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Hetare King
Instance: piefed.social
Joined: 9 months ago
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Comments: 155
Posts and Comments by Hetare King
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Comments by Hetare King
That reminds me, in the first draft of the script of The City on the Edge of Forever, there’s a scene in which an orator on a literal soapbox makes a speech to a crowd about how foreigners are to blame for all the country’s ills, yada yada yada, the usual bullshit, and when seeing Spock and believing him to be a foreigner, sends the crowd after him.
Spock gets quite… emotional over it.
AccessibilityElegant and well-executed, but, and this is probably just my lack of imagination as someone who is not colour blind, I’m having trouble coming up with uses cases, and most of the examples on the site aren’t really convincing to me.
Usually when we try to communicate something with colour, it’s not the colour itself that matters, but the colour being distinguishable and/or the associations we have with it, which someone who is colour blind may not even have. Like, if you have a big, red emergency stop button, it being red isn’t really what matters; it’s red because it stands out and because we associate it with danger. Adding a dot isn’t going to help with that, so to make it accessible to colour blind people, it needs additional features to make it stand out and instantly convey its purpose.
That said, I did bookmark the site, in case something comes up where it’s the colour itself that’s important.
AnimemesWouldn’t his mom also be British? And in order to pound her, wouldn’t she have needed to court her first, i.e. talk to a British person?
Waiter! There’s an internal inconsistency in my absurd joke!
GamingNot quite the same, but there is a game called Zwei!! (German for two). Its sequel is just called Zwei II, though.
Fuck AIYeah, that’s the big irony of this all: natural language is pretty much the worst way of conveying information for any task that’s even slightly technical. There’s a reason why architects don’t just tell the construction workers what the building is supposed to look like.
The one thing it does have going for it is accessibility, but unfortunately, it doesn’t lead to transferable skills. Like, if you do something like building with Legos, cardboard crafts, make collages from magazine clippings etc. and you want to start doing something more advanced, say, carpentry or graphic design, then what you’ve learned previously is still valuable. But if you just vaguely order an AI around until in produces something that “looks about right”, all you’ve gained is the skill set of a clueless executive and the limits of the model are your limits.
Fuck CarsEven listening to an audiobook is a worse experience in a car though, because you’re distracted from it, I would hope, by paying attention to traffic. And of course, there’s also lots of other things you can do in a train that you can’t in a car: read non-audio books, watch videos, play video games, take a nap, etc. Depending on what kind of work you do, it might even be possible to do some work and go home earlier. Even as a passenger, doing most of these things in a car is a good way of getting car sick.
The point is that almost always, the time spent on a train is of considerably higher quality than the time spent in a car.
GamesHuh, that’s interesting. I already expressed my thoughts on consumers making their own physical media in another post (tl;dr: I don’t think it makes much sense), but if there are recordable discs with lifespans comparable with pressed discs, maybe a print-on-demand service could be a solution for developers that can’t afford to order a batch of a thousand discs and cases and rely on digital distribution because of that.
It feels like it would kind of defeat the purpose. If you like the ritual of physically picking a game and putting it into your machine, there are more practical ways of going at it, like those NFC card-based systems like Zaparoo. If you like having a physical collection, it seems to me that having a bookcase full of labels made with a home printer and with none of the legitimacy of them being “the real thing” would feel rather empty. You can’t legally resell it or lend it to others and if you care about preserving the game without being dependent on an external service that can go down at any time, you’re probably better off keeping several backups of your hard drive than counting on flaky recordable media (hard drives don’t last forever either, but you’re more likely to regularly check on the health of a couple of hard drives than potentially hundreds of BD-Rs and SD cards).
Basically, very few of the advantages of physical media would end up remaining.
All things decay, not even the doping of ROM chips will last forever, but I think the average lifespan of recorded optical media is like, 10 years? That feels rather short.
Doesn’t recordable optical media also have a pretty limited lifespan? Unlike commercially produced discs, where the pits are pressed into the plastic, CD/DVD/BD-Rs just have a dye that is made to change colour with a laser, and that dye degrades over time.
Wikipedia@lemmy.world
I have to say, some of the song and dance around money is just baffling to me. Aren’t the Scottish and Northern Irish pounds already legally defined as being equivalent to GBP and accepted as legal tender?
I get that some English and Welsh businesses might be suspicious of them because they’re unfamiliar, but what is having a piece of paper with the boss of the bank’s signature on it in a safe somewhere that most people don’t even know exists going to do about that? It seems to me that this is a problem better solved with an information campaign. If they can’t take the Bank of England’s word for it that this is real money, then the very existence of a £100,000,000 note or even the value of the British Pound itself become suspect.
Slice of Life AnimeThis is the cover art for the single of the first opening theme, so the artist might be Oota Kazuhiro, the character designer of the show. This is not guaranteed, however.
Also, you can get a better version here. It doesn’t look like it on the page, but it’s actually pretty high resolution.
GamingI always have a hard time putting things into rankings, because different games have different qualities that make them hard to compare to each other, but if I had to choose, there is one game that I keep coming back to and is pretty much my “comfort food” game: Twinkle Star Sprites.
I don’t remember the details, but they definitely mentioned that you can’t just copy the doctor. The real reason is, of course, so that there’s some actual tension when the doctor gets sent off the ship and to avoid having to deal with the ethical and philosophical issues that arise from that (it’s also probably just the writer of an episode shooting from the hip as usual), but if I’m allowed to switch over to my thick-framed glasses and come up with a plausible in-universe reason:
Perhaps in order to properly reproduce human-like intelligence, you need to take advantage of quantum phenomena, so the state of the doctor’s program is in a quantum state. And since it’s not possible to perfectly copy a quantum state without destroying the original (Nebula), even with a Heisenberg compensator that works very well, any movement of the state of the doctor from one device to another would have to be a “transfer” and not a “copy”.
However, even if the state of the program is in a quantum state, the program itself may not be. In present day attempts at quantum computing, the program itself is still written in plain old text. If that’s the case, it would be possible to create copies of the doctor in their initial state, without any memories or experiences, which explains the miners and the EMH on the Enterprise-E.
As for undo, it may be possible to undo removing something from the state of the program if the data doesn’t actually get destroyed but the program is just blocked from accessing it. Similar to how if you delete a file from a drive, it doesn’t actually the destroy the file, it just removes the entry from the file system, and if you’re fast enough you can often still restore the file.
ClimateThrowing bricks through windows provides markets for glaziers, so clearly we need to incentivise this behaviour. My recommendation to the government is to subsidise the purchase of bricks for the purpose of throwing through windows as well as take measures to prevent brick-fraud, so that people don’t secretly build houses with subsidised bricks.
Ask LemmySubs, always. I don’t really consider dubs an option, unless there’s really, really no alternative. The biggest reason for that is undoubtedly growing up and living in a country where subtitles are the norm for foreign media, but I do think I have some more concrete reasons for it.
Take the line “Hey! I’m walkin’ here!” Probably, you know exactly what I’m talking about and how that line is delivered, even if you’ve never seen Midnight Cowboy (I haven’t). But I can almost assure you that if dubbed in Japanese, it would be thought of as just another line and would never become iconic. If you remove the language and the cultural context it’s spoken in, all that’s left is the literal meaning. And the same is true the other way around, if something is written in Japanese, then it’s going to typically be written with the assumption that it’s going to be spoken in Japanese.
Also, people working on the actual show are going to be involved in the recording in the original language, so it’s typically going to be closer to their intentions. To use an extreme example, Tomino Yoshiyuki (most famous for Gundam) is such a control freak perfectionist, that you can tell he’s directing from the way the voice actors deliver the lines. But the dubs of all the works he’s worked on over the decades are all going to have different ADR directors with no input from him (and even if he did have input, he probably isn’t fluent enough in English to do so effectively), so there’s no consistent (figurative) “voice”.
But most importantly, dubs just make it impossible to do any compensating for losses in translation. There’s a whole spectrum between “This language just sounds like gibberish to me” and “I’m fluent enough in the language to not need a translation”, so as long as you’re not in the former extreme, there are still things you can pick up on: first person pronouns, copulae, honorifics, dialects, levels of formality etc. And especially Japanese is, I think, a pretty translucent-sounding language to people who are used to European languages, so you end up picking up on patterns even if you’re not actively trying to learn it.
I consider these to be the main ethical issues with specifically LLMs and generative AI in general:
- Using people’s work as training data without consent.
- The high cost of training a model meaning that only a few entities in the world can actually do so and so, only few people get to decide what the knowledge base and “slant” of the model is. This is true even for open source models.
- The high resource cost of using a model relative to the value of its output.
- People with malicious intent being empowered by it far, far more than anyone else.
- The model producing the response to the query directly instead of leading to the source, leaving both the source without any way to benefit and the user from having any context queues they can use to verify the reliability of the information.
- Infinite and automated production of misinformation, libel and psychological manipulation.
- Inducing psychosis in people.
Point 1 can be resolved by the people training AI just making different choices. Many won’t unless they’re forced to, but in principle they could.
Points 2 and 3 could hypothetically be resolved in the future with better technology.
The rest are basically inherent to the technology and you can at best try and mostly fail to reduce the risk. So as far I’m concerned, what it would take to build AI ethically is to train it for very specific purposes and have it be used as statistical models by people who know what they’re doing.
Though I do see some potential for ethical LLMs by using them to perform vector searches instead of generating text, basically turning them into smarter search engines.
That’s interesting, when I watch something that was in English from the start, I often turn on English subtitles to reduce the cognitive load.
That’s the thing, though: they don’t, usually. Falsetto doesn’t simply mean forcing your voice to be higher than it is naturally (which is, of course, very common in anime), it’s a particular way of using your voice. You can also create a higher pitch with a head voice or even a chest voice. Falsetto is the easiest way to do it, but it’s also the hardest on your voice, which makes it hard to listen to for prolonged periods of time.
It’s not just the squeaky little girls either, even the young men are always very throaty.
I’ve been told that English dubs are way better now than 10 years ago for the last 20 years, but every time I hear something from a new dub, it still ends up having the same old problems. Like, my throat ends up aching because they insist on doing everything in falsetto for some reason.
Holos Discover
Does this do anything that pressing Ctrl+I, then opening the Media tab doesn’t?
I have to say, I was not expecting “making your bike summer-ready” to mean “ricing your ride with urgableds”, even with it being on Adafruit.
Wouldn’t this be more valuable in the winter, though, when it’s dark out for longer?
I saw it in the next episode preview of today’s episode. It caught me off-guard because there’s basically no overlap between the people making these shows on any level. Some assistant producer had to warm a lot of slippers for this one.
On one hand, from what I understand, in the 1983 crash there was a real mood of video games being over, that the fad had passed. In North America, anyway. I don’t think there’s any risk of that happening today. On the other, the video game industry is a lot larger now, so there’s a lot more shrinking that can happen without it completely destroying itself. So in that sense it may actually be bigger.
That said, I’m inclined to believe that by laying off all these people, big companies are just creating their own future competition, because there’s no shortage of demand for video games. If anything there’s a greater demand for games that aren’t constrained by the arrogance of big company executives.
If I had to describe it in terms of individual issues:
I’m a bit wary of critiquing things like this, though, because when I like something, I’m also a lot more forgiving of its flaws, so when I don’t like something, it feels like a rationalisation to convey it like this. But it’s the best I got without resorting to onomatopoeia.
On the positive side, I did quite like the look of the film and the fact that the protagonist and the antagonist never actually meet or have much awareness of each other tickled me. Also, for some reason I just couldn’t hate Ruby.
The Fifth Element.
I first heard about it in the late nineties or early noughties, and I wanted to see it ever since, because liked its aesthetics and science-fiction in general, but for whatever reason, I didn’t end up seeing it until last year. But wow, what a terrible film.
OK, so thus far we’ve had two major AI winters, where after some excitement over new developments in AI, funding ended up more or less drying up for decades, because it didn’t manage to go anywhere. I think a third such an event would go a long way in mitigating the harms from AI, because the AI space is currently very centralised, i.e. most users are very dependent on a handful of companies, and those companies are very dependent on continued investment. Also, running less capable open weights/source models locally has a fairly high barrier to entry and those models would become less relevant over time without the funding to keep up their training.
Thankfully for me, things appear to be moving in that direction.
As for regulation, I don’t think I mentioned or alluded to it at all. If anything, that seems more your thing, since you think holding people doing bad things with AI accountable is sufficient. Personally, I do very much think that the world would be better off without these forms of AI. But if there is to be regulation, I would argue it should focus mostly on the suppliers and not so much on the users. Not only because otherwise you end up in an unsustainable game of whack-a-mole, but also because there’s not always a user to hold to account. Like, if an AI chatbot encourages someone’s suicidal thoughts and they end up doing it because of that, what AI user is to be held to account?
It’s the opposite, this is very much a power-consolidating technology. It’s not like, say, reading and writing, where nobody can just change the alphabet to become incapable of describing subversive notions or something. With AI, what it’s capable of and what its biases are, is very much dependent on decisions of the people training and managing it. And because the cost of training a model the size of an LLM is so high, there are only a few entities that can afford to do that.
On top of that, people with good intentions cannot use AI at scale, because they need to verify all of its output. People with bad intentions, who don’t care about the details, only that the waters are sufficiently muddied, can use it at scale. And if they are or are backed by the elite, then they have the funding to use it even more at scale.
Only because the elite are currently subsidising it for you. Because they want you to accept this technology. Because they know it empowers them more than it does you.
I’m pro-education, but to teach someone, there needs to be something that can be taught first.
The large majority of text is not code. To begin with, LLMs being able to generate code was more of an incidental discovery than anything, only then did you get specialised products for that purpose.
That’s my whole point: if it’s not easy, then you have to justify the cost. And while yes, as you say, behind a lot of the problems associated with AI, there are deeper underlying problems that have nothing to do with AI, but that doesn’t mean that AI doesn’t significantly add to the problems and the cost to solve them. Let’s say you’re in conflict with someone, in what situation do you expect that it’s easier to resolve by talking it out: when they’re unarmed or when they have a gun aimed at you? Same underlying problem, different difficulty in resolving the problem.
I don’t understand how this is not getting through. Something can be worthless to one group of people and very valuable to another. If you care about truth, human wellbeing, creating value for society and so on, then AI (as in LLMs and other similar generative AI) is less than worthless to you. If you only care about gaining wealth and power and don’t give a damn about what is true or what harm you may be causing to society, then it’s the most impactful technology since social media. These two things can be true at the same time. And if you’re not aware of all the problems the second group has been causing at a scale that’s only possible because of AI, then quite frankly, you’ve been living under a rock. People getting laid off under the pretense that they can be replaced by AI is hardly the only problem.
Who said anything about regulating AI? I want nothing short of a third AI winter.
What are you even talking about? LLMs, which is mostly what “AI” has been referring to in this conversation, are text prediction systems. You prompt it with text and it tries to predict what text comes next based on its statistical model generated from its training data. Add some cute pre-prompting and wrapping of user input behind the scenes, and you can give it an imperative interface that gives the impression that it’s responding to user queries and instructions. The output is entirely too unreliable and the input entirely too imprecise to be valuable to anyone with good intentions, but I digress. The point is that it has nothing to do with programming, other than that if code was part of the training data, the model can be induced to generate text that includes code, and some products exist that have been optimised to generate and interact with code.
“Agentic” (ugh) just means that the model was induced to generate output in a format that the client can parse and turn into actual operations, like deleting a database. I guess that kind of overlaps with what a pipeline or a script can do, but I’m not entirely sure where you’re going with that, I’m pretty sure I already made it clear that it’s not my view that AI can actually replace workers, just that it can be used to keep up the pretense that it can for long enough to cause harm.
It’s not just that line, everything you’ve been saying suggests that’s what your view is. You’ve acknowledged yourself that the real use cases of AI are very limited, but despite that insist that that alone is worth dealing with all the problems that come with it, and we should just hold the bad people using it for bad things accountable, as if it were that easy (not to mention that sometimes there is no person to hold accountable, because it’s the model itself causing the problem). All for a small sliver of value to you, that in my mind doesn’t even exist. How is AI itself not part of the problem here?
Yes, a lot of the problems associated with AI are just worse versions of problems that already existed. Workers getting laid off by the thousands to raise shareholder value, misinformation, assholes on the internet trying to get people to kill themselves for the “lulz” etc. And these problems need to be solved regardless of AI existing. But the existence of AI makes these problems worse and harder to solve. So you’ll have to excuse me that I’m not very keen on the idea of letting our enemies have mechanised infantry so we can have a toy to play with.
I’m lucky enough that management doesn’t seem interested in forcing devs to use AI (they’re pretty hands-off in general) and that I’m a greybeard who made and maintains some pretty fundamental systems in a company that’s not very large. So I’m actually more worried about the double whammy of the AI bubble popping and the energy crisis caused by the Iran war. The company managed to survive the Great Recession and COVID, but still.
Most people are thoughtful and well-intentioned. But one, the minority that isn’t are enough to cause a lot of problems, and two, not all problems associated with AI are caused by bad intentions.
You say that we should just blame the people for how they use AI, but aside from that there’s not always a person to blame or the people causing the problems are often effectively invisible, people are already being blamed, there’s just nothing to make them care. So how do you propose we hold them accountable? The law? I mean, there’s not a whole lot of political will for that right now, but even if there were, a lot would be difficult to encode into law and even more difficult to meaningfully enforce.
Also, having to hold people accountable is also a cost that needs to be weighed against the basically non-existent benefits.
No, it’s not. Other than a few specific products, it’s not marketed like that, it doesn’t have an interface that suggests that it’s that and its functionality (or veneer thereof) isn’t limited to that. What a strange thing to say.
And here we get to the crux of the matter: you are getting some use out of AI that at least in your subjective experience, for now, is positive, and that’s all the justification for its existence you need. All the problems in the wider world associated with it, you just magic away with the phrase “personal responsibility” so you can just stop thinking about it. But that’s not good enough.
I can’t offer anything other than armchair hypothesising, but Tezuka Osamu, the most important person when it comes to making manga and anime what it is today, and whose influence can also be felt in video games (e.g. Mega Man clearly taking influence from Astro Boy), liked to do things like having a character rip out the gutter between panels and break it in half in a fit of anger. So these kind of meta-hijinks have been part of modern Japanese popular media since the beginning.
You’re basically making a “if only people would just…” argument, but people are not going to “just”. There’s no world out there in which “AI” (again, using a pretty strict definition) exists, but there is no search results polluted to the brim with slopsites, idiots using AI as though it was a reliable source of information, automated propaganda, moguls trying to gaslight the world into thinking workers and artists have no leverage, deepfake porn, chatbots encouraging suicidal thoughts etc. etc. So you need to weigh the costs and the benefits. And the cost-benefit analysis of AI looks considerably different from the hammer’s.
Well, I say all that, but it’s not as though I believe the world can’t be made a better place. If we can set up society so that these bad behaviours aren’t incentivised to begin with, it would mitigate some of the worst problems associated with AI (though I would argue that such a society wouldn’t waste its resources on such a worthless application of the technology in the first place). But when is that going to happen, tomorrow? Worse yet, AI empowers the people who don’t want society to change in that way far more than it does the people who do. So until we finish fixing society with our hands tied to our backs, we’ll just have to suffer through all of AI’s problems, and for what? So you can feel smug about misunderstanding a sentence in a scientific paper, because you were in no position to determine whether the rephrased sentence an AI ejaculated accurately conveyed the information in the original sentence, because if you were, you wouldn’t have needed the sentence to be rephrased in the first place?
If someone creates a destroy-the-world button, is only the person who pressed it responsible for the destruction of the world? That’s an absurd example, of course, but the point is that you can’t just classify something as a “tool” and then leave all outcomes of the existence of that tool as a matter of personal responsibility, that’s just cessation of thought. You have to actually think about who is empowered by a tool and in what way. And if a “tool” largely and greatly empowers fakers, grifters, political actors with little respect for truth etc. and the value for most people is largely nil to negative, then I’d say the “tool” is very much part of the problem.
It seems weird to suggest that the supposed legitimacy of the AI hype bubble is caused by anything other than people with a lot of economic and political leverage using that leverage to will something that doesn’t really exist into existence. Which isn’t that hard given the people they need to convince of its existence are some of the gullible people on Earth, and they do have a product that, while not what they claim it is, does have the veneer of it being that. If a company’s shareholders are convinced that AI can replace many of the company’s workers (or are convinced that the other shareholders are convinced that it can), then the executives can fire thousands of people and it will just increase the shareholder value. Sure, it will sabotage the long-term health of company, but by that time the locust will have had their payday and moved on to the next grift.
Now of course, this sort of thing has been happening since long before LLMs and the like were a thing, but a key difference is that before, there’s been at least some connection between the executives’ and shareholders’ fortunes and the company actually doing something, given workers at least some leverage to gain and enforce their rights. But now the existence of AI allows them to keep up the pretence that workers have no leverage at all for a good while, so so much for workers’ rights. It’s not actually AI doing this of course, but the existence of a strategic weapon is still a problem even if the weapon is never deployed and even if it’s just a box of firecrackers and pinball machine parts. And that’s putting aside all the ways AI is being used as a tactical weapon, undermining education and democracy.
I don’t really understand it. What’s the appeal? Personally, at least, the moment I realise that there’s nothing I can do in a game that affects whether I win or lose, I lose interest in it completely. Well, it’s not like I’m completely oblivious to the mechanisms here, I also get a little dopamine boost when, for example, I get a critical hit in a video game and disappointed when an attack misses, even though I can only vaguely influence the probabilities of those things happening, but that only works as a little constant pleasure differential as seasoning to keep you on your toes, it would be completely pointless as something that cumulates into a single climax.
The closest I’ve come to understanding the appeal is that the thrill of not just possibly winning money but also the risk of losing the fruits of your labour (i.e. “real stakes”, even if small), is pleasurable to some people…? But if that’s what it is, quite frankly, that’s seems less like seeking simple pleasure and more in the realm of depravity.
Anyway, I do think gambling is one of the dumbest dumbass dumb-dumb thing a person can do that doesn’t involve scooping out your eyeballs with a dirty plastic spork. Even putting aside that the odds are never in your favour and so, it isn’t rational thing to do, someone who starts gambling may not know they have the kind of addictive personality that gets them sinking into a bog, because that part of their character may have never surfaced, or only in low-stakes situations. So they’re not just gambling with money, they’re gambling with the very quality of their life.
Also, betting is just an inherently corrupting force. Even if you’re only making small bets, even if you’re not pressuring competitors to throw the match (if you even have the means to do so) or throwing banana peels into the ring to get the person you bet against to slip and fall or something, you’re contributing to the payout to the people who are, incentivising that behaviour. There’s no high payout for betting against the odds (and then working to make the unlikely the inevitable) if there’s not enough livestock contributing to the pot.
Well isn’t that cute…
I knew it as Dommel, but the English version appears to be called Wowser.
I still sometimes use the phrase “Let the archeologists sort ‘em out!” from the Terrible Thunderlizards part of the show.
Kami meaning god and kami* meaning paper do have different pitch accent patterns, but that’s never kept Japanese speakers from doing wordplay. In fact, the pun works even better in Japanese than it does in English. However, I think they would be confused why someone would want to name it that for a couple of reasons:
*) It becomes “gami” in “origami” because it’s the second part of a compound word, but the word on its own is “kami”.
EDIT: I just realised something: the company making these is called AirKamuy. “Kamuy” is the Ainu word for god. So if you squint real hard, it does kind of invoke kamikaze. Probably not intentional, though.
Reminds me of pattens, except they’re for shoes that already have soles.