Off-and-on trying out an account over at @tal@oleo.cafe due to scraping bots bogging down lemmy.today to the point of near-unusability.

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  • 301 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: October 4th, 2023
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@beehaw.org•OpenAI retired its most seductive chatbot – leaving users angry and grieving: ‘I can’t live like this’English
    2·
    6 hours ago

    Yeah, that’s something that I’ve wondered about myself, what the long run is. Not principally “can we make an AI that is more-appealing than humans”, though I suppose that that’s a specific case, but…we’re only going to make more-compelling forms of entertainment, better video games. Recreational drugs aren’t going to become less addictive. If we get better at defeating the reward mechanisms in our brain that evolved to drive us towards advantageous activities…

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirehead_(science_fiction)

    In science fiction, wireheading is a term associated with fictional or futuristic applications[1] of brain stimulation reward, the act of directly triggering the brain’s reward center by electrical stimulation of an inserted wire, for the purpose of ‘short-circuiting’ the brain’s normal reward process and artificially inducing pleasure. Scientists have successfully performed brain stimulation reward on rats (1950s)[2] and humans (1960s). This stimulation does not appear to lead to tolerance or satiation in the way that sex or drugs do.[3] The term is sometimes associated with science fiction writer Larry Niven, who coined the term in his 1969 novella Death by Ecstasy[4] (Known Space series).[5][6] In the philosophy of artificial intelligence, the term is used to refer to AI systems that hack their own reward channel.[3]

    More broadly, the term can also refer to various kinds of interaction between human beings and technology.[1]

    Wireheading, like other forms of brain alteration, is often treated as dystopian in science fiction literature.[6]

    In Larry Niven’s Known Space stories, a “wirehead” is someone who has been fitted with an electronic brain implant known as a “droud” in order to stimulate the pleasure centers of their brain. Wireheading is the most addictive habit known (Louis Wu is the only given example of a recovered addict), and wireheads usually die from neglecting their basic needs in favour of the ceaseless pleasure. Wireheading is so powerful and easy that it becomes an evolutionary pressure, selecting against that portion of humanity without self-control.

    Now, of course, you’d expect that to be a powerful evolutionary selector, sure — if only people who are predisposed to avoid such things pass on offspring, that’d tend to rapidly increase the percentage of people predisposed to do so — but the flip side is the question of whether evolutionary pressure on the timescale of human generations can keep up with our technological advancement, which happens very quickly.

    There’s some kind of dark comic that I saw — I thought that it might be Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, but I’ve never been able to find it again, so maybe it was something else — which was a wordless comic that basically wordlessly portrayed a society becoming so technologically advanced that it basically consumes itself, defeats its own essential internal mechanisms. IIRC it showed something like a society becoming a ring that was just stimulating itself until it disappeared.

    It’s a possible answer to the Fermi paradox:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nature_of_intelligent_life_to_destroy_itself

    The Fermi paradox is the discrepancy between the lack of conclusive evidence of advanced extraterrestrial life and the apparently high likelihood of its existence.[1][2][3]

    The paradox is named after physicist Enrico Fermi, who informally posed the question—remembered by Emil Konopinski as “But where is everybody?”—during a 1950 conversation at Los Alamos with colleagues Konopinski, Edward Teller, and Herbert York.

    Evolutionary explanations

    It is the nature of intelligent life to destroy itself

    This is the argument that technological civilizations may usually or invariably destroy themselves before or shortly after developing radio or spaceflight technology. The astrophysicist Sebastian von Hoerner stated that the progress of science and technology on Earth was driven by two factors—the struggle for domination and the desire for an easy life. The former potentially leads to complete destruction, while the latter may lead to biological or mental degeneration.[98] Possible means of annihilation via major global issues, where global interconnectedness actually makes humanity more vulnerable than resilient,[99] are many,[100] including war, accidental environmental contamination or damage, the development of biotechnology,[101] synthetic life like mirror life,[102] resource depletion, climate change,[103] or artificial intelligence. This general theme is explored both in fiction and in scientific hypotheses.[104]

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@beehaw.org•OpenAI retired its most seductive chatbot – leaving users angry and grieving: ‘I can’t live like this’English
    9·
    8 hours ago

    Now some of those users gather on Discord and Reddit; one of the best-known groups, the subreddit r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, currently boasts 48,000 users.

    I am confident that one way or another, the market will meet demand if it exists, and I think that there is clearly demand for it. It may or may not be OpenAI, it may take a year or two or three for the memory market to stabilize, but if enough people want to basically have interactive erotic literature, it’s going to be available. Maybe else will take a model and provide it as a service, train it up on appropriate literature. Maybe people will run models themselves on local hardware — in 2026, that still requires some technical aptitude, but making a simpler-to-deploy software package or even distributing it as an all-in-one hardware package is very much doable.

    I’ll also predict that what males and females generally want in such a model probably differs, and that there will probably be services that specialize in that, much as how there are companies that make soap operas and romance novels that focus on women, which tend to differ from the counterparts that focus on men.

    I also think that there are still some challenges that remain in early 2026. For one, current LLMs still have a comparatively-constrained context window. Either their mutable memory needs to exist in a different form, or automated RAG needs to be better, or the hardware or software needs to be able to handle larger contexts.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•Where to go now since Linux is mainstreamEnglish
    1·
    11 days ago

    Notably, this and dotfiles are popular among devs using Mac, since MacOS has nearly all settings available either via config files or the defaults system from the command line. In comparison, Windows is total ass about configuring via the command line, and even Cinnamon gives me some headache by either not reloading or straight up overwriting my settings.

    The application-level format isn’t really designed for end user consumption, but WINE uses a text representation of the Windows registry. I imagine that one could probably put that in a git registry and that there’s some way to apply that to a Windows registry. Or maybe a collectiom of .reg files, which are also text.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@beehaw.org•Too much open-source AI is exposing itself to the webEnglish
    2·
    11 days ago

    Oh, yeah, it’s not that ollama itself is opening holes (other than adding something listening on a local port), or telling people to do that. I’m saying that the ollama team is explicitly promoting bad practices. I’m just saying that I’d guess that there are a number of people who are doing things like fully-exposing or port-forwarding to ollama or whatever because they want to be using the parallel compute hardware on their computer remotely. The easiest way to do that is to just expose ollama without setting up some kind of authentication mechanism, so…it’s gonna happen.

    I remember someone on here who had their phone and desktop set up so that they couldn’t reach each other by default. They were fine with that, but they really wanted their phone to be able to access the LLM on their computer, and I was helping walk them through it. It was hard and confusing for them — they didn’t really have a background in the stuff, but badly wanted the functionality. In their case, they just wanted local access, while the phone was on their home WiFi network. But…I can say pretty confidently that there are people who want access all the time, to access the thing remotely.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoTechnology@beehaw.org•Too much open-source AI is exposing itself to the webEnglish
    8·
    12 days ago

    I mean, the article is talking about providing public inbound access, rather than having the software go outbound.

    I suspect that in some cases, people just aren’t aware that they are providing access to the world, and it’s unintentional. Or maybe they just don’t know how to set up a VPN or SSH tunnel or some kind of authenticated reverse proxy or something like that, and want to provide public access for remote use from, say, a phone or laptop or something, which is a legit use case.

    ollama targets being easy to set up. I do kinda think that there’s an argument that maybe it should try to facilitate configuration for that setup, even though it expands the scope of what they’re doing, since I figure that there are probably a lot of people without a lot of, say, networking familiarity who just want to play with local LLMs setting these up.

    EDIT: I do kind of think that there’s a good argument that the consumer router situation plus personal firewall situation is kind of not good today. Like, “I want to have a computer at my house that I want to access remotely via some secure, authenticated mechanism without dicking it up via misconfiguration” is something that people understandably want to do and should be more straightforward.

    I mean, we did it with Bluetooth, did a consumer-friendly way to establish secure communication over insecure airwaves. We don’t really have that for accessing hardware remotely via the Internet.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•Where to go now since Linux is mainstreamEnglish
    3·
    12 days ago

    (10^100) + 1 − (10^100) is 1, not 0.

    A “computer algebra system” would have accomplished a similar goal, but been much slower and much more complicated

    $ maxima -q

(%i1) (10^100)+1-(10^100);

(%o1)                                  1
(%i2)

    There’s no perceptible delay on my laptop here, and I use maxima on my phone and my computers. And a CAS gives you a lot more power to do other things.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytolinuxmemes@lemmy.world•Where to go now since Linux is mainstreamEnglish
    8·
    12 days ago

    First, the Linux kernel doesn’t support resource forks at all. They aren’t part of POSIX nor do they really fit the unix file philosophy.

    The resource fork isn’t gonna be really meaningful to essentially all Linux software, but there have been ways to access filesystems that do have resource forks. IIRC, there was some client to mount some Apple file server protocol, exposed the resource forks as a file with a different name and the data fork as just a regular file.

    https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/filesystems/hfsplus.html

    Linux does support HFS+, which has resource forks, as the hfsplus driver, so I imagine that it provides access one way or another.

    searches

    https://superuser.com/questions/363602/how-to-access-resource-fork-of-hfs-filesystem-on-linux

    Add /..namedfork/rsrc to the end of the file name to access the resource fork.

    Also, pretty esoteric, but NTFS, the current Windows file system, also has a resource fork, though it’s not typically used.

    searches

    Ah, the WP article that OP, @evol@lemmy.today linked to describes it.

    The Windows NT NTFS can support forks (and so can be a file server for Mac files), the native feature providing that support is called an alternate data stream. Windows operating system features (such as the standard Summary tab in the Properties page for non-Office files) and Windows applications use them and Microsoft was developing a next-generation file system that has this sort of feature as basis.