I'm cool with using the word Deepfake for text. Generated text should generally be referred to in the derogatory, considering it very rarely adds anything of value.
So you're cool with using just any words to describe just anything, so long as the vibe is right. Great. I'm sure that'll help a lot with everybody's understanding of the world.
Deepfake is a pejorative not because of the artistic value of the AI but because of the ethnical concerns that spring to mind around one's ownership of their own likeness, and how the tech can be used for deepfake porn and political misinformation. Muddying that conversation with a personal dislike for any AI seems harmful especially to the people most affected by it.
The closest analogue for text I can think of is when you use an LLM to write in the style of someone else, like Shakespeare. But "deepfake" is a stretch because AI-generated text in someone's style is not particularly convincing that it actually came from them, and wasn't too hard to do manually before. Plus doesn't raise the same ethical questions.
Ah, yes. Text generation trained on nearly the entire corpus of preserved human literature, what a useless invention. Yes, let's call it derogatory terms, and maybe it will leave us alone.
"Pretty neat, but definitely watch out for hallucinations."
We'd never hire someone who just makes stuff up (or at least keep them employed for long). Why are we okay with calling "AI" tools like this anything other than curious research projects?
Can't we just send LLMs back to the drawing board until they have some semblance of reliability?
Not sure if this was posted as humour, but I don't feel that way. In today's world, where I certainly would consider taking the blue pill, I'm having a blast with LLMs!
It has helped me learn stuff incredibly faster. Especially I find them useful for filling the gaps of knowledge and exploring new topics in my own way and language, without needing to wait an answer from a human (that could also be wrong).
Why does it feel, that "we are entirely inside the bubble" for you?
In the early days of ChatGPT where it seemed like this fun new thing, I used it to "learn" C. I don't remember anything it told me, and none of the answers it gave me were anything that I couldn't find elsewhere in different forms - heck I could have flipped open Kernighan & Ritchie to the right page and got the answer.
I had a conversation with an AI/Bitcoin enthusiast recently. Maybe that already tells you everything you need to know about this person, but to the hammer the point home, they made a claim to similar to you: "I learn much more and much better with AI". They also said they "fact check" things it "tells" them. Some moments later they told me "Bitcoin has its roots in Occupy Wall Street".
A simple web search tells you that Bitcoin is conceived a full 2 years before Occupy. How can they be related?
It's a simple error that can be fact checked simply. It's a pretty innocuous falsity in this particular case - but how many more falsehoods have they collected? How do those falsehoods influence them on a day-by-day basis?
How many falsehoods influence you?
A very well meaning activist posted a "comprehensive" list of all the programs that were to be halted by the grants and loans freezes last week. Some of the entries on the list weren't real, or not related to the freeze. They revealed they used ChatGPT to help compile the list and then went down one-by-one to verify each one.
With such meticulous attention to detail, incorrect information still filtered through.
I guess the real learning happens outside the AI, here in real life. Does the code run? Sure, it's on my local and not in production, but I would've never have the patience to get "that new thing working" without AI as assistant.
Does the food taste good? Oops, there's a bit too much vegetables here, they are never gonna fit in this pan of mine. Not a big deal, next time I'll be wiser.
AI is like a hypothesis machine. You're gonna have to figure out if the output is true. Few years ago, just testing any machine's "intelligence" was pretty quickly done and machine failed miserably. Now, the accuracy is astounishing in comparison.
> How many falsehoods influence you?
That is a great question. The answer is definitely not zero. I try to live by with a hacker mentality and I'm an engineer by trade. I read news and comments, which I'm not sure is good for me. But you also need some compassion towards oneself. It's not like ripping everything open will lead to salvation. I believe the truth does set you free, eventually. But all in one's time...
Anyway, AI is a tool like any other. Someone will hammer their fingers with it. I just don't understand the hate. It's not like we're drinking any AI koolaids here. It's just like it was 30 years ago (in my personal journey), you had a keyboard and a machine, you asked it things and got gibberish. Now the conversation with it just started to get interesting. Peace.
>It has helped me learn stuff incredibly faster. Especially I find them useful for filling the gaps of knowledge and exploring new topics in my own way and language
and then you verify every single fact it tells you via traditional methods by confirming them in human-written documents, right?
Otherwise, how do you use the LLM for learning? If you don't know the answer to what you're asking, you can't tell if it's lying. It also can't tell if it's lying, so you can't ask it.
If you have to look up every fact it outputs after it does, using traditional methods, why not skip to just looking things up the old fashioned way and save time?
Occasionally an LLM helps me surface unknown keywords that make traditional searches easier, but they can't teach anything because they don't know anything. They can imagine things you might be able to learn from a real authority, but that's it. That can be useful! But it's not useful for learning alone.
And if you're not verifying literally everything an LLM tells you.. are you sure you're learning anything real?
I guess it all depends on the topic and levels of trust. How can I be certain that I have a brain? I just have to take something for granted, don't I? Of course I will "verify" the "important stuff", but what is important? How can I tell? Most of the time only thing I need is a pointer in the right direction. Wrong advice? I know when I get there I suppose.
I can remember numerous things I was told while growing up, that aren't actually true. Either by plain lies and rumours or because of the long list of our cognitive biases.
> If you have to look up every fact it outputs after it does, using traditional methods, why not skip to just looking things up the old fashioned way and save time?
What is the old fashioned way? I mean people learn "truths" these days from Tiktok and Youtube. Some of the stuff is actually very good, you just have to distill it based on the stuff I was being taught at school. Nonody has yet declared LLMs as a subtitute for schools, maybe they soon will, but neither "guarantees" us anything. We could as well be taught political agendas.
I could order a book about construction, but I wouldn't build a house without asking a "verified" expert. Some people build anyway and we get some catastrofic results.
Levels of trust, it's all games and play until it gets serious, like what to eat or doing something that involves life threatening physics. I take it as playing with a toy. Surely something great have come up from only a few piece of legos?
> And if you're not verifying literally everything an LLM tells you.. are you sure you're learning anything real?
I guess you shouldn't do it that way. But really, so far the topics I've rigorously explored with ChatGPT for example, have been better than your average journalism. What is real?
Saying you need to verify "literally everything" both overestimates the frequency of hallucinations and underestimates the amount of wrong found in human-written sources. e.g. the infamous case of Google's AI recommending Elmer's glue on pizza was literally a human-written suggestion first: https://www.reddit.com/r/Pizza/comments/1a19s0/my_cheese_sli...
> without needing to wait an answer from a human (that could also be wrong).
The difference is you have some reassurances that the human is not wrong - their expertise and experience.
The problem with LLMs, as demonstrated by the top-level comment here, is that they constantly make stuff up. While you may think you're learning things quickly, how do you know you're learning them "correctly", for lack of a better word?
Until an LLM can say "I don't know", I really don't think people should be relying on them as a first-class method of learning.
"Occasional nonsense" doesn't sound great, but would be tolerable.
Problem is - LLMs pull answers from their behind, just like a lazy student on the exam. "Halucinations" is the word people use to describe this.
Those are extremely hard to spot - unless you happen to know the right answer already, at which point - why ask? And those are everywhere.
One example - recently there was quite a discussion about llm being able to understand (and answer) base16 (aka "hex") encoding on the fly, so I went on to try base64, gzipped base64, zstd-compressed base64, etc...
To my surprise, LLM got most of those encoding/compressions right, decoded/uncompressed the question, and answered it flawlessly.
But with few encodings, LLM detected base64 correctly, got compression algorithm correctly, and then... instead of decompressing, made up a completely different payload, and proceeded to answer that. Without any hint of anything sinister going.
We really need LLMs to reliably calculate and express confidence. Otherwise they will remain mere toys.
I think as these things get more integrated into customer service workflows - especially for things like insurance claims - there's gonna start being a lot more buyer's remorse on everyone's part.
We've tried for decades to turn people into reliable robots, now many companies are running to replace people robots with (maybe less reliable?) robot-robots. What could go wrong? What are the escalation paths going to be? Who's going to be watching them?
It's given you some information and now you have to seek out a source to verify that it's correct.
Finding information is hard work. It's why librarian is a valuable skilled profession. What you've done by suggesting that I should "verify" or "proofread" what a glorified, water-wasting Markov chain has given me now entails me looking up that information to verify that it's correct. That's...not quite doubling the work involved but it's adding an unnecessary step.
I could have searched for the source in the first instance. I could have gone to the library and asked for help.
We spent time coming up with a question ("prompt engineering"! hah!), we used up a bunch of electricity for an answer to be generated and now you...want me to search up that answer to find the source? Why did we do the first step?
People got undergraduate degrees - hell, even PhDs - before generative AI.
Look up the tweet from someone who said "Sometimes when coming up with a good prompt for ChatGPT, I sometimes come up with the answer myself without needing to submit".
Verifying information is an order of magnitude easier than compiling it or synthesizing it in the first place. Prompt engineering is an order of magnitude easier still. This is obvious to most people, but apparently it needs to be said.
An entire day of generating responses with ChatGPT uses less water and energy than your morning shower. You seem terribly concerned about signaling the virtues of abstaining from technology use on behalf of purported resource misuse, yet you're sitting at a computer typing away.
You're not a serious person, and you're wasting everyone's time. Please leave the internet and go play with rocks in a cave.
Sometimes you don't need sources to verify something is correct, its something you can directly verify. To reduce it to the easiest version of this, I ask for code to do something, it writes me code, I run my unit test, it passes, my time is saved!
For other things, it depends, but if I'm asking it to do a survey I can look at its results and see if they fit what I'm looking for, check the sources it gives me, etc. People pay analysts/paralegals/assistants to do exactly this kind of work all the time expecting that they will need to check it over. I don't see how this is any different.
I don't think the library/electricity responses are serious but to move on to the point about degrees... people also got those degrees before calculators, before computers, before air travel, before video calls, before the internet, before electricity, yet all of those things assist in creating knowledge. I think its perfectly reasonable to look at these LLMs/chat assistants in the same light: as a tool that can augment human productivity in its own way.
I'm interested to hear more about how you can verify information without a source. What are you looking at when you search for the verification, exactly?
You can use them for whatever you like, or not use them. Everyone has a different bar for when technology is useful. My dad doesn't think EVs are useful due to the long charge times, but there are others who find it fully acceptable.
This doesn’t make LLMs worthless, you just need to structure your processes around fallibility. Much like a well designed release pipeline is built with the expectation that devs will write bugs that shouldn’t ship.
Yeah, I used to hire people, but then one of them made a mistake, now I'm done with them forever, they are useless. It is not I, who is directing the workers, who cannot create a process that is resistant to errors, it's definitely the fact that all people are worthless until they make no errors as there truly is no other way of doing things other than telling your intern to do a task then having them send it directly to the production line.
LLM are "great" in some use cases, "ok" in others, and "laughable" in more.
Some people might find $500 worth of value, in their specific use case, in those "great" and "ok" categories, where they get more value than "lies" out of it.
A few verifiable lies, vs hours of time, could be worth it for some people, with use cases outside of your perspective.
The Furiphone FLX1 makes heavy use of this and it is amazing. I can do most things I'd want a real android phone for (which is not much, admittedly). I know of people who use it for Signal and Spotify. Great project, and right at home on a Linux phone.
I just heard of it from this thread and took a look. It looks great! I'd love to get one, but from the FAQ:
> "The only apps that won’t work are ones that require the full Google Play Store and all it’s requirements. This includes some banking apps"
Sigh. It looks like I'd have to carry two phones.
Banking and credit card apps are essential daily apps for me. I can't even log in to some of my accounts on a desktop browser without their phone app to authenticate, and quite often individual payments require phone app confirmation. Unfortunately I'm not in a position to switch accounts for a freer user experience.
Separately from finance, I also have to use the Google suite for my main job, and I've had to use Discord for another job. I guess those can run in a browser with reduced functionality, though. Not so for the banking/credit card apps, unfortunately.
This isn't a complaint about Waydroid or FLX1. I appreciate the work and creativity! I've long dreamed of owning (and building) a completely FLOSS phone, and seen how much work is involved. I owned two Nokia N900s back in the day.
But times have changed, and I wish and hope a way can be found to run the apps or protocols daily life seems to require now, on top of (or side by side with) a base FLOSS system.
Wow, this phone is almost perfect - TRRS connector, uSD card, user-replaceable battery, and available in the United States. Not having an OLED panel might be a dealbreaker though.
You guys should send our some review units to Linux tech youtubers. I kept searching for reviews of the phone and there is nothing except the 4-5 videos from your guys' channel, which does not instill confidence that this is a real project and not a scam.
I thought the same originally. Then after speaking with the online chat and realising Wayne was a Queenslander, I bought one.
There’s enough people in the Matrix and Telegram channels now to know there is a real phone. Even look at the GitHub activity. It’s busy.
Yeah it is. I have the Signal app installed in Android, but I only use it to initiate the Signal setup. Then use the desktop flatpak in FuriOS as my daily driver. You can change the look of it to be similar to the mobile app and a recent change (like a week ago) has made resizing the contact list easier from a touch screen rather than having to use a mouse the first time.
The Telegram and Matrix channels have been great for people sharing tips like this.
It's a productivity AI agent meant for workers who were already dealing with medical records and creating medical chronologies manually, primarily in the legal space.
Given it was leaked to what is primarily a national US political news outlet which is highly read by Washington DC, it seems like the cancelling of DEI was performative itself. I am saying it was done for political reasons and it was leaked to ensure that the politicos that would be interested in this move would see it.
People move to other states due to state laws. City laws can easily be avoided by living and/or working just outside the city limits. Or more likely, state laws will preempt city laws that go against state level politics.
The ONE dreadful thing the Liberals did was to renege on their promise of electoral reform. All Westminster-style Parliaments are done a disservice by using First-past-the-post. Trudeau campaigned on replacing the system with proportional representation, but incumbents in Westminster governments will never change the system that made them win.
Most people turn to the Carbon Tax as an example, but the Carbon Tax is implemented in such a way that the average family receives MORE in quarterly rebates than what they PAY in Carbon taxes; it's only those with very high incomes who come close to losing money from the tax[1].
Then they'll point to the pandemic and tell you that the worst thing we've ever done as a nation is ask people to get vaccinated and wear a mask during a time where a (not actually) unprecedented virus was rampant. And somehow the virus is the incumbent's fault.
After that you'll be told that healthcare is crumbling under Trudeau. Healthcare in Canada is a provincial responsibility, and the vast majority of provinces (eg Alberta) are run by right-wing governments looking to profit from private healthcare, so are employing a starve-the-beast strategy to make private healthcare look attractive.
And then some particularly weird people will tell you he isn't tough enough on trans people.
What’s dreadful is the rising cost of living and lack of affordable housing, which he failed to address. Moreover he doubled immigration during a time when the average Canadian was struggling to keep up with rising expenses.
I’m pro-immigration but not at an unsustainable rate. Housing construction was not keeping up.
Trudeau pushed beyond the limits of pro-immigration policy. If it was just conservative propaganda, the liberals wouldn’t be looking at a potentially historic election loss based on current polling.
That said, I don’t think conservatives will fix anything.
The immigration system we use today was set up by Harper. I'm an immigrant myself, having moved here on a Harper scheme, but under Trudeau.
You are absolutely right that this wasn't addressed by the current government, but it is a policy of the previous one. The only reason he alone is being blamed is because he happened to be in charge for a very long time.
It is likely to remain unaddressed satisfactorily under PP, too, since landlords benefit from immigration (especially high turnover immigration) and his primary interest is landlords and business owners.
This is a symptom of FPTP-based Westminster governments. If we had a more equitable electoral system, the blame can be more appropriately distributed and - even better - the issues can be addressed more efficiently.
> The only reason he alone is being blamed is because he happened to be in charge for a very long time.
No, he was in charge when it got bad. A policy that doesn't harm the country one decade can harm the country the next. And it did, so the one who chose not to repeal it, and rather to make it much worse, gets blamed.
Asking as a non-Canadian: What do you think he could have done that would fix these issues? If there is a clear path, why is it not politically attractive?
Universities have been abusing the temporary student visa as an income stream. The universities are awash with temporary foreign students, being charged higher tuition fees than domestic students. Partly this is greed, but it's also because funding for post-secondary has been getting cut in most provinces. BUT AGAIN - post-secondary funding is a provincial issue, not something the federal government (ie Trudeau) can do much about.
Alberta, for example, cut post-secondary funding, so the universities in Alberta turned to foreign students to make up the shortfall. This increased rental demand A LOT.
The issues were self created by skyrocketing the immigration rates / TFWs.
All they had to do was .... nothing, just keep the system as it was.
With that it seems like there has been a lot of heavy lobbying by companies built on low wage employment to deflate wages across the country. And it worked!
They rapidly expanded the LMIA program which provisions visas for primarily low income work.
Additionally they realllly expanded the international student visa pool, without actually checking who they were granting visas to.
The result was that pretty much non existent colleges were created with the sole goal of allowing people to pay for a backdoor to try and get PR without high level education, skills or even language proficiency.
Lastly there used to be a cap on visas issued based an unemployment rate of 6% they removed that cap so despite unemployment being up to around 10% in major cities they are still granting tons of visas.
So yeah... They really went out of their way to expand the visa program as fast as possible with very little oversight.
Additionally in terms of actual background checks, those seemed to go out the door as Canada in the past few years has given PR to a number of people who are actively wanted terrorists as part os Isis and other terror groups
The guy likely to take over is going to use non-emergency powers to curtail the rights of trans people.
The sanctioned individuals were involved with blocking an international border. They had the stated intention of causing mischief and preventing leaving or entering Canada. They were blockading their own economy; they deserved what they got. You don't disrupt life and economy just because you've been asked to help keep a virus from spreading and get to get away with it.
And now we'll curtail the rights of people who absolutely do NOT deserve it.
The lurch to the right is deeply inspired by attitudes like this. We even have the Premier of Alberta claiming that unvaccinated people are "the most discriminated against group in history", which, whatever "side" of the vaccination "debate" you fall on, you know is an unbelievably stupid thing to say.
Please, help prevent a drastic lurch to the right by at least reading the lede of an article as well as the headline.
As I'm just a lowly computer technician, no I do not get to choose who gets rights. That is typically the domain of judges, lawmakers, and more fundamentally the founders of nations.
Preventing goods from crossing an international border is called a blockade. In most jurisdictions, this is regarded as a crime and is generally done to harm an economy. Crimes are often punished. Some aren't (like wage theft, not since 1955), but a lot are.
Interfering with a country's ability to trade with another country, as well as publicly threatening to kill law enforcement officers, is quite a serious offence.
I am not certain left-leaning government should not punish crimes, as it's generally seen as a good idea to ensure that activity that disrupts life or liberty of others doesn't happen, and judiciary measures are a part of that. I guess we COULD try an idea in which people are trusted not to do harm, that could be an interesting experiment.
That's absolutely not what a blockade is. Again, by your logic, everyone that was part of the Oka Crisis should've been treated as a foreign enemy or a traitor, and prosecuted as such. I mean, they were armed and wanted indépendance. Yet that's not how it works when you are talking about Canadian citizens.
The exact same logic can also be used to prosecute the people who protested the pipelines in British Columbia. They were literally blocking the construction of a pipeline that was being built literally for international trade.
It's just an insanely dangerous logic, one that can be very conveniently used only against people who usually disagree with you politically.
Like your entire comment reads as a huge far right power fantasy.
Oh and by the way, judges can't do anything w.r.t emergency powers. That's what's so dangerous about them. They remove almost every check and balances.
I guess you're right. A blockade, by definition, is to "render [something] unsuitable for passage". They often have the impact of disallowing goods, people, aid etc from crossing a border (especially when a blockader says "I am blockading to prevent the passage of goods"), but I take your point.
In the UK recently, protesters who blocked major roads to make a point about fossil fuels were imprisoned due to the fact that they were disrupting infrastructure. One elderly protestor has even had to be put back in prison because a medical issue prevented her from being able to wear an ankle tag.
Blocking infrastructure IS generally something that gets punished. But again sometimes it isn't. Quite recently, a protest in London (UK) lead to major roads being blocked with tractors and other agricultural equipment. These protestors have not been charged.
Intent seems to matter. The Coutts and Ottawa guys were blocking infrastructure in protest at being asked to keep a virus under control; the oil protestors in the UK were blocking infrastructure to demonstrate that oil is maybe not great; the agricultural protestors were blockading infrastructure to demonstrate that paying inheritance tax is bad.
Maybe it's not about rights but more about demonstrations that correspond to popularly held positions? I'm not sure. It's something I think about a lot.
I mean don't get me wrong, I absolutely agree that they should have been arrested. I can't think of a single reason why they shouldn't have been. You can't blockade an international border without expecting to be arrested.
The issue wasn't that they were arrested or even charged of anything. The issue is that the government deliberately used the emergency act (which is basically a nuclear bomb) where they could've simply... arrested them. There was no emergency, there was no widespread unrest or any event that was leading to a loss of control. They could've absolutely just arrested everyone, using force if necessary, and moved on. The protestors weren't even armed, they could've just used anti riot police like they always due. As you said yourself, the UK protestors were arrested without using the equivalent of martial law.
So my point isn't that the protestors were innocent, it's that Trudeau's government clearly used the emergency powers act as a way to send a message, and to show that you won't just get arrested but also stripped of your rights completely. Which is to me absolutely abhorrent, and that's coming from someone who actually volunteered for Trudeau's campaign back in 2015 and the election after that one.
I would argue that the unrest was very much widespread. It was just distributed into different forms.
I worked at Chapters for that year, and after we started to require masks in store (we were all getting sick!), I had books thrown at me. That is unrest. What I experienced was NOTHING compared to what grocery store workers went through, nurses, police officers, transit workers... EVERYONE.
Those behaviours were dangerous to society itself; on an individual level, innocent people got hurt for nothing other than simply doing their jobs. On a wider level, had we thrown our hands up and went "okay, you're right. wearing a mask IS the worst oppression anyone has ever faced, Florence Nightingale is a mythical invention by Big Mask, and your individual freedoms are absolutely more important than anything else" and simply let the virus go on unchecked, we might not be posting on a silly orange website now.
I don't know if I completely agree with using the Emergency Powers Act, but it certainly sent a message that said "What we're all going through now is extremely serious. Sit down and let the adults speak."
And I think it worked. Merely arresting the protestors might have just been cutting a head off a hydra.
Maybe.
I don't know. We'll never truly know. It was a weird, lurid time for everyone and nobody knew what the right thing to do was with conviction and certainty. But we must have done something right, because we're still here.
But the incumbents of the day, in every nation, are being blamed. They are being blamed for...letting us continue to live?
It hasn't been a perfect decade. It wasn't under Harper and it won't be under PP, either. Westminster doesn't encourage perfection. Leaders are incentivised to just do enough.
It's going to be a difficult few years for all of us. Well, any of us bring home under $250k anyway.
The protesters at the border could and were arrested without invoking the Emergencies act. The border is under Federal jurisdiction and the laws broken were Federal.
The Emergencies act was invoked to evict the occupiers from Ottawa. They were breaking municipal and provincial laws and on land where the province and city had jurisdiction. The Ottawa city government, the Ottawa police chief and the province were all incompetent and failed to arrest and evict.
Surely there were options like appointing a new police chief which they could have gone to first rather than going straight to emergency powers and suspension of rights?
So, because the provincial government didn't think that the situation justified a harder crackdown, the federal government used exceptional powers, usually used in states of wars, overstepped the locally elected governments and used an exceptional law?
A law that strips people of all of their rights, and suspends the charter? Is that supposed to make it better? Like you realize the provincial and municipal governments were also elected democratically? All of this for a local protest, with no deaths, little physical violence, etc.
I mean, it does give credence that the entire thing happened because poor federal workers were affected, but it's still not a good reason.
> So, because the provincial government didn't think that the situation justified a harder crackdown
Because the provincial government loves it when anything bad happens to Ottawa or when the Federal government gets blamed for something that's their own fault.
If it was Toronto that was occupied, the province would have stepped in early, quickly and decisively.
