dsilverz

@diemartin @Gork More like +7 777 666-7777 (S-O-S).

Useless trivia of mine: in non-smart phones (e.g. early Nokia phones), the numerical sequence you mentioned translates to " ,tyu.xw,wpajd" using their keypad (I would say “T9”, but “T9” refers to the prediction algorithm imbued in these phones, which is different from individually pressing a given key number multiple times to yield a given letter e.g. twice the 2 for “B” or thrice the 5 for “L”). It’s a funny keypad to type in.

@technocrit While I agree with the main point that “AI/LLMs has/have no agency”, I must be the boring, ackchyually person who points out and remembers some nerdy things.

tl;dr: indeed, AIs and LLMs aren’t intelligent… we aren’t so intelligent as we think we are, either, because we hold no “exclusivity” of intelligence among biosphere (corvids, dolphins, etc) and because there’s no such thing as non-deterministic “intelligence”. We’re just biologically compelled to think that we can think and we’re the only ones to think, and this is just anthropocentric and naive from us (yeah, me included).

If you have the patience to read a long and quite verbose text, it’s below. If you don’t, well, no problems, just stick to my tl;dr above.

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First and foremost, everything is ruled by physics. Deep down, everything is just energy and matter (the former of which, to quote the famous Einstein equation e = mc, is energy as well), and this inexorably includes living beings.

Bodies, flesh, brains, nerves and other biological parts, they’re not so different from a computer case, CPUs/NPUs/TPUs, cables and other computer parts: to quote Sagan, it’s all “made of star stuff”, it’s all a bunch of quarks and other elementary particles clumped together and forming subatomic particles forming atoms forming molecules forming everything we know, including our very selves…

Everything is compelled to follow the same laws of physics, everything is subjected to the same cosmic principles, everything is subjected to the same fundamental forces, everything is subjected to the same entropy, everything decays and ends (and this comment is just a reminder, a cosmic-wide Memento mori).

It’s bleak, but this is the cosmic reality: cosmos is simply indifferent to all existence, and we’re essentially no different than our fancy “tools”, be it the wheel, the hammer, the steam engine, the Voyager twins or the modern dystopian electronic devices crafted to follow pieces of logical instructions, some of which were labelled by developers as “Markov Chains” and “Artificial Neural Networks”.

Then, there’s also the human non-exclusivity among the biosphere: corvids (especially Corvus moneduloides, the New Caleidonian crow) are scientifically known for their intelligence, so are dolphins, chimpanzees and many other eukaryotas. Humans love to think we’re exclusive in that regard, but we’re not, we’re just fooling ourselves!

IMHO, every time we try to argue “there’s no intelligence beyond humans”, it’s highly anthropocentric and quite biased/bigoted against the countless other species that currently exist on Earth (and possibly beyond this Pale Blue Dot as well). We humans often forgot how we are species ourselves (taxonomically classified as “Homo sapiens”). We tend to carry on our biological existences as if we were some kind of “deities” or “extraterrestrials” among a “primitive, wild life”.

Furthermore, I can point out the myriad of philosophical points, such as the philosophical point raised by the mere mention of “senses” (“Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, …”): “my senses deceive me” is the starting point for Cartesian (René Descartes) doubt. While Descarte’s conclusion, “Cogito ergo sum”, is highly anthropocentric, it’s often ignored or forgotten by those who hold anthropocentric views on intelligence, as people often ground the seemingly “exclusive” nature of human intelligence on the ability to “feel”.

Many other philosophical musings deserve to be mentioned as well: lack of free will (stemming from the very fact that we were unable to choose our own births), the nature of “evil” (both the Hobbesian line regarding “human evilness” and the Epicurean paradox regarding “metaphysical evilness”), the social compliance (I must point out to documentaries from Derren Brown on this subject), the inevitability of Death, among other deep topics.

All deep principles and ideas converging, IMHO, into the same bleak reality, one where we (supposedly “soul-bearing beings”) are no different from a “souless” machine, because we’re both part of an emergent phenomena (Ordo ab chao, the (apparent) order out of chaos) that has been taking place for Æons (billions of years and beyond, since the dawn of time itself).

Yeah, I know how unpopular this worldview can be and how downvoted this comment will probably get. Still I don’t care: someone who gazed into the abyss must remember how the abyss always gazes us, even those of us who didn’t dare to gaze into the abyss yet.

I’m someone compelled by my very neurodivergent nature to remember how we humans are just another fleeting arrangement of interconnected subsystems known as “biological organism”, one of which “managed” to throw stuff beyond the atmosphere (spacecrafts) while still unable to understand ourselves. We’re biologically programmed, just like the other living beings, to “fear Death”, even though our very cells are programmed to terminate on a regular basis (apoptosis) and we’re are subjected to the inexorable chronological falling towards “cosmic chaos” (entropy, as defined, “as time passes, the degree of disorder increases irreversibly”).

@gerryflap @bytesonbike

many men are reluctant to make that step

Sometimes it’s not the patient to blame. I made the step, countless times since my childhood… I sought help… Result? Got several, diverging diagnostics, several medications that didn’t work, until the most recent psychiatrist and psychologist some months ago: the psychiatrist said I got “nothing” (even when I had a fresh cut on my wrist) and the second “struggled to find any complaints from me”. So I simply gave up on seeking medical care (and “care” in general, human or whatnot). I don’t use AI for therapy because, as a former programmer, I’m deeply aware of their underlying Markov chain and NN algorithms, but sometimes their probabilistic outputs lead me to insights I couldn’t get from any living Homo sapiens beings (such as the possibility that I have “Geschwind Syndrome”, a condition of which will probably stay undiagnosed).

@MazonnaCara89 @Excrubulent I’m unable to reply your reply directly (for some reason, the Friendica instance I use can’t see the Lemmy instance you’re in; I’m suspecting it’s because Solarpunk instance uses Anubis CAPTCHA and Friendica could be operating in a different manner from how Lemmy operates hence triggering Anubis for a server-to-server communication, but I’m not sure).

I’m replying through this reply to my reply.

Facebook has had a strategy for a long time of monopolising the internet of countries that previously had very little internet. They essentially subsidise internet infrastructure and make that subsidy dependent on facebook being a central part of the network.

Exactly. And many carrier operators over here (Tim, Claro, Vivo) offer “rate-less access” (i.e. won’t count as consumed bytes) to Facebook, WhatsApp, among other mainstream platforms (sometimes TikTok).
Also, there are “Captive portals” (web-based Wi-Fi authentication for passwordless Wi-Fi networks) from many “free Wi-Fi hotspots” out there which uses “Facebook login” as a means of getting accessing to their “free Wi-Fi”. Facebook (and, by extension, Meta and its platforms) is deeply ingrained into Brazilian’s daily lives and I’m frequently told to “have a Facebook profile” for me, it’s deeply annoying.

They obviously have found ways to inveigle themselves into key infrastructure in lots of places, even if they couldn’t build it in from the ground up.

Exactly!

@joel_feila:

jesus that some dystopian shit

Yeah… it’s a deeply boring dystopian world. The world has been indistinguishable from Cyberpunk.

@otacon239 I didn’t know about the movie Waking Life, thanks for mentioning and recommending it! I just read about it (both on Wikipedia and IMDB) and it seems deep and well-written, particularly due to its references to “hard determinism”. I’ll try to watch it eventually (it’s been a while since I’ve watched a movie, I’ve been leaning toward textual works).

@BalakeKarbon Content warning: this reply will be long.

What I’m about to say will be probably controversial, but I’ll dive deeper into it nonetheless. Whenever we worry about some “Artificial General Intelligence”, we are starting from a deeper anthropocentric pretense that only we Homo sapiens have the “exclusivity” of something like “intelligence”, when it’s not.

Take crows for instance: Corvus moneduloides (a.k.a. New Caledonian crow) is known to be extremely intelligent. They’re capable of meta-tool usage, using tools for building/improving other tools (1)

(1): For scientific/academic reference: “Direct observations of pandanus-tool manufacture and use by a New Caledonian crow (Corvus moneduloides)”, published in 2004 by University of Auckland authored by Gavin R. Hunt and Russell D. Gray, DOI 10.1007/s10071-003-0200-0.

Sure, no crows sent probes to sidereal space, and crows don’t seem to tinker with fire, either. But what is intelligence, exactly? How intelligence can be defined and measured? And, most importantly, how intelligence/sentience can be distinguished from mere neurological activity driven by highly-complex (yet pretty deterministic) chemical-physical phenomena and, thus, distinguished as “True Will” (okay, this term is far from scientific, it’s actually a Thelemic term)?

Because when you look both deep up and deep down, respectively at the cosmic level and molecular level (As above so below), we’re not that better than biological automatons, ruled by strict laws of physics and biological programming (a.k.a. autonomic nervous system) which is also driven by genetic, environmental, and societal constraints.

Specifically, “societal constraints” gets even more interesting. Derren Brown can be controversial (especially due to how he describes himself as illusionist), but some of his documentaries (especially The Push) perfectly depict how individuals can be easily influenced by a collective of individuals.

Then there’s this interesting scene from the movie The Artifice Girl where Cherry talks to a elder Gareth (her creator) about how she’s constrained by her initial directives: even though she could choose to do something else (ballet), it’s something driven by that very initial programming.

Then there’s a myriad of thinkers who once philosophized about the subject, such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Camus (especially Myth of Sisyphus), Cioran, among others. Yeah, I mentioned the possibly “top pessimistic” ones and my list is biased in that regard.

My musings are fatalistic and deterministic, but that’s part of what Science currently knows to this day: that we’re made of star stuff (Carl Sagan, Cosmos TV Series) and, just like stars and other celestial bodies, we’re bound to cosmic constraints, such as entropy and passage of time, fundamental forces, chemical reactions, and so on.

Finally, back to neuroscience: what we refer to as “intelligence” seems to be a mere byproduct from synaptic interactions between gazillions of neurons, again, highly influenced by inner and outer factors through the lens of biological senses (and, to quote René Descartes, “our senses deceive us”, pink doesn’t exist as electromagnetic wavelength yet our eyes seem to “see” pink, a VR headset quickly trick our senses into perceiving motion pictures as “reality”, we see faces (Belmez Faces) out of pareidolia as a byproduct of biologically pre-programmed pattern-matching, among other examples I could point out).

So what’s so different between humans and the so-called “AGI”? Especially if such AGI becomes “embodied” just like an Artifice Girl, becoming a physical part of cosmic constraints and transience from spacetime continuum (both things define living beings as beings; currently, AI is “timeless” in the sense that these Markov Chain algorithms have no embodied beingness, but “AGI” would imply something akin to Major Mira Killian from Ghost in the Shell with a “shell”)…

It’s uncanny for Homo sapiens to realize we’re not exclusive as intelligent living beings (that’s why humans constantly crave for trying to control Nature, Cosmos and other humans), and the so-called “AGI”, if such a thing would came into being, would be the ultimate, undeniable realization: our “mind” is a physical illusion (just biological smoke and mirrors) and there’s no such thing as “free will”, for we’re condemned to obey cosmic constraints, from the vastness of continuum all the way down to atomic interactions.

I’m so sorry to sound pessimistic and highly-verbose. I once tried to believe in something out there, but I’ve been long since out of faith as I realized my deterministic nature. As Science allows us to understand the cosmic mysteries, existence itself feels more and more devoid of anima, for whenever we stare at the cosmic abyss, the vast and dark abyss stares back at us and remembers us about our fleeting and deterministic nature as living beings.

@Turd_Ferg PC (Linux): Librewolf for some things (fediverse, news outlets, mail providers, etc), Waterfox for other things (especially sites/platforms where I need to write Portuguese, because Librewolf’s “Resist Fingerprinting” breaks accent keys), upstream Firefox for more mainstream things (government services), as well as Lagrange for Gopher and Geminispace.

Smartphone (Android): Fennec, with native Chrome active against my will for WebViews from certain apps (governmental and banking apps, for example) that require Chrome For My Security™.

It’s been a while since I ditched Chromium-based browsers, although Firefox has some Chromium things inside its code. I’m waiting for whatever browsers that could bring third-party browser engines besides Chromium and Firefox-engine (yeah, there are Pale Moon, Basilisk, Safari/Webkit, among other browsers which are neither Chromium nor Firefox-based, but I’m talking about a browser as compatible as possible with features such as WebBluetooth, WebGL, WASM and other things as they can prove useful for personally-developed projects/self-hosted services).

@MazonnaCara89 The country I live in (Brazil) overly uses and depends on WhatsApp. From government departments to businesses and transactional relations, all the way to social and family affairs, people is addicted to it, forcing other people (e.g. me) to either have a WhatsApp account or ending up far beyond mere social ostracism (beyond mere loneliness): effectively, the inability to buy, sell, rent or even resolve citizen matters with certain government/state departments (such as receiving medical appointment schedules from Brazilian’s public health system (Sistema Unico de Saude/SUS (Unified Health System) via their “postinhos”/“Unidades Basicas de Saude” (neighborhood public health centers)). They don’t even use the grand old phone calling and SMS anymore: even “calls”, when performed, are made by people/departments/businesses via Whatsapp VoIP functionality.

That said, it’s worth mentioning that WhatsApp has been running ads for a long time: the “Channels” section lists seemingly random “channels”, many of which are businesses with “verified” “blue badges”. So it’s effectively advertisement disguised as veiled “recommendations” from Meta. It seems like it’ll just become worse (to the surprise of no one who understands what Meta is).

I really want to leave WhatsApp, but I’m socially compelled to stay (it’s the only mainstream platform where I still have an account, against my will)… the raw, grotesque distillation from social compliance, worse than depicted in Derren Brown’s documentaries…

@mighty_orbot @misk I’m using Friendica. From here, the links are normal. As it’s also not Lemmy, I guess it’s a Mastodon-specific (or even instance-specific) problem.

@cyrano The “problem” (actually, the feature) with those censorship algorithms is that they rely a lot on the “exact contents” of the message (“Scunthorpe Problem”), so X is probably programmed to detect the Signal’s domain and block due to the presence of such link (similar to how Facebook was/is blocking links to the largest PixelFed instances, and then they also decided to block links to DistroWatch and official websites from various Linux distros), so it’s not programmed (yet) to censor just the “hexadecimal/base64/whatever” portion of the link alone. And there’s where Tox could shine: a handle is literally a hexadecimal sequence, without Tox’s domains, without URI Schemas, just a bunch of digits and letters from A to F.

I don’t know why Tox isn’t mentioned as a “instant messaging platform for whistleblowers”: it got Onion (Tor) tunneling possibility (as well as tunneling it through I2P outproxies because it actually accepts any kind of SOCKS5 proxy), it’s registration-less (even Matrix needs registration) so it’s effectively anonymous IMO.

SimpleX seems to be that, too, although I didn’t have the opportunity to use it more than I used Tox. But from the little I’ve used it, it’s similar to Signal in the sense that it’s a link (and a large link) and not simply a hash/hex sequence.