• 3 Posts
  • 97 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 19th, 2023

help-circle

  • I have an old iPod that I got from eBay. I’m running Rockbox on it which allows me to put music on it with almost any format. Ive used it for about 4 or more years now and it’s working fine.

    I can connect it easily to other old “dumb” tech. It just works.

    Edit: it’s an old iPod classic of the last generation. There’s a bunch of mods/upgrades you can get online like HDD replacements with microsd-cards. You can increase the capacity that way. The battery even lasts longer then. Or you can get a bigger battery with a bigger metal case to fit.








  • Well in a way all Art is being done indirectly by some sort of instrument. Only the degree of sophistication or degree of separation of this instrument is different. A pencil drawing is in principle also done by the pencil, but I provided a lot of guidance through my hand. A pencil - almost no sophistication - is on one side of the spectrum and Midjourney/Stable Diffusion etc is on the other side of the spectrum.

    I don’t want to judge AI “art” in general - there’s so many awful traditional artworks that AI art doesn’t really stand out.

    What rubs me the wrong way is that it is a tool that no human can understand reasonably well. Everybody can understand a pencil. It’s possible to understand a computer renderer that renders digital art. But no one can understand the totality of an LLM which was trained on terabytes of images. It’s a lot of trial and error, because what the tool does generate random images even with precise directions. It’s throwing dice until one likes the result.

    The one thing I give this “artist” credit for: he was very early (maye even the first?) that entered AI art into a contest and fooled the jury. Being the first is often enough historically to make “great art”. Where art is more measured n the impact it has on a societal discussion. So I give him that.

    But a court already decided you can’t copyright AI art, because it’s trained on other art without permission. So he can get fucked.







  • exocortex@discuss.tchncs.detomemes@lemmy.worldSwift? more like Supersonic
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    1
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    True.

    I’m very much opposed to and sad about an international pop star and apparent progressive taking a private jet all the time.

    But there’s two things at play that should be differentiated.

    1. The role model aspect. She has millions of fans that look up to her. She could lead by example and use different means of transportation.
    2. She’s obviously a unique figure. She’s not replaceable or generic in the position she’s at. Her “position” cannot be replaced by someone else as would be possible with the Starbucks CEO. She’s not “some CEO” taking a Jet to work and thereby normalizing this as a habit for CEOs". Right now there are few if any other celebrities with her status l, so she stands for herself.

    The precedent of Starbucks CEO commuting by jet is much more of a blueprint that might be applied to other CEOs. Or already is. I don’t even know his name FFS. So he’s making a precedent that a lot of other people could readily adapt.

    I don’t want to excuse anything. I just think that it would be more beneficial to attack CEOs for taking private jets. There’s a lot more of them. They areuch more susceptible to the pressure if the companies is seen as a polluter than Taylor Swift might be. She’s much more independent than any CEO. She doesn’t have to worry if the board of directors or the shareholders are going to replace her if her if her habits are becoming a PR problem. So our energy might be more productively applied elsewhere.

    I’m still sad about a seemingly progressive and apparently Intelligent pop star like her flying that much.





  • It cannot “analyze” it. It’s fundamentally not how LLM’s work. The LLM has a finite set of “tokens”: words and word-pieces like “dog”, “house”, but also like “berry” and “straw” or “rasp”. When it reads the input it splits the words into the recognized tokens. It’s like a lookup table. The input becomes “token15, token20043, token1923, token984, token1234, …” and so on. The LLM “thinks” of these tokens as coordinates in a very high dimensional space. But it cannot go back and examine the actual contents (letters) in each token. It has to get the information about the number or “r” from somewhere else. So it has likely ingested some texts where the number of "r"s in strawberry is discussed. But it can never actually “test” it.

    A completely new architecture or paradigm is needed to make these LLM’s capable of reading letter by letter and keep some kind of count-memory.


  • We long left the era where we “own” things that we buy. As everything is a computer now it has become very simple to control stuff that remotely that was working on its own before.

    So the answer to “why would <CORPORATION> do this” is simply: “Because they can”.

    Every tiny decision is guided by increasing profit. No matter the side effects (short or long term ). Because with many shareholders administering pressure to maximize profits there’s only one way to go (even if it’s a dumb and shortsighted decision) maximizing profits NOW. If you are not doing that because you can see that increasing profits now will hurt profits in the future then you are hindering the project. You have to increase profits now, because if you are not then your competitor is doing it and that is a problem. If you are not going with the project you will be out of a job sooner or later. Then someone will take over that will make the decision you couldn’t do.

    This is a race to the bottom. Morals, integrity, honesty, responsibility and foresight are only obstacles in this logic (because the competition is not bound by them which gains them an advantage).

    It’s simply cheaper now to build everything in the car always and run an operating system that manages all these things and can control what you are doing in your car.

    Cory Doctorow held a great keynote about this some ~10-ish years (?) ago with the title “The coming war on general computation” where he explained the side effects of putting DRM in every stupid appliance. The side effect here is that we cannot hack our cars to switch on the heated seats (or whatever other feature BMW is not allowing us to use for free) because of DRM. It is not “our” car, even though we bought it.