Yes siree, the excitement never stops!

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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: December 7th, 2023

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  • As a person who used to work at MSFT:

    I can almost guarantee you there are a whoooole lot of people who have made their careers basically championing the very old chat bot model, and they are probably now either directly in charge of the OpenAI stuff, or at the very least ‘stakeholders’.

    They will do nonsense corporate bullshit to make them selves seem very important, never really wrong about anything, and this will result in extremely slow and gradual actual adoption of the GPT stuff, all the while stressing all the reasons their old stupid bullshit can’t be seriously modified because of reasons that have to do with synergizing with other MSFT products.

    The process of the company gradually figuring out that none of that matters when it comes to producing something that is actually better will be slow, painful and incremental.

    Itll probably take half a decade.

    For reference, as an aside, I was doing a contract of DBA kinda stuff when they unveiled Windows 8. We had to dogfood it, ie, the MSFT process of everyone working at MSFT has to beta test everything else MSFT is making.

    Well… Windows 8 initially broke basically everything we were using to actually do DBA.

    I got angry and pointed out that Windows 8 had removed the ‘windows’ from Windows. The initial version was soley the tablet based design, only allowing a maximum of two ‘panes’ open at a time.

    We had to wait about a month for the various problems with SQL Manager Studio to be ironed out, and for them to basically allow the option to just use the more or less Windows 7 desktop for you know actually working on our PCs.

    Point of me mentioning this is: I saw how ludicrous this all was, and was frequently verbally abused by our team lead for pointing it out.

    Youre not allowed to go against the grain at MSFT unless youre a big dog. And… you become a big dog by bullying people and vastly overstating the necessity of what your team is doing.

    The culture there is downright psycho and sociopathic.


  • MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they’ve just slapped a bunch of extra ‘features’ (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda’s game engine.

    Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.

    The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.






  • The Radcliffe Wave formation is a bunch of gas that is apparently, wiggling, in incredibly huge time and distance scales, like a sinusoidal wave.

    So, imagine very, very long ago, before the Milky Way formed, you have a particular dense gaseous region/formation.

    Dense gaseous regions tend to give birth to new stars. This region did so, and then one of them supernova’d.

    Next, the Milky Way ended up forming in the void created by this supernova.

    Then, this dense gaseous region was basically incorporated into the Milky Way (seems like one of its spiral arms) over another absurdly long period of time.

    But, for some reason, it is wiggling, in a manner that dense gaseous regions have not been observed to behave in.

    Thats the best I can do here, I am not an astrophysicist, though I did take two quarters of intro level astronomy in college lol.

    Probably worthwhile to note that the article says that their data ‘suggests’ not ‘shows’ or ‘proves’ the bit about the supernova clearing the Milky Way void.

    To actually prove that would encompass, among many other things, running the clock backward on star orbits/trajectories over billions of years using extremely complicated models and mountains of data I am absolutely not qualified to comment on.

    Im just trying to very broadly explain the chain of events here if this supernova really did cause the void the Milky Way formed in.

    Anyway, other fun fact: Our Milky Way Galaxy is not actually a pure spiral Galaxy as it has so often been depicted for quite a long time.

    It is actually a barred spiral galaxy. Basically, instead of just swirly arms, there are actually short, more or less straight parts to the arms as they emanate out from the center, which then begin to curve into spirally arms.

    Basically, Milky Way looks less like this:

    And more like this:


  • Sats that beam data to other sats do not have to worry about the atmosphere, nor are they using anywhere near the kind of power involved to fry the other sats. Its orders of magnitude greater power for that, which means more more weight and thus launch cost.

    Beam decoherence is a /huge/ problem when trying to go from ground to low earth orbit.

    You would again end up needing a pretty significant power supply along with exceptionally precise tracking.

    Im talking military grade equipment here, massive expensive and complex. Not something you could whip up in your garage, unless you worked at it for a decade, and if you did that, youd end up in jail.

    I really want to stress how precise your tracking needs to be. Assuming you precisely know the orbital trajectory, your /exact/ location, the rotation of the earth… you would need to have a mechanical system capable of sustained tracking to… what like a few (roughly 3 by updated calculations) arc seconds, something like that, to hit something /and stay on target for probably 30 minutes/ that is 120 miles away, roughly the size of an SUV

    EDIT: Fixed up my numbers, I was thinking in terms of the wrong unit.

    Point is… this approach requires an astounding degree of tracking precision that is basically impossible unless you are a defense contractor.

    Tracking a thing this accurately alone is practically impossible. And I mean that literally. There is no practical way you can do this, unless you consider starting up your own engineering firm to solve this, and you are allowed to use a whole bunch of tech with current security classifications, unless you consider that practical.

    If you do, hi Elon Musk, didnt realize you were on lemmy.




  • Are you talking about launching your own satellite with the ability to aim a laser at another satellite while in orbit, or are you talking about attempting to point a ground based laser at something moving at roughly Mach 24 or faster?

    Beam decoherence is a pretty big problem when you are lasering through the entire atmosphere, and both scenarios require an astounding degree of precision.







  • No, I am not welcoming an artist apocalypse, that would obviously be bad.

    I am noting that I find it amusing to me on a level I already acknowledged was petty and personal that many, many mediocre artists who are absolutely awful to other people socially would have their little cults of fandom dampened by the fact that a machine can more or less to what they do, and their cult leader status is utterly unwarranted.

    I do not have a nice and neat solution to the problem you bring up.

    I do believe you are being somewhat hyperbolic, but, so was I.

    Yep, being an artist in a capitalist hellscape world with modern AI algorithms is not a very reliable way to earn a good living and you are not likely to be have such a society produce many artists who do not have either a lot of free time or money, or you get really lucky.

    At this point we are talking about completely reorganizing society in fairly large and comprehensive ways to achieve significant change on this front.

    Also this problem applies to far, far more people than just artists. One friend of mine wanted her dream job as running a little bakery! Had to set her prices too high, couldn’t afford a good location, supply chain problems, taxes, didn’t work out.

    Maybe someone’s passion is teaching! Welp, that situation is all fucked too.

    My point here is: Ok, does anyone have an actual plan that can actually transform the world into somewhere that allow the average person to be far more likely to be able to live the life they want?

    Would that plan have more to do with the minutiae of regulating a specific kind of ever advancing and ever changing technology in some kind of way that will be irrelevant when the next disruptive tech proliferates in a few years, or maybe more like an actual total overhaul of our entire society from the ground up?


  • Well, off the top of my head:

    Whole Brain Emulation, attempting to model a human brain as physically accurately as possible inside a computer.

    Genetic Iteration (not the correct term for it but it escapes me at the moment), where you set up a simulated environment for digital actors, then simulate quasi-neurons, quasi-body parts dictated by quasi-dna, in a way that mimics actual biological natural selection and evolution, and then you run the simulation millions of times until your digital creature develops a stable survival strategy.

    Similar approaches to this have been used to do things like teach an AI humanoid how to develop its own winning martial arts style via many many iterations, starting from not even being able to stand up, much less do anything to an opponent.

    Both of these approaches obviously have drawbacks and strengths, and could possibly be successful at far more than what they have achieved to date, or maybe not, due to known or existing problems, but neither of them rely on a training set of essentially the entirety of all content on the internet.


  • It meets almost none of the conceptions of intelligence at all.

    It is not capable of abstraction.

    It is capable of brute force understanding similarities between various images and text, and then presenting a wide array of text and images containing elements that reasonably well emulate a wide array of descriptors.

    This is convincing to many people that it has a large knowledge set.

    But that is not abstraction.

    It is not capable of logic.

    It is only capable of again brute force analyzing an astounding amount of content and then producing essentially the consensus view on answers to common logical problems.

    Ask it any complex logical question that has never been answered on the internet before and it will output irrelevant or inaccurate nonsense, likely just finding an answer to a similar but not identical question.

    The same goes for reasoning, planning, critical thinking and problem solving.

    If you ask it to do any of these things in a highly specific situation even giving it as much information as possible, if your situation is novel or even simply too complex, it will again just spit out a non sense answer that is basically going to be very inadequate and faulty because it will just draw elements together from the closest things it has been trained on, nearly certainly being contradictory or entirely dubious due to being unable to account for a particularly uncommon constraint, or constraints that are very uncommonly faced simultaneously.

    It is not creative, in the sense of being able to generate something novel or new.

    All it does is plagiarize elements of things that are popular and have many examples of and then attempt mix them together, but it will never generate a new art style or a new genre of music.

    It does not even really infer things, is not really capable of inference.

    It simply has a massive, astounding data set, and the ability to synthesize elements from this in a convincing way.

    In conclusion, you have no idea what you are talking about, and you yourself literally are one of the people who has failed the reverse Turing Test, likely because you are not very well very versed in the technicals of how this stuff actually works, thus proving my point that you simply believe it is AI because of its branding, with no critical thought applied whatsoever.