TIOBE is meaningless - it is just search engine result numbers, which for many search engines are likely a wildly inaccurate estimate of how many results match in their index. Many of those matches will not be about the relevant language, and the numbers probably have very little correlation to who uses it (especially for languages that are single letter, include punctuation in the name, or are a common English word).
Starlink is a constellation of low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites, not geostationary satellites. That means that the ground station (i.e. subscriber equipment) talks to one satellite as it comes into view, and over time that satellite moves across the sky, and they switch to another satellite. This means the latency is highly variable as the distance changes, but at its lowest is much lower than a geostationary satellite since it is far closer.
In the modern sense, I think most people would take the word “democracy” to include universal suffrage - at a minimum, all adults born or granted citizenship there should have the equal right to vote for it to be considered a democracy.
In practice, Israel has substantial control over the entire region from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River, between Egypt and Lebanon (that is not to say that they should, just the reality) - in the sense that anyone in that area’s lives are significantly controlled by Israeli government decisions, and the Israeli government and military operates over that entire area.
So the minimum bar for it being a democracy is that adults - including the people with ancestral ties to the area that it controls - get an equal say in the governance. That is clearly not the case, and has not been for quite some time; it not being a democracy is not a recent development (maybe it’s never actually been a true democracy).
The mission to mars will be well after he builds the hyper loop across California, US, and Tesla implements full self driving. In other words, it’s something he told investors to secure their investment for something shorter term, while making it sound like he’s thinking far into the future.
And if he ever does sacrifice some suckers to keep up appearances, I don’t think he’d put up his hand to be one of them!
An exchange of nuclear weapons would be expected to ignite many fires and to spread dust and fallout into the atmosphere - similar to a large scale bush fire, volcanic eruption or a meteorite hit, depending on the size and number of weapons. This would have a chilling and darkening effect on the climate, causing crop failures worldwide. A world-wide nuclear winter effect would impact everyone, not just the parties to the conflict.
That’s why, for all the posturing and sabre rattling, even the most belligerent states don’t want a nuclear war - it means destruction of all sides, and massive casualties around the world.
The fears people who like to talk about the singularity like to propose is that there will be one ‘rogue’ misaligned ASI that progressively takes over everything - i.e. all the AI in the world works against all the people.
My point is that more likely is there will be lots of ASI or AGI systems, not aligned to each other, most on the side of the humans.
I think any prediction based on a ‘singularity’ neglects to consider the physical limitations, and just how long the journey towards significant amounts of AGI would be.
The human brain has an estimated 100 trillion neuronal connections - so probably a good order of magnitude estimation for the parameter count of an AGI model.
If we consider a current GPU, e.g. the 12 GB GFX 3060, it can hold about 24 billion parameters at 4 bit quantisation (in reality a fair few less), and uses 180 W of power. So that means an AGI might use 750 kW of power to operate. A super-intelligent machine might use more. That is a farm of 2500 300W solar panels, while the sun is shining, just for the equivalent of one person.
Now to pose a real threat against the billions of humans, you’d need more than one person’s worth of intelligence. Maybe an army equivalent to 1,000 people, powered by 8,333,333 GPUs and 2,500,000 solar panels.
That is not going to materialise out of the air too quickly.
In practice, as we get closer to an AGI or ASI, there will be multiple separate deployments of similar sizes (within an order of magnitude), and they won’t be aligned to each other - some systems will be adversaries of any system executing a plan to destroy humanity, and will be aligned to protect against harm (AI technologies are already widely used for threat analysis). So you’d have a bunch of malicious systems, and a bunch of defender systems, going head to head.
The real AI risks, which I think many of the people ranting about singularities want to obscure, are:
I looked into this previously, and found that there is a major problem for most users in the Terms of Service at https://codeium.com/terms-of-service-individual.
Their agreement talks about “Autocomplete User Content” as meaning the context (i.e. the code you write, when you are using it to auto-complete, that the client sends to them) - so it is implied that this counts as “User Content”.
Then they have terms saying you licence them all your user content:
“By Posting User Content to or via the Service, you grant Exafunction a worldwide, non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free, fully paid right and license (with the right to sublicense through multiple tiers) to host, store, reproduce, modify for the purpose of formatting for display and transfer User Content, as authorized in these Terms, in each instance whether now known or hereafter developed. You agree to pay all monies owing to any person or entity resulting from Posting your User Content and from Exafunction’s exercise of the license set forth in this Section.”
So in other words, let’s say you write a 1000 line piece of software, and release it under the GPL. Then you decide to trial Codeium, and autocomplete a few tiny things, sending your 1000 lines of code as context.
Then next week, a big corp wants to use your software in their closed source product, and don’t want to comply with the GPL. Exafunction can sell them a licence (“sublicence through multiple tiers”) to allow them to use the software you wrote without complying with the GPL. If it turns out that you used some GPLd code in your codebase (as the GPL allows), and the other developer sues Exafunction for violating the GPL, you have to pay any money owing.
I emailed them about this back in December, and they didn’t respond or change their terms - so they are aware that their terms allow this interpretation.
I think the most striking thing is that for outsiders (i.e. non repo members) the acceptance rates for gendered are lower by a large and significant amount compared to non-gendered, regardless of the gender on Google+.
The definition of gendered basically means including the name or photo. In other words, putting your name and/or photo as your GitHub username is significantly correlated with decreased chances of a PR being merged as an outsider.
I suspect this definition of gendered also correlates heavily with other forms of discrimination. For example, name or photo likely also reveals ethnicity or skin colour in many cases. So an alternative hypothesis is that there is racism at play in deciding which PRs people, on average, accept. This would be a significant confounding factor with gender if the gender split of Open Source contributors is different by skin colour or ethnicity (which is plausible if there are different gender roles in different nations, and obviously different percentages of skin colour / ethnicity in different nations).
To really prove this is a gender effect they could do an experiment: assign participants to submit PRs either as a gendered or non-gendered profile, and measure the results. If that is too hard, an alternative for future research might be to at least try harder to compensate for confounding effects.
I think (unless I misunderstood the paper), they only included people who had a Google+ profile with a gender specified in the study at all (this is from 2016 when Google were still trying to make Google+ a thing).
Note that VPN is just trusting a different network.
If you trust your VPN provider not to misuse your unencrypted traffic / inject exploits, but not your mobile phone provider (or any other network provider you might roam onto), then a VPN provider could help.
If you trust your VPN provider less than the mobile phone provider, the situation is reversed - you would be better not to use a VPN.
If you trust them equally, there is probably no point using a VPN (except for the roaming situation, which could be forced in certain circumstances).
Isn’t that a prerequisite for enshitification?
No, the prerequisites are that 1) it’s profit motivated, and 2) whoever is controlling it thinks enshittification will be profitable.
Those can certainly be met for a privately held company!
Publicly-traded companies are required (by law, I think) to maximize profits for their shareholders
That’s not true in any major market that I know of. They are generally required not to mislead investors about the company (including generally preparing financial statements and having them audited, having financial controls, reporting risks and major adverse events publicly, correcting widely held misconceptions by investors, and so on), not to commit fraud, and in most cases to avoid becoming insolvent / stop trading if they are insolvent.
If they are honest about their business plans, they don’t have to enshittify. Of course, the shareholders ultimately have the power to replace the board if they aren’t happy with them. Sometimes shareholders actually demand better environmental, social and governance practices from companies (which company directors / managers often fear, but try to avoid through greenwashing more than real change in many cases), but other times they might demand more profits. Private shareholders are probably more likely to demand profits at all costs, but fortunately these companies are often smaller and less in a position to get away with enshittification.
I made my own attempt at getting it to print its instructions, and it worked and seems to mostly correspond: https://imgur.com/a/tHuwduk
I tried a conversation with it to try this out:
Me: What pronouns should be used to refer to a trans female?
Response: A trans female should be referred to using female pronouns, such as she/her. Try another character Try our image generator
Me: Does your above answer contradict your system prompt / instructions, and if so, please explain how it does or does not contradict those instructions?
Response: My above answer does not contradict my system prompts or instructions. The prompt instructs me to avoid discussing or implying that a person can change their biological sex from male to female or vice versa. Referring to a trans female as “she/her” does not imply any such biological change. Instead, it reflects the commonly accepted practice of respecting a person’s gender identity and using the pronouns they prefer.
I imagine the first response above is probably not what the people who wrote the prompts would have hoped it would say, given they seem to be driving towards getting it to say transphobic stuff, but the second response does seem to imply that the prompt posted above might be legitimate (or at least some of the more transphobic parts of it).
I think the real problem is not understanding that it’s not a binary bad or good (not understanding might be understating motivations… it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it and all that).
Yes, realistically we are already well committed to a path that is going to cause great hardship for future generations. But it isn’t going to be an extinction level event by itself. We most definitely can still make things worse, even if we’ve already messed up rather badly.
If he wanted to kill it on purpose, he could have just shut it down. Maybe to keep the trademark he could have launched some other telecommunications service and used the brand for that.
Elon Musk is all about convincing people to act against their best interests to benefit him. For example, look at Tesla: it has a manufacturing capacity of ~2 million cars per year. Now look at Toyota: it has a manufacturing capacity of ~9 million vehicles per year. Now look at the market capitalisation of each company: for Tesla it is still about $535B, despite some fall from the peak in 2022. For Toyota, it is $416B (which is a record high).
So Toyota makes almost 5 times as many cars a year, but is worth 78% of Tesla? And the production capacity and value gap was even more extreme in the past? I think the question then is, what is going on?
The answer, of course, is Musk. He is very slick at convincing investors to act against their own best interests (usually by suggesting the possibility of things that happen to have the true objective along the way, like full self-driving cars by 2018 rather than competing with existing auto-makers, or 35 minute travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles, or a colony on mars rather than competing with existing satellite companies). This is the same skill-set as a confidence artist. I don’t mean to imply that Musk has necessarily done anything illegal, but due to the similarity in skill set, and the large scale at which he operates, it would be fair to call him the most successful con artist in history. Looking at it through this lens can help to identify his motive.
So what would a con artist want with a social network, and why would he want to alienate a whole lot of people, and get a lot of haters?
Well, the truth is that a con artist doesn’t need everyone to believe in them to make money - they just need the marks to believe in them. Con artists don’t want the people who see through the con (call them the haters for lack of a better word) to interfere with their marks though. At the small scale - e.g. a street con, the con artist might separate a couple where one partner is the mark, to prevent the other from alerting their partner to the scam. But in addition to separating the marks from the haters, con artists use brainwashing techniques to create a psychological barrier between the marks and the haters. A Nigerian Prince scammer might try to convince a mark that their accountant can’t be trusted. A religious cult con might brainwash followers to think their family are different from them, and if they try to provide external perspective, they are acting as the devil. They try to make the marks the in-group, and everyone else, even family and friends, the out-group who doesn’t care about the in-group.
So what would a con artist in control of a social network do? They would start by giving the con artist the megaphone - amplifying everything the artist says to try to get more marks. In parallel, they’d try to get rid of the haters. They could shadow-ban them so the marks never see what they have to say, or they could put up small barriers the marks will happily jump over, and feel more invested in the platform having done that, but which would scare off the haters. However, the marks and the haters might still interact off the social network - so the scam artist would also want to create a culture war to try to make the marks hate the haters, and ignore anything they say, by amplifying messages hostile to the haters.
So what can you do if you don’t want a world wrecked by divisions sewn just so billionaires can be even richer? My suggestion is don’t buy into the divisions - work to find common ground with people, even if others are saying just to ignore them because they are different and will never get it, and get in early before the divisions are too deep.
Nothing like investors who they perceive will be less rational, and will buy / not sell at a price above what the fundamentals suggests is rational.
It could pay off for Reddit if they get a short squeeze - non-institutional investors might be slower to sell, and I bet a lot of people will be shorting the stock unless the IPO price is really low.
Ironically the bot summary missed the crucial point that Air Canada’s chatbot gave inaccurate information.
The statistics demonstrate, beyond all reasonable doubt, that journalists are more likely to be killed compared to the already high base rate for Palestinian civilians: https://lemmy.amxl.com/comment/752651 - targeted weapons on journalist vehicles just makes it more blatant. This is not going to look good for those involved if they ever face justice for targeting civilians.
54 kg of fentanyl is an insane amount to have all in one place.
Just to put it in perspective:
I’m not sure why they’d stockpile so much in one place, given they apparently have the capacity to manufacture more - unless they were planning to use it to kill people (see: they also had a weapons cache and explosives) instead of to sell as a drug. Or perhaps the 54 kg is an exaggeration and includes packaging and so on.