Isn’t this site proof that the internet doesn’t have to die as a whole? I mean, I agree with your sentiment, but I feel that this will mostly hit the middle to high traffic sites. The community based ones with organic discovery will remain OK I think. This might even evolve back to an early internet age of smaller hobbyist sites because there no longer is big money in the internet (apart from what google captures as “their” internet)

If I were to ask my Magic 8 Ball “Is the word ‘difinitely’ misspelled?” 100 times, it’s going to reply in the affirmative over 16% of the time.

This comparison makes no sense. Your example has a binary question. In that case, any system that replies correctly at even a rate of around 50% would be useless. However, the problem space in this scenario is way larger than 2 options and still way larger than 100 options. Being correct in even a small number of 100 attempts is still statistically significant.

The fact that an LLM is unable to reason and that it is based on statistics doesn’t change anything about this behavior. At the end of the day you get a tool that is able to point you to actual new information that you by yourself did not arrive at.

Imagine that you put a lot of effort in a better model specifically for vulnerability research and you get it up to a correctness rate of a mere 10%. I would gladly hire some programmers to sift through these reports and possibly find overlooked vulnerabilities.

This is literally the very first experiment in this use case, done by a single person on a model that wasn’t specifically designed for this. The fact that it is able to formulate a correct response at all in this situation impresses me.

It would be easy to criticize this if it were the endpoint and this was being advertised as a tool for vulnerability research, but as discussed at the end of the post, this “quick little test” shows both initial promising results and had the fortunate byproduct of actually revealing a new vulnerability. By no means is it implied that it is now ready for use in this field.

The issue with hallucinations is one that in my opinion is never going to be totally fixed. That is why I hate the use of AI as a final arbiter of truth, which is sadly how a lot of people use it (I’ll quickly ask ChatGPT) and companies advertise it. What it is good at however, is coming up with plausible ideas, and in this case having an indication for things to check in code can be a great tool to discover new stuff, as is literally the case for this security researcher finding a new vulnerability after auditing the module themselves.

I hate AI. Why?

• Because of its extreme energy consumption compared to what it achieves
• Because it is all in the hands of the worst companies on this planet
• Because capitalists are foaming at the mouth to use it to fuck over workers
• Because it is devaluing art and reducing it to another commodity to “produce”

However

I also took the time to read the original blog post, and it is a fascinating story.

The author starts out with using an existing vulnerability as a benchmark for ChatGPT testing. They describe how they took the code specific to the vulnerability and packaged it for ChatGPT, how they formatted the query and what their results were. In 100 runs only 8 correctly identify the targeted vulnerability, the rest are false positives or claim that there are no vulnerabilities in the given code.

Then they take their test a step further and increase the amount of code shared with ChatGPT so that it also includes stuff of the module that had nothing to do with the original vulnerability. As expected, this larger input decreases performance and also reduces the vulnerability detection rate for the targeted vulnerability. However, in those 100 runs, another vulnerability was described that wasn’t a false positive. An actual new vulnerability that the author didn’t know about was discovered. Again, the signal to noise ratio is very low, and one has to sift through a lot of wrong reports to get a realistic one, but this proved that it could be used as a useful tool for helping to detect vulnerabilities.

I highly recommend reading the blog post.

As much as I like to be critical about AI, it doesn’t help if we put our heads in the sand and act as if it never does something cool.

If the show is as good as described in this article (I haven’t seen it yet) I feel that it will be more inspirational rather than pacifying. I might be to optimistic in this, but when I see parallels between my life and fiction and feel connected with the decisions characters go through, it often inspires me and gives me new insights into myself. Rather than this being a barrier to actual change or action, it becomes a source of motivation and better understanding of myself and my capabilities.

That’s the stupid part. Serious criminals will always find a way to encrypt their data. Any communication channel can be used for encrypted communication if you do the encryption part yourself (like with an agreed upon passphrase or something similar). The only people who are hit by this are the average users.

This makes me so mad.

Isn’t that worse though? They use your computing power but they still get the data :). At least with cloud apps you get the benefit of not having to run the app locally (this was the idea behind low powered chromebooks).

How come you have such strong feelings against Firefox?

Not trying to start a fight, just an honest question. Choosing to rather stop using the internet all together seems extreme for a browser that I use daily, but maybe I’m missing something in your use case.

Crunchyroll, can weebs not stay in their bedrooms privately??

Also, 2dehands, which is the biggest second hand buying / selling site and app of Belgium. Quite a big one!

You are absolutely allowed to look at a woman or make moves. Just respect other people and their boundaries.

Just move in the world, do stuff you like, meet people, be respectful to them and make connections. Don’t force stuff and respect the wishes of others.

If you do this, there is absolutely room for getting to know people better and becoming romantically involved. Just don’t be a dick.

Also, no need to be attractive as long as you’re true to yourself and are as open to others as you hope for them to be towards you.

I am not from the US but always felt the world would be so different if Bernie was up against Trump instead of Hilary.

Is there a younger member of the Democratic party with a similar vibe to Bernie?

I am am continuing to extend the life of my 6 years old laptop for as long as possible, hopefully I will be able to buy a framework when it does eventually die on me. (It’s a semi-shitty clevo model but I recently replaced the battery and it’s kind of decent again)

While technically correct, they do have it in China itself, it’s a modified version called Douyin. It is more restricted, censored and tightly controlled.

I agree that it is a cyberweapon, but don’t think that it’s only used against foreigners, they use it just as much to observe and influence their own population.

Finally, I would like to point out that to a lesser extent this is also the case for a lot of USA owned social media and tech companies. Edward Snowden’s revelations for example indicate this. While the extent of government control and influence is much larger in China, I wouldn’t underestimate the influences of Meta, Google and Microsoft for example.

Xonotic is still quite active!

How are fake artists able to add songs to real artists profile? I’d assume it would be impossible for me to make a fake The Weeknd song and add it to Spotify?

As for new artists that get recommended, a quick search should be able to make it clear if an artist is a real person / group no? With tour dates or pictures and stuff?

I agree with this take, well formulated!

That’s a very interesting point of view, and indeed well formulated in the video!

I don’t necessarily agree with it though. I as a human being have grown up and learned from experience and the experiences of previous humans that were documented or directly communicated to me. I can see no inherent difference with an artificial intelligence learning on the same data.

I never did all the experiments, nor the research previous scientists did, but I trust their reproducibility and logical conclusions. I think on the same way, artificial intelligence could theoretically also learn these things based on previous documented findings. This would be an ideal “général intelligence” AI.

The main problem I think, is that AI needs to be even more computationally intensive and complex for it to be able to get to these advanced levels of understanding. And at this point, I see it as a fun theoretical exercise without actual practical benefit: the cost (both in money, time and energy) seems far too large to eventually create something that we can already do as humans ourselves.

The current state of LLMs is one of very basic “semblance” of understanding, and close to what you describe as probability based conversation.

I feel that AI is best at doing very specific tasks, were the problem space is small enough for it to actually learn the underlying model. In the same way I think that LLMs are best at language: rewriting text or generating stuff. What companies seem to think though is because a model is wel at producing realistic language, that it is also competent at the contents of what it is writing. And again, for that to be true, it needs a much more advanced method of calculation than is currently available.

Take this all with a grain of salt though, as I am no expert on the matter. I am an electrical engineer who no longer works in the sector due to mental issues, but with an interest in computer science.

I am by no means an AI fanboy, and I extremely dislike the fact that it is in the hands of big tech, uses so much energy and is built on the work of people who are not being rewarded in any way. It is a new technology that is being forced and abused in the most capitalist way possible.

I do think however, that what you declare here as fact is not as certain as you make it out to be. Research indicates that machine learning models do in fact form some sort of model of understanding of their problem domain. For example this research. I am all for being critical of AI, but oversimplifying the issue might not work in our favour.

I love a good old over the top love song. Don’t get me wrong, realistic songs about real life romantic relations are awesome, but I love a world where something like this exists :).