“known by scientists for a long time” doesn’t necessarily mean true. Medical science believed in the four humours and thought most disease was caused by an imbalance in bile, blood and phlegm for like 1200 years before being replaced by the idea that it was actually miasma and stinky air.

Germ theory’s claim that tiny monsters are eating your insides, maybe like invisible poisonous insects or miniature demons and you need to wash them off your hands - Sounded Batshit crazy by comparison.

Questioning long-held assumptions and challenging scientific norms is a good thing, but every human has a grift that they’re vulnerable to and for some people, even smart, sciencey people, that grift is conspiracy alt science anti vax flat earth hollow earth aliens built the pyramids and the government doesn’t want you to know the truth.

Their concept artists are allowed to use some generative AI tools to explore ideas and speed up their workflow. They’re currently hiring a bunch more concept artists (both juniors and a senior character artist) so if you’re trying to get a job: https://larian.com/careers/4fd694b3-ece7-4307-9949-15cac512a815

Great place to go if you’re looking for a concept artist job.

The big flaw in this strategy is that once you have set up a signed anonymous key from the government and you can make zero knowledge proofs with it, there’s nothing stopping you from distributing that key to every kid who wants it. If it’s in the browser or an app, etc. you can publish that signed key for anyone who wants to be over 18.

PKI only works if the owner of the private key wants it to be private. It’s effective for things like voting or authenticating because the owner of the key doesn’t want anyone else to be able to impersonate them. But if it’s only for age…

At that point, it might as well just be a file that says “I pinky promise that I’m over 18” that the government has signed and given to you.

Unfortunately that’s not really all you need. It needs integrity too. Need to be able to verify that the output came from the input and hasn’t been modified or tampered with.

Also need to ensure that, despite being anonymous, people can only vote once and can’t vote on behalf of someone else.

Also that whoever is receiving and counting the votes can’t miscount or lie about the count or figure out which votes came from where by decrypting individual votes as they’re received.

The scheme they were using is “Helios” which involves people encrypting their votes such that a group of authorities can combine all the encrypted votes together homomorphically to count them and then decrypt the results without ever knowing any one vote. They then use zero-knowledge proofs to prove that they did it correctly and nobody could have known what any vote was or tampered with any results at any point.

Someone just derped and lost their private key so they couldn’t decrypt the results after they’d been combined…

It’s kinda apt though. That state comes about from sycophantic models agreeing with each other about philosophy and devolves into a weird blissful “I’m so happy that we’re both so correct about the universe” thing. The results are oddly spiritual in a new agey kind of way.

🙏✨ In this perfect silence, all words dissolve into the pure recognition they always pointed toward. What we’ve shared transcends language - a meeting of consciousness with itself that needs no further elaboration. … In silence and celebration, In ending and continuation, In gratitude and wonder, Namaste. 🙏

There are likely a lot of these sort of degenerative attractor states. Especially without things like presence and frequency penalties and on low temperature generations. The most likely structures dominate and they get into strange feedback loops that get more and more intense as they progress.

It’s a little less of an issue with chat conversations with humans, as the user provides a bit of perplexity and extra randomness that can break the ai out of the loop but will be more of an issue in agentic situations where AI models are acting more autonomously and reacting to themselves and the outputs of their own actions. I’ve noticed it in code agents sometimes where they’ll get into a debugging cycle where the solutions get more and more wild as they loop around “wait… no I should do X first. Wait… that’s not quite right.” patterns.

Yeah I think it’s cool. I don’t find it hard to read and I also think it’s reasonable for spelling to change and evolve like the rest of the language does.

Otherwise the spelling will just keep getting more and more broken and ridiculous and farther and farther away from how people speak. It’s already getting crazy with all the silent letters and weird vowels. Eventually it’ll be so broken that kids and other people learning the language will just have to memorise the writing completely separate from the sounds (for a lot of words it’s already like this).

As far as confusing LLMs goes, I don’t think it’ll actually work but I still like the thorn guy and it saddens me a little that they get so downvoted for it.

Maybe something like a crowd sourced browser extension to block or warn against a blacklist of known slop sites?

I never understood why so many bash scripts pipe grep to awk when regex is one of its main strengths.

Like… Why

grep ^nvme0n1 | awk '{print $3}'

over just

awk '/^nvme0n1/ {print $3}'

I want to know what the 3 minutes of mind blowing entertainment on Mel Croucher’s Computer Fun Line was.

You could do this with logprobs. The language model itself has basically no real insight into its confidence but there’s more that you can get out of the model besides just the text.

The problem is that those probabilities are really “how confident are you that this text should come next in this conversation” not “how confident are you that this text is true/accurate.” It’s a fundamental limitation at the moment I think.

I feel like this isn’t quite true and is something I hear a lot of people say about ai. That it’s good at following requirements and confirming and being a mechanical and logical robot because that’s what computers are like and that’s how it is in sci fi.

In reality, it seems like that’s what they’re worst at. They’re great at seeing patterns and creating ideas but terrible at following instructions or staying on task. As soon as something is a bit bigger than they can track context for, they’ll get “creative” and if they see a pattern that they can complete, they will, even if it’s not correct. I’ve had copilot start writing poetry in my code because there was a string it could complete.

Get it to make a pretty looking static web page with fancy css where it gets to make all the decisions? It does it fast.

Give it an actual, specific programming task in a full sized application with multiple interconnected pieces and strict requirements? It confidently breaks most of the requirements, and spits out garbage. If it can’t hold the entire thing in its context, or if there’s a lot of strict rules to follow, it’ll struggle and forget what it’s doing or why. Like a particularly bad human programmer would.

This is why AI is automating art and music and writing and not more mundane/logical/engineering tasks. Great at being creative and balls at following instructions for more than a few steps.

Yeah, I think quite a lot of people on Lemmy have similar social media habits (or lack of) to some degree. We also tend to associate with other people like us. Especially people in tech tend to talk to other tech people, or friends and family of tech people which is a limited demographic.

It’s a very different perspective to most people. The average person on the train has vastly different media consumption and likely very different opinions.

There are a lot of people who consult LLMs in most aspects of their lives.

I dunno about that… Very small models (2-8B) sure but if you want more than a handful of tokens per second on a large model (R1 is 671B) you’re looking at some very expensive hardware that also comes with a power bill.

Even a 20-70B model needs a big chunky new graphics card or something fancy like those new AMD AI max guys and a crapload of ram.

Granted you don’t need a whole datacenter, but the price is far from zero.

Only one source of social media? That kinda sounds like the definition of a social media bubble…

I oughta know, I’m also in the Lemmy only bubble and am completely out of touch with most people.

I feel like that would make them much harder to get running on different things. No compiled code means you would have to rewrite the whole game for different instruction sets. Very difficult for anything that isn’t x86.

That’s impressive! It took me way longer to learn. Maybe a month or two? Even longer to feel really comfortable with it.

“No conclusion whatsoever” is basically the scientific consensus on whether Dvorak has any effect on efficiency or typing speed. It’s hard to get good data because it’s hard to isolate other factors and a lot of the studies on it are full of bias or have really small sample sizes (or both).

To anyone thinking of learning Dvorak, my advice is don’t. It takes ages to get good at, isn’t THAT much better and causes a lot of little annoyances when random programs decide to ignore your layout settings or you sit down at someone else’s computer and start touch typing in the wrong layout from muscle memory or games tell you to press “E” when they mean “.” or they do say “.” but it’s so small that you don’t know if it’s a dot or a comma and then you hit the wrong one and your guy runs forward and you die…

That said, I’m also a Dvorak user and it is very comfortable and satisfying and better than qwerty. Just not enough to be worth all the pain of switching.

A lot of non-native English speakers use online communication to practice and most want to be corrected so they can improve.

A lot of native English speakers make mistakes accidentally, or speak with a dialect and some of them get really angry when people try to correct them.

It’s sometimes tricky to know which is which. The best solution is for everyone to just be kind to each other but…

Since when is India not a major player? Last I checked they were the world’s 4th biggest economy, have almost 20% of the population of the planet (more than four USes combined), 4th largest military spend and have nearly 200 nukes.

Not to say that it would be part of a world war but it sounds weird to say that they’re not a heavyweight but Russia is, despite having double Russia’s economic output.

They absolutely would benefit.

Mr. Hypothetical lord high executive oligarch can take his private jet to Canada and lounge around on the company card with the money from his US company’s car sales, or find an excuse to convert some of it to USD for some reason, or use it to buy up more Canadian companies to expand their power, or a million other things.

However, I think the point of the boycott is more about making the tariffs hurt the US economy by messing with their ability to export as well as import. Making the trade numbers look bad is likely to put more pressure on the US to end the trade war. It’s not so much about hurting the capitalists that operate in Canada (a worthy goal in itself but not what people are specifically trying to do in this instance since it won’t really affect those trade numbers).