FaceDeer

Europe has freight trains too.

I don’t see why this is a point worth quibbling about. The “gag” is that rails are designed for self-driving vehicles, but most trains are not self-driving. It’s only relatively recently that any of them are.

Most trains aren’t public transit, either. They’re freight haulers.

That’s not most trains. Those are highly specialized and constrained applications. There are already self-driving taxis in certain defined city areas, so they’re still ahead by that standard.

Trains don’t self-drive, though.

Edit: Okay, for the pedants: most trains don’t self-drive.

This is very important, I’ve seen people try this and it just makes things worse. In another comment I suggested my favourite solution to getting stuck like this; have a one-handed garden pick or similar tool in the car so you can dig the tires out of the ice.

I’ve got a spray bottle filled with windshield wiper fluid I sometimes use to “pre-treat” an icy windshield before I get to scraping it, it’s often able to loosen the ice’s grip on the glass so the scraper can just lift it off. Simpler and more controllable than relying on the built-in windshield sprayers.

A one-handed garden pick is a nice tool to have handy if you find your car’s wheels stuck in some hard-packed snow or ice. Don’t spin your wheels fruitlessly, the friction is just making the ice slicker and harder. Use the garden pick to dig the wheels out instead, creating a rough surface to get some initial traction on. There are also traction plates or mats that you can stick in there to help get moving, though you need to be able to move the car far enough to get them caught under the wheels for them to work.

Make sure your car battery is in good condition. Cold weather will reduce its power output, so if your car’s going to fail to start it’ll be in the dead of winter when that happens. For peace of mind I bought one of those battery booster packs that you can use to jump-start a car with and I really like it, it’s got a built-in air pump, USB charger, and light source as well and I’ve used it for all of those things now and then. Wasn’t very expensive.

Stash a warm hat and a pair of warm mittens in the car somewhere. If you end up stranded on a roadside you won’t have known ahead of time that you were going to be stranded so you might not have brought adequate clothing with you. A flashlight, too. In northern latitudes there’s a lot of darkness during winter time.

Udio. There aren’t yet any locally-runnable music generation tools like it, and even if they were they’d have to be pretty darned good to rival Udio’s quality. I make a lot of use of it for tabletop roleplaying games, but also “just for fun.” It’s only $10 a month.

I never left, I just started using both.

Probably the “final straw” would be shutting down old.Reddit. Unless they do something else unexpectedly awful that I haven’t thought of.

If it’s not communicating anything, what’s the point?

My point is that if we turn up our gibberish dial now then at least our llms will be learning the wrong thing & we have some control.

We’d be covering ourselves in poop to prevent people from sitting next to us on the train. Sure, people will avoid sitting next to us, but in the meantime we’ll be covered in poop.

And then other people will learn the trick, cover themselves in poop too, and now everyone’s poopy and the trick stops working.

There is still a lot of understanding that we do automatically that an llm will never do.

Are you willing to bet the convenience of comprehensible online discourse on that? “Automatically understanding stuff” is basically the one job of LLMs.

LLMs model language, and coming up with some kind of “gibberish” filter is simply inventing a new language. If there’s semantic meaning in it the LLMs will figure it out just like any other language, and if there isn’t semantic meaning then we’ve lost the ability to communicate entirely. I see no upside.

Well, the “at least for now” part is my point - if people start using “gibberish” to communicate or to hide their communication, that provides training material for LLMs to let them figure out how to use it too.

LLMs learn how to communicate based on existing examples of communication. As long as humans are communicating with each other somehow then LLMs will be able to train how to do that too. They have the same communication capabilities that we do at this point, so there’s not really any way we can make a secret clubhouse that they can’t figure out how to infiltrate.

Personally, I think there’s two main routes we can go to deal with this. Either we can simply accept that there’s no way to be 100% sure we’re talking to a human any more and evaluate the value of our conversation based on the content of the words spoken rather than the composition of the entity generating them, or we could come up with some kind of “proof of personhood” system to allow people to label the text the write as coming from them.

The latter is extremely hard to do, of course, both from a technical and cultural perspective. And such a system would likely still allow someone’s “person token” to be sneakily used by AI, either by voluntarily delegating it (I could very well be retyping all of this out of a ChatGPT window) or through hackery.

So I’m inclined toward the former. If I’m chatting with someone and I’m having a good time doing it, and then later I find out it was a bot, why should that change how much fun I had?

I don’t see how that would be practical. People who aren’t “in on the joke”, as it were, will call out the gibberish and downvote it. If enough people are “in on the joke” then the whole forum becomes useless and some other forum will be created to fill the role of the original. The AI will train off of that one.

Basically, if you don’t want an AI training on your content, then don’t post your content in public where an AI will see it. The Fediverse is the last place you should be posting since its very nature is about openly broadcasting your content to whoever wants to see it.

You realize that this is only going to train LLMs how to recognize “gibberish?”

It’s more impressive when you use inpainting to preserve the beak, eye, and feet from the original source image.

Yeah, I’ve got my own anecdote to chip in with on that, my dad was in the hospital for a month with a plethora of various potentially-fatal difficulties he was fighting with. There were ups and downs but many of the problems were being addressed. Then the diagnosis finally came in that the root cause was advanced lymphoma and there was no realistic chance of “beating” it, he died later that very day.

I don’t think that it’s necessarily a question of “willing yourself to die” or “willing yourself to live,” but I do think that one can decide how much effort is worth putting into the fight versus deciding to relax and let it go. Whether consciously or subconsciously.

Yeah. Scientific papers may teach an AI about science, but Reddit posts teach AI how to interact with people and “talk” to them. Both are valuable.

The term AI was coined in 1956 at a computer science conference and was used to refer to a broad range of topics that certainly would include machine learning and neural networks as used in large language models.

I don’t get the “it’s not really AI” point that keeps being brought up in discussions like this. Are you thinking of AGI, perhaps? That’s the sci-fi “artificial person” variety, which LLMs aren’t able to manage. But that’s just a subset of AI.

By the time intergalactic navigation is relevant we’ll have likely dismantled Earth. The vast majority of it is just sitting there generating gravity, a huge waste of its potential.

I was going to suggest the Great Attractor or the Shapley Supercluster, but I think your suggestion is better. It’s more point-like and since it’s farther away (well outside of the reachable universe) it results in a more uniform set of directions over long distances.

Of course, cultural influence will be big. If these explorers are Terragen then most likely the Milky Way’s north/south direction will be pretty deeply ingrained in their coordinate systems. They might keep on using that, since it’s not like manual astrolabe-style navigation will ever be relevant at that level of technology.

If it was completely sterile and artificial then I’d expect mummies instead of skeletons, there must have been some kind of bugs to munch up the leathery meat layer.