There’s an ongoing protest against this on GitHub, symbolically modifying the code that would implement this in Chromium. See this lemmy post by the person who had this idea, and this GitHub commit. Feel free to “Review changes” –> “Approve”. Around 300 people have joined so far.
Maybe it is pointless, maybe it is a bad idea. Maybe not. It’s difficult to predict what this kind of small-scale actions will have on the big picture and future development. No matter what you choose or not choose to do, it’s always a gamble. My way of thinking is that it’s good if people say, through this kind of gestures, “I’m vigilant, I won’t allow just anything to be done to me. There’s a line that shouldn’t be crossed”.
Of course you’re right about supporting and choosing alternative browsers, and similar initiatives. There are many initiatives on that front as well. I’ve never used Chrome, to be honest; always Firefox. But now I’ve even uninstalled the Chromium that came pre-installed on my (Ubuntu) machines. Besides that I ditched gmail years ago, and I’ve also decided to flatly refuse to use Google tools (Google docs and whatnot) with collaborators, as a matter of principle. If that means I’m cut out of projects, so be it.
Regarding WEI, I see your point, but I see dangers in “acknowledging” too much. If you read the “explainer” by the Google engineers, or in general their replies to comments and criticisms, you see that they constantly use deceiving, manipulative, and evasive language. As an example, the “explainer” says a lot “the user needs this”, “the user desires that”, but when you unfold the real meaning of the sentences it’s clear it isn’t something done for the user.
This creates a need for human users to prove to websites that they’re human
Note the “need for human users”, but the sentence actually means “websites need that users prove…”. This is just an example. The whole explainer is written in such a deceiving manner.
The replies to criticisms are all evasive. They don’t reply the actual questions or issues, they start off a tangent and spout a lot of blah blah with “benefit”, “user”, and other soothing words – but the actual question or issue never gets addressed. (Well, if this isn’t done on purpose, then it means they are mentally impaired, with sub-normal comprehension skills).
I fuc*ing hate this kind of deceiving, politician talk – which is a red flag that they’re up to no good – and I know from personal experience that as soon as you “acknowledge” something, they’ll drag your into their circular, empty blabber while they do what they please.
More generally, I think we should do something against the current ad-based society and economy. So NO to WEI for me.
Nothing dense in this, I don’t quite know what to write either. In my opinion what you wrote in your comment is just perfect, you’re a citizen simply expressing an honest concern, without lying – not all people are tech-savvy. It also makes it clear that it’s a letter from a real person.
But that’s only my point of view, and maybe I haven’t thought enough steps ahead. Let’s see what other people suggest and why.
Personal websites often give an email address for contact, as a mailto:[email protected] link. And the address is often obfuscated in a variety of ways to avoid its harvesting by spam bots....
Thank you! I checked it. From what I understand I should use a link like https://matrix.to/#/@[user]:[server.zzz]. Then from there they are redirected to use their own Matrix app, if they have one.
Other researchers agree that GPT-4 and other LLMs would probably now pass the popular conception of the Turing test. […]
researchers […] reported that more than 1.5 million people had played their online game based on the Turing test. Players were assigned to chat for two minutes, either to another player or to an LLM-powered bot that the researchers had prompted to behave like a person. The players correctly identified bots just 60% of the time
Complete contradiction. Trash Nature, it’s become only an extremely expensive gossip science magazine.
PS: The Turing test involves comparing a bot with a human (not knowing which is which). So if more and more bots pass the test, this can be the result either of an increase in the bots’ Artificial Intelligence, or of an increase in humans’ Natural Stupidity.
Agree (you made me think of the famous face on Mars). I mean that more as a joke. Also there’s no clear threshold or divide on one side of which we can speak of “human intelligence”. There’s a whole range from impairing disabilities to Einstein and Euler – if it really makes sense to use a linear 1D scale, which very probably doesn’t.
I’d like to add one more layer to this great explanation.
Usually, this kind of predictions should be made in two steps:
calculate the conditional probability of the next word (given the data), for all possible candidate words;
choose one word among these candidates.
The choice in step 2. should be determined, in principle, by two factors: (a) the probability of a candidate, and (b) also a cost or gain for making the wrong or right choice if that candidate is chosen. There’s a trade-off between these two factors. For example, a candidate might have low probability, but also be a safe choice, in the sense that if it’s the wrong choice no big problems arise – so it’s the best choice. Or a candidate might have high probability, but terrible consequences if it were the wrong choice – so it’s better to discard it in favour of something less likely but also less risky.
This is all common sense! but it’s at the foundation of the theory behind this (Decision Theory).
The proper calculation of steps 1. and 2. together, according to fundamental rules (probability calculus & decision theory) would be enormously expensive. So expensive that something like chatGPT would be impossible: we’d have to wait for centuries (just a guess: could be decades or millennia) to train it, and then to get an answer. This is why Large Language Models do two approximations, which obviously can have serious drawbacks:
they use extremely simplified cost/gain figures – in fact, from what I gather, the researchers don’t have any clear idea of what they are;
they directly combine the simplified cost/gain figures with probabilities;
They search for the candidate with the highest gain+probability combination, but stopping as soon as they find a relatively high one – at the risk of missing the one that was actually the real maximum.
(Sorry if this comment has a lecturing tone – it’s not meant to. But I think that the theory behind these algorithms can actually be explained in very common-sense term, without too much technobabble, as @TheChurn’s comment showed.)
We identify “life” with the capability of self-replication plus some other features. In other conditions, for instance on other planets, it could be possible for self-replication to happen in a way different from the RNA/DNA-based one....
Absolutely amazing!! I suppose you’ve seen some renderings like this one.
However, these molecules don’t really have a will or a scope, and in fact I don’t like how they are deceivingly represented in some of these animations. These animations show, say, some aminoacid that goes almost straight towards some large molecule and does this and that. And one is left with the question: how does it get there and how does it “know” that it should get there? The answer is that it’s just immersed in water and moved about by the unsystematic motion of the water molecules. Some aminoacids go here, some go there. In these animations they only show the ones that end up connecting with the large molecule. OK, this is done just to simplify the visualization, but it can also be misleading.
Similarly with molecules like kinesin, which seem to purposely walk around. Also in that case there’s a lot of unsystematic motion, that after a while ends in a particular more stable configuration thanks to electromagnetic forces. Simulations such as this or this give a more realistic picture of these processes.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the whole thing isn’t awe-inspiring or mind blowing. It is. Actually I think that the more realistic picture (without these “purposeful” motions) leads to even more awe, because of the structured complexity that comes out of these unsystematic motions.
Had never heard about Graphite, thank you! I’ll try to stay updated about it. But please feel free to post important news about it in this community, whenever there’ll be steps forward.
Luckily “effectively the standard” is just a temporary thing. What browser was considered “standard” has changed many times in the past, and will continue to change in the future. Of course for this to happen everyone who cares must keep on pushing.
I have degoogled myself when it comes to email, running self-hosted email & calendar (not my own server). Did it two years ago, and up to now it has worked very well. I don’t miss anything from Gmail and have all the features it offered, plus some extra ones (like deleting email attachments via an email client – Gmail never...
This image/report itself doesn’t make much sense – probably it was generated by chatGPT itself.
“What makes your job exposed to GPT?” – OK I expect a list of possible answers:
“Low wages”: OK, having a low wage makes my job exposed to GPT.
“Manufacturing”: OK, manufacturing makes my job exposed to GPT. …No wait, what does that mean?? You mean if my job is about manufacturing, then it’s exposed to GPT? OK but then shouldn’t this be listed under the next question, “What jobs are exposed to GPT?”?
…
“Jobs requiring low formal education”: what?! The question was “what makes your job exposed to GPT?”. From this answer I get that “jobs requiring low formal education make my job exposed to GPT”. Or I get that who/whatever wrote this knows no syntax or semantics. OK, sorry, you meant “If your job requires low formal education, then it’s exposed to GPT”. But then shouldn’t this answer also be listed under the next question??
“What jobs are exposed to GPT?”
“Athletes”. Well, “athletes” semantically speaking is not a job; maybe “athletics” is a job. But who gives a shirt about semantics? there’s chatGPT today after all.
The same with the rest. “Stonemasonry” is a job, “stonemasons” are the people who do that job. At least the question could have been “Which job categories are exposed to GPT?”.
“High exposure: Mathematicians”. Mmm… wait, wait. Didn’t you say that “Science skills” and “Critical thinking skills” were “Low Exposure”, in the previous question?
Icanhazcheezeburger? 🤣
(Just to be clear, I’m not making fun of people who do any of the specialized, difficult, and often risky jobs mentioned above. I’m making fun of the fact that the infographic is so randomly and unexplainably specific in some points)
Math requires insight that a language model cannot posess
Amen to that! Good maths & science teachers have struggled for decades (if not centuries) so that students understand what they’re doing and don’t simply give answers based on some words or symbols they see in questions [there are also bad teachers who promote this instead]. Because on closer inspection such answers always collapse. And now comes chatGPT that does exactly that instead – and collapses in the same way – and gets glorified.
Amen to what you say on infographic content as well 😂
Does anybody know if such a collapse would happen instantaneous or more gradual? With the massive amount of water in motion it feels like it would take a long time to stop, or are fluids behaving differently?
When I used to run simulations, a current of the size of the Gulf Stream could be turned on (with winds and Earth’s rotation), from nothing, in around 400 years (see p. 68). Then it maintained steadily. But turning off or changing in important ways can happen much faster. I’d like to know as well. There should be open-access articles in that journal about this.
They can setup arbitrary rules or ban you without any rules. It’s their service,
Indeed this shows the change in meaning that “service” has undergone in the past 10 or maybe 20 years. Before, the very notion of “service” was that this kind of events could not happen – otherwise it wasn’t a “service”. Reliability and reliance were integral part of the definition of “service”.
Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive....
Peer review, as the name says, is review, not “acceptance”. At least in principle, its goal is to help you check whether the logic behind your analysis is sound and your experiments have no flaws. That’s why one can find articles with completely antithetical results or theses, both peer-reviewed (and I’m not speaking of purchased pseudo peer-review). Unfortunately it has also become a misused political or business tool, that’s for sure – see “impact factors”, “h-indexes”, and similar bulls**t.
You’re simplifying the situation and dynamics of science too much.
If you submit or share a work that contains a logical or experimental error – it says “2+2=5” somewhere – then yes, your work is not accepted, it’s wrong, and you should discard it too.
But many works have no (visible) logical flaws and present hypotheses within current experimental errors. They explore or propose, or start from, alternative theses. They may be pursued and considered by a minority, even a very small one, while the majority pursues something else. But this doesn’t make them “rejected”. In fact, theories followed by minorities periodically have breakthroughs and suddenly win the majority. This is a vital part of scientific progress. Except in the “2+2=5” case, it’s a matter of majority/minority, but that does emphatically not mean acceptance/rejection.
On top of that, the relationship between “truth” and “majority” is even more fascinatingly complex. Let me give you an example.
Probably (this is just statistics from personal experience) the vast majority of physicists would tell you that “energy is conserved”. A physicist specialized in general relativity, however, would point out that there’s a difference between a conserved quantity (somewhat like a fluid) and a balanced quantity. And energy strictly speaking is balanced, not conserved. This fact, however, creates no tension: if you have a simple conversation – 30 min or a couple hours – with a physicist who stated that “energy is conserved”, and you explain the precise difference, show the equations, examine references together etc, that physicist will understand the clarification and simply agree; no biggie. In situations where that physicist works, this results in little practical difference (but obviously there are situations where the difference is important.)
A guided tour through general relativity (see this discussion by Baez as a starting point, for example) will also convince a physicist who still insisted that energy is conserved even after the balance vs conservation difference was clarified. With energy, either “conservation” makes no sense, or if we want to force a sense, then it’s false. (I myself have been on both sides of this dialogue.)
This shows a paradoxical situation: the majority may state something that’s actually not true – but the majority itself would simply agree with this, if given the chance! This paradoxical discrepancy arises especially today owing to specialization and too little or too slow osmosis among the different specialities, plus excessive simplification in postgraduate education (they present approximate facts as exact). Large groups maintain some statements as facts simply because the more correct point of view is too slow to spread through their community. The energy claim is one example, there are others (thermodynamics and quantum theory have plenty). I think every physicist working in a specialized field is aware about a couple of such majority-vs-truth discrepancies. And this teaches humbleness, openness to reviewing one’s beliefs, and reliance on logic, not “majorities”.
I’m often seeing links to posts on Mastodon and, when I click on them, they open in a Mastodon instance different from mine (I mean from the one where I have my account). This means that I cannot reply, boost, etc, that post....
Not hostile at all, thank you :) Indeed I asked this question because I suspected I was misunderstanding how to use the site. Here’s an example. A comment in this post:
gives a link to a Mastodon post. The link I see is mastodon.world/
If I click that link, I do see the Mastodon post, but it’s on a Mastodon instance different from mine (c.im). If I wanted to boost, favour, or reply, I have to open another tab/window, go to my Mastodon account on my instance, search for that post, and then I can boost etc. Let me know if this is unclear.
Maybe it’s just because I use Mastodon via browser and not a 3rd-party app, as some comments here have suggested.
;TLDR: Is privacy actions on an individual level worth pursuing, when friends and family are doing nothing to strengthen their privacy and when living in a country where my social security number, phone number, and so on, really can not be hidden?...
First claimed successful replication of LK-99 (twitter.com)
"Accomplished by a team at the Huazhong University of Science and Technology and posted 30 minutes ago....
Have you considered IRC?
Now you may be thinking; “That chat program is still around?” or “What the heck is a eye-arr-see?”...
Hello fellow travelors in the high seas (lemmus.org)
What is your EDC (Every Day Carry) for pirating? You can be as specific or as general as you want....
Google tries to defend its Web Environment Integrity (techreport.com)
I’m happy to see this being noticed more and more. Google wants to destroy the open web, so it’s a lot at stake....
Matrix address: how to give it? Should it be protected from spam bots? (matrix.org)
Personal websites often give an email address for contact, as a mailto:[email protected] link. And the address is often obfuscated in a variety of ways to avoid its harvesting by spam bots....
Shakespeare Serif - an experimental font based on the First Folio (shkspr.mobi)
I've built a new font! Thoughts and feedback on my approach very welcome.
ChatGPT broke the Turing test — the race is on for new ways to assess AI (www.nature.com)
An indepth explanation of how LLMs work with an minimum of jargon (open.substack.com)
References & resources about non-RNA-based self-replication? (lemmy.ca)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/2147796...
References & resources about non-RNA-based self-replication? (lemmy.ca)
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/2147796...
References & resources about non-RNA-based self-replication? (lemmy.ca)
We identify “life” with the capability of self-replication plus some other features. In other conditions, for instance on other planets, it could be possible for self-replication to happen in a way different from the RNA/DNA-based one....
New Imaging Technology Provides a Quick Look Inside a Human Being, Radiation Free (scitechdaily.com)
After Raising $235K, Abode Remains Committed to Taking on Adobe (petapixel.com)
TL;DR:...
A peaceful protest against Web Environment Integrity (github.com)
I thought this was kind of a fun way to show discontent with Chromiums added Web Integration - someone made a pull request to simply remove it....
Which URLs keep Google's cookies?
[If this is off-topic for this community, mods please let me know and I’ll delete it.]...
Alternative to Gmail as a backup email address?
I have degoogled myself when it comes to email, running self-hosted email & calendar (not my own server). Did it two years ago, and up to now it has worked very well. I don’t miss anything from Gmail and have all the features it offered, plus some extra ones (like deleting email attachments via an email client – Gmail never...
What are your opinions on this? (media.kbin.social)
Gloomy climate calculation: Scientists predict a collapse of the Atlantic ocean current to happen mid-century (www.sciencedaily.com)
Does anybody know if such a collapse would happen instantaneous or more gradual? With the massive amount of water in motion it feels like it would take a long time to stop, or are fluids behaving differently?
Elon Musk takes over @x Twitter account without paying owner (www.telegraph.co.uk)
Gaussian distro? (lemmy.ca)
This is completely random, but… has a Gaussian distribution ever been made? It’d be absolutely hilarious :D...
The Fall of Stack Overflow (observablehq.com)
Over the past one and a half years, Stack Overflow has lost around 50% of its traffic. This decline is similarly reflected in site usage, with approximately a 50% decrease in the number of questions and answers, as well as the number of votes these posts receive....
Typography & fonts: A community to discuss and share information about typography and fonts. (lemmy.ca)
You can find it at /c/[email protected] or !typography....
How to see posts from another Mastodon instance in a smooth way in one's own instance? (lemmy.ca)
I’m often seeing links to posts on Mastodon and, when I click on them, they open in a Mastodon instance different from mine (I mean from the one where I have my account). This means that I cannot reply, boost, etc, that post....
Is privacy still worth pursuing?
;TLDR: Is privacy actions on an individual level worth pursuing, when friends and family are doing nothing to strengthen their privacy and when living in a country where my social security number, phone number, and so on, really can not be hidden?...