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Comment Let's put this in context... (Score 1) 29

For someone who considers the MoCA "a very hard test", it's not all that unreasonable to consider an obsequious oracle "super intelligent".

Of course, we could say the same about a slightly brain-damaged labrador retriever, but they aren't setting national and global policy regarding the most likely cause of human extinction over the next few decades.

Comment Re:I wish it was easier to click the title bar (Score 1) 117

I kind of agree it's increasingly annoying to find dead space on a titlebar, and I absolutely loathe Microsoft's use of the title bar to stick crap I have never and will never use. I don't search enough to waste half the title bar on a search bar, I couldn't care less who I'm logged in as, and "Saved to this PC" is nothing more than Microsoft flipping us off for having zero interest in automatically saving everything OneDrive.

At the same time, I really do like using the title bar as a tab bar. It's a decent compromise insofar as they're conceptually like mini title bars for each page we have open.

Round controls, however, need to die yesterday. Rounded, sure, but having a full semicircle wasted at each end of a button is just a gratuitous waste of space. "Compact" is fundamentally incompatible with "round".

Comment Re: Rounded tabs? (Score 1) 117

Am I missing something here? Application Menu -> Settings -> Extensions&Themes -> Themes. You can choose a few common defaults, customize your own, or download thousands of them from addons.mozilla.org.

You're the third comment implying we can no longer apply (or even make) custom themes, yet the linked announcement bluntly states exactly the opposite and implies they're increasing the number of themes available. Admittedly I run ESR rather than the bleeding edge, but we're only talking six months old, not some antique from the late '90s.

Comment Re:Just Updated (Score 1) 117

You don't need to edit your user prefs to disable dark mode, themes are right there in the main settings.

That said, the vast majority of people using dark mode will consider some purple highlights in dark mode far, far less annoying than switching to light mode.

Personally, I prefer most of my "non-content" screen elements to be low-contrast grayscale and, wherever possible, dark grey window backgrounds. Purple is an annoying violation of that preference, but still beats bright white backgrounds and obnoxious Candy-Crush-like icons / controls / borders by a mile.

Comment Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Score 2) 31

So we're going to use an AI to monitor AIs to make sure they're not doing anything naughty? Pretty sure I've seen that movie already...

Not to mention, who exactly pays for Sentry to run? Golly, if some completely random AI hardware manufacturer were to somehow profit off designing and selling a scheme to waste extra tokens on yet another layer of supervision, that would almost look just a wee bit unethical!

Comment Re:I've literally seen it done (Score 2) 79

Our walmart installed these price-as-you-go tags a while ago and I have literally seen them change as I walk up to them, and then change again as I walk away. The trick to get them not to change is to be holding your phone at them - the store's AI won't change the tags if it thinks you're filming them.

My Walmart is worse than that. They didn't have any price tags at all. Just video screens with AI avatars of a guy in baggy pants sitting cross-legged on a rug.

When I walk by, he says "Look at my cotton swabs! I offer you the best cotton swabs in the land!"

I say: "Well, how much to they cost?"

He squints at me, looks me up and down for a long while, then says: "For you........ I give to you seven hundred and fifty swabs for two pieces of silver only. Believe me when I say you will search this entire kingdom and not find a better deal!"

Comment Re:Yes they do (Score 1) 162

That wasn't quite the response I expected - I guess I'm not entirely clear on whether you were mocking those guardrails, or presenting them as legitimately (albeit perversely) meaningful.

Either way, my central point was "why not both". It's entirely possible to be neutral, in the sense of calculating the mean (in the internal thought-vector sense) of all available viewpoints. If, however, 99% of sources are talking positively about some trashy conspiracy theory - Any version of "consensus" is itself going to lean pretty far into wingnut territory. In that regard, I think we might actually be agreeing?

Comment Re:Yes, probably. And they likely can do even bett (Score 1) 239

We can meaningfully ask the question "For each location a robotaxi has been involved in some sort of incident, how does the incident rate for both humans and other robotaxies comapre?"

That's not a meaningless number, and it's entirely possible Waymo really is doing better than humans - But only in situations Waymo gets to cherry-pick simply by enforcing their designated service areas. Meanwhile, let me know when a Waymo can successfully navigate overgrown single-track dirt roads common in my area. Anyone know offhand if they have moose in the Philippines?

Comment What would a kill switch do? (Score 2) 64

I'm a fan of drastically slowing AI development until we've solved the alignment problem, but a kill switch ain't it.

What would a kill switch really do? An AI is fundamentally nothing more than a description of it's topology and a set of a few billion weights. Implementing that topology and running those weights is the easy part and any coder worth a damn could roll their own (performance aside) with minimal effort - without bothering with a kill switch, if they so choose.

The only way to even come close to enforcing a kill order would be for every sufficiently-performant processing platform to enforce some kind of blacklist of known-evil weights in a way that's resilient across different quantization levels. And even then, simply running pre-killswitch drivers would still be a trivial way to circumvent any such restrictions entirely. Or for the truly determined, you can run even top frontier models on vastly underpowered hardware like a mid-range desktop CPU. Sure, your throughput might be measured in minutes per token, but realtime feedback isn't going to change the answer to "how do I hack the Gibson". An accurate answer a few days from now is likely to be just as useful in the vast majority of situations.

Comment Re:Yes they do (Score 1) 162

That all assumes there are more-or-less equally relevant answers available from both trusted and biased sources.

If someone asks about Hunter Biden's penis, that assumption is false, and the vast majority of relevant, if not necessarily accurate, information will come from partisan shills. There aren't any noteworthy safety issues, aside from the abstract risk of a third term leading to our next civil war. And there isn't any middle ground, since the response to the right's delusions isn't rebuttal but rather, a pretty much uniform "what the fuck is wrong with you people?" from the left.

We always need to remember AI isn't "smart", it's nothing but autocorrect on crack. It can't meaningfully evaluate those criteria we're giving it in any way except shifting the probabilities of multiple competing matches. If there's only one viewpoint represented in vast majority of training data, that's the one it's forced to choose.

Comment Here comes the false flag! (Score 0) 162

Here's the headline: "Midterm wins for Trump caused by Open Source AI Russian Bots! Lawmakers demand answers, and call elections illegitimate! Bernie Sanders calls for 20 years in prison for running a propaganda bot network! OpenAI and Anthropic says they can't do anything without banning open source and an FDA for AI models that will take years and cost millions to approve new models."

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