The one thing that this whole analysis is missing is this: There is a ton of work to do. The oceans are dying. The planet is boiling. The garbage is stacking up, endless and endless. There are crimes big and small going undiscovered, or un-processed and dealt with in a trustworthy fashion if they are discovered. There are wars, there are dangerous materials that need to be removed from the soil and the rivers, and the policies need to be set up and enforced to stop their cousins from replacing them within the year. WE’RE NOT FUCKING DONE. This illusion is wholly wrong that capitalism has created, that it is fine to drive the car off the cliff as long as we keep paying salaries and dividends up until the moment of impact comes

Yes, we’ve gotten more efficient and powerful in our ability to translate a human into an effective change in conditions at the earth’s surface. But the problems have gotten bigger, too, and more urgent to the point that they threaten our entire species. Just because we can now keep growing the food and doing layout for the advertisements with only 15 hours a week, doesn’t mean that’s all we need to fucking do.

There is a vital question coming up. When the machines do all the work, does that mean everyone eats? Or no one?

Right now it is “no one” roughly speaking. That must change. There is no future for anyone there, just nightmares unfolding and unfolding.

190 min read

Hoo fuckin’ boy

I do have to say that including Hyprland in the original post is silly. Hyprland had a problem with ignorant users making ignorant speech in their community, and they didn’t police it, and once a shitstorm started, they recognized their error and started trying. It’s fine. Putting them up top, and Omarchy which is literally lead-developed by an open fascist, down below, is weird.

Holy God it’s a shitstorm… reading

I just want to point out there is nothing true in this statement. No such thing as far-right in current government (unless you consider anything right of your beliefs to be far-right, which is just silly), and immigration is completely fine, currently. My wife is an immigrant and non-us citizen and we have many immigrant friends. They are only deporting criminals, illegals, people who have broken the law.

Fuckin’ hell man. (That quote is from nobody in particular, just some random user chiming in… but still fuckin’ hell man.)

nrp’s reaction in the reply chain mostly just reads like he hasn’t picked up what’s going on. He still thinks fascism is “a political view” instead of “an active threat that might come for him and people he cares about right now, into his house and his safety, that needs resistance.” I don’t think DHH needs to be in prison or anything unless he’s done something. I do believe in free speech. But yes, the time has come for boycotts, strikes, marches, strengthening the organizations that we’ll need as things continue to get worse. It sounds like nrp is just privileged enough living his tech life that he doesn’t grasp that, and he can’t understand what people are mad about here.

Nobody remembers Switzerland as unsung heroes of World War 2, because of their commitment to freedom of expression and commerce for any side without prejudice. They’re lucky they got away with it, to be honest.

Pretty sure there is a pretty generous window where you can just return the thing for a refund no questions asked. It might be worth looking into.

Depending on the wording of the return policy, you might even be able to request one and tell them the reason is “The far right has taken over the world’s biggest government and they’re snatching people in the streets. The time to hide support for them behind ‘everyone’s welcome to their opinion’ is over. If at this moment in history you’re not willing to exclude far-right people from your circle, then go fuck yourself, fuck your hardware, give me my money back, in hindsight people should have done this to BMW and IG Farben both before and after the war. I hope you wake the fuck up. You will not be safe indefinitely from them coming for you, unless people braver than yourself stop them before they reach you.”

Usually I am against bullying people into saying the political views or taking the political decisions you want them to take. You can think they’re wrong about this (as obviously do I, for the reasons stated above) and say so without needing to try to strong-arm them. But, in this case, fuck 'em, for the reasons stated above. Read the return policy first of course to make sure you’re on solid ground, I don’t really know what it is.

Yeah, I get it. I don’t think it is necessarily bad research or anything. I just feel like maybe it would have been good to go into it as two papers:

1. Look at the funny LLM and how far off the rails it goes if you don’t keep it stable and let it kind of “build on itself” over time iteratively and don’t put the right boundaries on
2. How should we actually wrap up an LLM into a sensible model so that it can pursue an “agent” type of task, what leads it off the rails and what doesn’t, what are some various ideas to keep it grounded and which ones work and don’t work

And yeah obviously they can get confused or output counterfactuals or nonsense as a failure mode, what I meant to say was just that they don’t really do that as a response to an overload / “DDOS” situation specifically. They might do it as a result of too much context or a badly set up framework around them sure.

Initial thought: Well… but this is a transparently absurd way to set up an ML system to manage a vending machine. I mean it is a useful data point I guess, but to me it leads to the conclusion “Even though LLMs sound to humans like they know what they’re doing, they does not, don’t just stick the whole situation into the LLM input and expect good decisions and strategies to come out of the output, you have to embed it into a more capable and structured system for any good to come of it.”

Updated thought, after reading a little bit of the paper: Holy Christ on a pancake. Is this architecture what people have been meaning by “AI agents” this whole time I’ve been hearing about them? Yeah this isn’t going to work. What the fuck, of course it goes insane over time. I stand corrected, I guess, this is valid research pointing out the stupidity of basically putting the LLM in the driver’s seat of something even more complicated than the stuff it’s already been shown to fuck up, and hoping that goes okay.

Edit: Final thought, after reading more of the paper: Okay, now I’m back closer to the original reaction. I’ve done stuff like this before, this is not how you do it. Have it output JSON, have some tolerance and retries in the framework code for parsing the JSON, be more careful with the prompts to make sure that it’s set up for success, definitely don’t include all the damn history in the context up to the full wildly-inflated context window to send it off the rails, basically, be a lot more careful with how to set it up than this, and put a lot more limits on how much you are asking of the LLM so that it can actually succeed within the little box you’ve put it in. I am not at all surprised that this setup went off the rails in hilarious fashion (and it really is hilarious, you should read). Anyway that’s what LLMs do. I don’t know if this is because the researchers didn’t know any better, or because they were deliberately setting up the framework around the LLM to produce bad results, or because this stupid approach really is the state of the art right now, but this is not how you do it. I actually am a little bit skeptical about whether you even could set up a framework for a current-generation LLM that would enable to succeed at an objective and pretty frickin’ complicated task like they set it up for here, but regardless, this wasn’t a fair test. If it was meant as a test of “are LLMs capable of AGI all on their own regardless of the setup like humans generally are,” then congratulations, you learned the answer is no. But you could have framed it a little more directly to talk about that being the answer instead of setting up a poorly-designed agent framework to be involved in it.

Yeah it’s a bunch of shit. I’m not an expert obviously, just talking out of my ass, but:

1. Running inference for all the devices in the building to “our dev server” would not have maintained a usable level of response time for any of them, unless he meant to say “the dev cluster” or something and his home wifi glitched right at that moment and made it sound different
2. LLMs don’t degrade by giving wrong answers, they degrade by stopping producing tokens
3. Meta already has shown itself to be okay with lying
4. GUYS JUST USE FUCKING CANNED ANSWERS WITH THE RIGHT SOUNDING VOICE, THIS ISN’T ROCKET SCIENCE, THAT’S HOW YOU DO DEMOS WHEN YOUR SHIT’S NOT DONE YET

I think the crisis of Trump is likely to be worse than any crisis in the Western world for the last 50 years. I think the closest analogue is probably the collapse of the USSR. So yes, some of the rich people upped their wealth by orders of magnitude, and honestly you might be right that Zuck might manage to be one of that category, but also some of them lost everything or got thrown out windows, or had to survive in reduced capacity within their new walled fortresses in the horrifying new meta. I feel like more likely is that the MAGA world will remember Facebook censoring their posts about ivermectin, and not feel like Zuck needs to have a seat at the table, no matter how many ass-kissing sessions he shows up at the White House to do.

For example I feel like breaking up Meta and mandating Truth Social and TikTok as the only new sanctioned social media going forward might be one possible outcome. It’s kind of hard to say and I won’t swear that you’re definitely wrong that he might come out way ahead in the end. I’m just saying that this type of crisis is a very different type of crisis.

Part of my point is that the damage Trump is going to do will cost them tons more money than if they had helped to prop up the fairly safe and civil society they previously were allowed to exist within, under which secure umbrella they’ve been able to rake in money like leaves in autumn on a wide country estate.

Hopefully the idiots who run these tech companies will learn their lesson soon.

“If the thing is free, you’re the product” applies just as much to dinners at the White House as it does to social media apps.

That oughta fix it

I saw an ad on YouTube for what a good job ICE is doing not that long ago. Kristi Noem was in it.

More disturbingly, I’ve noticed a little scattering of those “police bodycam raw video” channels starting to play up when the criminal involved is an immigrant, what their status was, how ICE was involved, and so on. There’s clearly something at work that’s a little more subtle and sinister than just paid advertising.

It’s 2025. Any minor success of his administration is being dismantled by Trump. Get with the times.

What percent reduction in US overall carbon emissions would you define as “minor”? If you had to give an objective number to it.

The larger point outside of that one word “minor,” I think, is largely true. People really fucked up on a world-altering scale letting Trump come to power again. Were you one of them? I feel like there are a lot of them in this thread, who contributed in their little infinitesimal ways to letting it happen. Thanks! You guys should do something about that going forward, or else this stuff is going to keep happening and get infinitely worse.

Also jesus christ, your condescending tone is obnoxious.

Do a quick search for “LOL” in these comments. I was pretty direct about disagreeing, but I wasn’t condescending until someone came up super hostile and talking down to me. I actually still kept it factual about what we were trying to talk about, which domain in standard lemmy.ml tradition they rejected with extreme hostility, but I wasn’t the one that started the condescension. Condescension and hostility are strong traditions here, valued and celebrated as long as they’re in line with the hivemind opinion-set. I was just better at it than the other person, and that’s why they got upset, and why you’re mentioning it now.

I had a feeling you wouldn’t want me to tell you, and would want to pivot to some aggressive complaint in some other kind of way, and bring up the talking point about “pretending” again as if I wasn’t specifically addressing it. 😃 Glad we had this talk.

(Here is a source: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bidens-climate-act-cut-us-emissions-by-2030-by-35-43-epa-2023-09-13/)

You expected him to single-handedly solve climate change? Start in 2020 and then by 2024 there is no accelerating pace of wildfires? And you can’t support a politician unless they can do that?

I asked what the total level of reduction in emissions his policies are predicted to accomplish are. I completely share the opinion that what someone pretends to do, doesn’t matter. So what’s the predicted reduction in objective terms? I feel like that’s something you should know.

Do you want me to tell you? I feel like it could be educational for you to learn on your own. You tell me, I can do either way.

Are we still giving Joe Biden credit for pretending to be progressive

What was it I gave Joe Biden credit for? I feel like you might have skimmed my message because of length, and missed it. I was pretty specific though.

Also, what’s the total reduction in emissions that Biden’s policies have resulted in, and what total are they predicted to produce in the future? (Or were, I mean Trump’s trying hard to undo them with some level of success.) That stuff wasn’t contained in my message but I’m curious whether you are aware.

I mean Biden tried spending almost a trillion dollars on the biggest action on climate change in the history of the US, about ten times over, and y’all didn’t give a fuck. So I guess Newsom is trying shitposting instead. I don’t love it either, but aiming to win elections on substance certainly doesn’t either, so why not.

Edit: I’m not able to see or reply to the lemmygrad person locally, but yes, people not voting hard enough for Al Gore in 2000 is very much a primary reason why this is happening as early as it is. It would have changed a lot of things, among them the creation of ICE. It wouldn’t have been enough by any means, but IDK how any person alive in the US right now at this point in history can say that voting doesn’t make a difference to the day-to-day reality we live in. This year is literally the A/B test demonstration.

Yeah, and I’m only supposed to use this bong for smoking tobacco. It said so very very clearly when I bought it so you know they mean it.

Making a few digits worth of wrong division way down in the not very significant bits of the answer, is way better than encouraging all your users to use an LLM to generate the answers for their quarterly reports / tax forms / do we have enough food for the winter calculations. The Pentium division fuckup was barely worth fixing unless you were doing some kind of numerical analysis or simulation or something, which is why it slipped past all the testing initially. This is astronomically worse of a fuck-up.

It is a good joke but you missed the chance to call back to one of the better gags from Space Quest 3 by writing “Yes / Yes”