Yup, same as the feedback loops in "cold readings"

Charlie Stross(@cstross@wandering.shop) wrote, in Mastadon:
The LLMentalist effect: Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms used by (fake) psychics to gull their victims: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsoftwarecrisis.dev%2Flet...

The title of the paper is "The LLMentalist Effect: how chat-based Large Language Models replicate the mechanisms of a psychic’s con"

That's been done for years, just not by Facebook. It's a classic problem in machine learning, and they've either finally noticed ... or took a revenus hit! Not making money is an excellent motivator (:-))

Interests, like "I want a trailer hitch for my Subaru".

All that other stuff? Wanted for someone else.
It's just piggybacking the blame onto advertisers, because people don't like them anyway

Yes, but that was part of the nonsense. Shaping specific traffic doesn't work well and is rarely used outside the "enterprise", let alone used abusively.

I don't know what problem the lobbying-twisted FCC's rules attempts to solve either. I know what problem net neutrality was supposed to solve.

In short, monolithic providers like Verizon double-bill. They bill you for your packets and then they bill the person you're communicating with for your packets too. It's not like the mail where only one side pays. Both sides have to pay or neither gets served. Naturally, the side who pays more gets to define the nature and shape of the service both side get. As the end-user consumer, that isn't you.

There is an exception: Verizon is part of a cartel of about 20 Internet providers who trade traffic without charging each other. If as a Verizon customer you want to talk to someone buying service from elsewhere in the cartel, Verizon will only charge you. This process is called "peering."

Like the rest of the cartel, Verizon engages in "closed" peering. This means that small businesses and anyone Verizon can bully is excluded and must bend to the double-billing. Here's where net neutrality was supposed to act: by requiring "open" peering where Verizon would trade packets with anyone once *one* of their customers had paid them to do so. No more double-billing.

• - they own the agent for the advertiser,
• - they own the agent for the publisher,
• - they own the auction house, and
• - they don't provide an audit trail.

I used to work in advertising, and I saw Google as the personification of "moral hazard" (which see). Other things? Way nicer.

>It's one of the few segments in IT where you're not directly at constant risk of being replaced by an H1B.

Truth. One of the reasons why I keep gravitating back to defense work. Only since around 2004 or so; there's now this "government shutdown" nonsense, which is a bit of a vicious circle, because programs get fucked over, then you have to roll off the contract and find work on another. And sometimes, there isn't any. (happened to me at Lockheed), so some people have to cycle back into the private sector for a few years (which isn't a bad thing; because THAT is where you pick up new skills, to be honest). Then when some asshole "businessman" crashes the business and does layoffs (to replace you with H1B's), you're back on the street again, and you end up back in the "safe" sector: defense. Oh, and if your Clearance expires while you're in the private sector, then the contractor just pays the $10k (or whatever it is now) to re-do your investigation. This has happened to me twice now.

China knows they can convert their exports into assembly kits and transship them anywhere in the world for assembly, attachment of a "made in somewhere else" label and subsequent export to the United States. We can't do that because we make _branded_ products and everybody knows which brands are American.

It wouldn't be science fiction if it wasn't doing something science can't (yet) do. But there's a plausibility to science fiction, without which it's just fantasy.

In the Tron universe, everything is normal except for super-capable computers and a magic digitizing laser. The moment you break those rules, impose the simulation on the outside universe, you destroy the suspension of disbelief. It's just bad storytelling.

Thanks for reminding me about another reason I disliked Legacy.

Light cycle's wall trail slicing a police car in half?

The light cycles existed and worked the way they did because it was an arcade game Flynn wrote.

"Not disintegrating, Alan -- digitizing. While the laser is dismantling the molecular structure of the object, the computer maps out a holographic model of it. The molecules themselves are suspended in the laser beam."

Flynn in the electronic world was the "holographic model," not the physical molecules.

The Ares trailer exhibits a Michael Bay level of loyalty to the canon: all hat and no cattle.

I was disappointed by the visuals in Legacy. The world inside a computer is _supposed_ to be all hard edges, as the original movie depicted. And the plot was just weak. And now Ares appears to be saying that well, the real world is just a simulation so we can project the Legacy computer world into it and break all the laws of physics. How hackneyed.

If you scan a thousand British faces and compare them to a thousand criminals, you will do 1,000,000 comparisons. (that's the birthday paradox part).
If your error rate is 0.8%, you'll get roughly 8,000 false positives and negatives.
That's bad enough if they are all false positives: people get arrested, then released.
It's way worse if they are all false negatives: 8,000 criminals get ignored by the police dragnet.

That was Britain: false positives are life-threatening in countries where the police carry guns.
0.8% is a good error rate. 34% wrong is typical in matching black women. See
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.aclu-mn.org%2Fen%2Fnews%2Fbiased-technology-automated-discrimination-facial-recognition%23%3A~%3Atext%3DStudies%2520show%2520that%2520facial%2520recognition%2520technology%2520is%2520biased.%2Cpublished%2520by%2520MIT%2520Media%2520Lab.