I was writing a comment that my device is unsupported and all the supported pixel phones are flagship priced. Then I decided to check my work and look it up.
Long story short I have a refurbished pixel 6 on the way, it was cheaper than my current phone was.
“We are legion.”
I’m just perusing my old comments and came across this, 7 months later. This is an amazing article, thank you.
Facebook has had a strategy for a long time of monopolising the internet of countries that previously had very little internet. They essentially subsidise internet infrastructure and make that subsidy dependent on facebook being a central part of the network.
So I’m not surprised to hear this. They obviously have found ways to inveigle themselves into key infrastructure in lots of places, even if they couldn’t build it in from the ground up.
They are obviously not in a reasoning place. I wouldn’t try logic, but they are susceptible to emotional manipulation. That’s how they fell for fascist propaganda in the first place. I would go for emotional truth.
You have to judge if you’re safe to do this, but the next time they’re screaming about their absurd conspiracies, I would get a really sad look on my face, make direct eye contact, shake my head and say, “You’re so full of hate, and it’s really sad.” Just go full sincerity and show them how you see them.
You can even set them up for it. Next time you try telling them some fact that they’re going to have this hateful response to, you can have this in your back pocket. You start with a simple fact, they respond with hate, you reply by telling them they’re being hateful.
This is a modification of this strategy: https://youtu.be/tZzwO2B9b64
Basically, don’t waste time arguing with fascists, just point out that they’re being assholes.
Now, I say you need to judge how safe you feel doing this, because you might be surprised how ballistic they go. People stuck in abusive behaviour patterns hate nothing more than having that behaviour simply described to them. But when they do lose their shit, you can just describe it again.
Sometimes they will just short-circuit and try to ignore you, or chastise you for speaking out of turn. The authoritarian personality is deeply connected to authoritarian parenting attitudes. Just persist over time, and maybe they will notice that they can’t stop you from reflecting their ugly selves back at them.
I don’t know how old you are, how physically big you are, how prone they are to serious outbursts, but again, pay attention to your body and how much you’re feeling your flight instinct. Only if you feel safe.
I do this with my parents sometimes. Like if my mum is fussing over my kids in some way that I think is invasive, - this was a sore point in my upbringing, she has no filter and no boundaries - I don’t engage on the facts of what she’s saying. I don’t tell her, “That tiny red spot you’ve noticed isn’t a big problem,” because that’s also being invasive and speaking on their behalf. I say “People don’t like to be scrutinised like that. If that’s a real problem they can tell us.”
It’s honestly astonishing how fast this resolves some situations. That might have been a perennial argument about some fussy detail of my child’s appearance, all the time adding to the boundary-crossing scrutiny they experience, but shutting it down by pointing out her behaviour really makes her stop, and it communicates to my kids that they don’t have to put up with it. It teaches them that they have autonomy.
It’s taken many years of demonstrating to her that I won’t be pushed around or intimidated for me to get to this point though. It’s not an easy road, and often the way to know the tactic is working is by watching how unpleasant someone gets when you do it, at least at first.
Again: only if you feel safe.
Honestly less frantic gameplay sounds good to me, I got sick of the “oh god they’re after me now I fell oh well try again” parts of the gameplay. I might take a look. Thanks!
I played the first game and thought it was okay but not great. What were the changes? Maybe they’ll suit me since I’m not so attached to the original.
The argument could be made that because the image generator is essentially a regurgitator with no artistic interpretation, there is no transformative artistic value in it. It’s like applying a filter with extra steps.
Also the generators charge for access, so they are profiting off of the IP. That’s quite different to making something for personal use or releasing it for free.
We don’t have the same problems LLMs have.
LLMs have zero fidelity. They have no - none - zero - model of the world to compare their output to.
Humans have biases and problems in our thinking, sure, but we’re capable of at least making corrections and working with meaning in context. We can recognise our model of the world and how it relates to the things we are saying.
LLMs cannot do that job, at all, and they won’t be able to until they have a model of the world. A model of the world would necessarily include themselves, which is self-awareness, which is AGI. That’s a meaning-understander. Developing a world model is the same problem as consciousness.
What I’m saying is that you cannot develop fidelity at all without AGI, so no, LLMs don’t have the same problems we do. That is an entirely different class of problem.
Some moon rockets fail, but they don’t have that in common with moon cannons. One of those can in theory achieve a moon landing and the other cannot, ever, in any iteration.
If all you’re saying is that neural networks could develop consciousness one day, sure, and nothing I said contradicts that. Our brains are neural networks, so it stands to reason they could do what our brains can do. But the technical hurdles are huge.
You need at least two things to get there:
1 is hard because a single brain alone is about as powerful as a significant chunk of worldwide computing, the gulf between our current power and what we would need is about… 100% of what we would need. We are so woefully under resourced for that. You also need to solve how to power the computers without cooking the planet, which is not something we’re even close to solving currently.
2 means that we can’t just throw more power or training at the problem. Modern NN modules have an underlying theory that makes them work. They’re essentially statistical curve-fitting machines. We don’t currently have a good theoretical model that would allow us to structure the NN to create a consciousness. It’s not even on the horizon yet.
Those are two enormous hurdles. I think saying modern NN design can create consciousness is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we can get to the Moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made in the last few years”.
Moon rockets are essentially artillery science in many ways, yes, but Jules Verne was still a century away in terms of supporting technologies, raw power, and essential insights into how to do it.
You’re definitely overselling how AI works and underselling how human brains work here, but there is a kernel of truth to what you’re saying.
Neural networks are a biomimicry technology. They explicitly work by mimicking how our own neurons work, and surprise surprise, they create eerily humanlike responses.
The thing is, LLMs don’t have anything close to reasoning the way human brains reason. We are actually capable of understanding and creating meaning, LLMs are not.
So how are they human-like? Our brains are made up of many subsystems, each doing extremely focussed, specific tasks.
We have so many, including sound recognition, speech recognition, language recognition. Then on the flipside we have language planning, then speech planning and motor centres dedicated to creating the speech sounds we’ve planned to make. The first three get sound into your brain and turn it into ideas, the last three take ideas and turn them into speech.
We have made neural network versions of each of these systems, and even tied them together. An LLM is analogous to our brain’s language planning centre. That’s the part that decides how to put words in sequence.
That’s why LLMs sound like us, they sequence words in a very similar way.
However, each of these subsystems in our brains can loop-back on themselves to check the output. I can get my language planner to say “mary sat on the hill”, then loop that through my language recognition centre to see how my conscious brain likes it. My consciousness might notice that “the hill” is wrong, and request new words until it gets “a hill” which it believes is more fitting. It might even notice that “mary” is the wrong name, and look for others, it might cycle through martha, marge, maths, maple, may, yes, that one. Okay, “may sat on a hill”, then send that to the speech planning centres to eventually come out of my mouth.
Your brain does this so much you generally don’t notice it happening.
In the 80s there was a craze around so called “automatic writing”, which was essentially zoning out and just writing whatever popped into your head without editing. You’d get fragments of ideas and really strange things, often very emotionally charged, they seemed like they were coming from some mysterious place, maybe ghosts, demons, past lives, who knows? It was just our internal LLM being given free rein, but people got spooked into believing it was a real person, just like people think LLMs are people today.
In reality we have no idea how to even start constructing a consciousness. It’s such a complex task and requires so much more linking and understanding than just a probabilistic connection between words. I wouldn’t be surprised if we were more than a century away from AGI.
Little Brother is a novel about a future dystopia where copyright laws have been allowed free rein to destroy people’s lives.
It’s legislated that only “secure” hardware is allowed, but hardware is by definition fixed, which means that every time a vulnerability is found - which is inevitable - there is a hardware recall. So the black market is full of hardware which is proven to have jailbreaking vulnerabilities.
Just a glimpse of where all this “trusted”, “secure” computing might lead.
As a short video I saw many years ago explained on the concept: “trust always depends on mutuality, and they already decided not to trust you, so why should you trust them?”
Edit: holy shit, it’s 15 years old, and “anti rrusted computing video dutch voice over” (turns out the guy is German actually) was enough to find it:
Faster to apply and much harder to remove.
Got them working, and was pleasantly surprised to find most of them had flatpak installers! Manual saving is still a pain but the engines running smoothly does make a big difference.
Although the dark forces installer doesn’t work with the steam install so you have to copy the game data to the data folder to make it work.
Honestly anything to deal with the horrendous friction and instability of the original would be welcome. Even modded I think I had to stick with 4:3 which even with black bars was still not quite right on my modern system. It would have to be a better experience, even if I have to re-learn manual quicksaves.
I just found Shockolate, a GPL-3 source port of system shock:
I actually really appreciate someone clarifying the chronology of these games, I’ve got them all in my steam library and can never remember the order they go in.
Do the OS remakes have any QoL improvements? I tried playing through them recently and had a very hard time with the manual save system since I’m used to autosave points in linear games like that.
More power to the rear makes sense because you get more traction at the rear under normal acceleration, not just when carrying a load. It’s pretty typical of electric cars to do this, just like it’s typical to have bigger brakes on the front of all cars, because there’s more traction at the front under braking.
There’s also the issue of torque vectoring. Without a differential, torque vectoring is essential, but under acceleration torque vectoring to the rear wheels is much more effective than to the front wheels, so that’s another reason to split the rear power but not the front.
He proposed a moon cannon. The moon cannon was wrong, as wrong as thinking an LLM can have any fidelity whatsoever. That’s all that’s needed for my analogy to make the point I want to make. Whether rockets count as artillery or not really doesn’t change that.
Cannons are not rockets. LLMs are not thinking machines.
Being occasionally right like a stopped clock is not what “fidelity” means in this context. Fidelity implies some level of adherence to a model of the world, but the LLM simply has no model, so it has zero fidelity.
Thanks, I’ve wanted to do this for ages, but I got this current phone before I knew about grapheneos and the compatibility issue. Now all I need is to fully switch my main email and I’ll be significantly de-googled.