Rhaedas

joined 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

That scientist must not know how much mass hits the atmosphere each day from meteors.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago

The 21st century DeLorean, only no one bothered making a time machine out of it.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 7 months ago (1 children)

If anything I think the development of actual AGI will come first and give us insight on why some organic mass can do what it does. I've seen many AI experts say that one reason they got into the field was to try and figure out the human brain indirectly. I've also seen one person (I can't recall the name) say we already have a form of rudimentary AGI existing now - corporations.

[–] [email protected] 62 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (31 children)

LLMs are just very complex and intricate mirrors of ourselves because they use our past ramblings to pull from for the best responses to a prompt. They only feel like they are intelligent because we can't see the inner workings like the IF/THEN statements of ELIZA, and yet many people still were convinced that was talking to them. Humans are wired to anthropomorphize, often to a fault.

I say that while also believing we may yet develop actual AGI of some sort, which will probably use LLMs as a database to pull from. And what is concerning is that even though LLMs are not "thinking" themselves, how we've dived head first ignoring the dangers of misuse and many flaws they have is telling on how we'll ignore avoiding problems in AI development, such as the misalignment problem that is basically been shelved by AI companies replaced by profits and being first.

HAL from 2001/2010 was a great lesson - it's not the AI...the humans were the monsters all along.

[–] [email protected] 50 points 8 months ago (8 children)

A recent article asking the same thing on Tampa Bay's activities

While there doesn't seem to be obvious red flags of harm, something doesn't feel right to me about dumping chemicals into the environment that eventually break down. The article says the company making this particular dye warns about it in higher quantities or letting it become concentrated in places downstream, and wearing protective equipment when handling the larger amounts. How much of that is only legalize to protect from misuse vs. actual tested issues?

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago

Long before. Even in 1930 the eugenics-motivated creator Carl Brigham recanted his original conclusions only years ago that had led to the development of the SAT, but by then the colleges had totally invested in a quick and easy way to score students, even if it was inaccurate. Change is hard, but I think the bigger influence here was money since it hadn't been around that long at that point.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 8 months ago

When I learned that even World War I was sparked by oil grabs, I was briefly surprised, then realized, of course it was.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Emphasis on "plastic is often not". Only PET (#1 on the symbol) can truly be recycled into new material, and usually it's tossed in with other materials and contaminated enough to make that not possible. There is the reusable path, where plastics are remolded into other purposes, but that's not "really" recycling and likely ends there for that form to eventually degrade and be trashed.

So just make more things with PET and recycle better, right? I'm guessing there's limitations on what PET can be used for given its characteristics vs. other plastics, and it is still cheaper to just get new material for new PET rather than recycle. So of course companies are going to go that route.

The interesting thing that I learned not so long ago from the YT channel Climate Town is that people see the triangle symbol with the plastic type number inside and assume it's recyclable, since that's the recycle symbol. But it's not that symbol, it's just designed similar to give that impression.

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