The latest We’re In Hell revealed a new piece of the puzzle to me, Symbolic vs Connectionist AI.

As a layman I want to be careful about overstepping the bounds of my own understanding, but from someone who has followed this closely for decades, read a lot of sci-fi, and dabbled in computer sciences, it’s always been kind of clear to me that AI would be more symbolic than connectionist. Of course it’s going to be a bit of both, but there really are a lot of people out there that believe in AI from the movies; that one day it will just “awaken” once a certain number of connections are made.

Cons of Connectionist AI: Interpretability: Connectionist AI systems are often seen as “black boxes” due to their lack of transparency and interpretability.

Transparency and accountability are negatives when being used for a large number of applications AI is currently being pushed for. This is just THE PURPOSE.

Even taking a step back from the apocalyptic killer AI mentioned in the video, we see the same in healthcare. The system is beyond us, smarter than us, processing larger quantities of data and making connections our feeble human minds can’t comprehend. We don’t have to understand it, we just have to accept its results as infallible and we are being trained to do so. The system has marked you as extraneous and removed your support. This is the purpose.

EDIT: In further response to the article itself, I’d like to point out that misalignment is a very real problem but is anthropomorphized in ways it absolutely should not be. I want to reference a positive AI video, AI learns to exploit a glitch in Trackmania. To be clear, I have nothing but immense respect for Yosh and his work writing his homegrown Trackmania AI. Even he anthropomorphizes the car and carrot, but understand how the rewards are a fairly simple system to maximize a numerical score.

This is what LLMs are doing, they are maximizing a score by trying to serve you an answer that you find satisfactory to the prompt you provided. I’m not gonna source it, but we all know that a lot of people don’t want to hear the truth, they want to hear what they want to hear. Tech CEOs have been mercilessly beating the algorithm to do just that.

Even stripped of all reason, language can convey meaning and emotion. It’s why sad songs make you cry, it’s why propaganda and advertising work, and it’s why that abusive ex got the better of you even though you KNEW you were smarter than that. None of us are so complex as we think. It’s not hard to see how an LLM will not only provide sensible response to a sad prompt, but may make efforts to infuse it with appropriate emotion. It’s hard coded into the language, they can’t be separated and the fact that the LLM wields emotion without understanding like a monkey with a gun is terrifying.

Turning this stuff loose on the populace like this is so unethical there should be trials, but I doubt there ever will be.

Comes to mind as an example that already exists, https://store.steampowered.com/app/2183650/MEGA_MAN_X_DiVE_Offline/

I just can’t get over how little we hear from academics RE: AI. It shows a clear disinterest and I feel like if they did bother to say anything it would be, “Proceed with caution while we study this further.”

Instead it’s always the giant corporations with vested interest in this technology succeeding. It’s just so painfully transparent.

What kind of source is GazeOn? Based off the top menu items, looks like a pro-AI rag. Biased source.

To give them an ounce of credit, there are many factors that would prevent any sort of accurate reporting on those numbers. To take that credit away, they confidently harp on their own poorly sourced number of 75.

Whether AI is explicitly stated as the cause, or even effective at the job functions its attempting to replace is irrelevant. Businesses are plowing ahead with it and it is certainly resulting in job cuts, to say nothing of the interference its causing in the hiring process once you’re unemployed.

We need to temper our fears of an AI driven world, but we also need to treat the very real and observable consequences of it as the threat that it is.

For sure, 💯

• secure players’ data: there should be no sensitive player data being stored on a private game server like that anyways, you’re connecting to a server, not logging into a service
• remove illegal content: not the developer’s responsibility in this case, it’s the responsibility of the private server (admittedly this could get messier with net neutrality and safe harbor stuff? unclear, but point remains, it’s still not the developer’s responsibility here)
• combat unsafe community content: ditto. Not the the responsibility of the developer but the private servers. It’s often been argued that the smaller communities of private servers do a BETTER job of moderating themselves)

• would leave rights holders liable: HERE IT IS! We can’t let you self host something like Marvel Rivals due to all the copyrights and trademarks and brand protections. How dare you!

Absolute trash statement, I really hope this bites them.

They’re just repeating a lot of the same misinformation that Pirate Software had been saying, the exact things that had riled the gaming community and caused this latest wave of action. We’re already primed to discount the points they’re trying to make and it shows exactly how disingenuous they’re being.

Positively, I hope this reflects some true fear on their end.

Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

As has been stated over and over and over again, private servers used to be an option until the industry decided they weren’t any more. If the result of this is that it forces the industry to not make shitty, exploitative games, that’s still a win for the consumers. I would rather have no game at all than something that psychologically tries to exploit my FOMO and drains my wallet.

Uh, without further context, uh, Talk Talk - Laughing Stock (1991)?

There are so many ways in which big tech is complicit with what’s happening in the US right now, but corporations have no home.

Lack of regulations, cozying up with an authoritarian, and a populace still with significant funds to drain keep them safely within bounds while things like the GDPR keep them at bay in Europe. But rest assured, once things become too difficult/drained over here, they’ll start pushing the boundaries. Likely through grassroots campaigns to make Europeans distrust the GDPR (what is the general consensus on this anyways? as an American it looks pretty good to me but I’ve never lived under it).

Big tech is a behemoth unto itself, and will need to be fought as such. Put up strong protections now while you can.

You would hope, but this is the same thing we see across almost all industries these days. It’s almost like there’s a root cause for it, some sort of, Iunno, economic system we could blame …

But especially cable companies, for example. Has a dwindling customer base caused them to rethink their business strategies? Or has it caused them to try and bleed that dwindling base dryer even faster?

There’s no “learning” anymore, there’s riding the bus to the absolute pits of hell and just hoping you’re not the CEO to be the one that has to go down with it.

Spider warning (it’s a jumping spider, so it’s tiny): https://www.youtube.com/shorts/59fZMRVoHCc

Certainly nothing to the level of people or even cats and dogs, but handling does improve personality. Jumping spiders will often recognize their tanks and immediate location as safe territory. They will also start to recognize their handlers as the food bringers and “beg”.

I understand if it’s still offputting if you’re not into creep crawlies, but jumping spiders are sometimes referred to as “octokittens” due to their tendency to be tiny little divas who sit around and clean themselves like cats. It might look a little scary, but when they start waving their front legs around like that they aren’t rearing up in defense like a tarantula, that’s their “give me uppies” pose. You’ll see a lot of videos of them online leaping at the camera; that’s not them attacking, that’s them treating all of life like a jungle gym. Personally I think they’re adorable and I recommend watching more videos from people who love them if you want to see more personality.

EDIT: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gEMPLrWh35g , tell me that’s not a cat!

EDIT 2: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DZkaLAoREWo , I think my favorite thing about jumping spiders is you can tell how smart they are. The way they look around and scan their environment and really seem to see things and take it in. You can almost hear the tiny gears turning in their heads as they consider things.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/a-QpxmSD9jo , they’ll also chase laser pointers like a cat.

Endlessly fascinating animals to me, I love them.

This is the current problem with “misalignment”. It’s a real issue, but it’s not “AI lying to prevent itself from being shut off” as a lot of articles tend to anthropomorphize it. The issue is (generally speaking) it’s trying to maximize a numerical reward by providing responses to people that they find satisfactory. A legion of tech CEOs are flogging the algorithm to do just that, and as we all know, most people don’t actually want to hear the truth. They want to hear what they want to hear.

LLMs are a poor stand in for actual AI, but they are at least proficient at the actual thing they are doing. Which leads us to things like this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKCynxiV_8I

Canada now gets to pick one of ours. Fair is fair.

Any one. Anyone at all. Just pick >_>

https://x-plus.store/products/n150-netbook

I saw a post on this a few weeks back and excited purchased one. I’ve had it for a bit now and I’m generally happy with it.

If you’ve ever bought a Chinese product like this before, you know generally what to expect: about 95% quality and 5% WTF.

Personally I put Arch on it using KDE Plasma/Wayland and touch is lackluster. Other distros might handle things better, but I’m an Arch guy and I’m sticking it out.

• Keyboard is better than expected, but still a little janky. Key feel is surprisingly good but far from great, although sometimes they don’t actuate. I think that’s because I’m still learning to type on it. Key arrangement is not as big of an issue as I thought, although stuff like Tab, -, ", / can be a little awkward for typing terminal commands, plain text typing (like note taking) I can get pretty up to speed. Honestly the jankiest key is . but it’s placement in the center of the cluster still makes it fairly easy to hit
• The screen is clearly a tablet turned sideways. I’ve seen this before and I think even the Steam Deck does this, but it does lead to some oddities like resolution being 1200x1920 and SDDM is sideways (I tried fixing it, I’m sure there’s a way but I broke it so bad on one go that I ended up just doing a reinstall)
• It’s hefty, feels like a solid device, although maybe even a little too hefty when using it folded over and trying to hold it with one hand while reading

For me it’s absolutely perfect for the kind of note taking, book/comic reading, emulator playing, internet browsing I need to do. Admittedly it may still be too close to that “toy” kinda feel though …

No worries! I did bring a bit of heat in my response and for that I accept the downvotes.

It does just make me a little angry to see someone post a question out of genuine curiosity where there is a real answer to be researched and discussed and met with a string of tired dunks. That’s some serious Reddit behavior right there (diss, intended for other posters).

Version numbering has no implications on development.

I understand that, so then why change it?

Firefox released just as frequently before, just that they didn’t increase the major version that often.

This does not appear to be true.

• https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/qw856/what_gives_with_the_firefox_rapid_development/
• https://mitchellbaker.net/2011/08/rapid-release-process/

That blog post has an aura of marketing speak around it.

Version numbering has no implication on development and doesn’t even need to align internally and publicly, so somewhere a conscious decision was made to do it this way for “reasons”. I conjecture those reasons are at least partially due to marketing. Is this not fair?

That’s my disclaimer that my research on the topic was less than exhaustive when I posted it at midnight, smartasscool guy. I then when on to offer a legitimate, if simple answer with sources that I linked. I see now the error of my ways in trying to provider a sincere answer to a question instead of posting the same tired dunk as everyone else.

I have learned the error of my ways and will carry this lesson with me into the future as we build this Lemmy community.

All the downvotes here kinda got me legit angry. Incurious fools and jokers.

It’s not a complete answer, but it’s partially because the development of Chrome and Firefox have always been highly competitive resulting in them both adopting rapid release cycles around the same time in the early 2010’s.

I haven’t read too much into the topic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this was as much a marketing decision as well as a developer one. Similar to how Microsoft didn’t want to release an XBox 2 in competition with a PlayStation 3.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefox_version_history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome#Development

These are just the Wikipedia links, but there is interesting discussion of development history to be had, here.

I really hope this goes somewhere.

Not because I have any sympathy for the shareholders, mind you, fuck absolutely everyone involved. But I think it would be very funny to make Apple prove in court that AI is such dogshit it would’ve hurt the product more to implement it than not.

There’s so many reasons this is a dumb, bad idea, but locally running models doesn’t even build confidence that they won’t exfiltrate the queries and other privacy invading telemetry. Just wait until you’re online next.

Oh shoot! I missed posting to this topic on my cakeday by 20 minutes, but me!

Came over after they killed third party apps because I couldn’t use my beloved Sync, which is now never updated anyways.

I’m not ashamed to admit I moved to Reddit during the great Digg migration. Platforms come and go, you just keep on rolling.

In all seriousness, I do feel like content has got better here in that time and I enjoy the raw, early Internet vibes. There’s still plenty of room to grow, but I feel very positive about it all.