Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.
Spent many years on Reddit and then some time on kbin.social.
Being slightly wrong means more of an endorphin rush when people realize they can pounce on the flaw they’ve spotted, I guess.
Don’t sweat downvotes, they’re especially meaningless on the Fediverse. I happen to like a number of applications for AI technology and cryptocurrency, so I’ve certainly collected quite a few of those and I’m still doing okay. :)
There was a politics subreddit I was on that had a “downvoting is not allowed” rule. There’s literally no way to tell who’s downvoting on Reddit, or even if downvoting is happening if it’s not enough to go below 0 or trigger the “controversial” indicator.
I got permabanned from that subreddit when someone who’d said something offensive asked “why am I being downvoted???” And I tried to explain to them why that was the case. No trial, one million years dungeon, all modmail ignored. I guess they don’t get to enforce that rule often and so leapt at the opportunity to find an excuse.
Downvotes for not getting it right, I presume.
Which makes me concerned that the “Hole for Pepnis” answer has so many upvotes.
Those holes look open to me.
Especially because seeing the same information in different contexts helps mapping the links between the different contexts and helps dispel incorrect assumptions.
Yes, but this is exactly the point of deduplication - you don’t want identical inputs, you want variety. If you want the AI to understand the concept of cats you don’t keep showing it the same picture of a cat over and over, all that tells it is that you want exactly that picture. You show it a whole bunch of different pictures whose only commonality is that there’s a cat in it, and then the AI can figure out what “cat” means.
They need to fundamentally change big parts of how learning happens and how the algorithm learns to fix this conflict.
Why do you think this?
There actually isn’t a downside to de-duplicating data sets, overfitting is simply a flaw. Generative models aren’t supposed to “memorize” stuff - if you really want a copy of an existing picture there are far easier and more reliable ways to accomplish that than giant GPU server farms. These models don’t derive any benefit from drilling on the same subset of data over and over. It makes them less creative.
I want to normalize the notion that copyright isn’t an all-powerful fundamental law of physics like so many people seem to assume these days, and if I can get big companies like Meta to throw their resources behind me in that argument then all the better.
Remember when piracy communities thought that the media companies were wrong to sue switch manufacturers because of that?
It baffles me that there’s such an anti-AI sentiment going around that it would cause even folks here to go “you know, maybe those litigious copyright cartels had the right idea after all.”
We should be cheering that we’ve got Meta on the side of fair use for once.
look up sample recover attacks.
Look up “overfitting.” It’s a flaw in generative AI training that modern AI trainers have done a great deal to resolve, and even in the cases of overfitting it’s not all of the training data that gets “memorized.” Only the stuff that got hammered into the AI thousands of times in error.
Sometimes peoples’ heads just fall apart.
Well, rarely.
Okay, once. Sheer coincidence that it was such a prominent person and in such a prominent moment. And that Lee Harvey Oswald just happened to be cleaning his gun by that window at the time. But hey, sometimes weird coincidences happen.
Training an AI does not involve copying anything so why would you think that fair use is even a factor here? It’s outside of copyright altogether. You can’t copyright concepts.
Downloading pirated books to your computer does involve copyright violation, sure, but it’s a violation by the uploader. And look at what community we’re in, are we going to get all high and mighty about that?
I don’t think you’ve thought through the logistics required for the sort of war where you’d just go around and shoot everyone who lives in hundreds of solar systems. Even assuming they do nothing at all to defend themselves, how do you even find them all?
It’s not specifically oxygen that’s linked to life, it’s chemical disequilibrium. Oxygen is highly reactive, there are lots of minerals that will bind it up and there aren’t any natural geological processes that unbind it again in significant quantities. If you put an oxygen atmosphere on a lifeless planet then pretty soon all of the oxygen will be bound up in other compounds - carbon dioxide, silicon oxides, ferric oxides, and so forth. There has to be some process that’s constantly producing oxygen in vast quantities to keep Earth’s atmosphere in the state that it’s in.
There are other chemicals that could also be taken as signs of life, depending on the conditions on a planet. Methane, for example, also has a short lifespan under Earthlike conditions. You may have seen headlines a little while back about the detection of “life signs” on Venus, in that case it was phosphine gas (PH3) that they thought they’d spotted (turns out it may have been a false alarm). These sorts of gasses can be detected in planetary atmospheres at interstellar distances, especially in the case of something like Earth where it’s quite flagrant.
Even if these are sometimes false alarms, in a “Dark Forest” scenario it’d still be worth sending a probe to go and kill whatever planets exhibit signs like that. It’s a lot cheaper and quieter than trying to fight an actual civilization. That’s why I can’t see why we wouldn’t have already been wiped out aeons ago in this scenario.
But that’s not actually true. We’ve been “broadcasting” the fact that there’s life on Earth in the form of the spectrographic signature of an oxygen-rich atmosphere, which is a clear sign that photosynthesis is going on. There’s no geological process that could maintain that much oxygen in the atmosphere. The Great Oxidation Event is when that started.
We have the technology to detect this kind of thing already, at our current level. Any civilization that could reach out and attack another solar system would be able to very easily see it.
Yeah, he had some good points before the sudden leap to genocide.
Well, “relatively cheaply” is a hard standard to nail down. I would say “no”, though. Antimatter is very expensive to manufacture and store and you’re going to need a lot of it. All of the energy that comes out of an RKV hitting its target has to be put into it in the first place, probably several times over given the inefficiencies likely inherent in the process.
The problem for the Fermi paradox is that there’s no reason to do stuff like that before we start colonizing other solar systems.
Also, how do you destroy a civilization that has a Dyson swarm already? That’s not exactly an easy task, and if you insist on remaining stealthy yourself it’s nigh impossible.
Relativistic missiles. Nothing moves faster than the speed of light. So if you can get a big rock to go 95% of the speed of light, we’d only be able to detect that it’s coming right as it hits.
This is a very common answer to “how”, but it comes with lots of problems in the Dark Forest context.
And ESPECIALLY if your civilization is still mostly planetbound.
Absolutely not guaranteed to be the case. Earth’s civilization could have easily had offworld colonies by now if circumstances had been slightly different, so a Fermi paradox solution that requires reliably blowing up Earthlike civilizations before they can get offworld doesn’t work. They’re already too late.
As I said previously, Earth has been quite obviously life-bearing for at least 2 billion years. Why wait until something like an RKV is needed, and even that is not guaranteed? They could have destroyed life on Earth far easier, and thus far more stealthily, if they’d done it a billion years ago.
How do they do it, though? It’s not really a valid solution unless you can explain how it works, otherwise it’s just “maybe some magic happens that kills civilizations.”
Once a civilization has begun spreading to hundreds of other solar systems I have yet to hear of any plausible way to reliably “kill” it.
I think others wouldn’t bother with us until we started demonstrating likelihood of using dangerous tech or crazy exponential expansion.
Why do you think that, though? It doesn’t make sense, frankly - if you’re worried about competition evolving you shouldn’t wait until the last possible second to destroy it. That raises so many unnecessary risks of being slightly slow on the draw, and then it’s too late. Why not do it at the earliest convenience, when it’s super easy to do by comparison and there’s an incredibly long margin of error if you somehow miss the first couple of tries?
I don’t remember well, but I think civilizations stationed their defensive or offensive tech away from their own civilizations, just dispersed around.
I think its explanation for why no one or anything has colonized the galaxy though is that if anyone shows signs of becoming that strong, they get zapped.
But they’re already doing it, you just said they’re putting outposts out there. If they can’t do that secretly then the Dark Forest doesn’t work in the first place. Placing a secret weapon base in another solar system is no different from placing a colony there.
My real preferred theory of why we don’t see other civilizations though is that I think they choose more inward, VR, computer-based evolution that doesn’t result in big mega structures.
As with many Fermi paradox solutions this one fails on account of requiring every single civilization (and every single subset of those civilizations) to all decide to do exactly the same thing, forever, with no exceptions. In a scenario like this what happens if a single subculture of a single advanced civilization decides for whatever reason that they prefer not to do that? They would be able to spread throughout the cosmos without opposition, everyone else is locked in their little dream boxes and therefore is basically irrelevant. It only needs to happen once, and the universe has been around for a very long time.
We actually spend a great deal of effort preventing it. Environmentalism is a really big thing these days.
But even if we didn’t, it’s not an extinction event for us. Humans are actually doing extremely well.
Yup. Fortunately unsubscribing from politics subreddits is generally advisable whether one has been banned from them or not.