• 6 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • No?

    An anthropomorphic model of the software, wherein you can articulate things like “the software is making up packages”, or “the software mistakenly thinks these packages ought to exist”, is the right level of abstraction for usefully reasoning about software like this. Using that model, you can make predictions about what will happen when you run the software, and you can take actions that will lead to the outcomes you want occurring more often when you run the software.

    If you try to explain what is going on without these concepts, you’re left saying something like “the wrong token is being sampled because the probability of the right one is too low because of several thousand neural network weights being slightly off of where they would have to be to make the right one come out consistently”. Which is true, but not useful.

    The anthropomorphic approach suggests stuff like “yell at the software in all caps to only use python packages that really exist”, and that sort of approach has been found to be effective in practice.






  • Plastic at the microscopic level, if they aren’t doing anything chemically interesting, really ought to function about like “rock, but light”. Most organisms don’t run into trouble because there are tiny bits of rock in the world, so I would expect tiny bits of plastic not to be a huge problem. Which is sort of backed up by how we have noticed microplastics everywhere and we haven’t seen huge problems resulting from it (most people are still alive, most children still develop to adulthood, etc.).

    But it’s entirely possible that some of these plastics are not chemically inert, and that they emit chemicals that do exciting and unwanted things in people’s bodies. If we can’t keep our plastics from becoming microplastics, we probably need to discontinue the manufacture of non-implantable plastics, since all the plastics will end up in someone’s body at some point.

    And it’s also possible that the microplastics physically do do something interestingly bad. I think there was a recent study to this effect on heart disease. But at this point, that’s the question we need to be asking. How many or what kind of microplastics does it take to give a ferret epilepsy? Not “are there microplastics in my all brands of peanut butter?”



  • But now, or soon, you can have one person with half an idea, like “what if The Rock had to save Shanghai from mole zombies”, and they can grab a text generator to fill in most of the screenplay, and then dial in the number of synonyms for “exciting” used to describe the explosions, and come out with Day of the Living Moles, a 95 minute feature film, in a weekend. Without actually having to have had any traditional cinematography skills or breaking an artistic sweat.

    There are categories of creative work that are throw-away; little sketches on napkins, improvised songs, quick sketches that an artist might think of are of no account to anyone. And the scope of what can be dashed off like that, with minimal time and effort, is growing because of more powerful tools.

    Why should I watch Universal’s superhero blockbuster when I can watch my buddy Jimothy’s? What happens when the number of plausible films dramatically exceeds the time that movie critics have to watch them to sort out which are any good?




  • Does the server operator avoid any responsibility for data protection by just having the actual physical copies of all the data they do have access to (user names, post contents, etc.) physically live over at Discord? If the company president’s PC is hacked and someone steals copies of all the personal information in support chats that were conducted over Discord, or the contents of private channels where people posted their home addresses for Secret Santa, or whatever, can the company get out of having any sort of data breach disclosure obligations because the data was really Discord’s data?


  • As long as what is going on here is basically comparable to what is going on when a company uses a third-party service as a peer to individuals, then yes, the company probably isn’t somehow responsible for what the service is doing. Government Twitter pages have been found to legally constitute public forums, but that was in the context of restricting the government from blocking people. The person whose page it is still don’t really run the place and probably isn’t responsible for the actions of the platform.

    But if a company hires another company to build and operate a communication platform for it (more of a Mailchimp or Invision Community situation), then you probably have a data controller-data processor style relationship.

    So, is Discord more like Spotify or is it more like Mailchimp?