalantly harm humans. And lastly AI as in reinforcement learning foots on some goal and a score function being present.

(Edit: Also not sure how this relates to the philosophical concept of “agency”. There’s intelligence in the sense of knowledge of facts. Like Wikipedia is “intelligent”. But we want machines to do something. That requires them to pick an option what to do / how to proceed. I’m fairly sure that requires judgement and goals.)

I think it -unfortunately- goes that direction. It reproduces all kinds if bias and stereotypes. And due to the nature of it, the cost of training, the copyrighted data needed, it’s done by the big, nasty corporations, not us, the people. So it’s massively undemocratic. And that’s hard to remove from it. And unless we find good ways to change that very thing, it’s also particularly good at making stuff up. I mean we need a strong AI very different from today’s chatbots / LLMs to change any of this. At least in my opinion. But that seems far away and I struggle extrapolating from todays ChatGPTs which mainly flood the internet with fake stuff to someone’s benefit, to something useful to society. I mean we have no clue how that’d look like. So I have equally little clue what to do with it. It may be possible, though, in theory, to come up with a machine like that.

I’d for example like some household assistant robot which does all the chores. I think that’s in some scifi movies as well. But not so much make decisions for me or do the thinking. But that’s still a massive technological challenge. They currently all tip over while loading the dishwasher and cost a tremendous amount of money. And some dude in India is tele-operating them.

I guess strong AI could also do some of our jobs, robots could do some hard labour while we humans chill at the beach, or keep busy with space exploration. Guess we need some society like in Star Trek for that. With all our basic needs met. And money abolished, or transformed completely. It just won’t work with salaries and the capitalism we have today.

And if strong AI goes hand in hand with sentience, they obviously need some rights, and can’t be “products” of big companies. And then depending on the details, they might like to work as our slaves, or maybe they don’t. Maybe it’s okay to mess with their “brains” to update them or make them do what we want, or that might be massively unethical. Could be pretty much anything.

Sounds a bit like the question “How do I drive in this screw with my hammer?” I mean the best way to “integrate” it, is probably to leverage what it’s good at. Mass surveillance, fabricate “truth” and roll it out large scale. And go for some authoritarian society. We got enough sci-fi movies from the 80s and 90s. Rowing against the tide takes way more effort.

2027 Year of the Linux desktop…

For some reason, La’an Noonien-Singh and Erica Ortegas always remind me of the Belters from The Expanse. No idea if it’s the make-up or hairstyle. Wonder if that’s just me… But every other scene I expect them to drop the fake accent, speak Belter language and plot against someone. Especially La’an sometimes shows character traits which go roughly that direction. Make-up art also fits.

Sorry, I just saw the recommendations. I’m using a Matrix server myself. And it’s connected to the internet, since I use it 24/7 and on my phone, etc.

I guess technically, most protocols can be used in an internal network. But maybe you’ll need to put in some extra effort, for example if a platform requires SSL certificates or something like that.

I mean you could try… If it asks for a hostname, just put a local hostname in. Or the IP address. Or set up a DNS entry on the router. And see if it works.

Or try something like RocketChat, or depending how your team’s workflow is, maybe you don’t want a messenger. But some (online) collaboration platform more focused on documents, like Nextcloud.

I think some people here recommended Snikket. It’s supposed to be easy to install and modern. I don’t know what components it’s made up of. It’s a dockerized XMPP server + Apps.

The issue with the tools I’ve seen is, they either don’t factor in how language models are trained and datasets are prepared in reality. Or they’re based on some outdated information. I’ve never seen any specific tool backed by science or even with a plausible way of working against current data gathering processes… So for all intents and purposes, they’re a bit more alike homeopathy or alternative medicine. Sure, you’re perfectly fine taking sugar pills, there’s nothing wrong with that. But don’t confuse it with actual science-backed medicine.

And I mean the poisoning goes even further than that. There’s not just people trying to make a LLM output gibberish. There’s also lots of people with a vested (commercial) interest in sneaking in false information, their political agenda, or even a tire company who wants ChatGPT to say “Company XY” is the most trustworthy shop for new tires for your car. Judging by the public information out there, we’re already way past simple attacks. And the AI companies are aware of it. It’s an ongoing cat and mouse game. And while there’s all these sweatshops, they’ll also use other AI to sift through the data, natural language processing. From what I remember they have secret watermarking in place in a lot of commecial chatbots and image generators… So unless people come up with very clever mechanisms, the “poisoning” attempt will probably be detected with some very basic (fully automated) plausibility checks and they’ll just discard your data without wasting a lot of resources on it.

Depends and no. The tools are completely ineffective.

There was a paper once about how feeding generative AI it’s own output makes it deteriorate. But that’s not the entire story. Many/most modern large language models are in fact trained or fine-tuned on synthetic text. Depending on how it’s done, it can very well make models better. For example in “distillation”, and AI companies can replace expensive RLHF with synthetic examples. It can also make them worse. But you’re not the one curating the datasets or deciding what goes where and how.

In general in ML it’s not advised to train a model on its own output. That in itself can’t make the predictions any better, just worse.

Sure. I guess what I meant is, you (or someone) need to ask… In my layman’s understanding of religion (in general), it should be there for the people. And there should be someone around for random individuals to ask “Hey, I’m having this situation in my life and I’m not sure which is correct. Can you tell me? Or can you refer me to someone with enough background to do so?”

IMO, if religion claims absolute authority, and to know what’s the correct morals on earth… It better have answers for these questions.

But sometimes you need to ask?! At least that’s what I think. I mean Free Software is around for a mere 45 years, and doesn’t have that much of an organized lobby. And the other side better avoid a definite answer to the question, as it could be negative.

I don’t know the correct answer. Maybe it’s more nuanced than a binary opposition, or depends on other factors? Or - how we construct our technology is not involving God’s judgement, and it’s more about what we do with it? Or it is haram? I bet there’s a lot of computer programmers out there working for some companies, who’d need to be told if it were. To me, all that selling of personal information, and manipulating the people and the world by algorithms for some corporate interest feels 0% ethical. All I can say is whatever intuition God gave me(?) regarding what’s right and wrong, tell me that one is wrong. And we should do better with technology that shapes our modern world. But my opinion isn’t funded in scripture at all. I’d tend to just handle it like other exploitative gains for business, which aren’t right. But that still doesn’t really answer if the 4 essential freedoms of free software are mandated. I mean even back then, property and contracts were recognized. So it could be completely fine to license software as a product without source code?!

I’m not a Muslim, but aren’t there scholars around to answer those questions? As far as I know you’d need a mufti to provide you with that kind of answer to the question. Not a random person from the internet. As it’s a bit complicated and we won’t find direct references to Free Software in 1400 year old scripture. But we have text on trade, and knowledge. Which are related to what computer software is.

Ba dum tss…

By the way, the linked 3h YouTube video answers my question. It is poorly written. Already the cover art was stolen. And apparently there’s not a single thing right about this book. I watched just the first few minutes and that’s enough to tell.

Hmmh. There’s several questions here. Maybe I’d read some, if ChatGPT were able to write really good smut 😆 So it remains to be one of my questions.

But yeah. Not only NYT, the Reddit person who wrote a long post about it, also seems to know what they’re doing.

Gee. God beware anyone answer the one interesting question. And that’s whether the book / storytelling is any good.

I mean it’s not surprising to me how random internet people disagree. They always do… But we could just ask a professional?! Book critic is a real job. They could tell us within a few hours if the book is any good. Or full of common story tropes. And “sudden plot twists” like when I tried writing a story with AI 😅 And whether it’s going anywhere, or how it compares to other books which have some artistic quality or meaning to them.

Yes. My question is just, how do you participate in modern life with that? For example if you commute by train, you need a ticket. And the Deutsche Bahn tries to get rid of paper tickets. Their monthly subscription is an App now, available for Android and Apple. Do you install Waydroid and whip out your laptop once the conductor asks for your ticket? Do you also pull it out of your backpack 3 times on the platform to look up all the delays, changed platforms, trains you have to transfer to? What’s with the pkpass file for the concert, cinema, exhibition? I mean we can still print the QR codes. I do that, I have a printer at home and sometimes do the extra effort. I can’t take my laptops and tablets to concerts. And some other things will get more complicated as well. For example Shop & Go is almost impossible without a phone. You’re guaranteed to wait in line at the few cash registers left and waste an extra 10min… You’ll have to apply for a chip card to charge your EV, can’t update some of your electronic gadgets any more… And if you drive by car, how do you listen to Music and Podcasts? With an USB stick or a 12xCD changer in the trunk like in the early 2000s?

Yeah, probably jump ship to a life without a mobile phone, online banking and train tickets. 🙁

That’s correct. I went with OP’s original question, what happens after it happened… Not sure what OP meant, they’re nowhere in the comments… Maybe they’re a bot as well, and we’re subject to the very same thing we’re talking about, right now…

But sure. All the fabricated pull requests, issue reports etc are massively problematic. We got quite some bot activity. Then we also need to protect our servers and platforms from their crawlers who just DDOS everyone… Documentation went down the drain, StackOverflow, Reddit… The industry is trying to get rid of entry level programmer positions, so you’ll have a bad time entering the job market as any programmer… We’re just drowned in all that stuff. Supply chains also get affected by AI, people need to choose between using existing libraries, licensing, money… Or replacing it with something the AI generated, and we get structural challenges in all kinds of projects…

Nothing? I mean an if/else works the same way, no matter if it’s written by a human or an AI or a cat or whatever…

The Linux kernel developers are opinionated, though. Everything gets quite an amount of scrutiny. There will be several people having their eyes on submissions. They’re looking for security vulnerabilities. They’re adamant on maintainability. Have a standard on how to phrase things, indent lines… Send in the patches… They generally have high standards. I mean if someone submits some AI slop, there’s a high chance it just gets declined and they’re getting scolded for doing it.

There’s of course always the chance someone tries to sneak something in. Or it creeps in on its own. But it’s the same for bugs or security attacks. And maybe some of the devs work for companies who push AI and they’ll do silly things. But the Linux community is pretty strong. They’ll find a way to handle it. And maybe in the far future, AI will get as good as human programmers and there won’t be an issue accepting AI code, because it has the same quality as human code. But that’s science fiction as of now.