Tootfinder

Buddhist Ways of Being Human in the Age of AI
https://ift.tt/6imDOHM
Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies 8.1 is now available Intellect is happy to…
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@… Hello, Evan.
We're considering ways to prevent the URL of an ActivityPub Note object from being a URL of a completely unrelated third party, as this can be undesirable.
Do you know of any resources that describe the specifications …

Buddhist Ways of Being Human in the Age of AI
https://ift.tt/Hr6BG3D
Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies 8.1 is now available Intellect is happy to…
via Input 4 RELCFP https://

RE: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/116788242133509166
It's inherent to LLMs that they produce garbage—it's not fixable, because text generation based on statistics has no concept of right or wrong or true or false.
Therefore it's only (partially) useful in a small subset of use cases that have other ways of enforcing veracity—namely programming, by literally looping over itself until the code is syntactically correct, it doesn't call non-existing APIs and the expected output for a specific input happens.*
Even then the code may 1. only cover the specific test cases asked of the LLM and fail for others or 2. the LLM may get stuck in an endless loop if it can't get the code to run or work.
*The programming use case also has a lot of other intrinsic and extrinsic factors that make it work better than most other text generation applications; for example a large amount of training data of mostly working code and that the languages being generated are both many orders of magnitude simpler in structure than human languages and mathematically unambiguous.**
**Except for Perl of course

Just finished "The Terraformers" by Annalee Newitz (@…). It was recommended as a "solarpunk" book, and I'm currently on a quest to find more speculative fiction as good as Le Guin or Butler, so I was eager to dig in. Having tagged the author (hi) I'll try to be polite here, but I'll admit I was disappointed.
Newitz clearly has a powerful imagination and there's lots of great stuff in the book, but it's not at all pushing boundaries in terms of imagining future societies. I think the message and intent was good in a lot of places, but off or self-contradictory in others. I absolutely adore the relatively small point made at the end about revolutions being complicated and not boiling down to heroes and battles, but despite the book's attempt to avoid that, I think it still falls into that pattern. Without too many spoilers, the way that some big problems are resolved near the end leans too much on a legal framework without questioning how it's enforced, and that resolution then means that a few heroic acts are enough to tip the balance, which undermines the point about messy histories.
The biggest contradiction of the book to my mind though is with a central theme. The book really explores a world in which "anyone of any species can be a person, as long as we just bioengineer them to be intelligent enough," and it tries to make a point about how engineering limited intelligences is cruel. At several points characters comment about how personhood shouldn't depend on intelligence. There's even a brief quote about how maybe rivers could be people... But... the point could have been "anyone can be a person, regardless of intelligence." This would have made for much more interesting philosophical territory to explore IMO (how do we then bound personhood; how do we reconcile predator/prey relations between persons, etc.). These are also questions that the indigenous traditions Newitz draws on (and consulted about, as mentioned in the acknowledgements) has interesting answers for, but we don't get to explore them through Newitz' world, and because the question of personhood regresses to the question of intelligence, it feels like the moral philosophy of the ERT folks isn't any better than the "InAss" they disparage.
It's not a bad book overall, even if it doesn't engage with the questions I'm hungry to see others engage with. Newitz' efforts to sketch out a more vibrant and diverse future are still monumental and inspiring in a lot of ways. I'm just still looking for something more. Ultimately, I think it lives up to the "solar" but not very much to the "punk."
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Worked with an #acting #coaching client on some material and played with Bogart's Viewpoints of Tempo and Duration. Beautiful seeing them finding new ways of being and new things to pursue in their character. Opened up a whole inner life.

Just started listening to this one, and I'd absolutely recommend it. It's great.
It's really hard to explain how complicated beliefs can be, especially to folks in an urban bubble. The truth is, part of my anarchism came from listening to #rural folks. I didn't really live in a big city until I was like 18, but I came to those places already with a set of liberal biases.
Some of the things I experienced in those places pushed me towards being a Communist. But there are some strangely anarchistic tenancies, even in those who profess to be politically the opposite.
My stance on guns was largely shaped by understanding and extending the arguments of rural gun owners. They continued to evolve long after, but it took actually listening to break through my liberal biases and understand the ways in which gun control can actually intersect with other forms of oppression. There is a lot more nuance than I had grown up to believe.
And it goes both ways. Conservative gun owners have absolutely no intellectual against anarchist gun arguments. They're generally either gonna fall into racism that you can talk about, or start to radicalize left. There are plenty of similar pathways.
But also, not everyone in rural areas is conservative. There are plenty of rural anarchists and communists. They just get buried under stereotypes.
Anyway, this has been great to listen to and I'd recommend it.
https://www.tangledwilderness.org/strangers-podcast/talking-to-rural-conservatives

Just finished "Future Home of the Living God" by Louise Erdrich. It's a beautiful and entrancing novel in many ways, but I couldn't bring myself to like the ending. I think in one of my most recent book posts I complained about a deus ex machina, so it's ironic that in this case as the pages dwindled I was fully prepared to accept and even welcome one, especially with all of the deus-related stuff going on already. I am left profoundly unsure as to whether Erdrich imagines a positive future beyond our current oppressions, or just futility, when for most of the book it seemed like the former, which is something I seek out in earnest these days. It is of course impressive that a book about innocents being hunted through the streets of Minneapolis & Saint Paul, while a volunteer citizens network organizes to keep them safe, could be published in 2017. There are strong echoes of Octavia Butler here, and in both cases I think it's a marginalized position which allows authors to see with clarity that most mainstream authors miss or don't even attempt.
I think I will seek out more of Erdrich's writing, but only after a bit of a break.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

If you set limits for a scale (e.g. x-axis) in ggplot, how would you like data outside of that range be handled? There is the oob parameter for that and a set of functions to use with it: https://scales.r-lib.org/reference/oob.html

Unregulated markets maybe create significant threats to well-being in ways we are only just starting to recognize. How many other #ZoonoticDiseases are we going to learn about? (#WHO knows?)

Unregulated markets maybe create significant threats to well-being in ways we are only just starting to recognize. How many other #ZoonoticDiseases are we going to learn about? (#WHO knows?)

Just realized that the fact that newer large language models keep getting bigger in terms of parameters is kind of a tell about how they work, even as it's also kind of a requirement from the investment standpoint.
Very roughly, models develop complex functional internal state about some sub-domains, and merely memorize many examples in others. In reality it's more complicated than this and even in this simplified metaphor it's a mix between memorization and "real" "understanding" in each domain. But the point is that if companies were really working towards AGI, they'd be feeding more data into models with *fewer* parameters (that's how you force a model not to memorize) instead of building bigger and bigger models (expands the illusion of competence through increased capacity to memorize).
But being the only ones with the hardware to train an even-bigger model is one of their few competitive advantages, and signing new deals for even more hardware is one of the only ways they can signal to investors that they'll retain their advantage and thus not be destroyed by a food of competitors. That's also how they can convince the hardware dealers like NVidia to continue with circular investments. So they have to run in that direction, regardless of the scientific merits.
This is why someone like LeCun would leave that side of things.
#LLMs #AI

Primaries are tomorrow, #Tennessee!
(Please don’t DM me if your voter registration is messed up, images are from a third-party social post)
#TN #Vote

One small thing I wasn't aware of.
For car plates the renewal process is automatic unless you have outstanding fines.
You can also subscribe to reminders about your car plates, license (or photo ID) and health card before they expire. I signed up for that. I will still put a reminder in my personal calendar for that, but two ways of being told I have to renew something is a good thing.
Now to do the same for my wife.

Just finished "Starfish" by Akemi Dawn Bowman. It was gripping (I basically barely put it down and finished in in a single day) but also feels flawed in some ways.
Things I liked: a protagonist that I really strongly rooted for, and a resolution that landed with a bit of complexity.
Things I'm feeling a way about: complete lack of depth in interrogating heritage, despite that being a huge theme, some tinges of deus ex machina in how the central conflicts are resolved, and a real lack of good messaging around consent.
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon

Dear generative AI enthusiasts,
Look, I know the tokens you're burning right now don't actually use *that*much energy (even though it's somewhat substantial already and disastrous when we take into account the quality of the crap it's being used for) but what's more important is the appearance (or not) of that token spend on the quarterly earnings report of OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. lays the foundation necessary for those companies to go ahead with their plans for datacenters on a truly ridiculous scale, and those datacenters, if built, ate indeed a climate nightmare which *my kids* will have to live through even if they never benefit from any of it at all. That's (one of many reasons) why I personally need you to stop using generative AI right now.
The fact that the output is crap, the way it erodes your intelligence, and the ways in which it plagiarizes and actively undermines good citation practices are among many other practical reasons not to use it, but what's personal to me is the way that your frivolous sloperation is making the future worse for the baby I'm feeding blueberries to as I type this, and half the time I interact with people like you the conversation begins with some form of "putting aside the ethical issues..."
#AI #GenAI #LLMs

Alan Kay’s original “Dynabook” vision superficially resembles modern laptops and tablets — uncannily resembles in many ways! — but it’s the opposite in one important respect:
Our modern devices are beautifully designed, hermetically sealed products in which there is a strong vendor / user hierarchy.
The Dynabook, as I understand it, would be the opposite of hermetically sealed. It arrives not as a finished design, but as a starting point. Embedded in that “for children” ethos is the idea of play, tinkering, scribbling, making a mess and cleaning it up — and thus the idea of devices being •reshapable•.
(Image source, with lots of commentary from Kay: https://www.quora.com/American-computer-pioneer-Alan-Kay-s-concept-the-Dynabook-was-published-in-1972-How-come-Steve-Jobs-and-Apple-iPad-get-the-credit-for-tablet-invention/answer/Alan-Kay-11)
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