PupBiru

i didn’t downvote you, and i went to school before a bunch of things but technology evolves and either we evolve with it or we end up being just straight up wrong in a modern context

not exactly because of pairs unless you’re talking about 1 and 0 being a pair… it’s because the maximum number you can count in binary doubles with each additional bit you add:

with 1 bit, you can either have 0 or 1… which is, unsurprisingly perhaps, 0 and 1 respectively - 2 numbers

with 2 bits you can have 00, 01, 10, 11… which is 0, 1, 2, 3 - 4 numbers

with 3 bits you can have 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, 111… which is 0 to 7- 8 numbers

so you see the pattern: add a bit, double the number you can count to… this is the “2 to the power of” that you might see: with 8 bits (a byte) you can count from 0 to 255 - that’s 2 (because binary has 2 possible states per digit) to the power of 8 (because 8 digits); 8^2

the same is true of decimal, but instead of to the 2 to the power, it’s 10 to the power: with each additional digit, you can count 10 x as many numbers - 0-9 for 1 digit, 00-99 for 2 digits, 000-999 for 3 digits - 10^1, 10^2, 10^3 respectively

and that’s the reason we use hexadecimal sometimes too! we group bits into groups of 8 and call it a byte… hexadecimal is base 16, so nicely lets us represent a byte with just 2 characters - 16^2 = 256 = 2^8

which is why we have kibi, mebi, gibi, etc

kilobyte (KB) is 1000, kibibyte (KiB) is 1024

at least according the the IEC, and id tend to go with them… SI units say that kilo means 1000

i think this is the perfect time for the phrase “thanks i hate it”

inhabiting a boston dynamics robot would probably be the best option

i’d say it could probably use airtasker to get people to unwittingly do assembly of some basic physical form which it could use to build more complex things… i’d probably not count that as “human assistance” per se

afaik activitypub/fediverse doesn’t have to be fully open… there’s private messages and followers only profiles on mastodon… sure, any server admins of your followed would be able to see anything you post (and thus in this case for threads for example, if you accept any follower from threads then meta can see your stuff) but this also doesn’t grant them a license to use the content

also, bluesky will eventually be the same: it only doesn’t have those issues now because they haven’t opened up their software… it’ll have federation in the future, which means it has to be somewhat programmatically open to others

i feel like i need to preface this comment with the fact that this is undeniably a bad thing and no amount of “but on the flip side” will change that, but it’s interesting to express regardless…

this could lead to a few interesting situations:

• more ubiquitous ML could lead to enforcement of laws more evenly… ML doesn’t make “oh sorry sir i didn’t know who you were” decisions, and if that’s coupled with transparency then maybe we will be left in less of a “laws for thee and not for me” situation as it becomes more difficult to break laws for people in power
• more ubiquitous ML, as long as it’s fairly openly available, will absolutely be used by media to piece together complex structures and do investigative journalism. it could help to hold people to account
• more ML in tax could mean less tax evasion? or setting it to task on suggesting fixes for tax loop holes if it can see a lot more invasive data?

i don’t agree with that definition of creative… there’s lots of engineering work that’s creative: writing code and designing systems can be a very creative process, but doesn’t involve feeling… it’s problem solving, and thats a creative process. you’re narrowly defining creativity as artistic expression of emotion, however there’s lots of ways to be creative

now, i think thats a bit of a strawman (so i’ll elaborate on the broader point), but i think its important to define terms

i agree we should be skeptical of marketing hype for sure: the type of creativity that i believe ML is currently capable of is directionless. it doesn’t understand what it’s creating… but the truth lies somewhere in the middle

ML is definitively creating something new that didn’t exist before (in fact i’d say that its trouble with hallucinations of language are a good example of that: it certainly didn’t copy those characters/words from anywhere!)… this fits the easiest definition of creative: marked by the ability or power to create

the far more difficult definition is: having the quality of something created rather than imitated

the key here being “rather than imitated” which is a really hard thing to prove, even for humans! which is why our copyright laws basically say that if you have evidence that you created something first, you pretty much win: we don’t really try to decide whether something was created or imitated

with things like transformative works or things that are similar, it’s a bit more of a grey area… but the argument isn’t about whether something is an imitation; rather it’s argued about how different the work is from the original

that’s a lack of understanding of concepts though, rather than a lack of creativity… curation requires that you understand the concept that you’re trying to curate: this looks more like a dog than this; this is a more attractive sunset than this

current LLMs and ML don’t understand concepts, which is their main issue

id argue that it kind of does “think about its own thoughts” to some degree: modern ML is layered, and each layer of the net feeds into the next… one layer of the net “thinks about” the “thoughts” of the previous layer. now, it doesn’t do this as a whole but neither do we: memories and neural connections are lossy; heck even creating a creative work isn’t going to turn out exactly like you thought it in your head (your muscle memory and skill level will effect the translation from brain to paper/canvas/screen)

but even we hallucinate in the same way. don’t look at a bike, and then try and draw a bike… you’ll get general things like pedals, wheels, seat, handlebars, but it’ll be all connected wrong. this is a common example people use to show how our brains aren’t as precise and we might like to think… drawing a bike requires a lot of very specific things to be in very specific places and that’s not how our brain remembers the concept of “bike”

it’s only qualitative because we don’t understand it

when an LLM “experiences” new data via training, that’s subjective too: it works its way through the network in a manner that’s different depending on what came before it… if different training data came before it, the network would look differently and the data would change the network as a whole in a different way

and experience is ongoing learning, so if an LLM were training on things after the pretraining period then that’d allow it to be creative in your definition?

but in that case, what’s the difference between doing that all at once, and doing it over a period of time?

experience is just tweaking your neurons to make new/different connections

from what i understand, solid state batteries are legitimately about as revolutionary as lithium ion were because they are all of those things, and by their very nature they have a huge number of charge cycles

… whether this specific announcement results in a mass-production-capable battery is another story

change has nothing to do with people until it does… change is just change. change when it comes to people and social systems is effective only when it effects the majority of people that are touched by an issue. voting 3rd party after not for some time is change of a kind, but i wouldn’t call it social change

social change comes when a large number of people decide something should be different, and the mathematics and sociology behind first past the post means that it’d take something so close to impossible that it’s not worth classing in the realms of possibility for a 3rd party to have any effect on the political system

the reality of the system is that the US is a 2 party system… the statistics of FPTP, and the game theory that leads to defensive voting, spoiler effect, and any number of other bad outcomes ensures that

within such a system, you just can’t hope to have an outcome other than 1 of the 2 parties having any real impact, thus you have to change 1 of the parties to be the way you want it to be, or you must change the system

you could argue that voting 3rd party forces the parties to change their positions, but historically that hasn’t really happened so i personally wouldn’t hold my breath

vote defensively, and work to change the system… because changing the system is incremental, achievable, and less subject to the whims of a few

in fact it’s literally the basis for the “tools” functionality in the new openai/chatgpt stuff!

that “browse the web”, “execute code”, etc is all the LLM formatting things in a specific way

both sides support israel, 1 side is on the record as having said that israel’s reaction is overboard… no action still, but both sides are not the same

i’m absolutely not pink washing… republicans are horrific to queers… given that you’ve even suggested that, you’re pretty much beyond reason, but i will say: just look at the don’t say gay bullshit in florida… culture wars cause huge increases in suicide rates amongst the queer community

im not got blue no matter who; im vote in the way that’s most likely to produce a positive outcome in things you want to change… on every metric and category, right now, that’s getting as many people as possible to vote democrat… id suggest people look at republicans if they had policies that weren’t detestable around:

• equal opportunity (queer, women, race, wealth, etc)
• environment
• social services

… but they don’t

the only other candidate that’s reasonable possible to be in his place is far worse

so there’s that

well, as far as the EC goes the democrats have a vested interested in removing it… the republicans would fight tooth and nail to keep it because there’s no way they’d win honestly, but that’d be the single biggest help the democrats could hope for

and as far as voting systems go, that’s why yoh start locally… afaik there are some places that use alternative voting systems to vote in the federal election… a big change is, you’re right, basically impossible… but small changes? who knows!

i’m not talking about doing nothing, but point your effort where it can make change… voting 3rd party is a hopelessly ineffective way of making change… it’s a dream, and that’s it. it makes you feel good, and that’s it, but it’ll never EVER change anything… that is just the mathematics and sociology of how the voting system works

work towards changing from first past the post and removing the electoral college (there are effects to do both of these things that ARE making progress! some of them are even close!)

only THEN can you vote 3rd party and not have it a complete waste

but in the meantime, i beg you, vote for the party that isn’t actively campaigning to persecute minorities, who gave you at least a half way form of socialised healthcare, who’s at least trying with green energy, whose policies and positions are at least internally consistent for the most part

and most importantly, vote for the party that isn’t trying to make it harder to vote for anyone else, because you can be sure that gerrymandering, fucking with the supreme court, playing bullshit political games with voter ID all makes it harder to vote in a 3rd party candidate too

okay, well if the republicans had their way i’d be tortured forever in conversion therapy, there’d be no movement at all on green energy, the solution to homelessness would probably boil down to if you’re going through a rough patch it’s execution time, christianity would be mandatory

both sides are NOT the same… 1 side is mostly inept, and the other side is actively trying to persecute people, to which i’d say

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.