Seeing film sets with some of the world's most famous people in masks (as I was just watching some Wicked behind the scenes shots!) is always an interesting reminder that there are still situations where all the factors converge to create far different behaviors than what we assume is possible
@izzy - Bluesky. This is funny.
Billions spent on AI, and this is the sort of garbage we get! #Google
people talk about the propaganda of the deed but we also gotta acknowledge the glow-up of the deed
I dunno what to tell you folks right?
Even if I concede that the problem is FASCISM, not CAPITALISM, the capitalism is what empowers the fascists and connects them all together even across faux "ideological" lines.
For profit media is an unreliable narrator precisely because they are OWNED by rich capitalists, and rich capitalists have clearly decided that burning the world/killing billions is better than ending the capitalism killing us and the way they accomplish that IS fascism.
👀 Study Finds Consumers Are Actively Turned Off by Products That Use AI
—@Futurism
"When AI is mentioned, it tends to lower emotional trust, which in turn decreases purchase intentions," said lead author and Washington State University clinical assistant profess of marketing Mesut Cicek in a statement. "We found emotional trust plays a critical role in how consumers perceive AI-powered products."
https://futurism.com/the-byte/study-consumers-turned-off-products-ai
My friend Jenni was beaten brutally for being trans in Oklahoma. She's raising money to get out of that state ASAP.
https://bsky.app/profile/jennig.bsky.social/post/3leq4hjrdmk2y
A lot of the current hype around LLMs revolves around one core idea, which I blame on Star Trek:
Wouldn't it be cool if we could use natural language to control things?
The problem is that this is, at the fundamental level, a terrible idea.
There's a reason that mathematics doesn't use English. There's a reason that every professional field comes with its own flavour of jargon. There's a reason that contracts are written in legalese, not plain natural language. Natural language is really bad at being unambiguous.
When I was a small child, I thought that a mature civilisation would evolve two languages. A language of poetry, that was rich in metaphor and delighted in ambiguity, and a language of science that required more detail and actively avoided ambiguity. The latter would have no homophones, no homonyms, unambiguous grammar, and so on.
Programming languages, including the ad-hoc programming languages that we refer to as 'user interfaces' are all attempts to build languages like the latter. They allow the user to unambiguously express intent so that it can be carried out. Natural languages are not designed and end up being examples of the former.
When I interact with a tool, I want it to do what I tell it. If I am willing to restrict my use of natural language to a clear and unambiguous subset, I have defined a language that is easy for deterministic parsers to understand with a fraction of the energy requirement of a language model. If I am not, then I am expressing myself ambiguously and no amount of processing can possibly remove the ambiguity that is intrinsic in the source, except a complete, fully synchronised, model of my own mind that knows what I meant (and not what some other person saying the same thing at the same time might have meant).
The hard part of programming is not writing things in some language's syntax, it's expressing the problem in a way that lacks ambiguity. LLMs don't help here, they pick an arbitrary, nondeterministic, option for the ambiguous cases. In C, compilers do this for undefined behaviour and it is widely regarded as a disaster. LLMs are built entirely out of undefined behaviour.
There are use cases where getting it wrong is fine. Choosing a radio station or album to listen to while driving, for example. It is far better to sometimes listen to the wrong thing than to take your attention away from the road and interact with a richer UI for ten seconds. In situations where your hands are unavailable (for example, controlling non-critical equipment while performing surgery, or cooking), a natural-language interface is better than no interface. It's rarely, if ever, the best.
Jagmeet Singh points out that Jordan Peterson's Poilievre interview was sponsored by PreBorn!, a US evangelist anti-abortion group:
"PreBorn!: Help save 11,000 babies from abortion
Media Partner: Thank you for donating to PreBorn!"
#cdnpoli #abortion
