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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: May 29th, 2024

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  • They might be generated for the purpose of creating adversarial images that appear relatively normal to a human but confuse AI image recognition. You can see an additional layer of weird patterns on top of them too.

    IMO this is not a particularly annoying captcha though. I’ve had some where the text instructions are so indirect and strangely phrased that it’s not even clear what you’re supposed to do.




  • Hallucinations are an intrinsic part of how LLMs work. OpenAI, literally the people with the most to lose if LLMs aren’t useful, has admitted that hallucinations are a mathematical inevitability, not something that can be engineered around. On top of that, its been shown that for things like mathematical proof finding switching to more sophisticated models doesn’t make them more accurate, it just makes their arguments more convincing.

    Now, you might say “oh but you can have a human in the loop to check the AIs work”, but for programming tasks its already been found that using LLMs makes programmers less productive. If a human needs to go over everything an AI generates, and reason about it anyway, that’s not really saving time or effort. Now consider that as you make the LLM more complex, having it generate longer and more complicated blocks of text, its errors also become harder to detect. Is that not just shuffling around the necessary human brainpower for a task instead of reducing it?

    So, in what field is this sort of thing useful? At one point I was hopeful that LLMs could be used in text summarization, but if I have to read the original text anyway to make sure that I haven’t been fed some highly convincing falsehood then what is the point?

    Currently I’m of the opinion that we might be able to use specialized LLMs as a heuristic to narrow the search tree for things like SAT solvers and answer set generators, but I don’t have much optimism for other use cases.




  • Isn’t this an interesting property of market economies?

    Software and silicon chip manufacturing has literally nothing to do with food production and yet a ‘disaster’ (I.E. going back to the status quo as of a few years ago) in that industry will affect your ability to eat. Nothing has happened to the farmers or their fields, or to the logistics system that moves food from one place to another, and yet somehow things suddenly can’t find their way from where they are produced to where they are needed.

    Remember, this is supposed to be the most efficient way to allocate resources.




  • Car engines, for probably the past 100 years, have always been advertised based on their peak power rating, not what they can produce continuously. Cars are not designed to have their accelerator pedals floored for hours on end, nor is this even possible to do, as you’d eventually hit a curve and need to slow down.

    This is especially the case for high performance vehicles, which usually have more demanding maintenance requirements just from normal operation, let alone from being abused like that.




  • I thought you were talking about just opening the drive to use it from the file browser.

    I do actually have a drive I use for automated backups, but I just used the GUI to change the automount setting:

    I guess that’s a little bit inconvenient, but its like 3 clicks, adding a step to something I had to do to set up some other software. Its not any more complicated than disabling sticky keys in Windows.

    Except we’re not comparing it to disabling sticky keys, we’re comparing it to needing needing to follow an entire page’s worth of instructions, pressing secret key combinations and entering commands into the terminal, just so you can use your computer without it phoning home to the mothership. And that’s on top of the fact that the instructions are probably going to be different in a year since microsoft is deliberately fucking with you.





  • It’s a tool, useful in some contexts and not useful in others.

    In my opinion this is a thought terminating cliche in programming and the IT industry in general. It can be, and is, said in response to any sentiment about any thing.

    Now, saying what sort of context you think something should or should not be used in, and what qualities of that thing make it desirable/undesirable in that context, could lead to fruitful discussion. But just “use the right tool for the right job” doesn’t contribute anything.


  • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zonetoScience Memes@mander.xyzplumpkins
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    1 month ago

    Suppose the pumpkin plant could be bred or genetically engineered to retain the desirable taste of its fruits even at very large sizes.

    Would this even improve the caloric yield per acre? Or would the bottleneck be the available energy from photosynthesis? In other words do giant pumpkins take a proportionally larger amount of leaf surface area, such that you’re not actually getting any more pumpkin mass per acre than with many smaller pumpkins?

    As I understand it normal pumpkins are already pretty high up there in terms of caloric yield, so perhaps there’s not much more room to push it.