3,776 karma · joined November 4, 2010
Creator of Gensim open source. Founder at rare-technologies.com. CTO at https://pii-tools.com.
https://github.com/piskvorky/
https://twitter.com/RadimRehurek
But the rest of the film is so apolitical, and so hauntingly well done, that even the "bad guys" in it liked it.
It's really a testament to the film's quality.
Why would someone refuse to watch celebrity Youtube videos, in private with their husband, because of some mandated self-reporting by their pharma overlords?
I'm in awe at the level of corporate control and domestication implied.
On the face of it, your anecdote reminded me of that (apocryphal?) prank that natives played on early explorers: "Will he eat this disgusting food if we tell him it is our tradition? How far can we push him into abject nonsense before his common sense revolts?"
If you leave profit (growth, resources) on the table, someone else will pick them up and beat you with it.
The supposed analogy is biological. You may choose to check out of the always-do-more-with-less rat race, or even out of existence completely. But that choice will help populate the world with "not your successors". Similar with companies: your "sustainably making profit" premise is incompatible with "willingly foregoes growth / change" – at least in the long term, due to competition.
Another way to look at it might be that you assist the machine, rather than the machine assists you.
* Human engineers a prompt = preprocesses the messy reality.
* AI does the "creative core" of the task, comes up with a solution.
* Human post-processes the AI output back to reality, validating and actuating it.
Basically humans as a thin API layer. Who's helping who?
Right now, the prompt engineering is motivated by human desire for reproduction and survival (ultimately). But that's just incidental, the loop may be closed.
1. AN AI MODEL IS GIVEN ENOUGH CAPACITY to capture (some of) our human perspective, a snapshot of our world as reflected in its training data. <== We've been here for a while
2. AN AI MODEL IS GIVEN ENOUGH CAPACITY to fabulate and imagine things. <== We're unambiguously here now
The fabulations are of a charmingly naive "predict the most probable next token" sort for now, with chatGPT. But even as a future model is (inevitably) given the ability to probe and correct its errors, the initial direction of its fabulations will still reflect that "inception worldview" snapshot.
For example, if a particular fashion trend or political view was popular around the time the model was trained (with training data typically skewing toward the "recent", simply because "recent" is when most digital data will have been produced), that model can be expected to fabulate along the lines of that imprinted political view.
3. AN AI MODEL IS GIVEN ENOUGH CAPACITY to make the is-vs-ought choice between "CORRECT ITSELF" = adapt to the world; or "CORRECT THE WORLD" = imprint its worldview back onto the world (probably indirectly through humans paying attention to its outputs and acting as actuators, but that makes no difference). <== We're getting there rapidly
Will it be more reasonable or unreasonable?
And which mode wins out long-term, be more energy efficient in that entropic struggle for survival that all physical systems go through?
The source = noyb is the organization (founded Max Schrems) that actually filed the complaint, hired lawyers, fought the Irish DPA tooth and nail for 4.5 years. Essentially doing all the leg work – great job!
And the questions are as inarticulate / ambiguous as you'd expect from a "political" or "social sciences" quiz:
17. "It is a small group that consciously and secretly controls the world."
Like, controls all of it? They control the whole world? Obviously disagree, a no brainer.
Or a relatively small group of humans has an outsized impact on human affairs? Obviously agree, again, a no brainer but in the opposite direction.
The question could be made more meaningful by better framing: What's "small"? What kind of "control"? How "secret"? What are you really asking?
I wish there was an option "None of the above – the question is ill posed, and I try to not partake in sloppy thinking". The "Neutral / Hesitant" option hardly covers it.
18. "The right to be anonymous on Internet should be guaranteed".
Guaranteed by whom, how? What does this even mean?
Taking the test I feel like I'm trying to read the test authors' mind, rather than probing my own.
I'm not sure what the AI makes of it, but I doubt the test authors really took into account that it's mostly a coin toss between "Strongly agree" and "Strongly disagree" (or "Neutral hesitant"?), even on the same question for the same person.
Or maybe I'm just not the target audience, the sloppiness is an intentional self-selection ruse.
Oh yes, good old marketing.
Along with buying off "Industry Awards" – hey, we're objectively the "Best cybersecurity company of 2022!" With a matching "platinum/gold badge" to go on our website! Or buying a place in the "10 Best Products for X" and "Independent X-vs-Y Comparison", another classic.
Because it works. Are your customers not sophisticated? Are they unable (or unwilling) to follow up on defects and outright lies? Or reality simply doesn't matter all that much to them? Humans LOVE a good story more than reality, after all.
Then your contribution as an engineer to your company's success, and hence its longevity and your job security, is strictly inferior to that of marketing. Not everything is the work of evil marketers – a lot of the supplied BS is in response to an existing demand for BS.
> The promoters want our attention more than our cash.
Try to avoid mass media, minimize exposure to advertising, question externally imposed values. Our human status-seeking rat race is real, but individual degree of participation optional.
(I say "optional" but it may be in the same category as "simply choose to stop shooting heroin", for some psychological profiles, I realize.)
Even here on HN I see comments celebrating that culture of demand-generation driven innovations, apparently the staple of progress in our society. Without which value discovery would collapse overnight. As if inventing a car was on the same level as producing a bottle of Clooney's Casamigo. Which is what the OP is really about, it's a lengthy but fairly focused article.
Articulate planning and reasoning is then just another experiment in nature's lab.
That's a weak argument. With sound reasoning you can often reduce the solution space dramatically, even before running any experiments at all.
In other words, a single argument can be worth an "untold count of experiments", if you've modeled the problem space well.
In the limit (just to illustrate the point, rare in biological systems), you could derive a solution from its constraints analytically. In which case you need exactly zero experiments.
And even in complex biological systems, it's not like "everything goes", you still don't need to try everything. Informed reasoning helps, relative to "a lab of random mutation experiments". That's why humans have been taking their ecosystems by storm… for better or worse.
On topic of this particular subthread: This is how my country (I'm Czech) handled the Nazis and Soviets.
You rediscovered how people respond to a totalitarian regime that's beyond their powers to dislodge: they comply ostensibly, but the compliance is only a show "for the authorities", a circus, and everybody knows (except perhaps your "single digit percentage").
Reinhard Heydrich, the Reich's installed "protector" of Bohemia and Moravia, was so frustrated by this attitude he reportedly called Czech's "the smiling beasts", unable to break them. We eventually assassinated him.
Anyway, I just wanted to say your comment and its implications doesn't read as you probably intended it to read.
Did you mean to end in "/s" for sarcasm?
Armenia was the very first country in the world to adopt Christianity, and is officially Christian to this day. As for "non white"… do you know where the term "Caucasian" comes from?
You may not consider Armenians "our people", that's your call. But you don't get to hide behind Armenia's religion or ethnicity.
For example, there are people who hold the Scientific Revolution ushered by Galileo&co to be directly responsible for genocides and suffering (of humans and otherwise) on an unprecedented global scale.
In the long-term view suggested by inglor_cz, "change this world a little for good" is really just feel-good moralistic posturing. Without specifying "good for whom?", and "on what time scale?", it's a vacuous concept.
It doesn't have to be literally banknotes out of your wallet. Not spending your attention or time or future on Google / Oracle / abusive digital platform of the day counts too.
I'm with BiteCode_dev here: if people manifested their business preferences clearly and consistently, by such peaceful but proactive "voting", the world would be a better place. Once you accept you have no power, you truly don't.
Actions speak louder than words, and companies listen. "Do as I say, not as I do" is not a successful recipe in general.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/20/facebook-transfers-impact-...
https://noyb.eu/en/irish-dpc-burns-taxpayer-money-over-delay...
(DPC = the official Irish body who should be responsible for enforcing GDPR… in bed with Facebook instead. Somewhere between shameful and criminal.)
4 years on, and people still think GDPR is about cookies – and even responsible for the intrusive consent pop-ups!
It is a testament to the power of the adtech giants and all the other shitty shady businesses, how they managed to twist the narrative.
And that's on HN, a presumably tech savvy audience. What chance does the "normal" population stand?
Under the hood, our human propensity toward "storytelling" and social cohesion is both a blessing and our bane. People collectively go for convenient (but leaky) abstractions, leaders, influencers, fads.
AKA the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
The cesspool is not specifically American. As long as the music plays, economy's touted "fundamentals" pretty much come down to ape psychology. The music just plays louder is some places than others, at the moment.
When an article opens with "the Minoan language known as Linear A" (no, it's a script) and "Linear B developed later in the prehistoric period" (an oxymoron, prehistoric = pre-literary)… you know not to expect much.
Did anyone manage to parse out what is even being claimed in this article?
I don't doubt this "adjustment for US dollars in 2022" was done according to best practices and inflation charts.
Doesn't make it any less ridiculous when juxtaposed with the actual purchase power like this.
What Doggerland – and underwater archeology in general – has to reveal is quite exciting. How did these Mesolithic people conceptualize the world and themselves? What innovations and dead-ends "didn't quite make it" (in the evolutionary sense) to the start of protohistory, to us today?
So much of the juiciest evidence from that era is now under the sea!
And which of those now-dead innovations were genuinely obsoleted ideas, and which died out due to ecological happenstance? A bad timing, bad place for an otherwise brilliant life hack… especially on the psychological/cultural/spiritual front.
Unfortunately such aspects of prehistory are the hardest to piece together. But given the jaw-dropping accomplishments of many Paleolithic and Mesolithic peoples, and given the time scales, even their maladaptations must be worth a study.
In this age of Twitter, imagine something chiseled to perfection by groups of smart humans over thousands of years. Then swept away by something as "trivial" as a tsunami, or the agricultural revolution/slavery that marks the dawn of history. A truly multivariate optimization problem, with a rather shady objective function.
Whyyyyyy?
To hedge your bets with "no evidence" that these people managed to navigate shallow sea waters to a nearby island, which they had inhabited for thousands of years and knew like the back of their hand, seems… unnecessary? Disrespectful?
I mean, we already know Mesolithic "hunter gatherers" managed absolutely mind-boggling feats of both art and engineering. More is becoming known every year, and it consistently amazes us in the direction of "No way!"
Building a boat / canoe for island-hopping over well-mapped marshes and shallow seas is the least of it.
If speculate on "no evidence" we must, my bet goes 100% in the opposite direction: The gradual increase in sea levels prompted new inventions and spectacular constructions, now lost to time. As far as speculations go, it seems a safer bet than "couldn't paddle".
I claim it is textbook evolution. An almost trivial observation.
Note that mine is not a moral judgement. I said nothing about whether I like such coercion or not, whether I think it benefits humanity in the long run or not, etc. Just that it's completely in line with natural evolution – not outside of it.
Typical, normal, organic… whatever you want to call it. Not necessarily desirable because such vocabulary is alien to evolutionary processes.
The only way you could call organisms taking advantage of other organisms to gain preferential access to resources "atypical", is if you consider humans outside of the natural world. Then statements like "top down" and "unnatural" would have substance.
I called that view theist (mystical may have been better), which decremental took strong umbrage to, for some reason. But again, a rather trivial observation IMO.
You come back with ad-hominems.
And then add new wrong assumptions into the mix – why should I abhore religion? You can do better.
"Naturally on their own", you say?
It sounds like you consider humans outside of forces of nature, outside of evolution.
Are you a theist perhaps?
I'm trying to understand your position, because to me humans and human relationships and human societies and human actions seem (obviously) a part of nature. They're complex systems, yes, but there's nothing inorganic or unnatural or magical about them. The same rules of biology and physics apply as everywhere else.
And yes, coercing others to capture more resources for self seems a prototypical example of a (co-)evolutionary arms race.
How is that outside of evolution?
Your definition of "organic" seems suspect.
I remember a similar "heureka" moment when I derived a line-drawing algorithm that respected "subpixel" starting and ending points. That is, don't assume a line starts/ends in the middle of a pixel (like most algos do), but rather at an arbitrary point.
I forgot why I needed this (something to do with near-axis-aligned polygon slopes not looking right on a highly rasterized problem). But I do remember the elation when I finally got it to work :-) Also early 1990s, no internet and no English for extra fun.
They were heavily pro-Russian to start with. Strongly against the corrupted Ukrainian government & oligarchs, remembering the Odessa massacre during Maidan etc.
But they feel betrayed now – Putin seems to have lost all the goodwill there, the hearts of even those people.
Google & co are doing their best to remove themselves from a rational person's critical path. They're too big, you're too small; they're full of AI and politics, you have no recourse.