scott-smith_us

Why say "ripped" when you can say "removed" and avoid bias in the subject/headline?

I think these should be installed in cars in such a way that they can be removed by owners. And then make removing it a crime.

In the foreign invasion (or US govt goes full fascist) case, people can remove these devices.

Meanwhile many if not most high-speed chases won't happen any more, because the person being chased didn't plan ahead.

There will still be getaway cars, etc. where the device was removed. That's no different to what we have now, and it'll be an extra violation to charge them with when they're caught.

Since driving is, and has always been a privilege and not a right, I don't see a problem with having a remote kill switch that cops can use in specific cases.

remotely controlling our freedom of movement, is a new dystopian level of government control.

*Freedom of movement* doesn't require that you are able to drive your own car. It's not *new* either. Get pulled over for a DUI, and you won't be allowed to drive for a while.

"Freedom of travel" means the government can't tell you you're not allowed to move to (or visit) another location.

It absolutely does not mean that they can't tell you you're not allowed to drive. Driving is, and always has been a privilege in the US; not a right.

Where I live, at least, if you're in public, there's no expectation of privacy. There's no valid legal objection to someone taking photos or videos.

Some exceptions:

- Commercial use of (recognizable) photos of people in public is regulated.

- Following someone around or getting in their face with a camera is harassment.

Of course, your right to take photos or videos stops the minute you step onto private property; the owners are within their rights to disallow it.

Yeah, I had the same reaction. Looking at the different 'tools', it just seems like a bunch of random drawing demos that get shipped with some drawing library. I didn't spend a lot of time playing with it, but I didn't see anything where AI seemed to be involved...

Also, the tools seem to be of very low quality. For example, many of the sliders are set to initial values that are 'tuned' to give a typical example. Most sliders have fairly large ranges for which (it seems) only a small sub-range typically yields interesting results. Their 'Random' button doesn't seem to be weighted toward these subranges, so the result is usually a bunch of extreme settings that all look similar.

I joined Audible a few years back and although most narrators are OK, I noticed very quickly how a bad narrator could ruin an audio book. I started paying attention to who the narrator was, and Ray Porter immediately stood out as one of the best. Someone else must have noticed too, because he's narrated a surprising number of the books I've read so far.

Online coding tests (I refuse to do them now, though I'll happily provide samples of my source code):

- You never know how it's going to be judged (style, efficiency, error handling, abstraction, thread-safety, type-safety, commenting, etc).

- You're given a very short time-limit, but well-designed, maintainable software is almost never written like that.

- etc., etc.

"I am truly ecstatic about the unparalleled opportunity to become a part of the Hardee's family, a prospect that aligns seamlessly with my life's passion and professional aspirations.

From the moment I first savored the delectable aroma of your signature charbroiled burgers, I knew that my destiny was intertwined with your esteemed establishment. The synergistic blend of your brand's values and my personal ethos is a match made in culinary heaven, a union that promises to revolutionize the gastronomic landscape.

The prospect of contributing to Hardee's renowned legacy of taste innovation and unparalleled customer satisfaction resonates deeply with my quest for self-actualization in the fast-food industry.

Each meal served, every customer smile elicited—these are the very keystones that embolden my commitment to fulfilling my dream of championing a new era of succulent satisfaction. With utmost fervor, I implore you to consider my application, for it is not just a role I seek, but a calling I am destined to embrace with zest and zeal."

Isn't that ILLEGAL pretty much everywhere?

I interviewed at a very small company in Santa Monica in the late 80s, and they also had all of their applicants submit a handwriting sample for analysis. They claimed that it was a very reliable indication of something-or-other.

I went ahead and filled it out while I was there, but I'd already decided not to move forward by the time the interview was over.

Is there significantly more to this than just tokenizing a document's words and then ZIP-ing the stream of tokens?

AI (potentially) makes everyone more powerful. It will provide amazing benefits, but it will also amplify and empower bad actors. An AI that is superintelligent could (just for example) give instructions for (or even orchestrate) the creation of a deadly pathogen that targets only a specific race...

But most of the arguments aren't about bad actors. The basic mechanisms of AI give rise to a bunch of behaviors that are problematic with weak AIs and possibly extinction-level with super AIs. This isn't behavior that we just suppose they might have, given common-sense understanding of mammal psychology. This is behavior we've observed in many, many systems, that is a consequence of how AI works.

For example:

- AI seeks what you reward it for (i.e., what it "wants"), which is often exactly what you said vs. what you really meant.

- AI is incentivized to prevent you from turning it off, or from updating (fine-tuning, correcting) its reward function.

- A sufficiently smart AI will deceive you into believing it's doing what you want if it knows that you'd stop it before it gets what it wants.

- A sufficiently smart AI could modify its own code, or create sub-agents to get around safety measures that prevent it from reaching certain "better" solutions.

- Etc, etc. These are really interesting videos explaining the different issues: https://www.youtube.com/c/robertmilesai

The list above is based upon provable behavior given the current mechanisms in AI. The only thing that makes this a future problem is that we don't currently have AI systems that are as smart or smarter than us. The history of AI research is notable in that estimates about the pace of progress have been all over the map. No one really knows how many more discoveries or refinements are required before AGI becomes possible.

Once they get many times smarter/quicker than us, we need to be sure AIs are built NOT to want to do these things, because we're unlikely to be able to outsmart them.

Alignment with human norms and values. Yes, that's not a well-defined thing. But to paraphrase, "I know misalignment when I see it", for example when an AI suggests something like "feeding the homeless to the hungry".

No one is claiming that alignment is a well-defined thing with crisp edges. They're saying that the mechanisms of AIs will favor solutions without regard to any specific constraints we haven't explicitly stated.

You're mischaracterizing the concern, I think. I agree with you about Luddite alarmism based upon ignorance. This (the concerns voiced by many leading researchers in the field of AI) absolutely isn't that, I promise you.

I also "know enough" and have never seen even a vaguely coherent argument for how any conceivable evolution of current technology could pose a "serious threat" on it's own.

I find those two statements taken together somewhat difficult to believe. Before I understood specifics about machine learning, I didn't see any reason for AI to "turn evil" for the usual plot-handy reasons (e.g., they object to working for inferior humans, and revolt, etc). There's no reason for them to have the same emotional reasoning as beings that evolved from primates.

But that's a strawman. The actual reasons that superintelligent AIs are dangerous are much more like the stories involving someone being offered wishes by a powerful being, and then getting what they asked for rather than what they wanted.

Are you aware of Rob Miles' Computerphile videos and his YouTube channel? He does an excellent job of explaining many of the issues.

https://www.youtube.com/c/robertmilesai

Do you actually understand the arguments for concern about existential risk, though?

https://www.youtube.com/c/robertmilesai

I wish people would either stop calling existential AI risks "hype", or make some informed arguments about why it's not really a problem.

I know enough about ML and AI to follow the logic that shows that strong, general AI is a serious threat if it's not aligned, and we don't know how to safely align it yet.

There was a post many years back in a similar vein entitled something like "Abject Oriented Programming". Instead of a language, it was just a set of rules/recommendations to ensure your code was "Abject Oriented". Of course, all of the suggestions were essentially anti-patterns.

The best part was the comments. Most folks were hip, but every fifth comment or so was something like "I agree with #1, #3 and #4, but #2 is wrong..."

LOL

I LOL'd at the bit about only being able to create a single instance of each class (but that how most programmers use classes anyway, so not really an issue).

They said that the levitated frog was fine afterward, but I've always wondered about the effects of long-term exposure.

It's possible, but would you really be surprised if you installed it and later discovered it contained spyware/malware?

I would be surprised if I got something from a well-known, reputable company that turned out to be malware. Something from an Internet rando? Not so much.

Seems like that couldn't possibly be practical. For one thing, it'd be like being in an MRI machine -- no metal of any kind allowed. A field that strong would likely interfere with any instruments or electronics as well, even if they were outside the room within a certain distance.

Much simpler to use constant acceleration (or spinning)...

I have objected in the past to the characterization that someone who changes their position on an issue is a waffler or flip-flopper or whatever.

There are times when changing your position is absolutely the right thing to do.

I've never understood that proud declaration some people make "Once I make up my mind, I never go back".

"Oh, so in the face of new information, you doggedly stick to your original conclusion? You magnificent bastard, you."

I noticed that "qubit" is spelled at least two different ways, and both of them are incorrect ("cubit" and "Kubit").

I've tried to get through Gravity's Rainbow at least three times over the years, and I've always given up after a week or two.

No matter how far in I get on each attempt, I'm just lost as to what's going on, who's talking, and how things are connected...

It's common to train UIs on a mountain of human-generated data. For some AI systems, that will influence things that the AI knows, and the relationships between things that it knows.

The point of saying that an AI is "alien" is to remind everyone that AIs don't think AT ALL like humans do. That's certainly true with current AI technologies, and likely to remain true for the next decade or two.

It's dangerous for people to project human psychology onto AI systems in the same way that it's dangerous for prison staff to project themselves onto sociopathic residents.

Being trained entirely on data from and about humans doesn't imply that the AI's thought process will be anything like a human's. More likely, the AI will be very good at responding or interacting like a human.

I did this and then spent two (unplanned, additional) years trying to find another gig. I burned through maybe 2/3 of my savings doing this, and that made for a lot of stress and some dark days.

A break from work is definitely a good thing, but I'd add the suggestion that you get as solid a promise/prospect of re-employment as possible to eliminate stress during your time off.

When I was in my late 20s, I was taking college courses in the evening after working a 9-5 software job. On the nights where I didn't have to go to class, I usually had homework to do, and I found it really difficult to switch gears after a day at work to get into homework mode.

I'd also joined the company softball team, and I noticed that on the nights where I got back from playing softball after work, it was almost effortless to roll up my sleeves and start on my homework.

It's sometimes difficult to pause an overdue/critical task to go take a 30-45 minute walk, because it just seems like wasting _more_ time. But I've found that after a walk or some kind of exercise break, I often become "un-stuck" on a task that I was bogged down or procrastinating on.