Andy

I think maybe execs and investors might feel it’s all the same, but if you’re a project manager for cloud infrastructure for enterprise services or you’ve been working for years on releasing a new component of Bing search that you think is a real gamechanger and some muckity-muck at the top says, ‘Oh, don’t worry about that anymore: a property manager that’s owned by a private equity partner of one of our big investors wants the chatbot that schedules apartment viewings in Huntsville to be more flirty, so go massage the prompts to make it convincingly laugh at bad jokes,’ some of those folks are liable to start grumbling that this isn’t the role that they were pitched when they took this job.

This sucks. I was really holding out hope that they might chart a better path forward than most of the alternatives.

Yeah, but the training set is nowhere near clean. That’s my point. “Close” is no where near good enough within this context,

Why do you guarantee that? It seems obviously wrong, on a technical level.

The point I’m making is that even if we take it as a given that a shrewd enough AI could correctly distinguish sex at birth – which I think is obviously impossible based on the appearances of many ciswomen and the nature of statistical prediction – you’d still need a training data set.

If the dataset has any erroneous input, that corrupts its ability, and the whole point of this exercise is trying to find passing transwomen. Why would anyone expect that training set of hundreds of thousands of supposed cis women wouldn’t have a few transwomen in it?

This is a great point.

The technology that excludes transwomen from the app is the clear warning that the app is populated exclusively for transphobes. It’s obviously wildly dangerous for a transwoman to be on the app.

The notion that AI is going to clock them is absurd AI hype. There’s no reason to expect AI to be capable of this kind of discernment, and that assumes you even had a training set. Where in the absolute fuck would someone find a training set like that?

Edit: I didn’t read the article. It seems it’s a lesbian dating app. Well, probably less dangerous for transwomen, but still not technically sound.

Yeah. And it’s so bad that I feel like the functionality barely goes down.

They should release the following:

‘Out of an abundance of caution, we advise against any user charging this device and attempting to rely on it for communications or regular assistance. Fortunately, we’ve found a workaround and suggest customers looking to continue enjoying the benefits of the Humane pin consider wearing it down in an unpowered state. This will provide infinite battery life and a 100% reduction in unwanted heating while enabling users to continue to receive nearly all the same functionality to which they are accustomed.’

First, thanks for that explanation. That’s interesting.

Is there a good place to learn more? I can see why having custom feeds and 3rd party moderation tools are good, but I still have a lot questions.

First, is there a genuine benefit to dissociating a users identity from their server? I think the connection between users and their home instances are a brilliant innovation. They seem to bring village culture back to the internet. They help people associate within networks below just the global level. I think the atomization of people online has been a part of why there is so little trust.

I don’t understand how any of these visions fundamentally differ from Mastodon.

Decentralized? Yep. It’s got no center. Open source? Yep, you can fork it and make your own if you want. Unmoderated? Sure, if you want that, you can set up an instance and host whatever illegal content you want. You’ll have a lot of legal problems and most people don’t want it, but the option exists.

Is there any point besides money and crypto bullshit? If you want to post short comments that your friends can subscribe to that isn’t controlled by a big corporation that gives your data to the government… well we have that. It exists. It’s pretty okay. Go use it.

Obviously not. But that’s true to some degree for all news sources. I don’t blindly trust any newspaper. I read Times of Israel through a lens of context, just like I do for the NY Times, The Guardian, The Intercept, etc.

I think it’s incredibly useful to see what a country reads about itself. Not only is that true even for countries engaged atrocities: it’s especially true for countries engaged in atrocities.

I find the Times of Israel to be a decent source. They’re obviously biased in favor of Israel, but it’s not behind a paywall and they’re far more informative than The NY Post, for instance. I think they seem less biased then the WSJ, frankly.

Overall, a useful insight into mainstream discourse in Israel with fairly accurate reporting.

I don’t think they mean that tiktok is being banned over this app specifically: I just interpreted their comment to mean that tiktok has been an ongoing nuisance to the American mainstream political establishment.

That’s cool. Do you have any details?

It’s either because of DEI or work from home. It’s not clear how, but it’s got to be one of those.

I am a Patreon supporter of the developers. It’s that the best way to support the project?

That’s a great image.

RIP Norm.

I don’t doubt that AI tools can be used to make great games, but I think part of the reason so many people disagree with you is because:

1. You claim “The best games will mostly be AI created eventually”, and I think most people question on what basis you think that AI will produce overall better quality. If you said that it’s faster, or can allow indie studios to complete with AAA, that makes sense. Attributing quality to it – at this stage – seems odd.
2. It’s unlikely, imo, that the best games will be created by AI as opposed to with AI.

I think using AI throughout the process so that one person can achieve the productivity of a whole team is a credible vision. But to say that games will created “By AI” implies that a generative AI engine will generate the code de novo to a complete game. Which I think is already possible, but it will be very, very hard for such a system to innovate newer games. Because currently, these tools rely on replicating features in their training, so their ability to create quests that match a new genre or to generate dialogue that is funny in the context of the story is going to be very impaired.

By and large, I think current evidence shows that Human-AI cooperation almost always improves upon AI performance alone, and this is particularly the case when creating things for humans to enjoy.

Check again. He never said it wouldn’t!

He’s not forgetting: that’s what he’s proposing!

I can’t speak for all of Doctorow’s work, but of the stuff I’ve read, I think that’s the genre he’s writing in.

Sure. The website is https://fullyautomatedrpg.com. You can see the whole thing there. We discuss development on a Discord server (linked from the website), although we also have an early Lemmy community: !fullyautomatedrpg.slrpnk.net.

I would advise anyone who likes sci-fi to read both of these authors.