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Cake day: June 11th, 2023

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  • I’m glad it was a misunderstanding. :)

    I think my central point still holds, so I’ll develop on it a bit more.
    Every era has its challenges, and they’re all seemingly insurmountable and possibly the worst thing yet. They’re less significant from our perspective, but we have the benefit of history. We know how the story progressed.
    FDR did have nuclear war looming, they just only knew that meant “bad”, but not the details. It was probably scarier then. We know now that he actually didn’t because the German program was doomed to failure from the start, but they didn’t at the time. They had an economy that was in tatters, a massive food shortage resulting in poorly quantified starvation, the most powerful militaries on the planet conquering Europe and Asia, and so on.
    We’re past the age where the president is likely to be able to inspire unity of purpose like they did then, but that’s always been how you get people to care: someone needs to convince them, or you pay them. In a time if turmoil, you can inspire a lot of purpose by giving people a stable job, and then constantly extolling the virtues of the purpose they’re working towards.

    All that to say, we don’t know the future. You are living through the dawn of a new age. Our problems aren’t insurmountable, we just don’t know how to do it yet. The details are different, but it’s not a new circumstance.
    I’m not an advocate for apathy, but… If it does go wrong, what actually happens? America collapses, war, people die, and turmoil. We can’t know the timeline, and we have 3/4 of those now with the remaining being pretty intangible. The fall of the Roman empire, depending on which fall you’re looking at, took 300 to a 1000 years. To the people living through the fall, it wasn’t even visible. The final fall ushered in the Renaissance, both a period of great development, but also pessimism born out of the proceeding centuries of turmoil (European peace shattered by 200 years of war, famine, several plagues, and an ice age). Injecting masses of fleeing scholars from Constantinople into that propelled things to new heights as their knowledge from the fallen empire blended with the local knowledge.
    We don’t know if the empire is falling, how long it’s going to take, if we’re at the beginning or the end, or if we’re even in the empire. We don’t know if the collapse will trigger a dark age (not actually dark, just “not roman”), or a golden age as waves of American scientists, artists, writers, mathematicians and engineers take their work to China and unintentionally create a fresh blend of perspectives and shared knowledge that builds on both. (Stereotypes aside we have a lot of those).

    People problems are ultimately solvable by people, inevitably by talking.
    History consistently tells us that it’s weird, messy, and long. Live life, be kind. If someone says to do something for other people for moral reasons, it’s a coin toss if they’re doing something history will look kindly upon. If someone says to do something for group identity, they’re probably fine. If they say to do something to someone else for group identity, they’re most likely not. If someone is saying something you’ve heard before but a lot of people are listening and the people in power don’t like it, thiniare probably shifting. Maybe not for the people speaking, but shifting.

    It’s late and I’m rambling as I fall asleep. When I say “you don’t”, I mean that history and society are too much to bend in a deliberate way. Best you can do is the right thing at the time as best you can and not worry too much about your role in the big picture. So few people have a role that sets them at the bend of those forces.

    Also, I’m not too worried about LLMs and social media, fundamentally. People have been saying and believing bizarre shit forever, they just made it easier and faster. The fading lustre of the Internet is just a drift back a bit towards before it, when people just believed stuff and then no one ever corrected them.


  • You don’t. People have always said that about basically every country. What is “cultural decay”? Define “civic duty”. Why is it a problem that people are content? Are we lazier? Are people on average more content now?

    The key lesson is that you can’t force people to care about what you do. Inspire people and they’ll follow you, don’t and they’ll do something else. FDR increased a sense of civic duty by paying people to do civic works.



  • Nope. The answer to number ten is ‘a’.

    Assuming you went with “last”, but that starts with ‘l’, not ‘L’. Each other question also specifies “one this line” where relevant, but not this one. The first word starting with ‘L’ is “Louisiana”.

    The trick of the test is that it’s subjective to the person grading it. I could have also told you that the line drawing one (12) was wrong by just saying it’s not the correct way to do it. Or that 11 was wrong because you didn’t make the number below one million, it’s equal to one million. Or if you crossed off one more zero I’d say you could have gotten fewer by crossing off the 1 at the start. Or that a long string of zeros isn’t a properly formatted number.


  • If there were a practical way to do it, a way to ensure that only those who were well informed on a topic could have a say in it wouldn’t be an issue. The only barrier to voting would be your desire to inform yourself.

    Unfortunately there isn’t, because just about every word in the above sentences can be twisted by someone with illintent.
    The concept isn’t fundamentally flawed, it’s just blocked by insurmountable obstacles.



  • LLMs are prediction tools. What it will produce is a corpus that doesn’t use certain phrases, or will use others more heavily, but will have the same aggregate statistical “shape”.

    It’ll also be preposterously hard for them to work out, since the data it was trained on always has someone eventually disagreeing with the racist fascist bullshit they’ll get it to focus on. Eventually it’ll start saying things that contradict whatever it was supposed to be saying, because statistically eventually some manner of contrary opinion is voiced.
    They won’t be able to check the entire corpus for weird stuff like that, or delights like MLK speeches being rewriten to be anti-integration, so the next version will have the same basic information, but passed through a filter that makes it sound like a drunk incel talking about asian women.


  • The US has a water system effectively comparable to the ones across Europe, FYI. That includes lead levels, since it wasn’t just the US that used lead pipes.

    In most circumstances lead pipes are safe to replace with different materials as part of routine maintenance. It’s only very notable incidents where things go wrong that have driven a push for greater haste, since it highlighted the consequences of things going wrong.



  • Fundamentally, I agree with you.

    The page being referenced

    Because the phrase “Wikipedians discussed ways that AI…” Is ambiguous I tracked down the page being referenced. It could mean they gathered with the intent to discuss that topic, or they discussed it as a result of considering the problem.

    The page gives me the impression that it’s not quite “we’re gonna use AI, figure it out”, but more that some people put together a presentation on how they felt AI could be used to address a broad problem, and then they workshopped more focused ways to use it towards that broad target.

    It would have been better if they had started with an actual concrete problem, brainstormed solutions, and then gone with one that fit, but they were at least starting with a problem domain that they thought it was a applicable to.

    Personally, the problems I’ve run into on Wikipedia are largely low traffic topics where the content is too much like someone copied a textbook into the page, or just awkward grammar and confusing sentences.
    This article quickly makes it clear that someone didn’t write it in an encyclopedia style from scratch.


  • A page detailing the the AI-generated summaries project, called “Simple Article Summaries,” explains that it was proposed after a discussion at Wikimedia’s 2024 conference, Wikimania, where “Wikimedians discussed ways that AI/machine-generated remixing of the already created content can be used to make Wikipedia more accessible and easier to learn from.” Editors who participated in the discussion thought that these summaries could improve the learning experience on Wikipedia, where some article summaries can be quite dense and filled with technical jargon, but that AI features needed to be cleared labeled as such and that users needed an easy to way to flag issues with “machine-generated/remixed content once it was published or generated automatically.”

    The intent was to make more uniform summaries, since some of them can still be inscrutable.
    Relying on a tool notorious for making significant errors isn’t the right way to do it, but it’s a real issue being examined.

    In thermochemistry, an exothermic reaction is a “reaction for which the overall standard enthalpy change ΔH⚬ is negative.”[1][2] Exothermic reactions usually release heat. The term is often confused with exergonic reaction, which IUPAC defines as “… a reaction for which the overall standard Gibbs energy change ΔG⚬ is negative.”[2] A strongly exothermic reaction will usually also be exergonic because ΔH⚬ makes a major contribution to ΔG⚬. Most of the spectacular chemical reactions that are demonstrated in classrooms are exothermic and exergonic. The opposite is an endothermic reaction, which usually takes up heat and is driven by an entropy increase in the system.

    This is a perfectly accurate summary, but it’s not entirely clear and has room for improvement.

    I’m guessing they were adding new summaries so that they could clearly label them and not remove the existing ones, not out of a desire to add even more summaries.



  • Eh, there’s an intrinsic amount of information about the system that can’t be moved into a configuration file, if the platform even supports them.

    If your code is tuned to make movement calculations with a deadline of less than 50 microseconds and you have code systems for managing magnetic thrust vectoring and the timing of a rotating detonation engine, you don’t need to see the specific technical details to work out ballpark speed and movement characteristics.
    Code is often intrinsically illustrative of the hardware it interacts with.

    Sometimes the fact that you’re doing something is enough information for someone to act on.

    It’s why artefacts produced from classified processes are assumed to be classified until they can be cleared and declassified.
    You can move the overt details into a config and redact the parts of the code that use that secret information, but that still reveals that there is secret code because the other parts of the system need to interact with it, or it’s just obvious by omission.
    If payload control is considered open, 9/10 missiles have open guidance control, and then one has something blacked out and no references to a guidance system, you can fairly easily deduce that that missile has a guidance system that’s interesting with capabilities likely greater that what you know about.

    Eschewing security through obscurity means you shouldn’t rely on your enemies ignorance, and you should work under the assumption of hostile knowledge. It doesn’t mean you need to seek to eliminate obscurity altogether.





  • Probably wasn’t edited because it wasn’t a deliberate change. People were the ones to write the texts and stories, but not a person.
    Telling the story you were told as you understand it will introduce some drift, as will making the jump to writing it down. Translation also introduces points where meaning can drift, since you have to write down what you understand the text to read, and you can be unclear on both sides.

    People making a good faith effort try not to intentionally embellish their important texts, even if parts seem to contrasict.

    Judaism and the old testament have had a lot of the quirks stick out so much because there are strict rules about preserving the integrity of the stories, once they got written down. Not from memory, only from another scroll created in this fashion and no other sources, only a specific font with specific text alignment, copy letter by letter and read aloud as you go, and then you can check the number of letters as you go to verify.
    Other religions over time haven’t had as much of a focus on textual preservation, so the stories can drift to match with the change in beliefs.


  • It’s not so much an alternative meaning of a translation as one part of the mythos was written a millennia before the other.
    Early the-religion-that-would-become-judaism was pretty openly polytheistic.
    Over time Yahweh went from being the god of the mountain to the king of the gods, to the only one that mattered to worship, to the only one at all.

    It’s entirely unsurprising that there are bits that allude to different phases of their worship. This isn’t even the most blatant. Satan? Holy Trinity? Host of angels?


  • I mean, there’s even other godlike characters in the Bible. Satan may not be the most powerful deity in the book but he’s canonically a deity. Same for angels and their ilk. Hell, even the later bits struggle to keep a lid on the numbers, jumping through hoops to make the claim that three deities is actually one.

    Way back when, the religion that turned into Judaism was openly polytheistic, and simply held that Yahweh, the king of the pantheon and God of war and weather, was the only god worthy of worship.
    Over time Yahweh merged with an adjoining religions god El, and started the transition to being the only god, instead of just the only worthy god.
    This transition happened literally a thousand years after many of the earliest texts were written, so there’s a lot of verbiage where the deity explains that the other gods aren’t important, which is later clarified to them not existing, or really just being servants and not at all lower tier gods in a complex pantheon.
    It’s why there’s so many weird turns of phrase, beyond it being thousands of years old and translated a lot.
    “El” being a word that was used for both “a god” and “this god” didn’t help. “The high god divided the world for all the gods, and our god God the only God and creator of all was given our land as he’s the high god and father of God the only God of the sky and also that mountain”.

    Different parts of the world took a lot of the same root deities and went a different direction with them. There’s a degree of overlap between aspects of ancient Greek religion and the Abrahamic religions because parts of each of them came from a common root. Just one mushed then together and made the grammar extra confusing. “King sky god”, “water god”, “afterlife god” being the children of mother and father cosmic creator gods. Also a big sea snakes who are up to no good. That one had legs, so to speak.


  • I feel like I could be persuaded either way, but I lean towards allowing them during sentencing.
    I don’t think “it’s an appeal to emotion” is a compelling argument in that context because it’s no longer about establishing truth like the trial is, but about determining punishment and restitution.

    Justice isn’t just about the offender or society, it’s also indelibly tied to the victim. Giving them a voice for how they, as the wronged party, would see justice served seems important for it’s role in providing justice, not just the rote application of law.

    Obviously you can’t just have the victim decide, but the judges entire job is to ensure fairness, often in the face of strong feelings and contentious circumstances.

    Legitimately interested to hear why your opinion is what it is in more detail.