• 0 Posts
  • 143 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: January 26th, 2024

help-circle












  • Soon you cannot believe anything you read online.

    That’s a bit too blanket of a statement.

    There are, always were, and always will be reputable sources. Online or in print. Writteb or not.

    What AI will do is increase the amount of slop disproportionately. What it won’t do is suddenly make the real, actual, reputable sources magically disappear. Finding may become harder, but people will find a way - as they always do. New search engines, curated indexes of sites. Maybe even something wholly novel.

    .gov domains will be as reputable as the administration makes them - with or without AI.

    Wikipedia, so widely hated in academia, is proven to be at least as factual as Encyclopedia Britannica. It may be harder for it to deal with spam than it was before, but it mostly won’t be phased.

    Your local TV station will spout the same disinformation (or not) - with or without AI.

    Using AI (or not) is a management-level decision. What use of AI is or isn’t allowed is as well.

    AI, while undenkably a gamechanger, isn’t as big a gamechanger as it’s often sold as, and the parallels between the AI and the dot-com bubble are staggering, so bear with me for a bit:

    Was dot-com (the advent of the corporate worldwide Internet) a gamechanger? Yes.

    Did it hurt the publishing industry? Yes.

    But is the publishing industry dead? No.

    Swap “AI” for dot-com and “credible content” for the publishing industry and you have your boring, but realistic answer.

    Books still exist. They may not be as popular, but they’re still a thing. CDs and vinyl as well. Not ubiquitous, but definitely chugging along just fine. Why should “credible content” die, when the disruption AI causes to the intellectual supply chain is so much smaller than suddenly needing a single computer and an Internet line instead of an entire large-scale printing setup?



  • Just like the citizens of the United States do not support the actions of the United States government

    They do. Period.

    If they didn’t, they’d complain. Louder and louder with each passing day, until the cause went away.

    However, that’s not what’s happening.

    Minding your own business means you support the current power structures and those in them. Silent support is still - support.

    Italy is doing good on the complaining front: they disrupt the economy. Not enough so anything changes in essence, but just enough so some lines go down and alarm bells start ringing.

    Most people, unfortunately, eat up the “antisemitic” and “Everyone I don’t like is Khamas” arguments. A good chunk not because they’re stupid amd can’t differentiate, but because it gives them an easy way of coping with what they’re seeing: truly bad stuff happening. Bad stuff they like.


  • the phone

    So that’s it!

    Seriously though, phones are terrible for file management. Probably because every file gets thrown… Somewhere. Most into Downloads, some into Documents, and then some apps have their own esoteric space.

    All the file management UIs are equally terrible: made to look nice, but dysfunctional.

    Nothing ever prompts you where to save your shiny new file.

    And, to be fair, screen size doesn’t help.



  • Yeah, I assumed. No way 86 pages are needed for a proof of ‘1+1=2’.

    That being said, it’d be nice for there to actually be a “proof” of 1+1=2, made as concise and simple as possible, while retaining all the precision required of such proof, including a complete set of axioms.

    This, obviously isn’t is, nor does it try to. It’s not the “1+1=2” book, ot’s the theoretical fpindations of matheđatics book. Nothing wrong with that.


  • What’s missing here os the definition that we’re working in base 10. While it won’t be a proof, Fibbonaci has his nice little Liber Abbaci where he explains arabic numerals. A system of axioms for base 10, a definition of addition and your succession function would suffice. Probably what the originals were going for, but I can’t imagine how that would take 86 pages. Reading it’s been on my todo list, but I doubt I’ll manage 86 pages of modern math designed to be harder to read than egyptian hieroglyphs.


  • I know a few artists and get their complaints against AI, but I feel they’ve been way too overblown.

    I look at AI as what it is - a new technology. Everthing was one at some point.

    For example - cameras. Do you think artists who learned painting were happy when cameras started displacing them?

    Of course there was outrage. It’s natural to protect your interests. However, technology has to be allowed to progress and people’s rights have to be respected. Developments in technology such as photography or AI are a disruption of the existing legal framework, and the two sides’ rights (those of the users and if those displaced) must be balanced.

    However, unlike photography, there’s a clear legal basis and precedent analogous to AI art - in most places recieving copyrighted material without permission isn’t punishable while distributing it to others is.

    An AI model is in essence a retrieval system in the sense of the US DMCA. Most other places have substantially similar laws in spirit, and most places draw the distinction between distribution and “fair” uses of infinging material. A good rule of thumb is that selling access is a big no-no, distributing is a big risk, and merely using a much smaller one. All technically illegal (as are memes).