Say all you want about hallucinations, but AI will never be able to outperform humans at bullshitting, so sales and marketing is safe.

Wait, isn’t it the other way around? You should arrive in NY earlier than you left London, since NY is 5 hours behind London. So if you leave at 8:30 and arrive 1.5 hours later, it should only be 5AM when you arrive.

You might need a third breakfast before your elevenses in that case.

Interesting read, thanks! I’ll finish it later, but already this bit is quite interesting:

Without access to gender, the ML algorithm over-predicts women to default compared to their true default rate, while the rate for men is accurate. Adding gender to the ML algorithm corrects for this and the gap in prediction accuracy for men and women who default diminishes.

We find that the MTEs are biased, signif-icantly favoring White-associated names in 85.1% of casesand female-associated names in only 11.1% of case

If you’re planning to use LLMs for anything along these lines, you should filter out irrelevant details like names before any evaluation step. Honestly, humans should do the same, but it’s impractical. This is, ironically, something LLMs are very well suited for.

Of course, that doesn’t mean off-the-shelf tools are actually doing that, and there are other potential issues as well, such as biases around cities, schools, or any non-personal info on a resume that might correlate with race/gender/etc.

I think there’s great potential for LLMs to reduce bias compared to humans, but half-assed implementations are currently the norm, so be careful.

After all these years, I’m still a little confused about what Forbes is. It used to be a legitimate, even respected magazine. Now it’s a blog site full of self-important randos who escaped from their cages on LinkedIn.

There’s some sort of approval process, but it seems like its primary purpose is to inflate egos.

It was an SEO hellhole from the start, so this isn’t surprising.

Do Forbes next!

It says:

Available Architectures
aarch64, x86_64

And it uses Android Translation Layer. Interesting. I’ll give it a shot on my desktop later.

Who thought it was a good idea to let an internet ad company control our internet client?

It seemed a lot more reasonable 15 years ago. The default on Windows at the time of Chrome’s rise was Internet Explorer.

I am watching Ladybird with great interest. The world needs a new-from-the-ground-up browser.

simply logging out or using an alt account

It is increasingly difficult to use X without an account. Not sure what the signup process is like nowadays. IIRC it used to require phone number verification in the Twitter days, but perhaps Musk relaxed the requirements in order to better pad the usage stats with spambots?

Assuming nominal voltage of 3.7, that’s about 60Wh. For comparison, the 14" MacBook has a 70Wh battery.

That’s not good battery life but it depends on what kind of usage they’re assuming with that 7H number. I’m not sure a MacBook runs that long under high load. If it’s 7H on a heavy load, that’s respectable.

Edit: not sure what class of device is the best comparison here. Laptop? Tablet? Phone? 🤷

Yep. If it uses a cloud service, they’re probably going to squeeze you, pull a bait-and-switch, or go out of business. The only exceptions that spring to mind are services with significant monetization in the corporate space, like Dropbox. And I’m not really confident that Dropbox’s free tier will remain viable for long, either.

Even non-cloud-based apps are risky nowadays because apps don’t remain compatible with mobile OSes for very long. They require more frequent updates than freeware/shareware generally did back in the 90s. I remember some freeware apps that I used for 10 years straight, across several major OS versions, starting in the 90s. That just doesn’t happen anymore. I’ve been using Android for over 10 years and I don’t think there’s a single app I used back then that would still work.

Single-purchase apps are basically dead, at least on mobile platforms. Closed-source freeware is dead, too. If it’s open-source, if push comes to shove someone can always pick up the torch and update it. It’s very rare for an open-source project to be completely abandoned without there at least being a viable open-source alternative available.

At this point, I don’t even look at Google Play. It’s F-Droid or bust.

You might want to look at the LibRedirect browser extension. You can have it convert all YouTube links to point to your preferred Invidious instance instead.

Yeah. It was a different time, when the general public had the disposition of a myotonic goat. I don’t think any of his stuff would seem shocking by today’s standards.

And the ease of repair, too. I have experience repairing laptops and phones, but even so, a lot of phones are just too much trouble for me.

Historically, my phone batteries become nearly unusable after 3 years. Several of my old phones would still be usable (with extended support from LineageOS) if I could replace the batteries, but the labor cost is prohibitive. It doesn’t make sense to spend $200 on a battery replacement when the phone is barely worth half that.

Does it require any creative thought for the user to get it to write “hello world”? No. Literally everyone launching the app gets that output, so obviously they didn’t create it.

A better example would be a text editor. I can write a poem in Notepad, but nobody would claim that “Notepad wrote the poem”.

It’s wild to me how much people anthropomorphize AI while simultaneously trying to delegitimize it.

I don’t think commissioning a work is ever as hands-on as using a program to create a work.

I suspect the hangup here is that people assume that using these tools requires no creative effort. And to be fair, that can be true. I could go into Dall-E, spend three seconds typing “fantasy temple with sun rays”, and get something that might look passable for, like, a powerpoint presentation. In that case, I would not claim to have done any artistic work. Similarly, when I was a kid I used to scribble in paint programs, and they were already advanced enough that the result of a couple minutes of paint-bucketing with gradients might look similar to something that would have required serious work and artistic vision 20 years prior.

In both cases, these worst-case examples should not be taken as an indictment of the medium or the tools. In both cases, the tools are as good as the artist.

If I spend many hours experimenting with prompts, systematically manipulating it to create something that matches my vision, then the artistic work is in the imagination. MOST artistic work is in the imagination. That is the difference between an artist and craftsman. It’s also why photography is art, and not just “telling the camera to capture light”. AI is changing the craft, but it is not changing the art.

Similarly, if I write music in a MIDI app (or whatever the modern equivalent is; my knowledge of music production is frozen in the 90s), the computer will play it. I never touch an instrument, I never create any sound. The art is not the sound; it is the composition.

I think the real problem is economic, and has very little to do with art. Artists need to get paid, and we have a system that kinda-sorta allows that to happen (sometimes) within the confines of a system that absolutely does not value artists or art, and never has. That’s a real problem, but it is only tangentially related to art.

I think you were downvoted by people who think “AI” was invented in the past decade.

You’re assigning agency to the program, which seems wrong to me. I think of AI like an advanced Photoshop filter, not like a rudimentary person. It’s an artistic tool that artists can use to create art. It does not in and of itself create art any more than Photoshop creates graphics or a synthesizer creates music.

It should be as copyrightable as the prompt. If the prompt is something super generic, then there’s no real work done by the human. If the prompt is as long and unique as other copyrightable writing (which includes short works like poems) then why shouldn’t it be copyrightable?

I’ve worked with tons of people who do not understand how to effectively use search engines. Maybe this was done poorly but it seems reasonable enough to me in principle.