baubino

it’s impossible to know whether misconceptions or gaps are because the author doesn’t understand the material deeply enough or the author does but the AI doesn’t and the author’s not proofreading carefully enough

It doesn’t matter. The human responsible for the written piece is … responsible for the written piece. If someone is willing to use AI to supplement their own intellect and/or writing abilities, then they need to take ownership of the mistakes, misconceptions, etc., that come along with that, the same as an author who does all the work themselves. The problem you’ve identified here is that the human responsible for the writing is not fully taking responsibility for the writing.

This shows that a lot of neologisms that people think of as ‘AI speak’ are often older and common terms but from an unfamiliar domain (like the corporate world or academia).

This is the most accurate take on AI I’ve ever read. The illusion of competency that AI conveys is especially frustrating because it keeps people who overly rely on it from actually developing the skills and knowledge that they wished they had.

My school district is beginning to roll back on computer use for kids, after having gone all in on putting almost all student work on laptops (and heavily relying on learning apps) during the pandemic. They are now offering guidance to teachers and parents about when and how to limit computer usage. They also banned student cell phones a couple years ago and students are never allowed to access social media on school property. All that to say, I think my district (and other similar ones) are struggling so hard to balance good active learning against unhealthy amounts of screen time that they will reach this same place with AI fairly quickly, within a year or two I think, and start wanting to set restrictions and place guardrails.

I personally don’t know anyone who’s worried about their kids falling behind because of lack of AI knowledge. I know lots of parents worried about how screen-centered life is for kids.

Huh. I first started listening to 538 in the run-up to the 2016 election and started really paying attention to them precisely because their 30% figure was so much higher than all the other polls. It was shocking to me then (and still is now reading your comment) that people didn’t seem to understand that 30% in the context of that particular election and that particular candidate suggested a remarkably high chance of winning, not a really low chance of winning. It’s a strange thing where people seem to think that less than 50% = not happening.

I teach in the humanities and have a small software development practice. I strongly encourage adding a course (if you don’t have one already) on computing ethics and/or an ethics component to a course on human-computer interaction. Regardless of where AI is 3-5 years from now, preparing students to make good decisions about how, when, and where to use tech will be more important than ever.

an academic trying to do similar work in multiple articles would have gotten review from peers on each article

Academic books are also peer-reviewed.

I feel vindicated by this recent turn back to vanilla js (which I never left).

I spent months trying to decide if I really was going to pay for search. Then I did it (about 2 years ago) and haven’t looked back since. Totally worth it.

It made me realize that one of the more troublesome things Google did was train us all to expect tech to be free. And then, by extension, trained us to accept shitty tech precisely because it was free.

AIs recommend what is most popular/well-known, which isn’t necessarily what is best. Both your description of AI sourcing and your AI-written comment demonstrate this point.

I only have experience in one city but I know that getting to drive for Uber is much much easier than getting a taxi driving job in the 90s. Taxi companies performed extensive background checks and while Uber claims to do so now, it’s not clear to me that they have really taken seriously the safety problem and that any random person shouldn’t be allowed as a driver. Their incentive is to get as many people driving as possible.

I never said there were no instances of sexual assault by taxi drivers; just pointing out that there’s a real crisis of rampant assault with Uber for which there are solutions that they’ve essentially refused to entertain because they don’t want to take responsibility for their drivers. I’m saying that these companies need to be held responsible for their role in this problem.

While I‘m glad that there’s an immediate safe option for women riders, in the longer term this lets Uber off the hook when they should be taking responsibility for their drivers who are functionally employees despite Uber insisting otherwise. It’s worth noting that the old school taxi companies did not have this problem of rampant sexual assault committed by their drivers. Why? Because they performed background checks before hire. I know that at least in Chicago it was very difficult to get licensed as a taxi driver. The problem with Uber is that they make it very very easy for shady individuals to be drivers, then act like they have no control over who’s driving.

Reach out to advocacy groups and service organizations that work with the kinds of people you‘re seeking for testing. Some might have a structured advertising channel that you can plug into or they could be willing to share the info through their internal lists and networks.

I like that HN doesn’t give voting power to new accounts. And because it takes a while to build the points (or whatever they’re called here) to get the voting power, that time allows newcomers to see and get used to how discussions works here.

I like that Discourse only has an upvote button and no downvote, but that the replies still stay in chronological order. That way there’s an actual flow to the conversation but you can still see which ideas people value.

I like the original premise for the upvote, which was that you don’t vote on whether you agree but on whether the comment/post is a good contribution to the discussion. The upvote should be a way of saying “good point (even if I disagree)” and the downvote should be saying “this is irrelevant or otherwise doesn’t contribute to the conversation.”

Of course, almost nobody uses the vote this way anymore. While your granular voting is quite interesting in principle, in practicality it seems it would negatively compound the existing problems with the vote system, namely that instead of voting to support the continuation of good faith discussion, everyone is voting to support just their own ideas. That in turn leads to fractious discussion (if we can even call it discussion) where the most popular and well-known ideas are strongly upvoted and continue to circulate, and anything deviating is barely seen. Then you don’t really have a discussion; you just have a series of highly upvoted statements. (See, for example, Reddit.)

in 10 years we (the world) will look back into the present with disbelief.

This is a very optimistic outlook, to the point of naivete, though I really hope you are right. In reality, neither Trump nor his cronies are acting like people who imagine they will be out of power anytime soon. In 10 years the world will likely still be dealing with the fallout of this administration, if not still dealing with the administration itself.

I commented on just one thing — that this book ban effectively impacts all public school districts. My comment says nothing about Russia, elections, or anything else you mention. I’m only making the point that this ban is not just about “some” public schools; it’s virtually all of them.

This only applies to schools taking federal money.

Which means all poor public school districts (free breakfast programs are funded with federal money) and most other public schools districts (special needs programs are funded with federal money). So the “only” here is basically “all” public school districts.

“I’ve never filmed pornography,” Wylder says. “But they have plenty of pictures and videos of my body and me walking in and out of the office, myTikTok, photos of me on Twitter before my account was deleted. They could easily make a composite of me, and I could be starring in adult videos that I never agreed to and never consented to.”

It just needs to be illegal to make an AI likeness of someone without their consent. I honestly still don’t understand why it’s not. It’s a whole new form of exploitation when brothel owners want to create AI porn that will be more profitable for them than the sex work taking place in the brothel yet they don’t want to pay the sex workers for the porn (or even get their consent to create it).

Fewer people even knew about the dot com boom (or understood what it was) because the 24-hour news cycle didn’t exist yet and the means through which news and information would travel widely and rapidly (the subject of the boom itself) had not yet boomed. In contrast, news about AI seems almost inescapable. The discourse on the dot com boom was limited almost exclusively to people in tech and finance (who were poised to benefit the most) whereas the AI discussion is much broader and involves the general public, which is now rightly debating whether the upside is worth the cost.

Clicked because I honestly wasn’t sure if this was breaking news or satire.

But domains and social handles gain meaning and value because they are keys to something else. Even if the something else never materializes (e.g., I hold a domain for years but never build a site), they are still valuable because of the potential they hold. Similarly, a deed to land (even vacant land) represents the potential value of that land as much as it represents the land itself.

A deed is meaningless if what it represents doesn’t have the potential for real value.

edit: I commented before clicking on the link (bad me). I has assumed the “experiment” was at no cost to the participant. Now that I see that there is a fee ($10) for a deed to nothing, the “experiment” seems more like yet another AI-driven cash grab.

That’s a terrible situation for that person to be in but it’s strange to me to suggest that there was no other possible alternative. I say this in the kindest way possible but people do get through grief without chatbots and have been doing so for all of human history. Also, just because something helps doesn’t mean that it’s good for you.

So much for all the speculation and complex theories. The answer was a simple and boring incompetence.

My rule is: 2 business days if I know you, 2-4 business days if I don’t know you but you are offering something of actual value to me, up to infinity for everyone else. I only offer an apology for the first group.

This was my thought as well given the length of time of the closure.

Shifting the tone and language away from defense and peacekeeping and towards warmongering isn’t good for anyone.

Going forward, Hegseth said, the War Department will focus on developing warriors, increasing lethality and reestablishing deterrence.

These people are just begging for conflict, domestically and abroad.

Personally, I believe the concern and outrage is warranted even if the death toll is indeed only (!) the 3,000 claimed by Iranian state media. That is the most conservative number so far and it is still an almost unimaginable number in such a short period of time.

That line stood out to me too. I don’t care about any of these companies but one of them accusing another of being authoritarian and a “dark path” is quite ironic.