Danny M @ dannym @lemmy.escapebigtech.info

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2 yr. ago

I can disprove what you're saying with four words: "The Chinese Room Experiment".

Imagine a room where someone who doesn't understand Chinese receives questions in Chinese and consults a rule book to send back answers in Chinese. To an outside observer, it looks like the room understands Chinese, but it doesn't; it's just following rules.

Similarly, advanced language models can answer complex questions or write code, but that doesn't mean they truly understand or possess rationality. They're essentially high-level "rule-followers," lacking the conscious awareness that humans have. So, even if these models perform tasks and can fool humans to make them believe they're intelligent, it's not a valid indicator of genuine intelligence.

you're posing an unfalsifiable statement as a question

"prove to me that you don't have an invisible purple unicorn friend that's only visible to you"

yes, as I said it's an EVOLUTION of markov chains, but the idea is the same. As you pointed out one major difference is that instead of accounting for only the last 1-5 words, it accounts for a larger context window. The LSTM is just a parler trick. Read the paper on the original transformer model https://browse.arxiv.org/pdf/1706.03762.pdf

it's not about feeling intellectually superior; words matter. I'll grant you one thing, it's definitely "artificial", but it's not intelligence!

LLMs are an evolution of Markov Chains. We have known how to create something similar to LLMs for decades, getting close to a century, we just lacked the raw horse power and the literal hundreds of terabytes of data needed to get there. Anyone who knows how markov chains work can figure out how an LLM works.

I'm not downplaying the development needed to get an LLM up and running, yes, it's harder than just taking the algorithm for a markov chain, but the real evolution is how much computer power we can shove into a small amount of space now.

Calling LLMs AI would be the same as calling a web crawler AI, or a moderation bot, or many similar things.

I recommend you to read about the chinese room experiment

I'm always astonished by the amount of information that people give away freely without securing it properly.

As for yet another billion dollar company's data being stolen... well... that's just a normal Friday. I'm not one for government intervention, especially considering how our governments act nowadays, but I seriously think that our privacy laws should be a lot more useful and a lot more severe.

I don't even know what this company was thinking, what goes through someone's brain to not stop for 20 seconds and think that storing this information unencrypted and just behind a simple login screen is a bad idea? Isn't it just blatantly obvious that they should've used e2e encryption? Require people to generate a key before they send their sample? Or if you want to make it moron proof, was it really impossible to write a unique seed phrase on each box and require users to type that to see their PRIVATE GENETIC INFORMATION?

I'm not anti capitalism, but the audacity of certain companies especially in the us is a sight to behold

I keep telling people that, but for some, what amount to essentially a simulacra really can pass off as human and no matter how much you try to convince them they won't listen

adobe creative I get, I know plenty of people that are forced to use their products because of the stubbornness of other people they work with.

sharepoint I kinda get, I assume that your company is a windows-only shop?

but one drive? why would anyone use one drive?

Anyone who uses excel in a business capacity can’t switch

interesting, what features of excel are you missing in libreoffice, onlyoffice or cryppad?

does solidworks not work under wine?

sigh 'member when computers were there to serve you and not the other way around? pepperidge farm 'members

at this point is there even a reason to use windows? I genuinely want to know from windows users, why are you still on this operating system?

for many years (since windows 8.1) I switched to using only linux (and at times macos), and I have never regretted my decision; what keeps you using this hellish platform?

it's not about the frequency, it's about the protocol. both 2.4 GHz and 5GHz are vulnerable with WPA2 (or worse WEP). WPA3 is not vulnerable

deauth attacks are still a thing, however this is changing with wpa3.

If your router has a setting called "Protected Management Frames" you should enable it ASAP, it's basically encrypted and signed communication for every packet of data, so that your computer basically refuses to trust any deauth signal that doesn't actually originate from the router (massively simplifying here).

Framework is doing amazing work. Sure, their stuff isn't cheap, but you're basically voting with your wallet against the throwaway tech culture. It's like saying, "Hey, we'd rather pay a bit more for gear that's actually built to last, than for some flimsy junk that falls apart and costs a fortune to fix."

I completely respect your decision to hold off on donations until there's a transparent system in place. It's an admirable approach that really aligns with the spirit of FOSS.

As one of my side projects I manage a blog called escapebigtech.info, and we've been fortunate enough to gather around 4000 unique monthly readers. We focus on FOSS and privacy, and I'm launching a weekly feature starting next Friday (2023-10-13) to showcase valuable FOSS projects. I think Purplix would be an excellent candidate for this feature, and I'd be interested in covering it in about three weeks if you're open to it.

Love what you're doing!

Where can I donate to help the project forward?

Also, would you be open to having an article written in a pro-privacy & pro-FOSS blog about the applications you're building?

if caring about privacy and not wanting companies and governments to watch everything you do is "the ideology of a suburb liberal", then fine, I'm a "suburb liberal" lol

EDIT: reading your profile you're (in your words) a "Firm believers in Marxism Leninism, cartoons, and the need for Gulags" so I don't think I will continue this discussion. have a nice day ^^

somebody wiresharking your traffic can see the domain name you're contacting even if you use https; this solves that.

reverse DNS lookup does exist, but it's not always accurate, especially when multiple websites are hosted on the same server (which is more common than you think)

I keep thinking about this, big tech companies and their recommendation algorithms that keep getting worse and recommending you content you don't actually care about but is designed to keep you on their platform is probably one of the biggest bullshit they come up with.

maybe I should write about this in longform next week

dude, don't just assume my political beliefs based on nothing more than a comment...