Everyone has their preferences and we keep Crystal Hot Sauce, Tabasco, and whatever hot sauces we've created on hand. Our last hot sauce was a ferment using Genghis Khan Brain peppers, which was absolutely amazing; covered all the bases we wanted in a hot sauce for general use.
For Tabasco, we keep it on hand, because it seems to pair well with a lot of the sauerkraut dishes we prepare.
"I have to say honestly, that AI looks like an apocalypse for human thinking [ Im glad Tao is warning people, I just dont think many people will listen ]"
I think back to what happened to the school-aged population during COVID lockdowns; widespread learning loss, mental health deterioration and educational inequalities. Students who were self-driven, tutored, or encouraged by their parents to continue learning flourished, and they were no longer limited by the slower learning pace, distractions, and or downtime (transportation and fill courses/periods). Some students leapfrogged ahead of their peers. Unfortunately, most students were negatively impacted by the situation and are still lagging behind where they should be in terms of foundational skills and knowledge.
I'm thinking AI will follow a similar path. Some people will genuinely excel, utilizing AI to optimize learning; but, most people will offload most work to AI and, more or less, become addicted and dependent to it. Of course, leading to what Tao is referring to as "an apocalypse for human thinking."
What I struggle with is how much of this learning loss and educational inequalities was engendered by needing to keep working and having a world where 1 job is just not enough. 1 job per person is also not enough.
We are strongly underestimating the impact of the income <> time gap economically which leads to an inability to lean into these situations.
We also have ended up in a place where that pursuit of capital limits our government participation. having class on TV would have been a different result. Closed groups of home school would have had a different result. Instead even the threat assessment was pushed down to the individual re: whether to mask, whether the service you want/need is open etc.
Would it have been perfect? No. Could it have been improved, yes.
And, nothing will happen. Did anything happen via Panama and Pandora paper leaks? Perhaps players with negligible political power to protect themselves were held accountable or selected by bigger fish to fall, but beyond those, nothing. The phenomenon is still happening and social collective action is continuously disrupted via no shortage of mechanisms. Wealth concentration is increasing and buying politicians was always a thing, but now it's publicly flaunted without recourse and they operate against what's good for the electorate interests openly--almost in spite.
I mean, the faltering ability to stir people to deal with Flock issue should be incredibly eye opening to what continuously slides under the radar for heinous activities that are not nearly as public facing or noticeably evident.
Fired up the old mIRC license I've had for decades last week to explore old servers and channels. Many are dormant, but life is still teeming in many. I'll probably wind up re-donating to mIRC developers and investing some time into IRC communities. I find the experience preferable to Discord.
Anyone interested in exploring this segment of the internet, start with: https://netsplit.de/
Netsplit is a great and vital resource. But I'm wondering if it's actually the best entrypoint for people who just wanna chat with others about some topic. https://libera.chat/ seems a bit more user-friendly and "hand-holding", for the people who prefer that. If Libera doesn't fit their vibe, the huge network list on Netsplit will surely be of more use to them once they understand IRC just a tiny bit better.
Not a bad actor spreading misinformation, but I encountered a similarish weird, dystopian experience with ChatGPT.
Utilized ChatGPT on my PC to search local plant nursery inventories for a specific tree. Output showed several local nurseries with rough probability descriptions regarding whether they have the tree in inventory, except for one nursery. For that nursery, ChatGPT provided a direct link to the specified tree, which was directly on the nursery's domain, showed a picture and description of the tree, and even showed the item in-stock with 6 in inventory at the 5-gallon size.
Excited, I plan my trip and am about to pick up my tree, I then double-check the nursery site on my phone to verify location and stock. As I attempted to navigate the website inventory to find the tree, I noticed that the tree no longer existed. There is no page for that varietal or species of tree on the entire website's domain.
I head back inside and look at the ChatGPT provided link on the PC and there it is, showing the inventory that doesn't show up when you use the nursery's website to directly find it without the provided link. A call to the nursery, further verified that the tree is not in stock, nor have they ever carried it.
ChatGPT made it all up. Did ChatGPT decide to do this, or did the nursery pay for this type of "advertising" to generate in-person customers? Nevertheless, still an incredibly weird and dystopian experience.
Did you consider that the website made it up and fed it to ChatGPT?
It sounds like a bundle of very common SEO tricks combined with the differential between your human user agent’s visit.
Perhaps ChatGPT only showed you what the nursery told it about.
This phenomenon is not unique to LLM. If you telephone a store, chances are that the salesman who answers the phone will tell you only what you want to hear. They don’t even strictly need to lie. The store only wins if you drive there and walk in the door. Why should they discourage you from doing that very thing?
This concept was driven home to me at the dry cleaners. Why should a dry cleaner stop work and answer the phone, only to tell a customer that their batch isn’t ready? They just got taken off-task for a non-revenue interaction. It doesn’t matter, because even if the customer’s batch is ready, they aren’t there to pay and pick it up!
There is no measurable difference between a neural network generating text that happens to be true and a neural network generating text that happens to be false.
It's not "Hallucination" or a conspiracy, it is their defined operating mode.
It told you they had that tree because you wanted that tree, and because it was trained to tell you what you want to hear. By design.
It seems that it generated a page with a plausible answer for a very long tail subject for which the random part of the generation could become prominent. We used to say that it hallucinated the answer. Another term is confabulation.
US schools were restricted from engaging in appropriate disciplinary action without the threat of losing federal funding. Either schools take action against violent students appropriately, or they can lose federal funding. They were financially strong armed to ignore it.
It's extremely difficult to overlook the consequences of how this policy impacted normalizing violence from an administrative POV.
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