Edman274 · HackerTrans

Edman274

809 karmajoined 14 jaar geleden

comments

14 dagen geledendiscuss

So what? A Google Pixel 9 Pro costs only about 4 times what a bare RPi 5 with a run of the mill camera costs, yet with its NPU it can perform 45 trillion operations per second with a camera that can reach 240 frames per second at a resolution of 2 megapixels. Do you think that's insufficient to autonomously pilot a drone moving at highway speeds towards a target that it identified as a fighter jet? In addition, it has an onboard battery, GPS, cellular and WiFi connectivity, pressure sensor, accelerometer, and USB connectivity. A phone by itself could replace practically all of the brains of a single use drone and they sell phones literally in the millions. The hardware is terrifyingly easy to source.

24 dagen geledendiscuss

Do you always judge the validity of a statement according to the implications of it being true, or do you get to do it just this once as a treat? Further, how does saying a court is "corrupt" not call for "extreme measures" but referring to it as "illegitimate" does? What's the meaningful difference?

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Okay, then by 2036 the curriculum and standards of teaching will have been updated too, the expectation of what teachers will be able to teach will have been updated too, the competence of students will have been updated, and the hidden expectation will still be that every teacher can do as well as the "gifted" teachers of 2036. You can predict that this is what will happen because this has been happening for the last century. Up until the last five years student test scores were improving, and if you believe that teacher performance is at all linked to student performance, then improving student test scores ought to draw from teachers getting better too, but that's not good enough. Why? Because the concern - after a baseline is established - is seeking exceptional performance, which definitionally cannot be made routine.

2 maanden geledendiscuss

You do understand at least intuitively that it's not even mathematically possible - let alone practically - to train 100 percent of teachers to be in the top 10 percent of teachers, right? The definition of "good" and "gifted" is only used relative to an average. No amount of training can make the average teacher better than the average teacher; it's a logical impossibility, and misunderstands the central effect of training and the goal of the person being trained. No student nor teacher cares about be trained to some objective standard of competence. Rather, the goal is to be better than one's peers and you can't have all teachers be better than all teachers unless you reject the concept of teachers being comparable.

2 maanden geledendiscuss

> in the mind of the observer

In the what of the observer? Are you accepting that minds exist but consciousness doesn't?

2 maanden geledendiscuss

> words for things that don't exist

This is rhetorically slippery, and feels like it is restating the thing that I asked to be demonstrated when I asked for example of the opposite. It feels like begging the question.

In either case, the central thing that I was saying is that critiquing an article because it makes a claim about a specific word which also applies to an entire class of words makes that critique feel less informative. What I mean is that if there were an article that said "The Sun is not red" and the response was that redness is a concept of human minds, then I don't know if I would feel informed. If the comment is just limited to point that out, I guess I wanted to point out the limitation.

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Describing something as "car-like" is begging the question. You are presupposing an objective definition for "car" in order to draw a distinction between things that are cars, and things that are almost cars. The reason such a thing doesn't exist for consciousness is that people believe that the offered definitions for consciousness are illegitimate. It would seem logically weird for me to accept that a term is "real" if it crosses some percentage of public acceptance of the definition, and not real otherwise. I would argue that using that heuristic would make it very obvious that computers are not conscious because it's a stance that practically everybody takes outside of hackernews.

2 maanden geledendiscuss

If you take the strategy that you will create a definition, create a label for that definition, and then say that any deviations from the defintion that was chosen makes usage of the label incorrect, then yes, it's the same everywhere in the universe -- according to fiat, and I don't believe that that negates that it is a label, just that validity of usage of the label derives from the perceived authority of the labeller. God didn't come down from on high and say that a meter is the length light travels in 1/299792458th of the time for 9192631770 cycles of radiation of Cesium 133. People in rooms chose that it would be based on the circumference of the Earth with a line passing through Paris, France (how convenient), and if there were an academy in the 1790s that invented the concept of "fat", and "fat" means a BMI exceeding 30, then fat would be true everywhere in the universe too (BMI after all is defined as a ratio of height, measured in meters to weight, measured in kilograms, which are both fundamental SI units), and there would be no ambiguity.

People are still coming up with definitions of consciousness and then those definitions end up being attacked by others who disagree with the foundation of the definition, which is - if you will recall - also what happened with the meter, over the course of centuries, until it was very recently redefined to be "unambiguous", but arbitrary. This was possible because few people had any particular emotional investment in the definition of a meter, and it is probable that consciousness will be eventually defined to mean that only humans can be conscious, which may be dissatisfying but would be true throughout the universe, like a meter. If the question then becomes "what defines a human" and "why a human", then I ask, why 1/299792458 of a second?

2 maanden geledendiscuss

A standardized unit of measure is almost definitionally a label of convenience, what? Why was there no concept of a meter until the 1790s? It was determined by a council of people, does that sound like a truth of the universe?

2 maanden geledendiscuss

I guess my question or confusion is that if there exists no readily accessible, easily identifiable example of a noun which does actually serve as something more than "a useful label, agreed to out of convenience", then the critique appears to be stating a vacuous truth, because there are no entities for whom the critique would not apply.

2 maanden geledendiscuss

I'm not trying to be difficult, but could you give me an example?

2 maanden geledendiscuss

Do you believe in the existence of any noun words which serve as something other than a "useful label, loosely agreed to out of convenience"?

2 maanden geledendiscuss

They can't rebuild it. Facebook Marketplace is allowing people to buy and sell locally for free with systems for managing fraud that are more robust than Craigslist. How do you rebuild when a way larger company - with a side project of theirs - offers one of your core businesses for free?

3 maanden geledendiscuss

Do you feel and have the subjective experience of feeling like you're arguing in good faith right now?

3 maanden geledendiscuss

> Yes you can. The same way Wikipedia (or, way back when, a paper encyclopedia) can be used for research but you have to verify everything with other sources because it is known there are errors and deficiencies in such sources.

I think that if Wikipedia had no recommendations on good sources for their own articles and did not ever ban sources, companies would not be so sanguine about letting people use Wikipedia. There's an entire internal process associated with evaluating sources, and the expectation when using Wikipedia is that nothing written in an article is going to be sourced from the Daily Mail or Conservapedia, as an example. Also, I do think that there are companies that do have policies against talking to known liars. Given the Wikipedia bans sources and news agencies ban human sources once they've been shown to be unreliable, I don't think it's insane to then have such companies or agencies say that AI shouldn't be used because it's been shown to be unreliable. Obviously there's a balancing act of utility versus accuracy, and Ars has (probably incorrectly) decided that the utility of AI outweighs its inaccuracies.

What is frustrating is that AI cannot have a higher accuracy than the median reporter, given a little more time. AI is trained on all digitizable text, including falsehoods and inaccuracies by laypeople. Humans can look up digitizable text using search engines, too. An AI can't follow up on leads or ask anyone questions. There's no world in which synthesizing available data from digitized sources alone ends up with more accurate data than a human with a search engine and the ability to make a phone call. So allowing LLM use at all is a direct admission that seeking out the "truth" is not an important goal because it could never actually improve accuracy and could only worsen it through hallucinated, probable reporting. It's one thing when companies say that they're committed to truth and then secretly their most important overriding concern is their bottom line - it's quite another thing when a company directly says that the bottom line is their most important concern. Imagine the emperor walking through the parade, nude, saying "So what if I am nude? What are you going to do about it?"

3 maanden geledendiscuss

It sounds like you are unfamiliar with the idea that software engineering efforts can be underestimated at the outset. The humorous observation here is that the total is 180 percent, which mean that it took longer than expected, which is very common.

3 maanden geledendiscuss

> If your peers are using AI and getting better grades, opting out is not a principled stand. It is a competitive disadvantage.

> The students are not confused. They are trapped.

> In this environment, choosing not to use AI is not intellectual integrity. It is self-sabotage.

> Here is where the conversation gets genuinely uncomfortable.

> The culprit was not artificial intelligence. It was standardised testing.

> For them, cognitive offloading is not a convenience. It is a developmental short-circuit.

> This is not merely a problem of laziness or moral failure. It is a predictable consequence (...)

> These investments are not philanthropic gestures. They are strategic plays for long-term market dominance (...)

> These are not neutral actors offering disinterested tools. They are companies with revenue models (...)

> This is not a new insight. It is a well-established finding that anglophone education (...)

> (...) AI is not a threat; it is an upgrade.

> If, however, the purpose of education is to cultivate human beings (...) then the arrival of AI is not the crisis. It is the revelation that the crisis was already here.

> Not more bans. Not more surveillance software. Not more hand-wringing opinion pieces from adults who themselves rely on AI for their professional work.

> But the overreliance they fear is not a new phenomenon introduced by ChatGPT. It is the logical extension of an educational philosophy (...)

The irony here is that the AI generated article gives a full throated endorsement of using LLMs to generate slop; why should we believe that the guy who prompted the LLM to generate slop that says slop generation is good did not himself use the slop generator?

4 maanden geledendiscuss

Are you aware that hundreds of American fixed wing aircraft were lost to surface to air missiles in North Vietnam? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._aircraft_losses_t...

5 maanden geledendiscuss

Yes, why are we still talking about the robot whose behavior can be programmed and whose behavior is set by a company and rolled out to all of their vehicles deterministically, when another commenter correctly engaged in whataboutism?

5 maanden geledendiscuss

People that don't buy insurance because they think it's a scam, then end up impoverished after a foreseeable accident or theft, as a more common one.