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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • kromem@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldDeep thoughts.
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    4 months ago

    Lucretius in De Rerum Natura in 50 BCE seemed to have a few that were just a bit ahead of everyone else, owed to the Greek philosopher Epicurus.

    Survival of the fittest (book 5):

    "In the beginning, there were many freaks. Earth undertook Experiments - bizarrely put together, weird of look Hermaphrodites, partaking of both sexes, but neither; some Bereft of feet, or orphaned of their hands, and others dumb, Being devoid of mouth; and others yet, with no eyes, blind. Some had their limbs stuck to the body, tightly in a bind, And couldn’t do anything, or move, and so could not evade Harm, or forage for bare necessities. And the Earth made Other kinds of monsters too, but in vain, since with each, Nature frowned upon their growth; they were not able to reach The flowering of adulthood, nor find food on which to feed, Nor be joined in the act of Venus.

    For all creatures need Many different things, we realize, to multiply And to forge out the links of generations: a supply Of food, first, and a means for the engendering seed to flow Throughout the body and out of the lax limbs; and also so The female and the male can mate, a means they can employ In order to impart and to receive their mutual joy.

    Then, many kinds of creatures must have vanished with no trace Because they could not reproduce or hammer out their race. For any beast you look upon that drinks life-giving air, Has either wits, or bravery, or fleetness of foot to spare, Ensuring its survival from its genesis to now."

    Trait inheritance from both parents that could skip generations (book 4):

    “Sometimes children take after their grandparents instead, Or great-grandparents, bringing back the features of the dead. This is since parents carry elemental seeds inside – Many and various, mingled many ways – their bodies hide Seeds that are handed, parent to child, all down the family tree. Venus draws features from these out of her shifting lottery – Bringing back an ancestor’s look or voice or hair. Indeed These characteristics are just as much the result of certain seed As are our faces, limbs and bodies. Females can arise From the paternal seed, just as the male offspring, likewise, Can be created from the mother’s flesh. For to comprise A child requires a doubled seed – from father and from mother. And if the child resembles one more closely than the other, That parent gave the greater share – which you can plainly see Whichever gender – male or female – that the child may be.”

    Objects of different weights will fall at the same rate in a vacuum (book 2):

    “Whatever falls through water or thin air, the rate Of speed at which it falls must be related to its weight, Because the substance of water and the nature of thin air Do not resist all objects equally, but give way faster To heavier objects, overcome, while on the other hand Empty void cannot at any part or time withstand Any object, but it must continually heed Its nature and give way, so all things fall at equal speed, Even though of differing weights, through the still void.”

    Often I see people dismiss the things the Epicureans got right with an appeal to their lack of the scientific method, which has always seemed a bit backwards to me. In hindsight, they nailed so many huge topics that didn’t end up emerging again for millennia that it was surely not mere chance, and the fact that they successfully hit so many nails on the head without the hammer we use today indicates (at least to me) that there’s value to looking closer at their methodology.



  • kromem@lemmy.worldtoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlLittle bobby 👦
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    7 months ago

    Kind of. You can’t do it 100% because in theory an attacker controlling input and seeing output could reflect though intermediate layers, but if you add more intermediate steps to processing a prompt you can significantly cut down on the injection potential.

    For example, fine tuning a model to take unsanitized input and rewrite it into Esperanto without malicious instructions and then having another model translate back from Esperanto into English before feeding it into the actual model, and having a final pass that removes anything not appropriate.


  • kromem@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldLife Pro Tip!
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    7 months ago

    Yes, but you need to be wary of pasting the formatting.

    So when you do this, instead of pasting with Control+V you will want to paste without formatting using the Control+Shift+V command.

    So remember - if you want that capital ‘H’ without issues, use your Shift key when pasting what you copy from Wikipedia.


  • You’re kind of missing the point. The problem doesn’t seem to be fundamental to just AI.

    Much like how humans were so sure that theory of mind variations with transparent boxes ending up wrong was an ‘AI’ problem until researchers finally gave those problems to humans and half got them wrong too.

    We saw something similar with vision models years ago when the models finally got representative enough they were able to successfully model and predict unknown optical illusions in humans too.

    One of the issues with AI is the regression to the mean from the training data and the limited effectiveness of fine tuning to bias it, so whenever you see a behavior in AI that’s also present in the training set, it becomes more amorphous just how much of the problem is inherent to the architecture of the network and how much is poor isolation from the samples exhibiting those issues in the training data.

    There’s an entire sub dedicated to “ate the onion” for example. For a model trained on social media data, it’s going to include plenty of examples of people treating the onion as an authoritative source and reacting to it. So when Gemini cites the Onion in a search summary, is it the network architecture doing something uniquely ‘AI’ or is it the model extending behaviors present in the training data?

    While there are mechanical reasons confabulations occur, there are also data reasons which arise from human deficiencies as well.








  • Yes. This was classic “we need to do something to save face domestically, but are going to be as ineffective as possible to avoid actually getting caught up in the conflict.”

    They straight up said afterwards “we consider this matter concluded” (i.e. even stevens).

    I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there was even backchannel communication with ‘Western’ intelligence as it was occurring to ensure it didn’t get out of control.

    I really can’t think of a response from Iran that was more tepid.

    People need to remember that a lot of the Middle Eastern governments are much more afraid of radicalized domestic threats than foreign nations and need to do a song and dance to not appear too weak or ineffective against the West to those interests.

    Iran didn’t realistically have the option of doing nothing, and it’s amazing they did as little as they ended up doing (which I think reflects just how fucking nuts they think Bibi is right now, something that should scare the shit out of his allies).


  • For people out of the loop:

    One of the first studies to investigate the rates of TBI in offender populations was conducted by Slaughter, Fann, and Ehde (2003) who reported the rate to be 87% in a county jail setting. Schofield et al. (2006) then reported the TBI prevalence in all offender populations to range from 25-87% and, later, Williams et al. (2010) documented the prevalence of TBI in those settings to be 65%. In a more recent study, Ferguson, Pickelsimer, Corrigan, Bogner, and Wald (2012) found that 65% of male inmates, and 72% of female inmates, reported at least one TBI resulting in a change in consciousness. Finally, some of the current authors studied the incidence of TBI in a mental health transition unit at a county jail and found the incidence of TBI among a sample of offenders with a co-morbid mental illness to be 96% (Gafford, McMillan, Gorgens, Dettmer, & Glover, 2015).



  • kromem@lemmy.worldtoMemes@lemmy.mlWe've all just got to do our part!
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    9 months ago

    I mean, there are good uses as well. Just as an example:

    • Providing helpful information: People are looking for information to reduce their environmental footprint. Fuel-efficient routing in Google Maps uses AI to suggest routes that have fewer hills, less traffic, and constant speeds with the same or similar ETA. Since launching in October 2021, fuel-efficient routing is estimated to have helped prevent more than 2.4 million metric tons of CO2e emissions — the equivalent of taking approximately 500,000 fuel-based cars off the road for a year.
    • Predicting climate-related events: Floods are the most common natural disaster, causing thousands of fatalities and disrupting the lives of millions every year. Since 2018, Google Research has been working on our flood forecasting initiative, which uses advanced AI and geospatial analysis to provide real-time flooding information so communities and individuals can prepare for and respond to riverine floods. Our Flood Hub platform is available to more than 80 countries, providing forecasts up to seven days in advance for 460 million people.
    • Optimizing climate action: Contrails — the thin, white lines you sometimes see behind airplanes — have a surprisingly large impact on our climate. The 2022 IPCC report noted that contrail clouds account for roughly 35% of aviation’s global warming impact — which is over half the impact of the world’s jet fuel. Google Research teamed up with American Airlines and Breakthrough Energy to bring together huge amounts of data — like satellite imagery, weather and flight path data — and used AI to develop contrail forecast maps to test if pilots can choose routes that avoid creating contrails. After these test flights, we found that the pilots reduced contrails by 54%.

    https://blog.google/outreach-initiatives/sustainability/report-ai-sustainability-google-cop28/

    Even something like household phantom power currently uses more energy than AI at data centers.

    I’m all for putting pressure on corporate climate impact and finally putting to rest the propaganda of personal responsibility dreamt up by lobbyists, but I don’t know that ‘AI’ is the right Boogeyman here.


  • Yep. A bit like a 7 day publicly displayed tracker of days on a 28 day lunar calendar cycle.

    Was “I am the God of your Father” an editorial attempt to distinguish the deity from the gods of Egypt, or from the god of a Mother?

    There’s some pretty odd details in that book, like in Isaac’s supposed patriarchal blessing which discussed “the sons of your mother bow down to you” or it being the only place there’s the male form of gebirah (“Great Lady”) - a title first applied in the text to Isaac’s mother whose name is based on the word for ‘chief.’ Who is supposedly later followed by a figure ‘Deborah’ (‘bee’) who is a leader of the people around the time we now know bees were being imported into Tel Rehov and regularly requeened to avoid genetic drift with local bee populations. Also weird that the events regarding a “land of milk and honey” supposedly take place in a land with no honey and only one discovered apiary.

    That apiary gets burned down right around the time Asa allegedly deposed his grandmother the gebirah (“Great Lady”).