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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Well, for starters:

    1. Platforms. I don’t believe that the people who create, or invest in, large internet platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Uber, Booking, Upwork, etc, have a natural or moral right of ownership to said platform. They should certainly receive returns on their investment - but they shouldn’t have full operational control. Instead, as the platofrm grows, operational control should slowly transition to its users. eventually, they should have the final say on, in the case of YouTube. what content in acceptable, what procedures should be used to remove unacceptable content, how to appeal, etc.
    2. Employment. One of the big issues I see is that employees are under someone’s direct control for 1/3 of each day, and have to do what their boss says. And while they technically consented to that relationship, I don’t see that consent as freely given, because for most people there isn’t a viable alternative. This could be done through more worker cooperative, or encouraging freelancing. Even for people who decide to remain in traditional employment, they should have more official control than they do now.
    3. AI. It seems many people here hate AI, but AI does have the potential for large productivity gains. And while, in the past, productivity gains have note resulted in less work, but rather higher GDP, we could always force the issue. After all, people did it ~100 years ago, and the economy didn’t collapse because of that.


  • I fear it will end egalitarianism.

    Many imagine future AI as an autonomous agent. I don’t think anyone will release that. Instead, I expect to see a generative AI like GPT-4, however one that produces super-smart responses.

    This will create a situation where the amount of computing resources someone has access to determines how much intelligence they can use. And the difference will be much bigger and more comprehensive than the difference between a genius and a normal human.




  • I think there’s an issue with coupling on the fediverse. For instance, if I run a community, but I’m not happy with the current instance policies, I can’t easily move it to a new insurance (while keeping the memberships). It’s also tricky to migrate my account - and it will lose me posting and vote history, edit/delete rights, etc. Finally, if I want to participate in two servers that have defederated each other, I have to maintain two accounts, which is a terrible user experience.









  • I have experience with GPT-4, and in particular I’ve used to for math questions in my work occasionally. I’m not sure how Bing chat compares.

    For GTP-4, I’ve noticed the following:

    1. How reliable the answer is depends on how easy or obscure the question is. It hasn’t lied to me on easy or introductory material, but once your questions start becoming more obscure, and it’s less likely to have the answer in the training set, it starts making things up.
    • I think of it as search to an extent - it needs to have the answer in the training data to find it. Unlike google, it can usually find an answer even if you don’t use the proper terms. But if it doesn’t find an answer, it might make something up.
    • “Easy or introductory” is relative - I have been able to get good answers for some masters-level math, and some wrong ones for lower-level things. Ultimately it depends on how much resources on the topic have been in the training set.
    1. It’s actually much more reliable in detecting errors than it’s in generating text. So you can open a new chat and ask, “Is the following true: …” and it will catch most of its own errors. Once it starts catching error, you should know you’ve left the reliable “easy questions” territory, and even if it can still be useful, exercise much more care.
    2. The way you phrase a prompt matters a lot. For example, if you ask it to explain its reasoning step by step, it becomes much more accurate.
    3. It is generally good in rephrasing questions to use better terminology.

    .

    Bing chat might be different in some regards. I know that it automatically searches the web for sources, and when generating an answer, and bases its answer on the contents of the sources it found - but I don’t have experience with it.

    That said, asking for additional sources (besides the search results it found) shouldn’t improve the accuracy. It might just give you something you can use to fact-check it.