For most software, iteration starts getting diminishing returns only if it’s approaching feature completeness and no bugs. LLMs are plateauing well before they became super genius job stealers like they were supposed to, and it’s going to take a major breakthrough to see any significant improvement.
Those images in the mirror are already perfect replicas of us, we need to be ready for when they figure out how to move on their own and get out from behind the glass or we’ll really be screwed. If you give my “”“non-profit”“” a trillion dollars we’ll get right to work on the research into creating more capable mirror monsters so that we can control them instead.
Fan art is generally protected because of a rule called “fair use”, which allows people to use copyrighted work without permission. For example, if you briefly quote a book, the author won’t have success if they go after you for copying from their book, even though you clearly did. Generally speaking, a person making fan art and not selling it is going to be protected under fair use. The law wants creators to have control of the thing they created, but we all live in a shared culture and we all deserve to participate in the art we experience, so there’s some wiggle room, and this has been the case long before AI was a thing.
What these AI companies are doing, on the other hand… well, it hasn’t really been tested in court yet, but they’re doing a lot more than single images or brief quotes, and they’re doing it for money, so they’ll likely have some work to do.
Ah, I didn’t see that edit, apologies, had the page loaded for a while before replying.
Isn’t that the same leverage that the earliest labor unions used because it was all they had? It seems to fit very well, actually. There’s a smaller but more powerful group in charge of them, workers get little to no direct say in company policy or who they are managed by and have to hope they’re listened to when asked how things are going. There certainly isn’t a second C-suite waiting in the wings to be put into power if the first one disappoints, the current powers-that-be would be insane to allow something as chaotic as that. If the CEO’s got a good track record of listening, the pay’s pretty good and satisfaction is high, and they’re kept in line with picket lines when it’s necessary, is this company an extension of the working class like China’s government is?
I’m comparing and contrasting quite a bit with my new job, which fits much more closely with what my idea of something worker-controlled would be. It’s fully employee owned, so profits go either back into the business or into our pockets as bonuses. There’s as little hierarchy as possible, the closest thing to a manager isn’t ever going to “put” you on a project, you’re free to find one that you like and wants you to join. Company decisions involve everyone equally, and there’s freedom to loudly speak your mind about policies and procedures if you disagree with them. That’s closer to the country I’d want to live in, not the one where my influence is akin to answering corporate surveys and getting to choose which of 3 approved managers I want to work under, or go on strike if I’m really not happy.
Right, that’s a good example of it going the way you describe, and I’m curious what would’ve happened if the government hadn’t folded. If the people really are making the decisions, they would get their way eventually, what does that look like?
But this doesn’t answer my question, the only mechanism for people’s input seems to be elections and polling, and it conspicuously omits the fact that elections only allow party-approved candidates. Maybe the powers-that-be have a great track record of listening and respecting the will of the people, and are beloved by all as a result, but that doesn’t actually put the people in control, it just means the ones actually in control are being nice. When the government and the people have a fundamental disagreement about the path forward, what piece am I missing that makes the government the one to back down?
I’m trying to get to how it’s democratic and worker-controlled in your eyes because it’s hard to see for me, as people don’t seem to get to choose much in the system as designed. What’s the mechanism for average people to change a government policy that they disagree with? If the party does start to lose touch with what the workers need or start working against their interests, how do the workers course-correct it?
Yeah, those don’t count, if they’re required to align with the party then they’re just subcommittees or something, not actual political parties.
I promise I’m keeping my mind open, but all of these answers seem indistinguishable from authoritarian rule, which was kinda my original point. The same organization has to rule in perpetuity because foreign influence would subvert the interests of the country if there were other options, quite lucky that they locked in the right one. Practically all one billion people are aligned on this and agree that this system is working for them, but no, they will not be allowing that to be tested at the ballot box or in a media environment where people can speak their mind, it might all fall apart despite how unified they are. It’s a party controlled by the workers and acting for their interests, with total control of the levers of power, they just felt like keeping some ultra-rich and ultra-powerful folks around for a laugh, not because they’re the ones who actually have the power.
Honestly, shit’s so bad in the west that I’m kinda open to the idea that maybe a totalitarian government that recognizes it needs to keep workers decently happy to allow them to rule is, in fact, better than what we’ve got going on now, but it’s really hard to go as far as saying that it’s an active, ongoing, consensual choice by the workers to never give themselves a choice.
The PRC is officially organized under what the CCP terms a “system of multi-party cooperation and political consultation under the leadership of the CCP,” in which the minor parties must accept the leadership of the CCP.
I’m in awe of your ability to read minds, because that was not at all the vibe I got when I was actually in that conversation.
But it’s also a ban on other socialist parties, not just capitalist ones, and it plays directly into the talking point that socialism is an authoritarian system that is imposed on people, not chosen on its merits. If the CCP really has enjoyed resounding, unwavering support from the proletariat for 75 years straight, why appear so weak by never allowing any competition whatsoever?
Okay, but we are talking about a country where you aren’t allowed to form a political party that opposes the CCP, right? How can we tell the difference between “hell yeah, my country is making my life great” and “there is exactly one answer to this survey question that will not get me in trouble”? I always try to keep in mind that I am not immune to propaganda, but I’ve personally known Chinese people who have very explicitly declined to offer any criticism of the Chinese government or go against the party line, even in private conversation, because they didn’t want trouble.
My characterization would be that there’s a spectrum here:
That first side of the spectrum is pretty easy to pin down. It has little to no metaphor or abstraction, and the pointy tip of this side is no metaphor at all, just writing machine code and piping it directly into the CPU. A higher level language will let you gloss over some details like registers, memory management, multithreading, maybe pretend you’re manipulating little objects or mathematical functions instead of bits on a wire, but overall you are directing the computer to do computer things using computer language, and forced to think like a computer and learn what computers can and cannot do. This is, of course, the most powerful way to use a computer but is also completely inaccessible to almost everybody.
The second, I’d link together as all being software with a metaphor that is not particularly related to computing itself, but to something more real world. People edited music by physically splicing tapes together, an audio editor does an idealized version of that. Typewriters existed, and a word processor basically simulates that experience. Winamp wasn’t much more than a boom box and a sleeve of CDs. There is usually a deliberate physicality and real-world grounding to the user’s mental model of the software, even if it is doing things that would be impossible if the metaphor were literal. You don’t need to use code, but you also don’t get anything code-like out of it.
No-code is in between. It’s intended for a similar audience as the latter category, who want a clear, easy-to-understand mental model that doesn’t require a computer science degree, but it tries to enable that audience to perform code-like tasks. Spreadsheets are the original example of this; although they originate as a metaphor for paper balance sheets, the functions available in formulas fundamentally alter the metaphor to basically “imagine if you had a sheet of paper that could do literal magic” and at that point you’re basically just describing a computer with a screen. Everything in a spreadsheet is very tactile, it’s easy to see where your data is, but when you need to, you can dip into a light programming environment that regular people can still make work. In general, this is the differentiator for “no code” apps: enabling non-coders to dip their toes into modifying program behavior, scripting tasks, and building software. They’re limited to what the tool provides, but the tool is trying to give them the power that actual coding would provide.
I’d never thought of WordPress as low-code, but I think that fits. Websites go beyond paper or magazines, and WordPress allows people to do things that would otherwise require code and databases and web servers and so on.
Safari on iOS has always had some pretty strict limits on what extensions can do. For example, content blockers don’t get to run code on the pages you browse, it’s more like they give the browser a list of what type of thing to block when you install and configure it, then when you’re browsing, the extension isn’t even doing anything, it’s just the browser using the list. Obviously that’s more limiting, there might be ads that are best dealt with by running a bit of code, so it makes sense that they’d consider it “lite”. (The benefit of those limits is that ad blocking extensions can’t run amok and kill your phone’s battery since the browser’s handling it by itself.)
I would guess it’s web requests made during a chat session, e.g. the user asks about kayaks and the AI searches and fetches some pages to put into its context before answering. That’s not really scraping, it’s data being used in the moment in response to a user request, closer to what a “user agent” has always meant in the web world. A crawler would be crawling the site, systematically trying to follow every link and collect what’s there with little to no human involvement.
That’s a decently rational response you’ve described, though. If you were really at immediate risk, you’d probably know it, especially with an alarm going off to get you looking for signs of danger. And it’s usually better to have a lazy, skeptical evacuation than a panicked stampede. Schools do fire drills to check the alarms, sure, but it’s also important to make them a routine thing that all the kids know how to handle.
The tokenization is a low-level implementation detail, it shouldn’t affect an LLM’s ability to do basic reasoning. We don’t do arithmetic by counting how many neurons we can feel firing in our brain, we have higher level concepts of numbers, and LLMs are supposed to have something similar. Plus, in the “”“thinking”“” models, you’ll see them break up words into individual letters or even write them out in a numbered list, which should break the tokens up into individual letters as well.
Ah, yes, I see that you know your judo well. Good one.
I am deeply troubled by the way that AIs slip right past peoples’ defenses and convince them of things that are absolutely not true. Not just things like the AI psychosis that some people have been driven into, not just the hallucinations or overly fawning over terrible ideas, it goes so much further than our monkey brains can understand. These things do not think, they do not have feelings, they don’t have motivations, they don’t have morals or values, no sense of right or wrong, they are, quite literally, word prediction machines that are selecting their responses semi-randomly. And yet, even people who know this to be the case cannot stop themselves from anthropomorphizing the AI. All of our human instincts scream “this is a person!” when we interact with them, and with that comes an assumption of values, morals, thoughts, and feelings, none of which are there. There is a fundamental mismatch between the human mental model and the reality of the software, and that is harmful, even dangerous. We will give benefit of the doubt to them, we will believe their explanations about “why” they “chose” to say or do what they did, and we will repeatedly make the same fundamental mistakes because we want to believe a total lie.
And that’s not even getting in to the harm when they are working properly, encouraging us to outsource our thinking and creativity to a service that charges monthly. I’m seriously worried that kids in school now are going to have their learning stunted terribly, it’s just so easy to have any and all homework done in a matter of minutes without learning a single thing.
That “unacceptable and insensitive” comment was, in reality, an entirely reasonable take on how Charlie Kirk directly stoked the fires that ended up taking his life. They’re sending a clear message that you are not allowed to speak honestly about any of the context surrounding the event, and can only share an opinion if it shows Kirk in a positive light, since apparently neutral or worse is not allowed.