The catarrhine yerba mate enjoyer who invented a perpetual motion machine, by dreaming at night and devouring its own dreams through the day.
Кўис кредис ессе, Беллум?
Yup. Google consistently gets rid of features or services that it deems unprofitable. And that’s fine, really - as long as you don’t pretend that you’re doing it for the users.
To be fair in modern phones there are some features that if removed would make the user experience better.
I hear ya - for example, the SIM toolkit being able to send you pop-ups (phone providers use that to spam the users).
We’re removing some underutilized features in Google Assistant to focus on delivering the best possible user experience.
Is this the non sequitur used nowadays to explain removal of features? “We’re removing it to give you a better experience”??? That’s bloody hilarious.
Be honest at least dammit. If you don’t want to maintain a feature, because it’s against your best interests, say so. Users are not stupid, and should not be implied to be stupid with this idiotic “it’s for you lol” discourse.
(I don’t even use Botnet Assistant.)
4chan was always called the asshole of the internet, but it’s more like the mouth of an extremely drunk internet ready to vomit on you.
I agree too much with the text to comment anything meaningful about it. So let’s see the comments…
One aspect of the spread of LLMs is that we have lost a useful heuristic. Poor spelling and grammar used to be a signal used to quickly filter out worthless posts. […]
Although I agree with the title, I also don’t think the internet is that significantly different from before GPTs 4, 3, or 2. Articles written by interns or Indian virtual assistants about generic topics are pretty much as bad as most AI generated material […]
Both comments reminded me a blogpost that I wrote more than a year ago, regarding chatGPT-3. It still applies rather well to 2024 LLMs, and it shows what those two tech bros are missing, so I’ll copypaste it here.
###The problem with GPT3.
Consider the following two examples.
Example A.
GPT3 bots trained on the arsehole of the internet (Reddit), chatting among themselves:
The grammar is fine, and yet those messages don’t say jack shit.
Example B.
Human translation made by someone with not-so-good grasp of the target language.
Captain: What happen ?
Mechanic: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What !
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's you !!
CATS: How are you gentlemen !!
CATS: All your base are belong to us.
CATS: You are on the way to destruction.
The grammar is so broken that this excerpt became a meme. And yet you can still retrieve meaning from it:
What’s the difference? It’s purpose. In (B) we can give each utterance a purpose, even if the characters are fictional - because they were written by a human being. However, we cannot do the same in (A), because the current AI-generated text does not model that purpose.
And yes, assigning purpose to your utterances is part of the language. Not just what tech bros are able to see, namely: syntax, morphology, and spelling.
Personal take: suck it up, Somalia; if the population of Somaliland has effective control of the region, and desires it to be independent, then there isn’t much that you could (or should) do. And from that, if both Somaliland and Ethiopia reach an amicable agreement over the ports, so be it.
Also, let us drop all that babble about territorial integrity. Even if you believe in this sort of political superstition, Somalia’s territorial integrity went kaboom in 1991.
My favourite insult in English - “you muppet”.
…I’m going to agree with @db2 here - sailing the seven seas will be likely the way to expose the new generations to this old content. I remember Muppet Babies from my childhood (albeit poorly, I was too young), and it’s fun for young kids. If nobody is streaming it nobody is losing value if you copy it, right?
It sounds more like a piece of protest than an actual license. Any arsehole could interpret the situation as “since this is software and not a human being, it isn’t ackshuyally learning anything. So our usage of your content doesn’t violate your license lol lmao”.
I think that people are correctly angry at big tech calling dibs on whatever it wants, but misblaming it on AI. There are worse cases out there; have you heard about targeted advertisement, for example?
The article mentions what the author sees as two trends behind retrocomputing (reusing the old and escaping the modern world), but I’d argue that the second one should be further split, since there are two modernities that people are running away from:
For further info, the link mentions this article. If I got it correctly:
Higher pressure compresses the orbitals of the sodium atoms, making them more cluttered together. As a result, the outer electrons - that “should” be in the 3s orbital, surrounding the nucleus like a bubble - are repelled to more energetic orbitals, like 3p and 3d. Those orbitals have “lobes” reaching far from the nucleus, so further away from the other electrons.
But since the sodium atoms are not isolated, and all those sodium atoms are doing this at the same time, the 3p and 3d orbitals from multiple atoms overlap. Orbitals overlapping form a chemical bond. And, since it’s damn hard to remove electrons from those bonds to send them elsewhere, electrical conductivity goes down. Sodium becomes first a semiconductor, then an isolating material.
So it’s a lot like your usual macromolecules (like, silicon dioxide or diamond), except that those bonds are shared by multiple atoms, not just two. And I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that all three are transparent, given that those electrons “stuck” in specific molecular orbitals suck major balls at absorbing photons and releasing them back.
Personal predictions:
I have this extension; it works great, and it has support for other engines (I use mostly DuckDuckGo), and if you really need the results from one of the blocked sites you just click a link and it shows them again. Give the link a check for the list of supported search engines.
I’ve done similar experiments with my two cats. Both behaved mostly like dogs - the mirror doesn’t smell like a cat nor makes noise like a cat, so why bother with it? I was rather surprised with Siegfrieda ignoring it because she tends to watch whatever I put on the computer screen, be it some “cat game” video or even anime.
That lower emphasis on vision became specially obvious when I showed them videos with kittens meowing. They didn’t bother with the screen, but with the speakers.
Now I get it. And yes, now I agree with you; it would give them a bit more merit to claim that the data being used in the input was obtained illegally. (Unless Meta has right of use to ThePile.)
The link does not mention GPT (OpenAI, Microsoft) or LaMDA/Bard (Google, Alphabet), but if Meta is doing it odds are that the others are doing it too.
Sadly this would be up to the copyright holders of this data. It does not apply to NYT content that you can freely access online, for NYT it got to be about the output, not the input.
I don’t think that the content was illegally obtained, unless there’s some law out there that prevents you from using a crawler to automatically retrieve text. And probably there’s no law against using data intended for human consumption to feed AI.
As such, I might be wrong but I think that the only issue is that this data is being used to output derivative works, and acc. to NYT in some instances “can generate output that recites Times content verbatim, closely summarizes it, and mimics its expressive style.”
That sounds reasonable.
2 seconds later someone can train a new one
“Training” datasets:
Does this look like the amount of content that you’d get in two seconds???
Maybe they should learn to code like those coal miners they pitied.
And maybe you should go back to Reddit.
Threads like this are why I discuss this shit in Lemmy, not in HN itself. The idiocy in the comments there is facepalm-worthy.
Plenty users there are trapping themselves in the “learning” metaphor, as if LLMs were actually “learning” shit like humans would. It’s a fucking tool dammit, and it is being legally treated as such.
The legal matter here boils down to: OpenAI is picking content online, feeding it into a tool, the tool transforms it into derivative content, and the derivative content is serviced to users. Is the transformation deep enough to make said usage go past copyright? A: nobody decided yet.
Classical Physics breaks in three situations: if it’s too fast, too massive, or too tiny. To address that, new theories appeared. Among them:
What researchers are looking for is a theory that is able to handle all three things at the same time, superseding both the relativities and the quantum theories. That’s the Theory of Everything that everyone is looking for. (Except me. I’m looking for my cup of coffee.)
And most people look for it in a specific way: they try to adapt relativity to quantum phenomena. Those researchers however are doing something different: they’re imposing a limit on the quantum theories, saying that they break under specific situations, because spacetime would work more like in classical physics than like in quantum mechanics - in other words that quantum theories need to be fixed to relativity, not the opposite.
The researchers then devised a stupidly simple experiment to test their hypothesis out.
Relevant link. Emphasis on “Not applicable to free-of-charge open-source software”.
It shouldn’t affect the open source environment itself. Only the corporate leeches.
I’m always amused by shitty corporate attempts to boss people around on language usage. They’re bound to fail, even if you screech “noo! muh traremurrk!” nonstop.
Although… this is smelling a bit like advertisement disguised as “brand awareness”. If that’s correct the HN OP is biting the bait.
Is this a uniquely US thing?
Among Portuguese speakers in my chunk of Brazil I’ve seen at the least the following genericised brands:
(Pronunciation for reference, it might vary quite a bit depending on individual. For example I tend to use [ks] for “xerox”, but plenty people add an epenthetic vowel to it.)
It’s hard for Google to claim that they’re focusing resources (e.g. dev time), given the list of features being removed. As one of the HN comments said, quite a few of them “seem to fall under the umbrella of “features that actually make the assistant an assistant”/connecting the assistant to other apps”. In other words, integration - that’s core functionality for an assistant and they likely know it.