Eskating cyclist, gamer and enjoyer of anime. Probably an artist. Also I code sometimes, pretty much just to mod titanfall 2 tho.

Introverted, yet I enjoy discussion to a fault.

  • 46 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Superpowered lying is already a thing, and all we needed was demographic data and context control.

    Today, it is possible to get a population to believe almost anything. Show them the right argument, at the right time, in the right context, and they believe it. Facebook and google have scaled up exactly that into their main sources of revenue.

    Same goes for attention hacking. AI generated content designed to hook viewers functions in entirely predictable, and fairly well understood ways. And the same goes for the algorithms which “recommend” additional content based on what someone is watching.

    As for why doctors can’t do things AIs are pulling off, I’d suggest that’s because current systems are using indicators we don’t know about, which they aren’t sentient enough to explain. If they could, I have no doubt a human doctor, given enough time, could learn about, and detect, such indicators.

    There is no evidence that what these models are doing, is “beyond our scale of thinking”.

    But again, I do think the machine will be faster.

    Current models display “emergent capabilities”, as in abilities we don’t know about before the model is created and tested. But once it is created, we can and have figured out what it is doing and how.



  • Logic is logic. There is no “advanced” logic that somehow allows you to decipher aspects of reality you otherwise could not. Humanity has yet to encounter anything that cannot be consistently explained in more and more detail, as we investigate it further.

    We can and do answer complex questions. That human society is too disorganized to disseminate the answers we do have, and act on them at scale, isn’t going to be changed by explaining the same thing slightly better.

    Imagine trying to argue against a perfect proof. Take something as basic as 1 + 1 = 2. Now imagine an argument for something much more complex - like a definitive answer to climate change, or consciousness, or free will - delivered with the same kind of clarity and irrefutability.

    Absolutely nothing about humans makes me think we are incapable of finding such answers on our own. And if we are genuinely incapable of developing a definitive answer on something, I’m more inclined to believe there isn’t one, than assume that we are simply too “small-minded” to find an answer that is obvious to the hypothetical superintelligence.

    But precision of thought orders of magnitude beyond our own.

    This is just the “god doesn’t need to make sense to us, his thoughts are beyond our comprehension” -argument, again.

    Just like a five-year-old thinks they understand what it means to be an adult - until they grow up and realize they had no idea.

    They don’t know, because we don’t tell them. Children in adverse conditions are perfectly capable of understanding the realities of survival.

    You are using the fact that there are things we don’t understand, yet, as if it were proof that there are things we can’t understand, ever. Or eventually figure out on our own.

    That non-sentients cannot comprehend sentience (ants and humans) has absolutely no relevance on whether sentients are able to comprehend other sentients (humans and machine intelligences).

    I think machine thinking, in contrast to the human mind, will just be a faster processor of logic.

    There is absolutely nothing stopping the weakest modern CPU from running the exact same code as the fastest modern CPU. The only difference will be the rate at which the work is completed.



  • This is the same logic people apply to God being incomprehensible.

    Are you suggesting that if such a thing can be built, its word should be gospel, even if it is impossible for us to understand the logic behind it?

    I don’t subscribe to this. Logic is logic. You don’t need a new paradigm of mind to explore all conclusions that exist. If something cannot be explained and comprehended, transmitted from one sentient mind to another, then it didn’t make sense in the first place.

    And you might bring up some of the stuff AI has done in material science as an example of it doing things human thinking cannot. But that’s not some new kind of thinking. Once the molecular or material structure was found, humans have been perfectly capable of comprehending it.

    All it’s doing, is exploring the conclusions that exist, faster. And when it comes to societal challenges, I don’t think it’s going to find some win-win solution we just haven’t thought of. That’s a level of optimism I would consider insane.








  • OnePlus offloads heat to the charger

    Some of it. They omit some circuitry that would have generated additional heat in the phone, and have it in the charger instead, but that doesn’t magically mean the battery itself wont generate the inevitable heat caused by being charged faster. The battery itself only accepts one voltage, so the only way to charge it faster is amps.

    And my feeling is that they aren’t using the gains from this to make the batteries last, as SUPERVOOC is faster than pretty much every other standard. That makes me think they turned in any and all gains in battery health, for speed.

    Most chargers send the additional energy via the cable in the form of extra voltage, because that doesn’t require a special cable. Turning that voltage into amps in the phone produces a little bit of extra heat, but that doesn’t mean that by eliminating that step, you get none from the battery itself as it charges. You can technically charge with a higher voltage, if you set up a phone such that it has more than one lithium cell. Some phones do this, but this doesn’t require the OnePlus approach of using a special charger that provides a higher current, since any fast charger that can do the usual higher voltage method of providing extra power will work.

    Like you say. I’m curious how they test this. Even if one battery gets more cycles, it’ll degrade with time, as well. iPhones fast charge, too, but not with the chargers that used to come with the phones. You have to get one specifically for fast charging to get faster-than-normal charging.

    Also, a tip. You may want to use something like AccuBattery to actually measure the state of the battery. Batteries, being chemical devices, have different capacities straight off the production line simply by virtue of not being chemically identically down to every molecule. (My Xperia 1 V unfortunately came with 93% design capacity, still within manufacturing tolerance, but the lowest I’ve seen on a new battery, it can be a bit of a lottery)

    The built-in battery health monitor will just say “all good” until it isn’t. AccuBattery has allowed me to monitor every percentage of degradation over the lives of my last few phones.








  • Citizens iniatives may be a form of petition, but the difference is they come with actual legal requirements.

    This isn’t some change.org bs, a list of names totaling some arbitrary number. That’s why it has a hard deadline. And requirements for how signatures have to come from more than one country.

    This is a pre-existing system for the people of the EU to force it to tackle an issue. Most EU countries have equivalent systems locally, as well. This isn’t new or unusual for us.

    Legal precedent is how the US works. Where lawsuits catalyzing the setting of new standards for what is legal, is the most common way the law changes. If you thought that’s how EU legislation got done, then you have no fucking idea what you’re talking about. Almost everything the EU does, is based on proposals. Not legal cases.

    Those can happen in the EU, too, but we have additional ways to propose law as citizens, and legal cases are more common on the national level, rather than the continental level.

    If you can gather proof (signatures) of concern on a given issue, you can force a proposal through the door that normally has to come from elected representatives.