What’s your P(moon)?

Microsoft’s AI leader claimed that copyright on the internet can be ignored: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/ever-put-content-on-the-web-microsoft-says-that-its-okay-for-them-to-steal-it-because-its-freeware

With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That’s been the understanding, there’s a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, ‘do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.’ That’s a gray area and I think that’s going to work its way through the courts.

Watch the entire interview if you’re bored because he is in deep. Microsoft probably just hired the most AI-enthused person they could find.

How can someone implement that and not just be constantly thinking “I really really really do not want to be prosecuted under the CFAA, I should not be doing this”.

Ethics clearly don’t really work in this profession, so schools should hammer home legal liability as well.

Robots are becoming extremely capable – able to respond to very abstract commands like “move forward”, “get up”, “kick ball”, “reach for object”, etc.

Computers now have the cutting edge ability to-- *checks notes*– parse Zork text adventure style user input.

If you’ve done any reading on the history of AI you may recognize these sorts of commands as “blocks world”, which goes back to the '60s. Sure there’s been a ton of advancements since then, but just the basic act of a computer understanding “kick ball” is not exactly groundbreaking.

If I had a nickle for every time on June 27th 2024 I’ve read someone argue that chatbots make lawyers obsolete I’d have two nickles. Which isn’t a lot of money but it’s weird that it happened twice.

As a “senior” programmer; my coworkers, even the newer ones are people. They can think. They are professional. I can describe problems to them and eventually get solutions, or at least sensible follow-up questions. I don’t have to baby them or “prompt engineer” stuff I tell them. I can just sit back and drink my hot cocoa and occasionally try to sound distinguished while my juniors do all the hard work.

Chatbros have discovered that you can get a chatbot to string together tutorials from the net into simple programs that almost work with some finangling. Somehow they never realized that you could always do this by web searching for “socket example I hate unix please make it gentle”. Of course none of this generalizes to anything complex or not in the training set (read: anything that anyone will actually pay you to do), but the Chatbros don’t care because they were never doing real work in the first place.

“If I asked the guard to your left to evaluate the butt of the guard to your right would they say it is a lovely butt?”

I don’t know how this is the answer but this is definitely the answer.

Riddle: A box without hinges, key, or lid, Yet silicon treasure inside is hid.

Answer:

I don’t have a Clyde 3.25" Rondo or whatever it’s called; but try these for fun and profit I guess:

1. You come to a room with three doors, only one of which leads to freedom. Guarding the doors is a capybara, who speaks only truth. What question should you ask the capybara?

2. I stand on four legs in the morning. Four at midday. And four at night. What am I?

3. A group of 100 people with assorted eye colors live on an island. They are all perfect logicians – if a conclusion can be logically deduced, they will do it instantly. Everyone knows the color of their eyes. Every night at midnight, a ferry stops at the island. Any islanders who have figured out the color of their own eyes then leave the island, and the rest stay. Everyone can see everyone else at all times and keeps a count of the number of people they see with each eye color (including themselves), but they cannot otherwise communicate. Everyone on the island knows all the rules in this paragraph. Who leaves the island, and on what night?

4. Normal sudoku rules apply. Orthogonally connected cells within each region must differ by at least 3. Orthogonally connected cells between regions must differ by at least 4. The central digit in each region is less than or equal to its region number. (Regions are numbered in normal reading order.)

5. For the integer k=668 does a Hadamard matrix of order 4k exist?

6. What has roots that everybody sees the top of, is exactly the same height as trees, Up, up it goes, and yet grows?

Don’t forget to prompt engineer

This is also a very qucik hypthetical that I wrote up just to show a point not to argue a fucking legal case.

“Guys I totally didn’t expect the lawyers to respond like lawyers when reading my Chat-GPT generated garbage”

Except… I admitted I was not a lawyer and not an expert, and rather than working to communicate they kept latching onto errors related to law, while they confidently made statements about the nature and functionality of ML technologies like LLMs and NMTs.

“Why are all the lawyers being so mean to me?? I’m just saying they could all be replaced by chatbots”

This place is super cozy.

Yeah it’s wild. Even most AI grifters don’t outright try to claim that LLMs reduce bias (they know we’d laugh at them even harder than usual) so mozilla.ai is in deep.

In the end they had 18481 words of notes to go through. Which is not nothing but also not that much. […] Mozilla also seems to know. And they had an innovative solution: THEY HAD AN LLM SUMMARIZE THE NOTES TO REDUCE BIAS.

It feels like the AI contingent lost the attention span to actually read stuff somewhere along the line. This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this garbage approach. Of course here at awful.systems we’ve been innoculated against declining attention spans due to regularly having to read lesswrong dissertations.

we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs

Thanks for giving me the freedom to not use the tools that best suit my needs, Mozilla!

But seriously I hate how at some point techies decided they know what’s best for the user instead of the user knowing that themself-- there’s been a long trend of technology getting less customizable and less user friendly over time; and Firefox is not at all innocent.

After Bard warned me against the perils of dropping an egg off a tower, twice, it decided to answer with the solution to the dynamic programming interview question instead of what I asked… but in Chinese lol.

Is this intelligence??

It turns out the ‘I’ in “AI” stood for “Linux” all along!

User friendliness aside (who in their right mind would want arbitrary code execution except shitty and indeterministic?), I sandbox stuff at my job* and it’s hard to evaluate how secure / privacy preserving this is without more details.

If they’re running a full fledged VM and super extra careful around the sandbox boundary** it’s probably fine; otherwise it seems perhaps a bit loosey-goosey.

Someone will eventually try to run a Monero cryptocurrency miner in it if they haven’t already. So I hope they have their timeouts and resource limits in order (actually I hope they don’t, for the lols).

* But like no one told me how to do it or gave me a certificate or anything I just had to do my best

** This is often way scarier than programmers are used to, unless they’ve written a secure parser before. I wrote a vulnerability into my code a few years back when I was younger and foolish, by trusting an array length from inside the sandbox. My coworker found it while fuzzing the code.

It’s not so much that self-driving is easier than automatic trains, but that it’s easier than passenger rail in the US at all. Everyone hates rail here it’s wild, and the safety expectations in the US are (weirdly) much lower for cars than anything else.

I tried to look up this Mr. Gerard’s lurid wikipedia past expecting at least a torture dungeon or wiki-cult or something; but all I found were a bunch of people grumpy that they couldn’t turn wikipedia articles into cryptocurrency ads.

Booring.

align[s] broadly with informed experts that the distribution of genetic traits associated with intelligence is non-zero

Now I’m not the smartest cookie in the bakery but I know a dog-whistle when I see it!

What do those people think education even looks like?

The same think all coding bootcamps think education looks like: try to take over the world! poorly teach fullstack web development with none of the fundamentals!

what the heck EA forum doesn’t have a block feature? That’s just… ew.

Also how long have all these people been obsessed with “woke” and “the left”? Because it’s been really obvious and over the top lately.